San Fransisco Chronicle Datebook Interview 25/9/04 Edward Guthmann He's not Marianne Faithfull. But Black Rider understudy isn't competing. He's packing them in for matinee madness It's not easy to alternate a stage role with another performer, especially when the other performer is Marianne Faithfull, a pop celebrity with dozens of albums, a voice that cuts diamonds and a personal history- Mick Jagger, heroin addiction, recovery- that attends each performance she gives. " I mean, Marianne comes on and she is that icon," says Nigel Richards, the British singer who fills in for Faithfull at the matinees of The Black Rider at the Geary Theatre. " She doesn't have to work at charisma. And that voice is extraordinary. I just knew I couldn't compete with that." Richards found another way to approach the role of Pegleg, a slinky Mephistopheles in whiteface, black tux and forked tails. Instead of underplaying the devil, as Faithfull does, Richards conjures a ripe sense of camp, sex and imminent danger- and delivers Tom Waits' songs with a lewd grin in a stunning, classically trained baritone. Richards is so good in the role that matinees, usually the province of silver-haired matrons and indulgent husbands, are a hot ticket. People want to see Richards attack the role- because he's so superb and because he's so obviously having a bloody good time with it. " I have fun- I'm very naughty," Richards, 39, said this week during breakfast at the Hotel Monaco. Told his performance is more lascivious than Faithfull's, he grins broadly. "Good, good! I've been working on that. My references were people like Greta Garbo and Frank-N-Furter from 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' And a bit of Duke Ellington, in the way I sing." For evening performances, Richards switches hats- wigs actually- to play George Schmit, a spurned lover gone mad. George has long, moplike hair covering half his face and Richards sings the role in falsetto, which he'd never done before. The result is explosive: imagine a Molotov cocktail mixed from Bjork, Diamanda Galas, Nina Hagen and Slim Whitman. Although it was received coolly by the London critics, The Black Rider was a major hit in San Francisco from the day it opened. The run was extended twice to meet ticket demand, and the show has smashed ACT's box office records with $1.2 million in individual ticket sales- thats on top of subscription sales. Scott Walton, ACT's director of marketing and public relations, predicts a $1.5 millon take for the seven week run. At the end of four weeks, Walton said, " we had done almost the same box office that we did in 12 weeks with Urinetown," the company's previous box office champ. Word of mouth is strong, celebrities are flocking to the show ( Sean Penn, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Lily Tomlin, Bonnie Raitt) and Richards is thrilled. " I so wish the tour was longer," he says. "I would think that with the reviews we got (including a rave from the Chronicle's Robert Hurwitt) that Broadway producers would be interested, but there's no talk of it at the moment. This is exactly the kind of theatre that Broadway needs." Offstage, Richards is surprising: shorter than expected, of course more subdued than onstage. As Pegleg, Richards has a reptillian menace. He wears the same white make up and black wig as Faithfull but goes bare chested, his pecks carefully sculpted by a make up artist. His eyes dance with mischief and he looks as if he could project his tongue into the audience, flick it around some unsuspecting soul and swallow him whole. In London, Richards specializes in musical works by a generation of new American composers. He was in the British premiere of Adam Guettel's Floyd Collins, and played in Michael John LaChiusa's Hello Again and Jason Robert Brown's Songs For A New World. He sang The Marriage of Figaro last year and will play the lead in a new musical about Lord Nelson next year. Initially, Richards was reluctant to share the role with Faithfull. But when director Robert Wilson encouraged him to put a completely different stamp on Pegleg, he agreed. "Also, when a male devil is seducing Wilhelm ( the male lead, lured into a Faustian bargain), you know that's going to be a homo-erotic scene. Its going to have a completely different energy." In London, where The Black Rider began its three city tour, Richards played George Schmid each night and subbed for Faithfull just once when she missed a performance. Eventually, Faithfull found that eight shows per week were too much and asked to take the matinees off when the show continued to San Francisco and Sydney."It was too taxing on her voice," Richards says. "She's used to doing concerts where you do three in a row and then rest." Last week, Faithfull, who's become a chum, caught Richards' Pegleg at a matinee. "She was almost in tears at the interval," he says. "She said, "I cant tell you how proud I am to be in this show." Ive worked with divas, and she has been nothing but grace itself. And we have such a laugh. She's a fantastic cast member." As for The Black Rider, Richards says the show, a dense marriage of music, dance and Kabuki-like movement, was tough to learn. "It's like doing a two and a half hour yoga class because with Bob's direction, you're always very conscious of the space you're creating. So you have him in your head all the time sort of directing you, even when he's not there...It's an extraordinary discipline." In the show, individual steps are sometimes choreographed to different lighting cues or musical strokes. "There are 725 lighting cues," Richards says. "Forty-five would be normal. And often you have to hit marks, so that a hand shake gets special lighting. If you see the stage at the Geary, it is covered in tiny little marks where we have to stand. One would think it's quite a fascist way of working," Richards adds, "but it's not. The worst thing a director can do for me is not to provide any direction at all, just to say, 'Oh that was lovely'. Im much happier being given physical constraints and being put in a box and then allowed to flower within that box. Sort of like a bonzai." " The only drawback to acting in The Black Rider,"Richards says," is not being able to see it." He's read the reviews, heard friends describe the great sculptures of light and the animated paintings that Wilson creates. "People are dazzled by it, but I have no idea what it looks like." Richards says he's not about to fake a sick day in order to sneak in and watch the show, but jokes that he's tempted to take a sickie on Sunday's matinee performance so he can attend the raunchy Folsom Street Fair. "Id love to go in make up and costume, because I was told that anyone in The Black Rider, because it is so extreme, would go down so well at the Folsom Street Fair. So we're all going to dash down at 5 o'clock and grab the last hour of the fair."