 Bingo. That's a capital B bingo. We're back to two o'clock rock, and we're talking about community matters, and we're talking about what do the Tonys mean for Hawaii, but it's just that's just a kind of a place to go segue, right? Eden Lee Murray, professor of theater from HPU, thank you so much for joining us. You are the personification of theater in Hawaii. You are. Thank you, Jay. Thank you. Certainly for something that I love and is very near to my heart at any level, whether I'm teaching it, directing it, performing in it, watching it. What is it about theater that makes you so excited? I think it's the community. It's the idea of being part of something that is way bigger than any one person can do. Even if it's a one-person show, you've got your sound person, you've got your light person, you've got your director, you've got your audience. Everybody, everybody who comes into the theater from whatever capacity comes in with an agreement that they're going to do something together. One of the things I tell my kids, and I know this because I do it, where an audience member walks in through the door of a theater, I don't care how old they are chronologically, they're five years old, and they come in trusting you. Trusting you. And saying, tell me a story, and believing that everybody that they're going to watch from there on has put it all on the line to deliver a story and take them from A to Z, whatever happens in between. To me, that's moving. It's moving. I remember I went to see, it was nice work if you could get it. This couple of years ago, it was the last performance, I didn't know that. Nobody in the room knew that. And they announced that at the beginning, and they told us, rather at the end of the play, they told us that it was the last. And it was struck me, it struck everyone, what a completely integrated experience was. Everybody was together. You felt the person next to you. You felt him breathing. It was the community of that theater was just fantastic. It happens in Broadway, it happens. Sometimes these plays don't work out, and I just wanted to tell you that Garrison Keeler, what was his show again? Perry Home Companion. It was a movie by that name. I think it was an interesting view of art in general, because in art, and I'm excluding present company, there are a lot of crazy people. There are a lot of, you know, innovative people, art people, passionate. They're different than the rest of us. You don't have to exclude present company. I think in order to be exciting at what you aspire to do, you have to think outside the box. Again, I tell my students, the sweet meat is out there on the thinnest limb, and you have to dare to put your foot out there, and you might fall. And you have to be ready to fall or fly. But you know, a lot of people do fall. I remember kids in my class, I grew up in New York. They wanted to go into the theater, and I never heard of any of them again. Well, you look at movies. I mean, old movies, we would do a lot of Turner Classic at home at night, and you look at, there'll be a big star, and then there'll be people, a long list of credits, and you've never heard of them again. You know, and some went on, and some were good for or big for a while, and then chose to walk away, because there's a certain amount of sacrifice that's involved in going to that level of professionalism, whether it's in the movies, whether it's in the theater. That's one of the marvelous points about it. I mean, it's the selection of the fittest. It's a bone crusher, too. Not everybody succeeds, but the ones, the ones who succeed certainly have their gratification, but the other ones who, you know, don't succeed, they have gratification too, even for a moment. You know, 15 minutes of fame. Right. Well, you think about, you know, they're the ones who don't make it, are the ones who can go to the grocery store without wearing makeup. They're the ones whose marriages aren't pulled apart on the daily news, or inquiring minds want to know, and they plan a bunch of stories about, no. Very happy not to be running in that crowd. You know, I always thought that lawyers, you know, who go to court and try to convince people of their position, they ought to study theater. My family, the men in my mother's side of the family were lawyers, and we're trial lawyers, and my mother, who was a very good actress, would say, you know, a trial lawyer is one of the best actors there, because you've got to perform for the jury, you've got to improvise, you've got to think on your feet, you've got to do your lines, know your homework, have a very strong point of view, and sell your story. And the good, the guys who are good at it, and girls, they really love it. They love to be in front of a jury. I mean, it's an exhilarating experience to be in front of a jury. It's not just that they're being entertained, which they are. It's that you're trying to make them, have them make a political decision, and you're a favor, and you're going to use every technique you can to convince them. It's one of the most interesting processes in our culture, for sure. You know what, if I can plant something here, there's a really interesting jury story and new play that's about to open up at the end of this summer called The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Are you familiar with that? Yeah. Stephen Grigis. It's the trial of Judas, who's, the play is set in Purgatory. The two lawyers, the defense attorney is somebody who lives in Purgatory, who is an Irish, she's a split between an Irish father and an Egyptian mother, and the prosecutor is El Fayoumi, who's this really slick Arab gentleman. And they put on this trial with Judas, who's practically catatonic, his life and the balance. And it's all about, it's all about choice, free will, forgiveness, transcendence. It's hilariously funny. It is edgy as can be. F-bombs flying all over the place, but ultimately it goes from being hilariously funny to being deeply moving. And that's going to be at Lab Theater, the Lab Theater Kennedy, a August 18th through September 3rd. I highly recommend, yours truly does it turn as Mother Teresa. Well, you make the point that it touches every part of our lives. And what we get from the media, what we get from, even from our education, is not complete because the human condition is, it's needs to be studied all the time. From inside, from outside. Ideas have to be thrown at us. We have to integrate this. And our lives are not complete unless we have, you know, that special crucible of the theater where anything goes, anything goes. And the beauty for the audience is you're sitting in the dark and you're watching the trial. I mean, you are, in a sense, the jury. And you're watching the trial play out on stage, and then you get to, if the playwright is successful, you walk out with what they want you to think. In the Greek days, it was the catharsis that purged the ill of whatever society was dealing with. I'd love to know what kind of catharsis we need right now, given what's operating on it. Well, I think art will follow that. I think there'll be a lot of art around what's happening in Washington. We're only beginning, and it's too serious not to be art. It must be. We need art on this. We need interpretation of it to connect it up in our human condition. So why did you get into this? You mentioned your mother was an actress. What does that mean to your decision? It wasn't really a decision made. I grew up when I was really, really little. My mom did, she'd had her time in New York. She was at the American Academy of Dramatic Art, and then was with a wonderful national radio company and was working with a cadre of actors who were going to go with television when it broke nationally, right, commercially. Then came World War II, and that put the kibosh on that. So she was one of the women who went down to Washington and was in a forest and went back from Washington, New York, worked with the Rockefellers, at which point, long about 46. Her father said, I think it's time you came home and got married, and that's to Kansas City, and that's what young women did when their fathers said, come home, they went. So she came home, she was married to my dad, who she'd grown up with within about six months, and never did professional theater again, but she never was very far from it. So I remember being tucked under her arm when she was part of the community theater, and we'll talk about community theater in a minute, if you like, community children's theater, and they trooped from school to school, and I would sit backstage and watch, as these women that I'd watched get dressed upstairs, one of them three months pregnant, she had a little baby bomb all that business, but now she was somebody else, and they went down on stage and the curtain opened and the light hit them, and they became someone else. That's my mom. That's not my mom. That's Gutenberg. That's the little Chinese boy who says, Rick T. Shin too, to make the tree bear fruit. I mean, my mom is making magic on stage, and I couldn't wait to see her afterwards in makeup, in costume. My sister wouldn't have anything to do with her until she washed and changed. It's so funny. So, but I just, I remember one of, after I learned how to read, one of the first things I remember doing is holding a script for Midsummer Night's Dream when my mom was taking over the role of Nick Bottom, and she had to have somebody prompt her with lines. So I mean, I just never thought I would do anything else. How do you do that? I mean, aside from the lawyer experience, you know, which I can understand, I do not understand how people can put a, put the garb of another character on top of themselves. Is that character living in any way? You know, it's different for every person who's in theater, I think. I love, I love the feeling of sort of creating a conduit for another being to come in and try and understand how they think. You get possessed somehow. I think that's a good way to put it, because you want to leave yourself off stage. You want to let that other character, you want to create a home for them. You want to have your body assume their body. You want to, their voice, their reactions, which is really interesting. How do you, how do you step away and let somebody else react to what's being said to them? Yeah, yeah. It's magic, I think. It is magic. And what's, I mean, really, we must spend a moment just on differentiating how it is to act in the movies and how it is to act in the theater. And I remember seeing, I was so surprised at this, an audition of a number of women who were auditioning for a part. Screen testing? Screen testing for a film? Or for, okay. For a film. And it struck me how quiet their voices were, because they were talking conversational in an intimate fashion. And it's very hard to make a play that, that carries with soft voices and intimate, intimate engagements. And the play, you're really talking to the audience. And whether you have a microphone or not, you got to belt it out. They got to hear what you're saying, hear what you're thinking. It's a different projection entirely, don't you think? Right. I think it's creating a character, analyzing a text, living someone else's life. It's the same whether you're film or live. I think it's a degree of projection. You just said it. In the theater, you have the thought, but it's not enough to have the thought. You have to get it across to the back of the house. A friend of mine who was in my MFA program, a guy who was doing the speech, the Shakespeare speech, it winds up with, he is the head that wears the crown. And he was sitting on stage in the class and doing the speech, and the teacher was somewhere out in the house. He goes, I can't hear you, Buckner. Start again. So he began the speech, and he's talking about a nightmare, and it's very intimate. And the teacher stopped him. I can't hear you, Buckner. Start again. Three or four times. And finally, my friend just said, Gavin, if I'm loud, I don't feel it. And he goes, I don't give a... Whether you feel it or not, I can't bloody hear you. Here it is. Yeah, right? So, and the thing is with movies, and there's some actors who can go back and forth, because it's the same process. You have to create the person who has the thought. In movies, if you've got the microphone just off, just off what do you call it, shot, you don't have to speak very loudly as well. You shouldn't because then it sounds really forced and fake. You have the cameras right here or under your nose, so all you have to do is think something, and it's there. If you do too much, then it's like... It's overacting. It's overacting, and it's really... But on the stage, overacting may be necessary. Well, it has to come from a place of truth. If it comes from truth, and you're just trying to get it out there, it'll work. And being private and small doesn't work on stage. Well, I told you that when I saw the Tony's last Sunday to the extent that I could appreciate them and was willing to spend the time watching all of that, I felt that there was a blending. It showed you the line. It showed you maybe the connection between movies and Hollywood and Broadway. I prefer Broadway, if you want to know. But I was struck with how the two are sort of inextricably intertwined now. They're not as separate as they used to be. I don't know if you agree with that, but that was one of the takeaways that I had in general. And I think that Hollywood is slicker than Broadway, and I want Broadway to be more from the heart. Right. And I don't want it to be slick. Well, when it... I thought, for example, the best television was watching Kevin Spacey do Johnny Carson, and the camera was right there, and he was doing TV-level work, right? And he was brilliant. Did you watch that one? I saw that, yeah. Then for a lot of the big numbers, and given that the audience accepts the fact that they're watching a musical, they don't expect the intimacy of television. And the camera was back for the big picture for the musical numbers. Occasionally they do close-up, but it was with the understanding that the actor you're watching is projecting out there, as opposed to talking to you, the camera, singing really, which would have come across as very fake and false. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I dare you to make Bette Midler's camera size small, although she can do films, right? I do free association with her, and I always think of the same thing, Aya. She was born and raised in Aya. Right, right, right, right. She's a local girl. Well, she does Disney films. She's the witches of Eastwick. Did you see that? She was hilarious, but somehow they got her to where it was, you know, she's doing over the pot like that. She's not projecting to a whole theater because she doesn't need to, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love, can I do a Bette Midler story? One of my favorite, favorite stories ever by the guy who wrote a book called Audition. Michael, somebody. And Bette Midler couldn't get, she was not, she was not a type, a palm olive selvis oak girl, a commercial girl. She couldn't get hired for dog catcher, and she went to this Michael, I can think of his name in a minute, to him, who was also her teacher, in addition to this writer of an audition book, Shirtleff, Michael Shirtleff. And she said, I'm done. I'm beaten. I'm going home on my tail between my legs. And he goes, wait, what is the thing that you want most to do here? And she said, I want to sing for people who get me. He said, figure out a way to make that happen once, so that you have tasted success in New York, right? The Baths. She goes and she does her act for the Baths, Barry Manilow playing piano, and the rest is history. The rest is history. There's one line that I'll never forget. It was in one of her movies. She endeared herself to me forever. She was playing the role of some egotistical, crazy person, you know, wild, wild woman, you know, exuberant beyond description. And she said to the character opposite her, she said, but enough about me. Enough about me. Let's talk about you. Let's talk about how you feel about me. I can't deliver it the way she did. No. But that was really a high point. She's a brilliant, I loved it on the, I loved it when we were talking earlier. I loved it when she's giving her, she wins Best Actress. And apparently just that hello dolly she does is showstop. It's a great play to begin with. Right, right. And then I was reading something in The New Yorker about how she had a coughing fit on stage one night and somebody, one of the characters runs off stage and in character brings her a glass of water. She drinks it and then she does this thing and she falls down on the stage and from the back, from the stage, from the floor, she says something that's a brilliant ad lib and the audience came to their feet for her, right? So then she's winning the Best Actress on Broadway, top of the top. And she's giving her thank you speech and she's acknowledging the play and the people in the play and the music begins to play and she just kept on talking. And the music kept playing and she got a little bit louder and the music kept playing and they ran out of music and she had the last word. She kept on. She kept on. I mean, they use the music to shut people down, yeah? Not that much, no, no, no, no. Well, it was really interesting to watch it and it was a great confirmation. Maybe you want to go to Broadway right now. Somebody told me the John Rampage in the theater, the Ruger theater there, that Diamond had to do. Diamond had to do it, right? Takes a trip every year. He takes the kids. Oh, geez. Did you tell me that? Somebody told me that. He takes, well, shooting stars. There's a trip every year that gets out there to get the kids who are themselves. And this is where we're going to talk about community theater and stuff. I don't know where we are, time-wise. But the Diamondhead shooting stars have sent a number of kids on to New York. It's a chance for, he does his best to expose them to what's out there professionally and they do their training and they get as far as they can get here. And I think you asked what the Tonys mean for those kids, the Tonys and Broadway are mecca. So they see what the best of the best can be, can do. And what John and Diamondhead, and it's billed as the Broadway of the Pacific, he brings as much as possible that kind of scale of musical theater. He'll bring artists who have either been in productions or assisted on productions. He'll bring them in to either direct or be in or both at Diamondhead. And it gives the kids a portal into what they could do if they stay with it. It also gives the people who have no ambition to go further professionally a chance to have a taste of what that is. And that's important too. I think that's... It gets guys like me the opportunity to connect a little more with Broadway. Let's take a short break. Eden Lee Marish, she's a professor of theater at HPU. We're talking about, what do the Tonys mean for Hawaii? We're going to get to that. The topic question, the essential question right after this break. A show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic. We identify problems in the state, but also the show is dedicated to trying to find solutions, not just detail our problems. So join me every other Tuesday on Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm Tim Apachella. Thank you. Which you can see live from 1 to 130 every Tuesday at thinktechkawaii.com and then later on YouTube. I am an energy attorney, clean energy advocate and community outreach specialist. And on Power Up Hawaii, we come together to talk about how can Hawaii walk towards a clean, renewable, and just energy future. To do that, we talk to stakeholders all over the spectrum, from clean energy technology folks to community groups to politicians to regulators to the utility. So please join us Tuesdays at 1 o'clock for Power Up Hawaii. We're back. We couldn't wait to get back. There's so much more to discuss. We'll never finish this, Eden Lee. So let's talk about, you know, let's talk about how the Tony's, what the Tony's mean for Hawaii. Because, you know, when you go, when you sit and you rub elbows with the guy next to you and feel that magic in the theater where everybody is sort of coming together as one, as an audience who is completely, which is completely engrossed in the action on stage. I mean, it's a special experience. It's hard to repeat that. It's hard to do that. You've got to be excellent. And they have so many people like in the Prairie Home Companion who are a little crazy, who have to collaborate. And sometimes they don't do it very well to get there and make that program, make that show. It's one of the most exciting, most fantastic experiences in human conduct, I think. But the problem is it's in broadway. It's in the crucible in broadway. It's very hard to do it outside of broadway. And that's a study that you make. That's a goal that you have to try to get a crucible going here. How do you do that? And how successful have we been? I think we've been very successful. I think I'm very proud of what the conglomerate of community theaters is able to do. I think it runs the gamut of performance being the most important thing, which I think Diamond Head and Minoa Valley, they take stories that are not new necessarily, but they tell them again. They give actors, young, old community, whatever a chance to be part of the experience of carrying a story that they know works forward, learning the dance numbers and being able to perform it. Five, six, seven, eight, go. Well, they're going to do that today, though. No, no, no, no. And then you have a theater like TAG, which is a tiny little theater down there in Dole. The Actors Group. The Actors Group, Brad Powell's Theater. And they are more, it's interesting because you have, you're juggling performance values versus ideas. And I think TAG, TAG is kind of the off-off Broadway here and they take the newest plays, the edgiest plays, the plays that- From Broadway or from off Broadway? No, not necessarily. Oh, from here? So, well, they're just new plays. Whatever. And they do them. They just did a wonderful play and I can't remember the name of it last, but a really edgy exploration of ideas play. Kumu does that for local playwrights and Hawaiian issues. And they do it in a very theatrical fashion. They don't do it like for a Hamilton or where you have to as a playgoer shell out upwards of $1,000 to see the final performance of the original cast of Hamilton. It's like $1,000. I mean, I don't know how good a play has to be before I reach into my checklist. It's a market. Right, I guess. It's a market. I was in New York working when Nicholas Nickleby first came in from the Royal Shakespeare Company and they broke the $100 mark for a play that was eight and a half hours worth of theater, right? I mean, $100 is chump change on the wait line or maybe standing room now, right? Just like, ooh. When I was in school, I was in the school of Manhattan and I went to the plays all the time, but, you know, $5, $2 first, right? Did you have standing room? I mean, there was a standing room, you know? Whatever. I mean, there's only recent years that I've been able to get closer to the stage. I like getting close. I like the smell of the paint, the roar, the smell of the roar of the crowd and the grease paint and all that stuff. The smell of the grease paint, the roar of the crowd, right? Or the spit. No, it's the other way. It's the smell of the grease paint. No, the smell of the crowd and the roar of the grease paint. Or the grease paint. Whatever. It was a play. It was years ago. It was a play. Oh, my goodness. So, I mean, you know, what about the audience here? You know, I mean, one of the problems, for example, in the Hawaii Opera area is that it's hard to, it's hard to get young people, millennials, and younger to, to dedicate themselves to opera, to spend the money or to find the money and to go and spend the time to maybe read up a little, maybe listen to a lecture on, you know, on the outside of the theater beforehand and put it in a historical context so that they can appreciate it. And I bet the same kind of thing exists, you know, in the theater as in the opera. Well, I think the opera, and we were talking about this earlier, I think there was a generation that missed the opera that right now, it's interesting because I think H.O.T. is having the same problem that Hawaii Theater was having when the Hawaii Theater was closed and a whole bandwidth of generation of either kids didn't get brought to the theater and they're now the ones who are taking their children to theater and they don't go to the Hawaii Theater because they weren't taken as children. The people who were parents while the theater was closed are now writing philanthropic checks and they don't think of the Hawaii Theater because they didn't go when they were. Right, right. I think H.O.T. has got a bandwidth of, and they're doing a wonderful job. Eric Haynes and his education program, they've got that thing called Opera for Everyone. He sat in that seat. Did he? Telling us about it and then I asked him to sing and he just blew everybody up here with a blooming voice all through the theater. They know about it on the whole floor on the eighth floor. No, he's a wonderful one. I produced him, I brought their stuff into the Hawaii Theater when I was there because I think it's so important to get opera to children. Right, I mean, my little kids from grades one through eight, I'd bring them in to watch Eric's and his touring opera things come in. It's part of what? It's part of theater, for sure. Absolutely. It's an essential, theater is an essential element of opera. I think so, but opera is, I was watching, I actually had the privilege of being in this recent Tales of Hoffman that was Henry Aquinas' swan song. And it was a magnificent production and when you opera at its best, it aspires to so much. It aspires to perfection of sound, of voice, of orchestra, of light, of art, of the... It aspires to the best and when it all comes together, it's almost a religious experience. It was just extraordinary and when it misses or when any one of those elements misses, it sucks. It just sucks big time. But there's that... That's the risk and the reward. You might see one where it sucks, but on the other hand, to see one where it's good, that leaves an impression forever. So what H.O.T. does with the final dress rehearsal is to bring, every people already know this probably, but they bring teachers and students from across Oahu and the kids, I prefer to see the operas if I'm not going to be in them. I prefer to watch it that night because the house is full of these kids who have dressed to the nines because they're seeing opera. See them reacting to it. And they react and when something's funny, they laugh. It's a visceral response. What was really, I watched when they did Midsummer Night's Dream, not the Mendelssohn, but the Britain's opera, that has a countertenor playing Oberon. Okay. And I obviously, no one had told the children who were throwing that house what a countertenor was. Okay. So I'm back in the nosebleed seats up there and whoever played Oberon looked like a transformer toy. I mean, he was built like a superhero and his costume was to die for. And he steps forward. He done some walking around the stage before that just so people kind of got an eyeful. And then he came forward to sing and here's this, he's got this little teeny-weeny soprano voice and there was a gasp in the house. I mean, all these kids were like, yes. They were sitting up to wait to hear what Oberon's going to sing and he opened his mouth and out came that. It was hilarious, but they're never going to forget that. Yeah. Yeah. You know. Do you act now? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I was, well, I just finished. I did, I did three non-singing roles in HOT's Streetcar Name Desire, the last of which was the nurse that takes Blanche to the ground. And we did. We had Blanche in this chair last week. She's wonderful. She was fabulous. Jill, Jill Gardner. Jill Gardner. Oh my God. When I met her, I mean, just a quick side trip, I was one of the principals because I had a speaking part, right? So I get to go to the lunch and it kicks everything off and I met the director first and I said, well, I just watched the movie last night and that nurse took Blanche to the ground and are we going to do that? And he goes, oh yeah. And I went, how much fun? And then I met Jill. I'm like, oh, hi, Jill. And she was a good six to seven or eight inches taller than me and outweighed me by a bit. And I said, do we have a fight choreographer? And he said, oh no, we're going to do this ourselves. I'm going, really? All right. But Tony Pisculli, bless his heart, came in and just gave us some really safe moves so that she didn't get hurt and I didn't get hurt. And it was fine. And then I did Tales of Hoffman as one of the five wicked pieces of smoke that swirled around the villain. That was really fun. I'm going to be doing this piece. I told you about the last days of Judas Iscariot, which Mark Branner is directing. And he's got two ringers coming in who did the production with him before in LA. And one guy, they're playing the two attorneys I was telling you about. And then the guy playing Satan is an amazing actor coming in from New York. Mother Teresa and I'm co-producing while Mark is in China on another project right now. You know the lines? Yes. Well, how about closing here? We're out of time. But how about closing with a line? Let me see you project an emotional emote, if you will, on the stage. Bye. One must take responsibility for one's own salvation. When you turn off God, you're saying, I know better than you. No, good. Excellent. Thank you so much. Yes, thank you, too. What a pleasure. It's wonderful to see you start to do this again. We're only beginning the discussion. Aloha. Aloha.