Copyright 1995 Southam Inc.   
Calgary Herald 


February 1, 1995, Wednesday, FINAL EDITION 

SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. B6 

LENGTH: 646 words 

HEADLINE: Carver's playing the Devil tonight Edmonton 

BYLINE: MARTIN MORROW 

BODY: 


PREVIEW: BRENT CARVER stars in RICHARD III, at the Citadel's Maclab Theatre in Edmonton tonight through Feb. 19. Tickets, from $ 12 to $ 25, on sale at TicketMaster in Calgary. 

In 1993, he reduced Broadway theatregoers to tears as the fantasizing gay prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman. A year later, at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, he squeezed every drop of pathos out of that noble poet with the prodigious nose, Cyrano de Bergerac. 

Now it's 1995 and Brent Carver is back at the Citadel, but this time he isn't expecting your tears and sympathy. Unless, of course, it's sympathy for the Devil. 

"It's kind of a flip of the coin," says Carver with a giggle, referring to his nasty new role as perhaps the most outrageously wicked of all Shakespeare's bad guys, King Richard III. But trust the sensitive Carver to find a pitiful strain running through a demonic character who, in order to obtain the English crown, seduces a widow at her husband's funeral, literally stabs his colleagues in the back and has his two young and innocent nephews murdered in cold blood. 

"He represents a part of human nature that is there in all of us," claims the gentle-spoken actor in a telephone interview from the Citadel, where Richard III opens tonight. "Maybe not in terms of the actions Richard takes in order to support his cause, but certainly in terms of the feelings of not being understood and being marginal within a society or within a family -- of being an outsider because of his physical and psychological nature." 

The most popular image of Richard III remains Laurence Olivier's flamboyant film portrayal as a spindly legged hunchback with a dangling withered arm -- a veritable horror-movie villain. The boyish Carver is coy about any use of makeup and prosthetics for his Richard in Robin Phillips' new production. "Yes, he does have a slight disability," he allows. "But we're not playing it up or playing it down -- consciously, anyway." 

He sees what Richard calls his "deformed, unfinished" body as being at least partly the man's own self-perception. 

"He thinks this is how he is seen. If you label someone often enough, say to them this is what you are, they'll become that. It happens with children all the time." 

It's that kind of penetrating approach to his characters which stunned New York audiences two seasons ago, when a 41-year-old Carver burst on to Broadway with the hit musical version of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, snapping up rave reviews and a Tony Award. 

Even the dissenting critical voices had nothing but praise for his performance as Molina, the South American jailbird who escapes his squalid confinement by conjuring up exotic movie scenarios. 

The musical is still on Broadway and a North American tour with Carver's co-star, Chita Rivera, is in progress (it plays Vancouver this summer but no Alberta engagements have been set). Carver, however, chose to leave the show when his contract was up. 

"The route it took, from Toronto to London to New York, was really quite an adventure," he says of Spider Woman,"and it would be great to be involved in another musical of that scale. But," he adds, "doing Cyrano and Richard III have, in terms of quality, been absolutely on a par with it." 

Citadel engagements aside, Carver has lately been devoting himself to AIDS awareness and fund-raising. He's hosted a CBC-TV special called Dancers for Life, telecast on World AIDS Day, recorded a song for a Broadway AIDS-benefit album and done a series of benefit performances, including one in his home town of Cranbrook, B.C. 

"Certainly, the arts community has been devastatingly affected by AIDS," he says, "but more and more it's happening everywhere. Even walking into the read-through for a first rehearsal, you're always reminded of the people who are not there, who might have been able to hear this." 



GRAPHIC: Photo 

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH 

LOAD-DATE: February 2, 1995