We interview Christian McKay of "Rosebud" opening soon at 59E59.

From the press notes: This is an exceptional and exciting piece of theatre, a deliciously literate chronicle of the lives and loves of Orson Welles, the boy genius who started at the top and worked his way down, having become the greatest film director of the 20th Century.

Bearing an uncanny likeness to Welles, McKay revisits the glories of Welles' youth: the black Voodoo Macbeth in Harlem and the fabled Mercury Theatre, the live newscast adaptation of The War of the Worlds which had New Yorkers fleeing the city in terrified droves, and of course the timeless, brooding classic, Citizen Kane—the greatest movie ever made.

ROSEBUD is not a biography, rather a carefully constructed play which explodes the Faustian myth that has clouded Welles' reputation for so long. A magnetic tour de force performance by Christian McKay is coupled with the elegant, erudite script of Mark Jenkins and the subtle precision of Josh Richards direction.

For more info and tickets click here.

Broadway Bullet:  Brits Off Broadway has been bringing many productions to 59 East 59th Street Theater the past few weeks, and we are talking to Christian McKay, in the studio, about his one-man production of Rosebud, in which he plays a rose growing out of… No.  (Laughter from McKay) No, you are playing Orson Welles I take it.

Christian McKay:  I'm playing Orson Welles, yes.

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Broadway Bullet Interview : Christian McKay of Rosebud

BB:  It doesn't look like a big stretch looking at you; you look like a young Orson Welles.

CM:  Well, I think we both eat too much, that's where we start.  It's amazing, because my company  -- Atomic80 , who produces Rosebud, -- we've been getting, over the last couple of years, quite a few e-mails from all over America, and it is amazing how many people are cursed with having an uncanny likeness to Orson Welles.  It seems every other American actor looks like him, and wants to do the show, which is very flattering.  But the show was written for me, and so here I am.  It's wonderful, absolutely wonderful, to bring Orson home, in a sense.

BB:  Well, I guess first off, you say it was written for you.  So, how did that all come about, that you get a show written for you, about Orson Welles?

CM:  Through a lot of cheek, I think.  At the time, I was playing a eunuch at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Antony and Cleopatra, which was a very humble beginning.  My friend and then director, Josh Richards, who had played a very famous one-man show, written by Mark Jenkins (who also wrote Rosebud), called Playing Burton.  And he did a charity performance at Stratford-upon-Avon , which I was lucky enough to see, and it remains one of the greatest theatrical performances I've ever seen.  Josh doesn't particularly look like Richard Burton, he doesn't sound like Richard Burton, but suddenly on the stage, he became Richard Burton, which was absolutely fascinating.  So, afterwards, with a lot of his Welsh friends…and the Welsh are very famous for partying, and we were singing Welsh songs, and all the rest of it.  It was a night that Richard Burton would have really enjoyed.  I probably had a few glasses of wine, so I went up to Josh, and I said, "You know, I would like to do that; I would like to play Richard Burton on stage," and all this.  He said:  "Well, you cheeky young thing.  How's about Orson Welles?"  And I'm afraid my immediate reaction was:  "I'm not that fat." (Laughter)  Because I remember from my childhood, Orson, you know, looking into camera, very earnestly, and selling wine before its time and things like that, and sherry adverts, and you name it.  But the old man, this grand senior sitting there, selling all kinds of dubious whiskeys, and you name it, dog food.  I didn't really know the younger Welles.  So, [Josh Richards] introduced me to Mark Jenkins. And Mark was very reluctant, he didn't really want to write the play because he had had a famous one-man show, and he didn't really want to write another one, and have it be a disaster...

BB: ...Or that becomes his thing:  the guy that writes one-person shows.

CM:  Exactly, but thankfully he did.  Rosebud premiered in Edinborough at the Edinborough International Festival in 2004.  It was a fairy tale -- we won two major awards, and we got wonderful reviews from the critics.  And it's gone from there.  I've been touring, and then I put him away in the suitcase, put him down in the shed for about twelve months; went off to do other things, playing Shostakovich in play.  My first career is as a musician; I trained as a musician.  So, it was lovely to get back to music and play some concerts, and that sort of thing. And then he was knocking on the suitcase door, "Let me out," and so we kind of took him back on the road, especially with the opportunity of bringing the old man home.  So here we are in New York City, and now when I'm talking about the Mercury Theatre and Seventh Avenue and things like that [in the play], it's just outside the theater.  It's fantastic.

BB:  So, now you mention you tour with this as well.  How many places have you been with this besides New York?

CM:  Well, I toured all over the UK and Ireland with it.  I went to the Flying Solo Festival in Toronto, Canada…I've been to New York previously, with one of the awards we won in Edinborough -- it was the Best of Edinborough Award -- so that enabled us to play five showcase performances at the Michael Schimelman Center For The Arts, which was very exciting.  That was just after Edinborough.  Then we did a substantial UK tour.  We've had inquiries from all over the world from Vienna, for example, where The Third Man was filmed, so I'd love to take it there…and South Africa, Australia, Hong Kong, and so there's a lot of places I'd like to take it before he goes back in the suitcase once more, and I get on with other things.

BB:  Now, I understand that although this was written for you, you actually did a large part of the research to get the show ready.

CM:  Yes, I did.

BB:   So what were some of the most interesting things that you dug up about Orson Welles that you don't think many people know?

CM:  Well, I became sort of an Orson Welles anorak, I really did.  And the wonderful thing, about any artist, is how you divide the truth from the legend.  And Orson, what he loved to do was create legends about himself.  For example: that he was great friends with Houdini as a child, and Houdini taught him magic tricks.  And he was on holiday with some friends in Austria in about 1933, and of course he's in a beer killer, and sat next to man with a little moustache -- of course it had to be Herr Hitler, just because Orson was there.  He would go as a teenager to the bull rings in Spain, in the south of Spain, and instead of watching, like which we all would, perhaps, if you like that sort of thing - which I don't.  But at that time the whole town, the whole village went to see the bull fights.  Of course Orson wasn't content with watching, he got in the ring.  I can't imagine a young man with flat feet being an even match for a bull.  So I think that's another legend, you know. 

But what I wanted to do in the play, what Mark and I tried to do, was tell the truth about the man because I think there is a prevailing perception of Orson Welles, especially in America, that is not shared in Europe.  In Europe, especially in France, his foibles and his inconsistencies are very often forgiven, for the body of work that he left.  Whereas several people have come up to me, because I'm playing a show at the moment at 59 East 59th called Memory, about the Holocaust, and afterwards, of course they come out crying, saying how moved they have been by this theatrical experience; they enjoy it very much, and then I say, "Now, Orson Welles, I'm doing Orson Welles," and very often they turn around and say, "Oh yes, he got fat, he sold out, he left his film to be butchered, and he went off to South America, like he was going on some kind of holiday."  And so, I'm there trying not to… and I just want to say just come and see the show, because I think it's a little deeper than that.  There are a lot of things that happened to him: governments, and taking on powerful people with Citizen Kane, and things like that.  And to see the system turn against this great artist, it's quite amazing.

BB:  It's definitely interesting, and the one-man shows can be done a variety of different ways.  I'm curious as to exactly what kind of theatrical mode you tell this story in.  Do you stay Orson Welles the whole time, or do you step out into yourself, and back and forth?

CM:  No, I play Orson from about the age of twenty-five through to seventy.  He lived his life on, kind of, Shakespearean archetypes.  For example, when you think that by the age of twenty-five he had revolutionized theatre in America with the Mercury Theatre.  Even before that as a nineteen year-old, he played Voodoo MacBeth in Harlem, and the cops were blocking off the roads; people were fighting for fifty-cent tickets, I think it was.  He tells a beautiful story about the actors he was working with; they were part of the New Deal.  They didn't know Shakespeare, they certainly had never spoken Shakespeare before, and this nineteen year-old gave them the magic of Shakespeare.  It was a very, very, beautiful, famous production.  He said it was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to him, because instead of the curtain coming down, and them taking their bow, they just left the curtain open, and the audience just came onto the stage to congratulate the actors.  So, then, of course he went on to write for the radio; he revolutionized radio. 

I'm very lucky, because when I was playing the show in London, I heard this wonderful lady outside -- I was getting changed, and I heard this wonderful old lady saying, "Oh, he won't want to meet me.  No, don't bother him," and all this.  So I ran out, and there's this lovely lady, Madeliene Gilford, one of the old great actors, and we were talking.  She said, "Thank you for bringing my old friend to life."  So, that was the best compliment I've ever… better than critics or anything.  And I said, "Oh, you knew him?"  And she said, "Yeah, yeah, he gave me my first job."  So, I said, "What was that?"  In The War of the Worlds, that was her first job.  She was there on that fateful night.  And then, of course, he went to Hollywood.  After a few false starts, looking for the right material, he produces Citizen Kane, which is still regarded as one of the greatest films ever made by the critics all over the world.  It's quite an achievement.  And of course, he then said, "Well, I started at the top and I've been working my way down, ever since."  So it's that. He started off as, let's say, Prince Hal, Henry V, and he ended up as Falstaff.  And for me, my favorite film that Orson ever made was Chimes at Midnight  -- his portrayal of Falstaff is absolutely wonderful and very human.  Whereas I disagree with Orson when he said that he's the one good man in Shakespeare because I think he was rather mercenary.  But obviously Orson saw something in [Falstaff]. 

And I think when you're looking for money for movies, it's very easy to become mercenary, when you're desperate to complete a work of art.  He always said that if he had been an artist, he could have gone and worked in a grocery store and earned the money for brushes and paints and easels and that sort of thing.  Canvases.  But because he worked in film, he had to go and sell himself.  It wasn't selling his soul, necessarily; it was selling a product.  I mean, Toulouse lautrec, Picasso, they produced posters.  I don't know whether it happens here in America, but certainly in England, there was a kind of snobbery about a great actor producing commercials and doing commercials.

BB:  That's been a big problem until about the last decade.  It's become acceptable for big names to do this.

CM:  Absolutely.  Laurence Olivier used to come to America to earn a fortune selling cigarettes, and all the rest of it, but he would never do it back in England.  It's extraordinary.  Whereas Orson earned a lot of money, and the wonderful thing is, where he's a man of obstinant integrity; the fact that he took that money and put it into his films, into his projects.  And thank goodness, as a result we have a beautiful body of work that will last millennium, hopefully.

BB:  Now, this is running from May 29th until when?

CM:  May 29th until June 10th.  It's quite a short run, really. I could stay in the city doing it for months and months.  It's just two weeks at 59 East 59th Street Theatre as part of the Brits Off Broadway Festival.  I think it's 8:30 in the evening.

BB:  All right, well, thank you so much Christian, and I hope you get a chance to tour the US, so even more of our listeners can catch the show.

CM:  Thanks very much; thank you for having me.

For more information about "Rosebud" and the other great Atomic80 Productions, visit their website at www.atomic80productions.com.  And for more about Christian McKay visit him at www.christianmckay.com.

Photos:  1.) "Rosebud" – Christian McKay; 2.) Orson Welles 3.) Christian McKay

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You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 116. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.

 or MP3 Feed with XML