Four Inane Questions with stage actor Reed Uthe ahead of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder
Courtesy of The White Theatre
Talk about split personalities! The White Theatre at the Jewish Community Center just announced the debut of their newest musical, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.
The show—which premieres Saturday—features actor Reed Uthe playing eight different characters of the D’Ysquith family. (Yes, you read that correctly.) It’s an impressive feat for Uthe, who is also the director of theater at Blue Valley West High School. “My challenge has been to find not just who they are, but also what kind of characteristics, what kind of voice are they going to have, and how does that voice translate from their speaking voice into their singing voice,” he says.
Uthe tells us he has directed over 100 educational theatrical productions over the years. And he’s acted in countless professional and community theatre productions for more than three decades. This, however, might be his biggest tour de force performance.
We caught up with the thespian extraordinaire during rehearsals to zing him with our zany questionnaire. We’re pretty sure he answered them as himself, but we can’t be completely certain.
Courtesy of The White Theatre
The Pitch: If you were a classic villain, what classic villain would you be?
Reed Uthe: I share many qualities with the great villain, Wile E. Coyote. I overthink solutions to simple problems. I often chase my own ‘roadrunners’ to the point of diminishing returns. I’m more humiliated than harmed by my own failures.
I also treat Amazon like my own personal Acme Co., although I’ve yet to find portable potholes and invisible paint to meet my own personal standards. And I swear I heard a slide whistle as I fell off the top of a 12-foot ladder cleaning my living room ceiling last year.
What movie/theater monologue could you do verbatim on demand at a moment’s notice?
I used passages from Shakespeare when I taught 7th-grade theatre students memorization skills. They had a choice to memorize the first 14 lines of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy or the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Listening to students recite those for almost 20 years drilled the words into my brain like the Pledge of Allegiance.
What’s one thing you can fix/repair without any assistance from anyone?
I tinker with almost everything before asking for help. That’s probably because I grew up on a farm. Plus, I’ve spent 35 years as an educator, both giving me a predisposition for MacGyvering solutions. But I pride myself on my creative uses for duct tape to fix almost anything. Dreams and duct tape are the two main things that hold life in theater education together.
Courtesy of The White Theatre
What’s the fastest you’ve ever driven your car?
115 mph. But it wasn’t my car. And I wasn’t in the USA.
I was driving a tiny Eastern European rental car on the Autobahn in Germany in 1990. My buddies and I were hiking and touring around Austria and Bavaria, and it was my turn to drive between locales. I got tired of all the BMWs and Porsches passing me up, so I floored it for several miles. However, when the car started vibrating like the little plastic players on an electric football game table, I decided I better slow down so I didn’t bust up like a Cold War satellite on re-entry.
Bonus 5th Question: Who has the world’s most annoying, grating voice, in your humble opinion?
I could never bring myself to finish watching an episode of The Nanny due to Fran Drescher’s voice. I love her New York accent, but the nasal tonality that she brought to her character grated on my last nerve like broken glass.
