While actor Bryan Torfeh admits that the narrator’s challenge will be balancing the feel of the music with what’s happening in the story, and knowing when its his turn, his job will be easier because he reads music. ’In a sense, I am one of the musicians,’ he says. ‘I am running the dialogue with the musicians, just keeping the story moving forward and keeping the voices distinct.’ Torfeh came to acting in an odd reverse from the experience of many kids who ache for a theater career. ’When I was 14 or 15, I announced to my parents that I was going to law school,’ he recalls. Most dads would be thrilled with such an ambition, but not his. ’My dad was so disappointed,’ Torfeh says, adding, ‘I had a prejudiced dad who was an actor and had trained at the Birmingham Theater School.’ Growing up in Pacific Palisades, Torfeh studied music with Delores Stevens, who for many years just taught him theory, harmony, voice leading and chamber music, but not piano. He had another teacher for that. ’One day, Dee said that she could teach me piano,’ Torfeh says. ‘I, being rebellious at the time, said that ‘I’ll only do Chopin and Beethoven.’ She said, ‘OK,’ and, as time went on, of course I opened up and she got me back in.’ Torfeh is still is very close to the Stevens, especially with their son, Paul. The two boys attended Windward High School., after which Torfeh did not go to London but instead studied theater at UC Santa Cruz, where he received ‘phenomenal training. I had done a couple of summer stock gigs in New England, but also with the Pacific Conservancy of the Performing Arts [PCPA] in Santa Maria, which is a well-respected resident company of theater professionals and training ground for actors and theater technicians on the Central Coast.’ In 1980, Torfeh signed a contract for the summer with PCPA, where he encountered his first taste of the realities of life for an actor. After three days auditioning for all the plays in the repertory and receiving positive nods for his reading of Shakespeare, ‘I was cast for virtually nothing. I realized that if you’re not a graduate of a theater-training program, such as Yale or Juilliard, people don’t take you seriously. I have worked in regional theater, but in terms of people under 50, maybe two percent had not gone on to an MFA program.’ Torfeh’s mentors at Santa Cruz advised him that he should really go to England. So to England he went, to study for three years at Guildhall in the early 1980s. After graduation, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he remained for 10 years. ’In those days, actors in England had families, a real life,’ Torfeh says. ‘Very few actors had survival jobs, as they do in the States. But, by the 1990s, London was getting to be just like New York, and I was tired of being poor, and realized that this was not how I wanted to spend my life.’ Torfeh auditioned for Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’ in the West End and played Mafia leader Rico. All of a sudden, he was making real money and getting a mortgage. He now lives in the Kings Cross neighborhood of London. He hasn’t gone back to the major companies; instead, he makes a living directing Shakespeare in drama schools and acting in musical theater. The spoken word work came about when Torfeh was playing Salieri in ‘Amadeus’ in Sarasota. A local symphony was doing ‘Fa’ade,’ based on the series of poems by Edith Sitwell, which were given an orchestral accompaniment by Sitwell’s prot’g’ William Walton. ‘The piece is more sound than sense,’ Torfeh explains. ‘It requires a dozen musicians and a narrator.’ Torfeh took the narrator’s part, and then more of the same kind of work came along, including ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ and ‘Babar, The Elephant,’ for a children’s concert. Torfeh will remain in the States through Christmas, visiting with his two brothers and their families. He says that he has nothing scheduled for next year as yet, except for a Shakespeare workshop in April with William Hobbs, the renowned fight director for ‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Duellists,’ who has written a play about a traveling troupe. Sounds familiar.
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