Charles Dutton`s muscles are getting flabby from too much TV.
It isn`t the beefy ”Roc” star`s hefty physique in question here, it`s his acting muscles that are atrophying from not using them in the theater, where he received his dramatic training.
”The tendency is to lose your stage muscles,” he said. ”You lose your depth, your ability to learn lines and retain lines. You lose your stage stamina, your spontaneity, your insightfulness. You lose that essence, that organism of living on a stage.”
Dutton, who earned Tony nominations in two Broadway plays, ”Ma Rainey`s Black Bottom” and ”The Piano Lesson,” gets a chance to flex those muscles again in a workout Sunday.
That`s when the freshman sitcom is broadcast live from Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, at 7:30 p.m. on Fox-Ch. 32.
The four main cast members-Dutton, Ella Joyce, Rocky Carroll and Carl Gordon-are mainly stage actors. Dutton, Carroll and Gordon appeared in ”The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson`s Pulitzer Prize-winning play; Joyce most recently starred in the playwright`s ”Two Trains Running.”
Monday, Tommy Davidson, a regular on Fox`s ”In Living Color,” was added to the cast. He will play Donald, a homeless man whose wife Linda (Emmy-winner and Dutton`s wife, Debbi Morgan), is pregnant. While he`s out looking for work, Roc`s brother Joey (Carroll) finds her on the street and invites her home. This will be the first dramatic role for Davidson, who has irreverently played O.J. Simpson, Hammer and Spike Lee on ”In Living Color.” ”If there`s any cast in television capable of doing a live show, it`s this one,” Dutton said.
Dutton isn`t alone in his enthusiasm for performing live.
”I`m looking forward to it, I really am,” said Joyce, who plays Roc`s wife, Eleanor, a nurse. ”It`s like revisiting the theater, which I miss. Doing it straight through at the same time it`s being aired-I find it very exciting.”
Joyce sees advantages and disadvantages to acting in two media.
TV offers enormous exposure with a new script every week to spice up what can be a cumbersome and often dull production process. On stage, there is only one script during a play`s run, but there is time to refine the nuances of the character and receive applause at the end of the performance from the audience.
”In theater, you can really sort of disappear in the character, become part of the scenery,” she said. ”In television, you`re always interrupted. It`s going good and you have to stop-set change, costume change, some problems with the cameras.”
It makes it more difficult to stay in character, Joyce said, again comparing it with theater, where ”once you get going, you`re there for three hours.”
The live episode of ”Roc” brings back a taste of that excitement.
”You have the challenge of really knowing your lines. You can`t stop and edit. You just have to plow through it,” she said. ”It`s exciting for us actors who love to live dangerously on the edge. That`s really who theater people are.”
”Roc” executive producer Vic Kaplan said Fox first approached HBO Independent Productions about doing the show live after giving a green light to ”In Living Color`s” live halftime Super Bowl special last month.
At first the HBO producers were reluctant but decided to take the plunge after talking to the actors.
”They got excited about the possibility of doing something live again, like they were doing a theater presentation. They`ll be in front of a studio audience, but they all recognize, beyond that, that their performance is going out to viewers in the home,” Kaplan said.
Technically, a different crew experienced at handling video and live transmissions will be brought in to replace the crew that usually shoots the show on film with four cameras.
The show may turn out to be slightly less expensive by going live even though a new crew has to be hired. ”We save on post-production,” Kaplan said. ”The videotape is cheaper than film stock.”
One of the bigger headaches is timing the show precisely. If it comes up short, Kaplan said, the cast will come out for a curtain call and a longer version of the credits will roll.
”It is a very limiting way to present a sitcom,” he said. ”However, the excitement will be in their performances and seeing what they can do.”
Given the conditions, it will be a challenge, said Dutton.
”If you blow a line, you`d better be witty because it`s not stop and start again,” he said. ”It`s … kind of scary stuff. It gets your adrenalin pumping. What you have to watch for is not to let the adrenalin take over the performance, that it`s all energy and nothing else.”
