Sills the One
A Bona-fide Broadway Star, Douglas Sills Comes
Back Home to L.A. in The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Douglas Sills remembers walking through Manhattan’s theater district and being stopped by another actor who had taken an evening off from his own show to see Sills as The Scarlet Pimpernel. "You were great," the other actor said, "you were really worth it."
It was one of the things that proved to Sills that he had made it in his first Broadway appearance: That, along with receiving a Tony nomination, being given a Theatre World Award by Patti LuPone, and - especially - seeing his parents in the audience one night.
Now swashbuckling across the stage of Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre as Baroness Orczy’s dashing hero, Sills has been an L.A. resident for several years. But, he says, "To be a member of that fraternity that occurs nowhere else on earth but in those few square blocks in New York - it’s just so special. You feel so included; you’ve arrived. That’s something I’ll never forget."
The 38-year-old actor-singer has been getting ready for his "arrival" since he was a boy. He remembers his mother calling him to join her "private time" very late one evening when he was about nine years old. She pointed to the television set and the vintage movie that was playing, and she said, "So, you want to be an actor?"
"Yeah, I think I do," young Sills answered.
Pointing again to the set, his mother said, "That guy knows what he’s doing." It was Leslie Howard in the classic film version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Sills remembers Howard "sort of gliding through the air." Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.
The sight of Leslie Howard that night started Sills’ lifelong romance, as he calls it, with the British school of acting and his other idols: Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, and Richard Burton. As the years passed, as he read about these great actors and watched them in action, they taught him a lot.
"It really changed all my perceptions about theater and performing," he says. "They talked about acting like they were cabinetmakers, like it’s a craft. You apprentice to it, you study, you watch other people do it very well, and you slowly increase your skill level. It made acting worth pursuing. It’s not an immediate gratification thing; it’s something where the dividends pay off later."
Sills acted through college and beyond, winding up at the noted American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. "I had already performed a lot when I arrived there," he says of his time at ACT. "I already had my union card. As a result, I had some bad habits - a bag of performing tricks." Sills says he got rid of those bad habits at ACT and further developed his skills. During his three years in Pimpernel, those skills have helped him to keep his performance fresh.
"It’s certainly been a challenge," he says, "And I draw on everything I’ve been taught - different techniques, depending on what I feel my deficit is as we go into that day’s performance, to keep it fresh. I’m acutely aware of that rule of thumb; we have nothing if we don’t have the audience." Sometimes, Sills has heard actors complaining backstage that a particular audience is unresponsive: "I say, ‘No. If there’s a problem, it’s us. We’re not connected to them. They’re fine. They paid their money. It’s not their job to make us feel good."
As Sills enters what he assumes is the last eight weeks of his association with Sir Percival Blakeney and his dashing alter ego, The Scarlet Pimpernel, he’s very proud of having kept his performance vital. A solid background in classical theater has helped. "And if I’ve learned anything about the fraternity of actors during the Pimpernel journey, it’s that there’s not enough of that going on in the musical theater community. I’m very aware of the paucity of training among musical theater people. They’re getting snatched up into great situations by the likes of Miss Saigon, the likes of Les Miz. They’re pulled out of school, and they think if they can belt out a song, and they have long hair, they have their youth, then that’s enough. But I think they will find shortly, in their late twenties or early thirties, that it’s not enough. I see a lot of actors who have no vocabulary to speak intelligently about a theme, to be able to dissect it and talk about how to approach it."
After his run at the Ahmanson, Sills is looking forward to digging into some classical pieces. He’ll be playing Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing at South Coast Repertory in the fall. There’s serious talk about a Sills Hamlet in the near future - as the actor says, "before it’s too late." Jerry Herman came backstage during Pimpernel, and asked Sills to do Mack and Mabel for the Reprise! series of musicals in concert in the fall, saying, "the only reason to do it again is for you to play the part." Pimpernel composer Frank Wildhorn has talked to Sills about new musicals in the works concerning Bonnie and Clyde—and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
But, for the moment, Sills is just glad to be among old friends. He’s a founding member of Los Angeles’ classical Antaeus Company, and some of his former classmates from ACT operate A Noise Within and Pacific Theatre Ensemble. "And I really enjoy being home so I can have my dog at the theater, and stuff like that," he says. "But the reason I did the tour was to create some visibility for myself in Los Angeles. If some higher-paying, higher-visibility work comes along…well, I have a mortgage to pay!"
-T. H. McCulloh, TheaterMania.com
May 1, 2000
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