ACTOR TESTS LIMITS IN ‘GUIDE’
Actors often talk of dream roles on the theatrical stage — complex, conflicted characters that allow them to display a wide range of talent.
John Rapson, currently starring in the national tour of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” gets to play eight of them, eight times a week, in a single show.
Rapson portrays eight members of the despicable D’Ysquith family in “Gentleman’s Guide,” including a priest with bad teeth, a bad actress, a greedy socialite and a vegetarian bodybuilder. It runs Wednesday through May 15 at Theatre Under The Stars at Hobby Center.
“I immediately craved it. I bought the CD and learned the music by osmosis,” Rapson says, adding that he saw the Tony-winning Broadway production several times.
“I’m a character actor. I’m not out there playing Tony in ‘West Side Story.’ Honestly, truly, the idea of doing it on the first national tour never crossed my mind. It never occurred to me
that it would be something that would come along this soon in this big of a capacity.”
“Gentleman’s Guide” is the morbidly comic tale of Monty Navarro, ninth in line for a large inheritance behind members of the D’Ysquith family, all played by Rapson. Navarro decides to kill them off and take what he believes rightfully belongs to him.
The show is based on the 1907 novel “Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal” and was made into the 1949 film “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” starring Dennis Price and Alec Guinness, who portrayed the eight characters.
The Broadway musical opened in November 2013 and ran through January of this year. It earned four Tony Awards, including best musical, director, book and costume design.
Rapson previously had small roles in “Les Misérables” on Broadway and attended the University of Michigan for musical theater. He’s been with the tour for eight months but was “nervous as heck” the first several performances.
“This show is the greatest gift that I’ll ever have, maybe, in my performing life. It’s a combination of really difficult and boggles your mind at times,” he says. “It’s like the most fun nervous breakdown you’ve ever had.
“It’s never a job — and I mean this in a good sense — that’s gonna be comfortable. You get to the top of the hill, and you just start running and hope you don’t fall.”
The real challenges are in the breaks between scenes, when Rapson has mere seconds to change his clothes, makeup and hair into a completely different character. Rapson also credits dresser Nadine Hettel, dubbing her “the D’Ysquith whisperer” for her help amid so many costumes and wigs.
“There’s a lot of fun to be had in every one of them. It is a journey every night,” he says. “You finish a quick change, and that 10 feet from the stage is sort of my chance to, in two seconds, test something in my voice or do something with a walk or just get in character.”
Once his run with “Gentleman’s Guide” is done, Rapson says there’s another role he’d love to sink his blades into, as the titular, murderous barber in “Sweeney Todd.”
“For God’s sake, I’m getting killed 64 times a week,” he says with a laugh. “I wanna kill some people.”