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"Nicholas could have been a bit of a prig, you know," says Rees, 35. Instead, Rees has mixed Nicholas' quiet good manners with Dickens' fervent ideals and incorrigible high spirits to create a combustible personality. His voice rarely breaks the whisper barrier, but impulsive outrage sends his face into a turmoil of emotions and makes him start and buck like a corralled stallion. He is forever bolting toward some man of the world to declaim his beliefs, and forever getting into trouble for them. "Ever since Look Back in Anger it's been pretty unfashionable to be virtuous," Rees says of Nicholas. "But there is a need to find some beauty in virtue. You see Nicholas in different lights: impetuous, unformed, weak, almost a porcelain figure. He was, after all, brought up in the petit gentility. But by experiencing great shocks, he gradually learns that the world can be changed, improved by small acts of generosity."
Rees has worked for 13 years at the R.S.C. As pleased as he is to dominate a landmark production, he is uneasy at the prospect of the international stardom that could follow his Broadway and TV exposure. "I love being an actor," he says. "I like pursuing the craft. I'm not interested in the power and the glory."
But he must feel the power, seize the glory, at the end of each Nickleby performance—the audience on its feet, hoarse with cheers, beating its hands to a collective pulp, and Rees onstage, leading new waves of actors on and off for half a dozen curtain calls. To create such a character, to inform such a production, to receive such approval and exult in the reciprocal intoxication—surely this is an actor's life at its most thrilling.
A pity that the experience can be shared by only 55,000 or so U.S.
theatergoers in the next 14 weeks —fewer people than can fill Yankee Stadium for a single game. A greater pity that the $ 100 ticket (a flat rate for any seat in the house, though standing room is being sold for $30) will keep this populist production from reaching most segments of the populace. "It is very odd that something supposed to be enriching is only for the rich," muses Rees. The producers who imported Nickleby—Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs of the Shubert Organization, James Nederlander, Elizabeth McCann and Nelle Nugent —are not subsidized as the R.S.C. is. It is 1 costing $4.4 million to mount the show in New York. Even if 3 Nickleby sells out its entire run, sit is likely only to break even.
Says McCann: "We knew it |wasn't going to make any money. But a special show like this could create a momentum from which we'd all profit."
So far, only about a third of the possible seats have been sold.