Actor literally breaks leg, has to cancel Fringe show
It’s all fun and games to say “break a leg” to an actor – until he actually breaks his leg.
It happened to Reed McColm, who was to star in the one-man Glen Berger play Underneath the Lintel at Stage 14 – but it has been cancelled in the wake of his injury.
“Break a leg?” he says (it’s common thing to say to performers about to go on stage, having a reverse jinx effect in a sometimes superstitious trade). “I just take it really literally. I tend to be very obedient – and I’m never going to do that again.”
The 56-year-old actor, who’s lived and worked in Edmonton for the last five years after decades in Los Angeles, slipped on the ice in March, had surgery, but re-injured the leg at tech rehearsal this week. He says he and director Glenn Nelson came to the reluctant conclusion that there was no way he could do it in a wheelchair, since the characters are very active.
McColm says, “It sounds so snooty, but it’s really true: I didn’t want to do a play that was good enough – I wanted this play to be exquisite. The script deserves a really good performance – and I couldn’t give it. I am embarrassed and ashamed.”
He needn’t be. This “the show must go on” saying seems to be akin to the sports mentality of “play through the pain,” and maybe we don’t need that. “I know it was the right thing to, so I’m OK with that,” McColm says.
The actor still has a hand in the Fringe as the director of Five Stages of Death (at Stage 16), and wants to make some lemonade out of this. He says he’s game for any impromptu performance opportunities that come up in the next 10 days – perhaps in a late night improv revue where his character can be in a wheelchair (he can get around with a cane with some difficulty). “I’m anxious to be part of something,” he says.
And despite the frightful Edmonton weather having been responsible for breaking his leg, McColm loves it here.
“There’s 11 professional theatre companies in this town,” he says. “I spent a long time in LA, and I’ve never founds a place of similar population that’s been so supportive of the arts. There’s never been a great city in the history of the world that didn’t have a thriving arts community, and maybe Edmonton proves it.”
As for Underneath the Lintel, it’ll be at the Fringe next year.
McColm says, “You let down a lot of people, and that’s hard, but I look forward to next year. I think Truman Copote said, ‘Barrier is the condiment that makes success tasty’ or something like that – and I will not fail next year.”
