Intermission Magazine: There’s something delightfully impish about the way Michael Man moves onstage.
I noticed it when I saw the actor in the Stratford Festival’s world premiere production of Jovanni Sy 施崇梵’s The Tao of the World as Dr. Wilson Wong, a sexually repressed, buttoned-up physician from Saskatchewan caught in the social chaos of a wealthy Singaporean family. I noticed it again in The Hobbit, when he played the instantly recognizable Gollum, a creature who has spent centuries skulking around Middle-earth obsessing over a certain band of gold.
3 comments:
I really admire artists like Michael Man; artists who are interested in the nitty-gritty, the pre-production that others might find boring or dull, and run with it. This article proved that the commitment Michael has to his craft is immense, and that he considers not only his appearance as his character in a specific moment on stage, but all of the history that got that character to that moment on stage. His decision to forgo the preconceived version of Gollum we are all familiar with and refer to Tolkien’s original depictions of the character was quite respectable, as the audience would have been content with a version of the character that would have required a lot less from him personally; Man still elected to craft his version from scratch. He is so versatile- being able to play both the mythical creature of Gollum and pull off a character like Dr. Wilson Wong is not something I feel many actors would be able to do, but he has clearly put in the work to get there.
I am probably one of the biggest Lord of the Rings fans ever, but I have honestly never thought about it possibly being a stage musical. And even more interesting is the character of gollum. A character that relied heavily on VFX and edits in post to make the character come to life. I wonder how much makeup they use to help get the character across. But ultimately the most important thing is the physicality portrayed by the actor michael mann. To hear how he approaches physicality is really interesting. He listens to his instincts and is almost playful. Making room for curiosity in acting is where you get a lot of good acting. He lets his boys respond to a characters circumstances which makes him very good.
It is so interesting to me to see how different actors inherent these various roles. The way Micheal Man uses physicality and instincts to pull himself into these various characters such as a physician, a gollum, robin, and other various characters continues to interest me. To embody a gollum, a creature centuries old must have been a really challenging character to inhabit and it really makes me curious to see the performance. As a tech it is an insane concept to me to inherit all these different characters and non human creatures from different eras and personalities. It is always such a memorizing thing to watch an actor onstage and shed their own skin to inherit a new person. There is so much creativity and thought that goes into every character Micheal Man creates showing such an in-depth level of character analysis and awareness.
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