I had a lot of fun speaking with David, who has quite a wry sense of humor. Back in September when the show was being rewritten and rumors were rampant, one story had been leaked that the new version of the show would have three renditions of "You Are My Home." This seemed a bit much, so David was asked jokingly by a Leaguer if there was any truth to the rumor that Chauvelin and Robespierre would be singing a reprise of "You Are My Home?" Not missing a beat, David replied, "Hmm, it was considered, but it's been replaced by the `It's a Pretty Plan Chauvelin Tap Dance!'"

NR: Can you give me some background? Where did you grow up?

DC: I grew up not too far from here, north of the city. Do you know where Woodbury Common is?

NR: Yes. (Woodbury Common is a shopping center in Westchester County, New York.)

DC: That's my high school. I lived back there on the hill.

NR: Did you come into the city a lot to see shows?

DC: Yeah, but I didn't enjoy it much.

NR: Really? Why not?

DC: No, I didn't much like Broadway. The first show I saw was Camelot with Julie Andrews and it was transcending. It was incredible. I liked the shows, I liked the theater, the little bit I saw. I didn't see a lot of it. But, I never liked the city itself. I thought it was noisy and dirty and crowded and all those things. So, I never much liked it, but I certainly like it now. I love it now. It's a great city. I lived in California the last 6 years and I was glad to come back here.

NR: When did you decide to act?

DC: In high school.

NR: So, what type of training did you go for then?

DC: Well, I went to Ithaca College for four years and it was pretty intensive. Not that anybody knew what we were doing - it was a very small school. We just did a lot of plays and the ones that stuck to the wall worked and you learned a lot by your mistakes. I did 65 plays in four years, and that's a lot of plays. I remember doing three plays in one day.

NR: How did you keep that straight?

DC: I don't know, I don't know. You do it. You know, when you're young, it's pretty amazing what you can do. It was The Owl and the Pussycat, Becket, and at night was The Holly and the Ivy.

NR: Very different experiences.

DC: Yeah, it was amazing. Two in the afternoon and one at night.

NR: When I asked Ron Melrose about the conducting by the Prince of Wales in the ball scene, he told me that you are a conductor, that you've done some conducting. (incredulous look from David here.) (laughing) Well, you've fooled him if that's not true.

DC: I guess so, I've never trained. I remember once conducting the Peter Duchin Orchestra for a rehearsal, raising money for Channel 13 (PBS). I was conducting for Elaine Stritch. Elaine said to Peter, "He's the guy that knows what he's doing. Let him conduct the band." I was surprised, but I did it. But it's just like dancing. It's a rhythmic thing, that's all.

NR: You've been in many Broadway shows over the years...

DC: Only four or five.

NR: All right, that's enough. How does the experience with other shows compare to Pimpernel?

DC: That's funny, they either get easier or more difficult. I think they get easier. It's a tough question. The first one was The History of the American Film which came out of regional theater. Christopher Durang, and a whole bunch of really neat actors - Swoosie Kurtz, Brent Spiner, Gary Bauer, Maureen Andeman - wonderful regional theater and Broadway actors. It was a real "legit" kind of approach to a kind of "whiz-bang Christopher Durang" musical about the movies, and it was lots of fun to do. When it closed after 7 weeks, nobody was upset. We were in the wrong theater. We were in the old ANTA Theater, which is now the Virginia, which is a big barn. It's a very difficult venue in which to watch a play about what takes place between a camera and an actor. Whereas it had been done in three-quarters at the Krieger at Arena Stage and the audience was able to see in between that vector. It's not a proscenium kind of show. But anyway, that was great.

Drood was the best thing in the world. The Mystery of Edwin Drood was the best thing in the world because there are 465 permutations for the endings. There are three different points where the audience votes on up to six different outcomes and the combinations of that added up to 465 - ALL of which were scripted by Rupert Holmes. It was an amazing piece of theater, and it got better and better and better as we did it. We loved it.

Then I did Me and My Girl. That was a lot of fun. It's like this show in a way. It's a thing you take your parents to. You have a good time, you laugh. It's well done, first class, solid Broadway fare. That's what Me and My Girl is. I liked that. I did that on the road too with Tim Curry. That was fun.

NR: What has been your favorite role to date?

DC: Probably Polonius in Hamlet. I just did it recently. Doug (Sills) and I are going to do it again. We don't know where. Maybe he does and he's not telling me.

NR: Well, you'll have to tell us.

DC: Yeah, I know. We will.

NR: Do you have a dream role that you haven't played yet?

DC: No. I don't want to sound weird, but I'm very happy about something. I've done everything I really want to have done. I don't have anything to prove and it kind of relaxes me and frees me up to do the next thing, whatever it is. I like working in the theater, that I know. I'll do anything in the theater. I think it needs some positive energy. I don't like it turning into this kind of formula stuff that we see so much. I don't like the "Hollywood mentality" of low common denominator thinking coming into the theater. I think it's going to kill it.

NR: Can you explain your duties as dialect coach?

DC: I was not able to do a very comprehensive job with this because I started late. The horse was well out of the barn, so the dialects are not consistent and they are not at all anything I'm proud of. In fact, I've had my name taken off.

I love to do it. It's something I really enjoy, and I have been inspired by a few people in my career - Tim Monick, another guy named Gordon Jacoby, who's now at Rutgers, I understand. It really gives you a way in to a character through your voice, which is also a physical way in. The voice is so physical. People don't realize how important the sound of the vowels are in terms of conveying emotion, something I learned doing a lot of Shakespeare. An old exercise when you're doing Shakespeare is to remove all the consonants from the line, and you play with just the vowels, and you can still feel the content of the line. That's the way Shakespeare used to write, that's the kind of dedication he had to the voice in the actor, and we need more of that.

NR: Since you play the only two historical characters in the show, did you do any research on them?

DC: Yeah, some. Not much. The Prince of Wales - not really because he didn't really fit what Nan (Knighton) had written. It's kind of a combination of the actual grandson of the Prince of Wales, historically speaking. And, of course, he's different now than he was when we started.

Robespierre is interesting though because he was a paranoid schizophrenic. We're going to try to play him for laughs, but it's pretty much pared down to simple exposition right now so there's not too much humor in him anymore. When we first started out we had a lot of fun with the paranoid schizophrenic aspect of it.

NR: Let's talk about that. How hard was it, because they changed your characters a lot? They took away your Fisherman.

DC: Yeah, I really don't like what happened with Robespierre in the first scene because they took away the way that Terry (Mann) and I had discovered we could play it. Terry said to me once, "I HATE this scene," and I said, "I know. It's not working." He said, "I just hate what I say to you. I just hate it" because he used to say all the things that the soldiers used to say. Remember Jeff (Gardner) and Eric (Timothy Eric Hart) used to say all those things? He used to say all of that and it made him look really stupid and cowering just before his big song. I said, "Well, what do you want to say to me?" and he said, "I don't want to say anything." I said, "Then don't. Point to the soldiers and let them talk. And then we'll see. We'll experience the paranoia of the time, of the Reign of Terror, and the fact that these soldiers are being political. They want to climb up by saying the right thing, and they'll stick their necks out, and you're not sticking your neck out at all. You're going to let them fry." And it really worked. I'll never forget the first night in front of an audience and we were really happy that it got laughs, because we weren't sure whether that scene was going to get laughs or not. When it got solid laughs we were really happy. Well, that's gone now, and that's a hard thing to let go, because it's the first thing I do in the show, and God knows I don't do much in the show anymore. My job used to be to make sure the audience knew the kind of humor we were going to be presenting to them, especially the verbal stuff, especially the more "sarcastic edge" stuff and audiences love it. They love to be allowed in to aspire to the ideas that we're trying to give them. They don't like to be shown everything on a plate, you know? They want to play too. And we used to let them play. We used to let them in more in good scenes like that, and I miss that.

NR: How about "Creation of Man?" Do you miss that?

DC: I think it's great. I think it's absolutely wonderful, and I love coming in after it now. I love coming in and just kind of cleaning up a little bit in a way. It's lots of fun.

NR: What about the Fisherman? We miss that.

DC: I miss the Fisherman. I didn't want to play the Fisherman to begin with. I said, "Peter (Hunt), I just want to play Robespierre and the Prince of Wales." He said, "No, you're going to play the Fisherman too." I said, "All right." And it became one of those....there were nights that it turned into the old Carol Burnett Show. With Terry with the gag and those big blue eyes of Terry's and Doug and I up there with Christine (Andreas), we used to have such a good time with that scene.

NR: You have so much more offstage time now. What do you do to fill the time?

DC: (James) Judy and I play cribbage.

NR: What's the best part of working on this show?

DC: Money.

NR: (laughing) OK, that's honest.

DC: The money's good. I love the people, don't get me wrong. I love working with Douglas and with all of them. It is a great bunch of people, and working in a first class Broadway show like this is a hoot. I say the money, flippantly, but of course the money's a part of it because you really get treated very well, money being one of those things, and it's nice to make a very decent living for a change. It's not what I set out to do. I didn't set out to make a good living in this business because you really can't as an actor. It's not what you do. I gave up Hollywood and television where the money is because I HATED it.

NR: Really? Why was that?

DC: You don't know when you're through working. People have to tell you when to go home. You don't know what you've achieved or not. You have no way of knowing whether you've done your job or not, and that is a very distressing thing. You know the expression, "There is no there there in LA" attributed to Gertrude Stein or Dorothy Parker or somebody? But it's exactly true. Nobody is committed to being there. They're there to make the money but they certainly wouldn't send their kids to school there, they certainly wouldn't put down roots there. When you get five or six million people thinking that thought, it's not a place any human being really wants to spend any time. There's nothing there. There really is no commitment there. And you do your job. My first director in television once told me, "All we really want to do is go home." What a scathing indictment that is! And it's true, so I went home. I came back here, and I'm really happy I did.

NR: Have you had any interesting experiences with the fans?

DC: I love these fans. They're really neat people. I sometimes question their commitment because it's so...At some point you say, "Get a life" and I actually say that to them and they say, "We do have a life, thank you very much."

NR: We have a very busy life in fact.

DC: Exactly, and it's really great.

NR: But after seeing the show several times, it's still funny, it's still enjoyable. It's certainly not boring.

DC: And I tell you, I think the Pimpys are the thing that kept the show alive last summer. I really do think so. I think Sal Italiano had an awful lot to do with us being here now. People don't really realize that. Sal was the one who said to me, "People don't think it's funny. People think it's kind of dusty historical crap." And the point of it is, it was funny. It's still funny, but it was a lot easier to take in terms of its humor. Its humor went all over the place in the old show, and nothing was taken seriously.

NR: Do you have any advice for a high school student who wants to perform on Broadway?

DC: Go to school. You'll find out. Try it, but you've got to learn the technique. You've got to learn the basics. You've got to learn the speech. You've got to learn to move. You've got to learn all these things about your body. You've got to learn all the technique. It's not easy, but if you set along the road of technique you're going to find out pretty soon whether you're cut out for it or not. It ain't all glitz and glamour. It's a lot of hard work, but it's a great, great profession too. And I would not not recommend it. I do recommend it. I think it's healthy. I think it's good for a person psychologically. I think it keeps you pretty well balanced, because you have to be. There's no room for "flakery" in this business, there really isn't. It's a "cut the mustard" business. If you don't cut the mustard you've got to find out how to cut it, and that's through technique. And go to school. Go to a good school. Ithaca College is a great school for that. It's small and yet very intensive, concentrated. There are many good, smaller schools out there. I would stay away from a bigger school - the Yales and things like that, unless you're post-graduate. High school students should go to a good four year intensive college and get training. There's a lot of them.

NR: What do you wish you had more time for in your life?

DC: Shakespeare. My kids' show. My "Play Around Shakespeare" which I wrote when I was at The Folger, which needs to be done. It needs to be in schools.

NR: Tell me about it.

DC: Well, it's a 50 minute in-school program. We did it in outreach for The Folger Theater when I was there for ten years, and it's five actors who go into a school to perform great moments from William Shakespeare and wind up boring the crap out of all the students, and that's the hook. Then we take off and we improvise. We do pretty much of a romp through Shakespearean clowns based on the Mechanicals. Every time the Mechanicals run into trouble introducing their "Pyramus and Thisbe" they illustrate the solution to that problem with a scene from another of Shakespeare's plays. So, we have three realities. We have actors and we have the Mechanicals and then we have the Mechanicals playing...like I used to play Romeo because nobody else was available to do it. It's just real "whiz-bang" theater and we need to do that again and I keep working on it but I don't have enough time. I've got to produce it myself and I don't have enough time to do that.

NR: What would you like to do in the future?

DC: More Shakespeare. Polonius. I hope it's with Doug.

NR: I hope so too, and I hope it's somewhere that we can see it. Thanks.

DC: You're welcome.

I have to admit that one of the things I do miss about the old show is seeing more of David on stage. I still enjoy his Prince of Wales immensely, but it was fun to watch his crazy Robespierre and his Fisherman character. Who knows? Maybe we'll get to see him and Douglas do Hamlet together at some point. I certainly hope so.

Questions suggested by:

Joanna Morton-Gary, Sara Starr, Linda Guenette, Colleen Rosati, Renee, Susan, Kathy Thurlow, Dani Biancolli, Susan Cassidy, Davvy Clardy, Laura, Gillian Girvin, Frank Boemio, Josie Smith, Lois Colpo, Shovelin', Anita Boksem, Jan Kolb, Cheryl Pryor