A Reminisce by Matthew Rodenkirch

"My first experience with Community Theatre would go back to ‘Camelot.’  I was more or less asked to audition for the part of ‘Mordred.’  Apparently, as is typical, we have a dearth of male actors for any show, and I don’t even remember any more who had sort of given me the nudge or given my name out to say, 'Why don’t you go and try this?'

Matt's audition -- “And I remember I went to Dan Berns’ house to do the audition.  And I read a few lines for him, and ‘Mordrid’ has a song of course and that was ‘The Seven Deadly Virtues.”  And I attempted to sing it.  I don’t read music; I don’t sing.  And I think Dan was pretty much unless I am, you know, awful, he was going to give me the part.  Because I’ll never the look on his face when I sang.  It was this sort of ‘aw crap.”  But, you know. he just basically said, ‘Well, okay, we’ll figure it out. We’ll get you some help.’

“And I remember essentially I sort of ‘Rex Harrison-ed’ my way through the song, because basically since I couldn’t really sing, it was just a matter of hitting the cadence without actually trying to hit the notes and the melody, so that’s more or less the way I really got through that song.  So that was my first big production."

The sword fight -- “So I did actually get the opportunity to teach a real quick fight scene with large broad swords using what little I knew.  I’m not even sure they really quite used all the choreography.  I think it ended up being too long.  And they just did a few moves and got off the stage real quick.  That was the only real fighting in all of ‘Camelot.’

“I actually still have the broad sword.  I was given one of the broad swords, and it’s this massive, three or four foot long piece of steel and it’s a good three inches wide at the base.  I remember I worked at the trophy shop (Fondy Trophy Company) at the time.  I took the trophy base to make a better hilt for it.  Because all they did, they just wrapped foam around the end.

Alone on stage -- “So I remember the actual performances.  I was on stage alone an awful lot in that show, which was very unnerving, because you have no one to play off of.

“‘Mordrid’ isn’t in it until the second act, and he actually opens the second act.  And I remember walking out, and I have to sort of survey the castle, and look around and decide, well, this is going to be my domain, because he plans on horning in on this.  And then I sort of fade off scene as Terry and Alan (Fuller) come on as ‘Lancelot’ and ‘Guenevere.’  And of course ‘Mordrid’ gets a whiff of what’s going on behind the scenes at Camelot.  Then I have my scene with Bud (Caldwell).  Then I have my song, which is on stage all by myself.

“Later on I have a scene where I’m on stage all by myself and I’m reacting to a voice, because I’m talking to my invisible Aunt, ‘Morgan le Fay.'  And this worked out fine.  Arlyss Candlish) was up in the balcony, which was the technical area at that time, and she would do her lines over the speakers.  They were kind of fading them back and forth on the speakers.

“But I thought I had nothing to do if something went wrong, which naturally it did.  The very last performance, something went wrong with the sound system.  And the scene starts, I walk out, ‘Mordrid’ is calling her name, ‘Where are you?’  And I’m hearing absolutely nothing.  There’s absolutely nothing happening.  I’m trying to stretch this.  Well, she starts – not shouting – but talking as loudly as she can from the balcony.  So I start trying to play it to the balcony. 

“And about half-way through Tim Freiss got things figured out, what was wrong, and she started coming through the speakers again.  But that was…I think that went on for (it seemed like) a good forty-five minutes, with me not having anything to do, and nobody to talk to, with me (thinking), ‘Do I keep going?  Should we stop?’  I just did not know what to do, and being inexperienced, I really didn’t know really what quite my options were, and I really couldn’t see if there was anyone gesturing to me from the balcony for what I should be doing at this point.  Was she even up there?  I didn’t know what was going on.  So I remember being on stage alone an awful lot.

“The other thing that always struck me from that production – I did not appear on stage again for quite a long time after that – and people were recognizing me.  I swear I think I had somebody recognize me like ten years after the fact, that they had remembered that I had been in ‘Camelot,’ and they complimented me on my performance, which was really quite something.

"Horrid" -- “The other thing I distinctly remember – well, actually there are two other anecdotes that go along with ‘Camelot.’  The first one is, Gary Sharpe’s character, ‘Pellinore,’ has a dog, and of course we had a real dog for the show, but we very seldom have the dog for rehearsals.  And being bored and a garden-variety attention whore, on a few occasions I simply stood in for the dog, and obediently prowled around…and for my troubles I got this nice box of Milk Bone dog biscuits at the cast party.

            The comic rehearsal -- “Also back in those days, any production that ran two weeks always had two pick-up rehearsals between the two weekends, and one of them was always referred to as the ‘silly rehearsal,” where you get everything out of your system that you always wanted to do, and then some, and I remember the music was being played basically double-speed just to get though it.  Everybody got into the spirit of things