Jack Hitt
speaker
849 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 3 Jul
Jack Hitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what you have to understand is that everybody in this sort of community understood that there were And there was certainly a sort of air of everyone sort of reaching beyond their own grasp. Every actor was sort of in a role that was just a little too big for them. Every aspect of the set and the crew. And, you know, rumors had sort of cooked around. You know, there was this huge crew.
There were lots of things being planned.
That's right. That's right. And maybe greatness could have occurred.
Opening night comes and, you know, well, almost everybody in the area and the, you know, 10 mile radius of this theater knows somebody in this production. So the place is pretty much packed. And I don't know if you remember the opening moment of Peter Pan, but it's the three little kids sleeping in their bed. And Peter Pan comes flying in the window.
And in this particular production, there's a big bed with all the three kids in it. And off to the left, I remember, is a big, huge wardrobe. And there's a large window there and a little bureau. And Peter Pan comes in and has a little speech where he says... You know, anybody can fly. Why? With just a little magic dust, one can fly. And Peter Pan sort of sprinkles this magic dust in the air.
And sure enough, the kids sort of suddenly just lurch into the air. And it becomes clear right away that the people that they've hired to run these flying apparatuses really aren't quite clear on how they actually work.
So instead of the kids sort of sailing, you know, gracefully to and fro, they sort of hang in the air like puppets, just sort of dangling there and sort of getting jerked up an inch or two or back and forth.
Yeah, just hanging there like a spider. And then several of them start to sort of circumscribe these circles in the air where it's clear that the people running the machines have just sort of set them off on these kind of oval courses that spiral farther and farther out. And if you're sitting in the audience, there was clearly a sense of fear on the faces of these people. Of the actors?
The actors. The actors actually, you could sense their lack of confidence, shall we say, in the people running the machines in the back.
No one is laughing. Everyone, now this is one of the great things about audiences, especially in a live theater production, is that they're very forgiving. They want the show to work. And so everyone is sort of gripping their chair a little tightly. We feel for them. They're up there. They're embarrassing themselves for us.
And so the audience, I think, was very forgiving and very understanding of this moment. But there was one moment in this first opening scene that kind of put the audience on notice. And that's when, as the kids are sort of jerking up and down and swinging back and forth and sort of going around in these ovals, at one point, the littlest one...
the little boy, is sort of being flung around a little too hard.
Right. Okay, so and? And so he's flying around in this circle, and the audience sort of sees this coming, and there's a real sense of pain and gripping of the chair and white knuckleness as the kid suddenly does just a,
an enormous splat into the wardrobe I mean and it's clear that he's hurt you know and he comes off of it sort of you know a little dazed and then of course he's jerked up in the air a little bit and often a little too high so that he's suddenly sort of in the workings he's sort of He sort of left the stage itself. He's now up there with the lights, you know.
And then all of a sudden he just sort of... Suddenly he would just plummet back down to the stage and be caught up just before he hit the floor. And... It was hard to watch because, as you can tell, it's an incredibly funny moment. But like I say, the audience was still in this very forgiving mode. And no one said a word. We just all sat there sort of holding our breath.
And there's that weird tension of being in the audience thinking, oh, oh my goodness, they have gotten off to a very bad start. Oh, this is not good. Right. And we feel for them.
No, no. Because, you know, like I say, audiences are forgiving. And, you know, one or two mistakes, even big ones like this, they're going to let that ride. Yes, they are. We did. We did. We were very good.
What happens immediately after this? They disappear to Never Never Land. And if you remember, the stage goes dark. And then when the lights come up, there's Captain Hook. And he's giving his first opening soliloquy about how evil he is and what a menace he is and how he harms people and hates children. It's all that good stuff. And so Captain Hook is out there, and he looks great.
He's got one of those big old fat hats and this great hook and these wild-looking boots and everything.
Something's happening. It's a good sign. It's a good sign. And he's in charge. This guy, he's got a bad mustache, and he is certainly evil.
Showing 801–820 of 849 · page 41 of 43
← Previous
Next →