all the worldwide web is a stage The Official Website of Richard Reilly

The Official Website of Richard Reilly

Acting Naturally

A middle-aged man goes to his first audition and is shocked to be offered the lead role - and suddenly he realizes he has "fallen down the rabbit hole" into a very strange world of stage-craft and illusion that he finds curiously addictive.

Cast as Ebenezer Scrooge in his very first role, a bewildered novice begins a crash course in all things theatrical. Written with humor and a frank humility, we discover the world of performance through the author's eyes. What is it like to play the infamous Professor Henry Higgins? How does it feel to say goodbye to cast-mates who have grown closer than family? What is "talent," really?

We get a first-hand look at the orderly chaos behind Opening Night, and we look over his shoulder as he competes with sleek twenty-somethings to master song-and-dance routines and win coveted roles. Through musicals and dramas, back-stage dressing rooms and rehearsal halls, the reader experiences both the joys and the heartbreaks of the stage.

Every aspect of the theater is covered in this loving memoir from a man who found his passion on the stage. A must-read for aspiring actors. Written in the first-person journaling tradition of the infamous Constantin Stanislovski's "An Actor Prepares."

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$10 to purchase the complete E-Book, 224 pages (Memoir: 76,000 words)

Table of Contents

Please feel free to browse through the chapters and read the chapter synopsis and an excerpt from the chapter itself.

Overview of Acting Naturally

Why did I become an actor?

Scrooge's Christmas Carol

Annie

Oliver! auditions

The Oliver! experience

Scrooge's Christmas Carol - second production

Auditioning for Death and the Maiden

The Sound of Music

Man of La Mancha

Pride and Prejudice

Summer odds and ends

Some thoughts about playing Henry Higgins

My Fair Lady

Poetry Reading

Being in the public eye

Working with directors, technicians, other actors

Sabbatical

A Christmas Carol day by day in rehearsal

A Christmas Carol in performance

On Shakespeare

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Auditioning for two television commercials

Fear and open auditions

The Fantasticks

Acting in the Real World

Many more chapters to be added here soon...