The Qualities of Quast
Interview with Patricia Valentine, The Weekend Australian 14-15 April 1990
Remember Philip Quast's obsessively avenging policeman in Les Miserables at Sydney's Theatre Royal. Now he's in London, playing the lead in Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George. PATRICIA VALENTINE was there.
Nightly on the stage at the Royal National Theatre in London, Australia's Philip Quast has to act, sing and draw. Recently, this extraordinarily demanding triple bill was compounded by the excitement of awaiting the birth of his first child.
"Altogether," grinned the one time star in London and Australia of a more rollicking kind of show, Les Miserables. "Its been a fairly unforgettable time."
He is starring in the Pulitzer Prize winning musical Sunday in the Park with George for an unprecedented 10-week straight run at the National, which normally intertwines its shows in repertory short runs. Eight times a week until June, Quast not only has to sing the devilishly difficult score of composer Stephen Sondheim and to speak tongue-twirling monologues, but he also crayon sketches on stage under the watchful eyes of the Olivier theatre audiences.
Each performance, he does the drawings anew . . . and now members of the cast are seeking them from him as their personal souvenirs of a show that is already sold out for the duration. Quast has not had drawing lessons, nor has he been taught singing. His acting study was done at NIDA. His wife Carol, a teacher, was due to have their first child five days after opening night but the little one missed his first cue and arrived a week later. "He caught the second curtain.'' laughed his proud dad.
Everything had been officially in place for the star's understudy to take over - as he duly did - when Quast raced to be with Carol for the birth. He missed the matinee and the evening performance - "the upper management were not too keen about that," he said. But for him the show that had to go on was the one at the hospital in south-west London.
Sunday in the Park, previously performed only in New York, relates to the pointillist masterpiece Un Dimanche d'Ete de La Grande Jatte, painted by George Seurat just over 100 years ago on the outskirts of Paris. On stage at the National, the performers bring the painting to visually stunning life. Seurat's pointillist technique is cleverly paralleled by Sondheim's wispy arpeggios and melodic phrasing, the overall objective being to show the pain and pressure of a work of art being brought to life.
In the production, George is obsessive: he neglects his girlfriend Dot and their baby and she eventually goes off to New York with a baker. In Act II, the action moves forward to today and George's great grandson, another George, a pretentious American pseudo-artist who "paints" with mechanical aids and gives ghastly audio-visual presentations of his work in an American gallery. Georges Seurat was, in fact, a lonely and dedicated artist who lived with his mother in Paris and died at 32-comparisons have been made with the aloof perfectionism of Sondheim himself.
Philip Quast is George, while Dot is played by Maria Friedman, a leading young English performer who has played the National before (Ghetto) and in Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. "Maria is fabulous. We started rehearsing a week before the others in January, partly to try and establish a relationship between us and to do some extra work on the music." Quast is in his dressing room at the National Theatre. Just being there is exciting to him.
"I've had a dressing room in Sydney where I never saw daylight," he said as sunlight poured in. "Occasionally I see Judi Dench at her window over there and Ian McKellen's is right above-he's doing Richard III at the moment.'
The National company is the most positive he has worked with - "Temperaments boil. Egos are pushed. Sheila Ballantine, who plays my mother, is wonderfully experienced and has taught me a lot about speaking. I have that very flat Australian delivery where you drop the end of every sentence. I did not know I was so bad until I had to do the speaking in this play.
"Listening to other actors work here, I have realised how vocally dexterous they are compared to how we are at home. I have an awful lot to learn." He has also worked with a brilliant vocal coach, Joan Washington. "She should go to Australia and give classes. She knows about 300 dialects and can teach them, plus the English ones. Just having access to someone like her is extraordinary. The National brings her in as a consultant. She reminds me to keep up the ends of sentences. I don't mean 'G'day,' he said, in broad vernacular, "but I did not realise how I let everything drop."
What also nearly slipped early on was his morale ... there were so many hitches: "No actor ever believes he is ready for opening night, but we did have so many problems. The work is so technically complex and the music is terribly difficult. It is much higher than Les Miz - it is up where only dogs can hear it." The role in fact requires him to "yip" like a pup and growl savagely. The dogs are in Seurat's painting.
Quast has become a passionate Sondheim fan. The composer came to his dressing room-"he sat where you are sitting"-and gave him personal coaching in the role. "We had been rehearsing four or five weeks when he came to give a three-day master class. He writes the music as you would speak it. Sometimes you don't actually know you have started singing, it just flows from the dialogue. You can sing a song without being aware you have done so. He knows I am a bit funny about singing. I keep saying: 'I am an actor, not a singer.'He says to stop that, it's ridiculous. I just have to face the fact that I am a singer. So I don't think I can use that excuse any more. It is just insecurity on my part."
There were unsettling problems during the previews. The lighting director went off to another job and Quast found himself singing in darkness quite often. One preview had to be cancelled.
"I was stuffing up my lines. I was drying in the middle of songs. A gallery that was meant to fly up got half-way and stuck there and I had to sing wondering if it was going to fall on my head. The songs are not meant for applause, they are kind of internal monologues. I've got a beard and I sing to the painting and sometimes I found it difficult to communicate to the audience. But it was exciting last week because the improvements in the show were enormous."
He admits his reviews were mixed. Leading critic Charles Osborne said he was easily the equal of Mandy Patinkin, who played George on Broadway, while Clive Hirschom credited him only with "limited success". What did Sondheim think?
"I hate to say he was quite happy with what I was doing," answered Quast, whose modesty is high-profile. "He did say before I started that I would not find it boring singing his songs and I reminded him of that. When I said how difficult it was, all he said was that you don't play tennis against people you can beat. I think he is quite happy with the way the show is going."
Now he is wondering what to do after the end of the run. A rest from singing would not go amiss because singing Sunday in the Park eight times a week is "draining and induces paranoia". And he has been in musicals for 3 and a half years.
'I've got to think about things very seriously. I would like to go home and do some straight acting. Then you think it might be hard to come back here and start all over again."
Nevertheless, Quast is more relaxed at the National than he was doing Les Miserables. "I think it is because Carol was pregnant. Her little production made mine seem rather egotistically self-centred. She coped so very well."
Now there is their son to include in future plans - who will be always be as much a souvenir of London as his father's success in two award winning shows.
*Portions of this article have been edited to exclude personal details relating to Mr Quast and his family.
Grateful thanks to Elizabeth for locating and sending us this article.
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