Actor fills up empty Tabard Theatre with livestreamed show.

‘Looking Over the President’s Shoulder’ is available online through Sunday

Actor James Creer was scheduled to reprise his acclaimed 2013 performance in “Looking Over the President’s Shoulder” in March at San Jose’s Tabard Theatre.

He got only one show in, and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, shutting down the production.

Four months later, Tabard’s new executive artistic director, Jonathan Rhys Williams, and Creer decided they could safely mount the one-man show again, thanks to technology funding from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and a small but creative production crew.

So Creer is back on stage, telling the true story of Alonzo Fields, a classically trained musician with dreams of a career in opera who took a short-term job in Washington, D.C., in 1931. That stint put his life on a different path. The grandson of a freed slave, Fields spent the next 21 years as the chief butler at the White House, working for presidents from Hoover to Eisenhower.

The one-man show requires Creer to play the parts of Fields, the four presidents he worked for, as well as Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt and other White House staffers. Besides memorizing 60 pages of dialogue, he learned the mannerisms and speech patterns of the day.

And now he has to convey those personalities to an audience he can’t see, but, with livestreaming could far outnumber the 130 theatergoers the Tabard normally holds.

“It’s a huge challenge,” Creer

said. “I’ve never experienced anything like this.”

With the use of multiple cameras, he said, the production crew has done an “amazing job” of capturing the little-known story of Fields and the other historic figures.

He’s slso grateful for the tremendous feedback from home audiences — you might call it a living-room standing ovation — that tells him his livestream performances in the coronavirus era have been a success.

“They are getting the essence of the show — the vibe and the energy,” Creer said.

PHOTOS: DAI SUGANO — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Actor James Creer performs in “Looking Over the President’s Shoulder” during a live performance for an online audience on Wednesday inside the Tabard Theatre in San Jose. The plays were supposed to be performed in March but were canceled because of the coronavirus.

“It’s a huge challenge. I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Creer said about performing his one-man show inside an empty theater to an audience that can see him only on a computer screen.