Director to speak at Dean's Forum

Brains, neurosurgery and psychology interested Jonathan Miller when he first graduated from college -- not the theater. "I was never really interested in it until I began doing it," Miller said. "I got sucked into it like America did with the Vietnam War." Miller, a British theater, opera and television director, will be speaking about the responsibilities of a director when he presents a classic work at the School of Arts and Sciences' Dean's Forum tonight at 8 p.m. at the Harrison Auditorium. His established his reputation as a director with several Shakespeare productions in the 1960s, although he first entered show business in 1961 when he co-wrote and acted in Beyond the Fringe with Dudley Moore. The play appeared on Broadway and in London. Miller said he has had no urge to write another play since authoring the political satire. "Although dialogue comes easily to me, I can't imagine a plot which could sustain lots of dialogue," he said. "I wouldn't know what to get them to say next." Although Miller said he enjoys directing, he added that he regrets he had to give up medicine because of the clinical research that is being conducted in the field. Miller has directed many well-known actors and singers, such as Sir Laurence Olivier as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Jack Lemmon in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. But there are several in the profession that Miller refuses to work with, including the "three tenors" -- Luciano Pavarotti, Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo. "There are certain what I call Jurassic Park singers whom I would pay my whole director's fee not to work with," he said. "[The three tenors are] horrible actors and they don't pay their colleagues the courtesy of turning up for rehearsals and when they do it is only bearable if you close your eyes and listen to the music," Miller added. Visual imagery is usually the first part of the directing process for Miller as he begins work on a production. "Something I've seen on the corner of a building in Italy will occur to me and then I will see the thing in my mind's eye as occurring in that particular set up and then one thing leads to another," he said. And Miller added that when directing a classic play or opera, making it audience-friendly is not his biggest concern. "The idea of universal popularity has never interested me," he said. But directing is an intuitive skill that one can or cannot do and is not something learned, according to Miller. His advice to students that are thinking about directing careers is not to take any theater classes. Throughout his many productions, Miller said plays he thought would be the worst became some of his best work. "With The Cunning Little Vixen, I really thought for at least three-and-a-half weeks that this was going to be a catastrophe," he said. "I couldn't get a night's sleep while I was doing it and it turned out to be a wonderful time." A critically acclaimed production of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion in London is Miller's favorite piece he has directed in the past 10 years. "I was moved by it and found myself in tears at least a quarter of the time when actually rehearsing it," Miller said. "It moved me deeply in all sorts of ways."