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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Dec 23, 2004 22:36:27 GMT
`The Lizard King' Documents Jim Morrison's Final Hours The music's over for Jim Morrison. He's bloated and boozy but still the dangerous poet, spilling his invective into a tape recorder between drinks and just before oblivion.
It's 1971, the last 36 hours of Morrison's life in a Paris apartment shared with his longtime companion Pamela Courson and the ghosts of his incendiary stardom.
The American premiere of playwright Jay Jeffrey Jones' "The Lizard King" at Hollywood's Friends and Artists Theatre cannot be compared with Oliver Stone's "Doors" movie-the play is telescoped and downbeat whereas the movie is an epic-sized rock 'n' roll celebration. But, interestingly for Doors and Morrison fans, an uncanny continuity connects Val Kilmer's screen performance and Stephen Nichols' stage-bound lizard king.
Needless to say, Nichols' Morrison is a tougher act. He's no sexual glamour boy. With Byron, Shelley and Keats, the myth of dying young was at least romantic. Here the self-exiled Morrison and would-be writer is too burned out and drunk to sing, to make love or face up to responsibilities. That's not to say he can't still lyricize.
This is not a musical (Martin Allen Davich's original background score notwithstanding). It's a horror story and a fascinating coda to the Morrison legend and a play buttressed by the playwright's interviews with Morrison's drinking buddy, the late porn actor Tom Baker (capably played by Clay Wilcox).
This American premiere of a drama that opened in London three years ago seems a catch for a small house like Friends and Artists. The narrow theater may have the hardest seats in town but director Avner Garbi, a talented five-member cast and an artful design team led by set designer Robert W. Zentis lurch you into another world.
Let's face it-the death of a rock star is not exactly fresh territory, especially a drama as assaultive as this one. But Nichols' heavily bearded, black T-shirted figure and his stream-of-consciousness rantings are laced with humor and never boring. Nichols is an actor absorbed by his character.
For example, the king's sexual impotency, in the show's most daring moment with raven-haired Kristina Starman as the overwrought lover Pamela, is risky but dramatically potent. It underscores the tone of decay and desperation.
Emblematic of the precise staging is a beautiful scene in which Morrison and his flustered manager Max (Mat Kirkwood) argue on one side of the stage while two women (Darcy Marta's EdieSedgewick character and Kristina Starman's Pamela) sniff coke and wordlessly cuddle and giggle on the other side.
At the end, Morrison is going to get things back together. Maybe even move back to L.A. He and Pamela patch things up for the night. He'll see her shortly. First he's going to have a little drink and prepare a bath. He sits down by his tape deck and the house lights narrow to a single light on a revolving audio cassette. By RAY LOYND Los Angeles Times -May 29, 1991
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Dec 23, 2004 22:37:26 GMT
Jim Morrison's Last Words Rock poet's final struggle to recapture his artistic vision is at the core of `The Lizard King'
You can lop off a piece of a lizard's tail, but it will grow right back. Jim Morrison of the Doors died 20 years ago but, like that lizard's tail, the vestige of Morrison's mystical aura returns. Its presence is currently felt in the Oliver Stone film "The Doors," and opening Friday at Friends & Artists Theatre Ensemble, in Jay Jeffrey Jones' drama "The Lizard King."
Make no mistake. This is the play-not the movie. It doesn't concern the poet-singer's career, but zooms in on the last 36 hours of his life, in the Paris apartment where he desperately struggled, peering through an alcoholic haze, to recapture his psychic roots and the dream of being a serious poet. It was a dream that had been interrupted by the meteoric rise of the Doors, a vehicle he guided to international stardom.
"From the beginning of his career," says Stephen Nichols, who plays Morrison in his final hours, "Jim orchestrated the whole thing. He wanted to shake society up. His whole intent was to create this bad boy, lizard king, erotic politician, rock 'n' roll god. He knew exactly how to do it."
Nichols and director Avner Garbi have spent months researching Morrison's end and the laser-lit life that led him to that Paris apartment. They have dissected Jones' play, which first saw light in a small Soho theater in London in 1988. "This huge image he'd created for himself became his undoing," says Nichols. "It was a monster that ate him up. It took away any chance for him to be taken seriously as a poet, and at the same time he had the alcohol working on him. If he could have lasted another five or 10 years and gotten away from the rock 'n' roll thing, who knows?"
Garbi first learned of the play when Jones sent it to Hollywood's West Coast Ensemble, of which Garbi is a member. The WCE schedule was full, so Garbi showed it to Sal Romeo, the artistic director of Friends & Artists, and the opening was set.
Garbi's first job was finding the right actor to play Morrison. He remembered seeing Nichols in the hit production of a play called "Delirious" in Hollywood.
"That's where I first saw Stephen," Garbi says. He thought, " `That actor was so dangerous.' Stephen was my first choice."
Morrison's character requires that sense of danger, and Nichols' acting has that quality. When he originally appeared on the soap "Days of Our Lives," he was cast as a heavy. "I was only supposed to be there a couple of months, but I played the guy real vulnerable, and they liked that. Immediately they had to redeem me. They rewrote things-`No, it didn't happen that way, this is the way it happened.' "
Nichols went on to play Patch Johnson on the soap for five years, and was nominated for an Emmy for his performance. But he's happy to be back on stage.
"You tend to get stale on a soap and lose sight of where you came from, and why you became an actor," Nichols says. "Not that you can't do good work on a soap. I think a lot of the work I did there was fine, and I worked hard. But you really just have to get the hell out and start over and have a regeneration."
He agrees that TV is not an actor's medium. "Absolutely not. It's hard to do anything seriously, because it's all so quick, and the bottom line is money. It is not creativity. When you're working on a play, you come from a real focused center as an actor."
Nichols is emphatic about the fact that he's not doing an impression of Morrison. He's trying to find something inside the character that speaks of Morrison's psyche. Some of that has come intuitively through Morrison's poetry, much of which was written in Paris, near the end.
"What I first knew about the Doors was pretty much surface, what the media fed me when I was a kid," Nichols says. "I was 16, 17 years old when the first couple of albums came out, too young to understand the implications of Jim's music and the poetry within the music. I just listened to the music. Doing the research and finding out what the references in the music were was very fascinating o me." Morrison's inspiration came from Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Blake.
"I feel it's really important to get to the guts of who Jim was and put that on stage, to show the audience his innermost feelings. At first, talking to my wife, I said, `I don't know if I can do this, if I can do the man justice.' I didn't know I would feel that way. I'm a firm believer in the intuitive forces in the universe. Because I'm working hard and doing research, I think I'm getting tuned in to his spirit. He's not coming to me in my dreams and talking to me, but his words speak to me.
"About two months ago I was reading some of his poetry from the last book that just came out, `Wilderness, Vol. 1,' and in it was the poem `Road Days.' When I read that I felt he was saying, `Stephen, you can do this, you have my permission.' I'm not saying he came to me in a vision, don't get me wrong. This is my own intuitive feeling."
It's a feeling Morrison's poetry creates, and some of that quality transfers into the text of the play.
"One of the wonderful things Jay Jones captured," says Garbi, "he based a lot on Jim's poetry. He took from the poetry the feelings of what happened in that apartment in Paris. If you read the poetry, a lot of the play reflects Morrison's pain. He wrote the bulk of his major work in Paris, the three or four months he was there. Jones based the scenes in Paris on that. In the play you see his tormented soul, his tormented mind questioning what really brought him to what he was. He had a very sad life."
Nichols adds, "Very few people have tried to speculate where Morrison was at, and how he was feeling in Paris, what his attitudes were about what had happened to him in the previous years. Nobody has really gotten into that can of worms."
"The Lizard King" attempts that kind of speculation, putting a magnifying glass on a natural phenomenon called Jim Morrison, looking for missing pieces like the tail of that elusive lizard. It's the kind of puzzle that fascinates the director, Garbi, and Nichols, the actor who is trying to fit together what is left of Jim Morrison in his poetry.
"I know why I'm doing the play," says Nichols. "I'm doing it because it's an enormous challenge for me as an actor, the greatest challenge I've ever had, and I've been around for almost 20 years. Here we are, in this little 48-seat theater, and," he continues, pointing to the set, "that's my room in Paris over there, and I'm thrilled. It's what the doctor ordered for me."
By T.H. McCULLOH The Los Angeles Times/Apr 14, 1991
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Dec 23, 2004 22:38:43 GMT
When I heard Stephen Nichols was going to be playing Jim Morrison, all I knew was that I was going to see it if I had to walk (and it's a one and a half hour drive=)!
I jumped at the chance to see my favorite actor live and in person. But I thought that television had shown me his range and that I couldn't possibly be more in awe or impressed more by seeing him in person, on stage. I was wrong, VERY wrong.
My friends, my mom, and I were lucky enough to get front row seats. The theater is very small, but the play and especially Stephen more than made up for that. Though the play was based on fiction, it gave a lot of insight into the heart and soul of Jim Morrison. When Stephen came up on stage it was like he was Stephen no more. He absorbed the spirit of Jim Morrison and was now introducing him to the audience.
Once again, Stephen gave dimensions to a character and showed the human side to a character that on the surface seems like "just another bad seed". In every line and every syllable, Stephen captured every bit of symbolism and irony and humor, emphasizing them to make us feel as though we'd been transported back to meet Jim Morrison himself. Stephen vividly portrayed a man torn up by the Hollywood game; a man who desired to be more than a poster idol but succumbed to his addictions.
This portrayal of Jim Morrison was stunningly intense, and to this day-three months after seeing the play- I am still haunted by the "spirit" of Jim Morrison.
After the play we got to meet Stephen. He was SO nice. What struck me was how calm he was after this performance. He was very patient with fans, and didn't seem to mind talking to us at all- it wasn't a chore to him. It was obvious after speaking to Stephen that leaving Days was a positive step for him. He was excited about the play, believed in the play, and seemed to have a great time doing it. It was wonderful to see that.
When we talked to him, he mentioned that he and Mary Beth would be doing a play called "Love Letters" in Beverly Hills the very next week. As we left the theater, Stephen was very sweet, asking us to come again as we said good bye and told him what a great performance he gave.
Needless to say, the week between plays seemed to drag on forever. Finally the day came, and they were incredible! The characters never touched, kissed, or looked at each other in front of the audience, but they didn't need to. You could FEEL the love.
As Andrew and Melissa, Stephen and Mary Beth made us laugh so hard our stomachs hurt, and made us cry- plus everything in between. Mary Beth did what she does better than any other actress I have seen: she made us sympathize with and care for Melissa Gardner despite her flaws. Melissa was unlike Kayla in every extreme: she was bitter, insecure, unstable, and lacked the real family she so desperately wanted. I saw a grown man in front of me in the audience get choked up and cry when Melissa died. The only word that comes close to describing these actors on stage is magical. I wish every Stephen Nichols and Mary Beth Evans fan could have had, or does have the experience of seeing them on stage.
Liz.. Webmaster Stephen Nichols fan site 1991
Title Lizard King, The (I) Company Transatlantic TC First Produced 1991 Judy Caden Theatre, New York First Published Unpublished Genre Play Parts Male 3 Female 2 Other Notes (US) Directed by Gabriel Connaughton. (UK) Directed by Suzan Crowley. (produced 1983, The Eton, London Synopsis Jim Morrison records his final secret tape. Ten years later a trio of high velocity bizzaros tries to whip up a little promotional enthusiasm for its commercial potential.
Title Lizard King, The (II) Company First Produced 1988 Boulevard Theatre, Soho, London First Published Unpublished Genre Play Parts Male 3 Female 2 Other Notes (UK) Directed by John Quinn. (US) Directed by Avner Garbi produced (US) 1991 Friends & Artists Theatre Ensemble, Hollywood Synopsis The embrace of the drunken muse, the hijacking of the intellectual outlaw by the habits of the rock and roll brat and the dangerous privileges of human beauty are all in play as Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson spend their last haunted weekend in Paris
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Post by jym on Dec 25, 2004 18:35:19 GMT
Alex, I thought this was pretty interesting, wish I'd live in L.A. when this play was uh, playing. I e-mailed the author Jay Jeff Jones to see if a video or anything exists, i'll report back if I get an answer, who knows how old the e-mail address I found is. I have some time this Christmas to google, looks like Stephen Nichols is an actor on some soap opera, but his site is pretty cool www.stephennichols.net
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Dec 25, 2004 19:21:10 GMT
Keep us informed mate
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Post by ensenada on Dec 25, 2004 21:40:46 GMT
wow, that would have been a trip to watch! I hope you can find it on dvd or video Jym, you will have to do us a copy! ;D I wonder if they covered the post death scenario at all. i mean what the doctor did etc.. stephen's website looks pretty good to, just looks like a porn star in the pics on the left with him posiing lol
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Post by jym on Dec 31, 2004 13:31:34 GMT
OK, here's the update, no reply from Jay Jeff Jones, but that maybe because it's an old e-mail address or because of the holidays. So, last night in desperation I e-mailed the webmaster of Stephen Nichols website & they have it!! Here's her reply: We do sell the Lizard King play on VHS and DVD. We usually sell it on FansofStephenNichols.org but it is temporarily down right now. You can order that through me. Autographed is $30 and unsigned is $20. Shipping is $3.50 for priority. You can use Paypal account fanstore@stephennichols.net or mail check or money order made out to Van Aaron Productions to the following address: Stephen Nichols Fanstore Post Office Box 82231 Athens, GA 30608-2231 Thanks for your interest in Stephen! Sherry McCutcheon I'm gonna order it, I'll let you know! ;D
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Dec 31, 2004 13:38:02 GMT
That is quite incredible Jim....I never thought there would be any record of it let alone a DVD......let us know what you think mate.... Be damn cool to see it make a TV spot....... We have BBC and ITV arts shows on cable that it would be perfect for that..... Good show mate!
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Post by jym on Dec 31, 2004 14:35:03 GMT
Yeah, same here. I thought it was really a shot in the dark, but I guess Stephen Nichols' fanclub (who sell the video & DVD) really put fanatic back in the fan.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 1, 2005 11:33:01 GMT
Sherry contacted me by email and told me that anyone outside the US who wants a copy (bear in mind you will need a multi region DVD player or a compatible US video player) she can ship it for a $5 global priority. Details same as Jims reply above...
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Post by jym on Jan 1, 2005 14:33:48 GMT
See, the fanatic back in fan.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 4, 2005 13:16:21 GMT
Bit of info about the authors latest projects and a few ideas he has in the pipeline....thanx to Jim Cherry for this...
"Dear Jim Cherry I have some correspondence from a film company in Hollywood that wanted to record the play properly, that is in order to sell it to cable television. As far as I know it didn't happen and my agent at the time had no further information about this. There isn't much to tell you about other projects except that I have written most of a new play which has nothing Doors related. Just published a long article about the Living Theatre which features Morrison in a bit part and am working on a memoir of expatriate American writers in London in the 60s/70s which will include an appearance by Morrison's sister, who I met long before the play was thought of. There are some strange aspects to the long genesis of the play (which was only done justice to in LA - both London productions were dire and the NY one was wonderfully weird). Someday I aim to write a piece about how the play came about and the connection with remarkable people like Tom Baker (Jim's booze buddy who is a character in the play), Felix Dennis the publishing magnate and Marianne Faithful's smack dealer (and I'm not talking about Paris). If there's any other questions, let me know." Best regards, Jay Jones
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Post by jym on Jan 11, 2005 15:57:09 GMT
Jay Jones who wrote this play has "Just published a long article about the Living Theatre which features Morrison in a bit part" this article is in Beat Scene Magazine which can be found at www.beatscene.net in case any of you are interested in getting it. It is published in the U.K. so you chaps will have an easier time getting hold of it than I will. The article is in issue #46 their current one.
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Post by ensenada on Jan 11, 2005 21:04:32 GMT
That is quite incredible Jim....I never thought there would be any record of it let alone a DVD......let us know what you think mate.... Be damn cool to see it make a TV spot....... We have BBC and ITV arts shows on cable that it would be perfect for that..... Good show mate! it is great news that it is available on video let alone DVD! Once I have money i will get myself a copy too. let us know what you think of it dude now this photo is interesting, going back to the old jim's necklace debate. The actor here is wearing a red one, snakey made red ones and wasnt the red one on the doors film? but most people i met in paris claimed that it is actually green, where the red bits are. does anyone know the truth? perhas the old black and white images from the first album shoot have been interpreted incorrectly.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 12, 2005 16:47:40 GMT
Maybe he had more than one necklace and people are only reporting the ones they have seen.
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Post by ensenada on Jan 12, 2005 17:27:31 GMT
;D good point!
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Post by jym on Jan 18, 2005 2:11:27 GMT
Just letting everybody in on this comedy of errors. The first DVD I recvd from Stephen Nichols fan club was put in a DVD case that the peg was broken on, so in the mail it got all scratched up & I was only able to watch the first 10 minutes. So, I contacted the fan club & asked Sherry to send me a new DVD which she agreed to, but I hadn't recvd the new one as of Saturday so I e-mail her again & she says she'll put it in the mail Tues (tomorrow) becasue we had a holiday today. So I should get it Thursday or friday so barring any more mishap I can let everyone know how the play is. I think this is the 1800 post ;D
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Post by jym on Jan 23, 2005 0:02:22 GMT
Well, just a note, Sherry at Stephen Nichols fanclub has been dragging her feet at getting a new DVD of The Lizard King to me. So, if any of you have or are thinking about getting the DVD be careful. It's too bad what I was able to see of the play it looked interesting.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Mar 26, 2005 16:28:07 GMT
Been checking it out and it seems like a rather intriguing play.....Stephen Nichols is damn good and the poetry he uses in the play stands up well with Jim's own. my DVD is a bit dicky so am unable to watch it other than in stages as I keep losing the sound (which is not great to begin with as hte actors don't wear mikes) and am just over half way through but what I have seen makes me wish someone would contact a TV company and get this out as a TV play.....BBC did a similar thing on Janis Joplins last 48 hours in the 90s and Morrison would be something special to feature....
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Post by jym on Mar 26, 2005 17:57:57 GMT
Jay Jones should, he lives in England now, I think he's working as an graphic designer, I think that's what it said in his e-mails. I don't know what his interest in the project may still be.
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