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 the audience is totally in his pocket. He's speaking away and gesturing wildly and going on and on about how bad he is. And then at a certain point... As he gestures, his hook and the entire black casing up to his elbow flings off of his hand and flies into the audience and punches an old lady in the gut. And now – He is bad. Yeah. He had like the worst ad lib I've ever heard.
I mean, what do you say at that point? Because, of course, his hand is now nakedly exposed to the audience.
Captain Hook said, you know, they just don't make those hooks like they used to. That was actually the ad lib. I will never forget it. Then the lights come up, and we are in Never Never Land. In Act 2. Yeah, this is like Act 2. And Captain Hook might have stood in front of this set, but you didn't really see it because he spoke from shadow.
And now the lights come up, and this is supposed to be a very dramatic moment. The rumors of all this crew and the painting and everything that was going on and all this construction... all work towards this one moment. Because when the lights came up, here was Never Never Land, this sort of psychedelic set. There were papier-mâché mushrooms everywhere of different sizes.
It was absolutely wonderful and surreal. Wow. And there's nobody there. And then from the upper rafters of stage right, suddenly the kids and Peter Pan appear. Flying. Flying. They're flying. And their landing occurs rather rapidly at an angle of about 45 degrees to the stage. They come down basically like, I don't know, lead sinkers on a line and crash to the floor.
And then are sort of just dragged across the floor like mops and wipe out all of the mushrooms.
Yeah. Yeah, it's clear now that the audience is giving way. Something has been lost. Some sense of decorum, that little bit of forgiveness that the audience has for the actors. And empathy. And empathy. It's beginning to dissipate. Well, there was a split in the audience. The younger people who were the least forgiving, they started to go first.
So the high school students, a couple of college students maybe, they started to laugh out loud. I'll be honest, Ira, I might have been one of those first people to laugh. I was in the 10th grade. It was hard to not laugh at this.
But then whatever restraint that the audience had, it just evaporated at this point because there were a number of things that happened in quick succession that just made it impossible to hold any sense of decorum. Which are? For example, Tinkerbell appears for the first time around this moment. And Tinkerbell is essentially a light bulb on an extension cord. What? Yeah.
And this was the director's idea of being raw, being very modern. Tinkerbell was just going to be... you know, this literal light bulb dangling from an extension cord.
That's right. Or something like that, or nothing at all. And people just address the invisible, you know, sprite, right? Well, that did not happen in this case. This bulb comes just dangling down and sort of hangs around. This naked white bulb just hangs around and people are talking to it.
And I think Tinkerbell must have had an appearance in the first act, but it was somewhere in here that people just started laughing at this. Then another thing that happened was later on in this scene, if you remember, Wendy gets trapped on an island. And and she she spots a kite that's floating by and flying by and she's supposed to grab it and attach it to her back and fly off. Right. Right.
Well, of course, the kite is attached to the flying apparatus line. And it gets closer and closer to her. She's standing on this little paper mache hill. But the flying apparatus people can't quite get it close enough to her to reach. So she has to step out into the waters that she's just told us is filled with crocodiles to grab it. She finally gets the kite.
And when she yanks on it, it pops off the flying apparatus. And the hook goes zinging up into the lights and catches. Yeah. So now there is this big loop of wire hanging in front of the stage. And there's Wendy holding the kite. And she ad-libbed as best she could, as I remember. She sort of said, on second thought, maybe I can swim.
And with that, she walked off the stage sort of motioning her arms like you would do the swim, the dance in 1965. Oh. So she does that. At this point, I mean, the audience, the actors are just falling apart. They are so frightened of the audience. There are just belly laughs rolling up to the stage from the audience. People are howling with laughter at every mistake.
And now any small mistake just takes on these... You know, it's just any instigation for laughter is just enough for this audience. And now the old people have given it up. Everyone has quit being nice. Now there is just this kind of frightening roar that comes from the audience every time there's a mistake.
Yeah, this is a fiasco. And what's really interesting about a fiasco is that once it starts to tumble down, the audience wants to push it further along.
Oh, it would have been a grave disappointment had there not been just one more mistake after another, one more embarrassment after another. Now the reason they're there is to chronicle these embarrassments. This is why I have remembered this play for 25 years. ¶¶ Towards Act 3, the director had decided that she wanted to break down the fourth wall.
You know, this was cutting-edge theater as far as she was concerned.
That's right. And interact with the audience and break down that wall. So the idea being that you would get more in touch with the dramatic sense and the reality of what was happening. Right. Anyway, so in this particular scene, what was going to happen was that the Indians were going to throw rope ladders down from the balcony and climb down these rope ladders into the audience.
Showing 821–840 of 849 · page 42 of 43
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