Erik Van Beuzekom in “Rosebud: the Live of Orson Welles”
By MIKE TEAL
Erik Van Beuzekom starred as Orson Welles in Mark Jenkins’ 2006 play Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles at the Woodstock Opera House on Saturday night, before an enthusiastic audience that gave him a well-deserved standing ovation at the end.
I’m always in awe when I see a one-man (or woman) show, having watched Simon Callow perform his own Dickens and Shakespeare shows. This one was no exception. Erik Von Beuzekom channels Welles very confidently and charismatically, and although he looks more than sounds like him, still brilliantly captures the essence of Welles’s restless creative spirit, and his mercurial genius.
Jenkins’ play covers many of the highpoints, from Voodoo Macbeth, to the Martians, through Kane, Ambersons, Harry Lime, Falstaff, to his decline as a commercial spokesman. At only 70-80 minutes, it’s basically Welles 101, so much is glossed over or ignored, but there is more than enough there to recognize the general trajectory of Welles’s career, how varied it was, and to provide some intriguing and plausible theories about what caused his rise and fall. For example, near the end of Act One, Welles, at the peak of his power following the Citizen Kane triumph, recalls Hearst saying to him during their fabled elevator ride together, “You think you’ve destroyed me? You’ve destroyed yourself instead.”
Subsequently we get the political intrigue at RKO that caused Ambersons and It’s All True to be ruined, and the opening of the FBI file on Welles as a communist sympathizer. The story implies that, because of the intense resentment of Welles in Hollywood to begin with, he chose the wrong bully to pick a fight with in Hearst, and wound up being victimized from it. But it doesn’t let Welles off the hook either. We get the womanizing, the cheating on Rita Hayworth, the overeating (which Jenkins cleverly traces to all those magnificent Viennese pastries Welles discovered during the filming of The Third Man), and the unwillingness to compromise.
Some of the best Welles stories in the play are taken from biographies and documentaries, although never verbatim. Jenkins rewrites them cleverly enough that they seamlessly and efficiently blend into one another and sometime illuminate more than one point at a time. Welles’s well-known “Italian waiter” story, for example, is rewritten so that it not only illustrates Welles’s frustration with the indifference and ignorance shown towards all his post-Kane films, but towards all of his unfinished films and unfilmed screenplays as well.
Above all, the play shows how Welles was a showman and provocateur almost from birth and remained one his whole life. As to why he decided to program the old sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds for his radio show, Welles reasons with wicked glee that “Jane Eyre doesn’t put people in the hospital.”
A fun and very entertaining show for Welles fans that would be a terrific introduction for those not that familiar with his life and career. Van Beuzekom is going back to California with the show, and any Welles fest for the remainder of the year and beyond would be making a great addition to their schedules by making arrangements to include it.
The three people I was with last night, none of them Welles fans, enjoyed it very much and raved about Mr. Van Beuzekom’s performance.
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