Sandman Live Reading

Saturday night I attended a live stage reading of two issues of Sandman in honor of the series’ 20th anniversary. The two issues were "Three Septembers and a January", the story of Emperor Norton I of the United States of America, a real historical figure, and "The Golden Boy" based on the DC Comics character Prez, the first teenage President of the United States. I’ll get to some thoughts on the event later, but I wanted to discuss something that happened during the Neil Gaiman Q&A after the reading. In the only question related to the performance, Gaiman was asked whether he’d prefer to live in a country run by Norton or by Prez. And his answer was Norton. He felt that Prez, a gifted, charismatic leader, created in citizens the sense that he could solve all their problems for them. While Norton, on the other hand, would oversee a country where people would have to solve their problems themselves. It highlights the fact that the choice of doing these two issues ties in not only to Sandman’s anniversary, but also to this past week’s election.

Gaiman’s point is something to keep in mind as the U.S. moves forward in the weeks and months to come. It seems like a number of supporters of Barack Obama hold the view that once he steps in, he’s going to solve all our problems. Not all of them do. And I’d be surprised if Obama himself did. There has been a significant change, no question. For the past eight years we’ve had to deal with a leader who created problems and who often created obstacles to our attempts to solve them on our own. But Obama’s a leader, not a magical creature capable of granting wishes. His ability to inspire large numbers of people to get involved may be the greatest skill he brings with him into office, because that’s what it’s going to take to really turn things around. One leader making decisions on his own while everyone else watches and admires him isn’t going to do it. As many have said, what’s going to come is going to take a lot of hard work, not just by the new President but also by everyone who voted for him.

Okay, enough politics. On to the show itself. As I said, the two issues “Three Septembers and a January” and “The Golden Boy” were clearly chosen, as I said earlier, partially for their relevance to current events. “The Golden Boy”, the more relevant of the two, would seem to be a less than ideal choice for the format used. Seven actors sat on the darkened edges of the stage and read their roles as the panels from the comic were projected onto the screen. “The Golden Boy” involves large amounts of narration, delivered by a narrator depicted as a wizened Asian mystic. So this resulted in several pages at a time of only one actor reading narration alone. While the moments of dialogue in between were well done, it’s a curious decision to do “The Golden Boy” rather than an issue that would have meant more interaction between the performers.

The performances themselves had a mixed effect, although this isn’t something I can really lay at the feet of the actors. The otherworldly figures at the core of the Sandman stories have such an image built up around them that there’s almost no way to satisfactorily portray them in a live performance. Delirium and Despair especially I’ve always pictured as having voices so inhuman that they’d probably require some form of electronic enhancement to be convincing. Racheline Maltese, the actress who played both Desire and Delirium, was spot on with Desire, but something was missing from Delirium. I think possibly the only way to correctly pull off the character would be to take Summer Glau, ask her to do something similar to her performance as River in Firefly, and then pump her full of incredibly potent narcotics just as she’s about to perform. And even that might only get you halfway there. Dan Green as Dream himself was good, but it’s hard to step into the role of such an iconic figure and deliver everything that a reader has built up in their minds. The performers excelled more with the other roles. Ollie Wyman’s Emperor Norton was what I thought to be the best execution of a character by any of the actors. And exchanges between Wyman’s Norton and Tom Wayland’s King of Pain, Wayland’s Prez and Dan Green’s Richard Nixon, and Prez and Greg Abbey’s Boss Smiley were the best moments of the performance. And it was these exchanges between characters that really made the comic come alive effectively in a way that I wanted to see more, a sentiment Gaiman himself echoed after the performance. It’s a way of presenting comics I’d never encountered before and I’m not aware if it’s been done extensively anywhere else. But it would be something I’d certainly see again, given the opportunity.