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Joy gets to join his daughter on stage

By SUSAN DOOLAN, SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER
Posted 2 days ago

It's going to be a busy summer for actor Robert Joy and that's just the way he likes it.

On hiatus from the television series CSI: NY where he plays Sid Hammerback, one of the medical examiners, Joy is returning to Canada, his birthplace, to perform in Theatre by the Bay's The Tempest.

The Barrie theatre company moved up its regular Shakespeare run to June 30 to accommodate his shooting schedule. In addition to playing Prospero, he will also be performing the father/daughter role with his real-life daughter, Ruby.

"The idea of doing a play with Ruby, my daughter, was totally irresistible," Joy said. "But it would have been irresistible anyway -- to be offered Prospero in The Tempest -- which is one of the greatest roles of all time."

In learning his lines, Joy says he is rediscovering how much he likes Shakespeare. The last time he appeared in one of his works was for The New York Shakespeare Festival, in Central Park, around 1990. In addition to its ability to transport both the actor and the audience, he really enjoys the language.

"There's just nothing like it -- it's the most thrilling language you can speak or hear in a theatre, and that almost doesn't communicate it because there is an alchemy there that transports the audience and it gets people more excited than any other writer," he said.

In addition to Barrie, Joy will also be appearing in a play called Hail in St. John's, N.L., and a new work called Pidgeon, a fully rehearsed five-performance run in New York.

St. John's is where Joy grew up -- he was born in Montreal -- and where he was exposed to theatre for the first time. His mother took Joy and his brother to see an amateur production of The King and I at the Arts & Culture Centre there when he was a teenager.

He knew from that moment on he wanted to be on stage and he followed it, acting in a couple of high schools shows and in 1970 took a summer course in London, Ont. Then he returned home and auditioned for the same theatre company that sparked his interest, and was cast in a couple of shows.

Nevertheless, his formal education -- including Memorial University in St. John's, and University of Oxford (he won a Rhodes Scholarship) -- was in English. His seminal years in theatre were spent with CODCO, a well-known comedy group out of Newfoundland.

Joy still enjoys doing comedy and one of the roles he is most proud of is an Everybody Loves Raymond episode.

There are elements of comedy in his CSI role and The Tempest also contains comedy.

" The Tempest is one of those plays that combines drama and comedy. In the old-fashioned sense it's definitely a comedy, because after going through all the trouble in the play you come out on top rather than, like Hamlet, dead on the floor," he said. "One of the reasons it's considered one of the best plays is it hits so many different notes, of drama and comedy and magic and betrayal and slapstick.

"It's like the whole gamut in one play."

It also has some stage combat and this is one of Ruby's specialities. The Toronto-based actor is part of a stage combat group called Rapier Wit.

She is also an assistant director of an after-school program where she coaches high school student in Shakespeare performance and stage combat, such as sword fighting.

She is the only child of Roy and his wife, Mary, whom he met in an off-Broadway play. They have since divorced and he has been with Broadway composer Henry Krieger for the past 16 years.

Outside the theatre, Joy says he's also a basketball "nut." He plays an average of two games a week in New York and Los Angeles, where he currently lives. He hopes to find an opportunity to play while he is here in Barrie, too.

Theatre by the Bay presents The Tempest from June 30 until July 16 at the new downtown theatre, Dunlop and Bayfield streets at the Five Points. Tickets are $25 for regular admission, $23 for seniors/students and $21 per ticket for groups of 10 or more. Evening and matinee performances are available.

To reserve, call the box office at 705-735-9243.

source: http://www.thebarrieexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3165694 via Csi files

Citation :

CSI: Barrie — Robert Joy tackles The Tempest


ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE/TORONTO STAR
Canadian Robert Joy from CSI:NY, returns to play Prospero in Barrie.
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Jun 28, 2011

On any given week, you can see Robert Joy on CSI: NY, playing the genial coroner, Dr. Sid Hammerback, dispensing pearls of deadpan wisdom as he slits apart a cadaver and probes its innards.

And on this bright early summer morning, he’s sitting in his sister Debora’s house in the Beach, doing the same thing to the role of Prospero in The Tempest, which he’s preparing for a July 1st opening at Theatre by the Bay in Barrie.

“Some people like to talk about Prospero as a magisterial poet sorcerer. Well, it seems to me like he’s someone whose whole world has been upended. He has to think on his feet, do things quickly.

“But he gets so involved with his own machinations that he isn’t just the invincible, all-knowing puppet master, he’s one of the puppets as well. You can’t play one thing in Prospero, it’s not that simple.”

Joy snaps his eyeglasses apart in the middle, the same trick frames that Hammerback uses on the show. It does in real life just what it does on TV: focus the attention of the listener perfectly.

“The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.”

He’s quoting Prospero and the combination of deeply felt passion and cool intelligence he brings to that one line instantly lets you sense how good he’ll be in the role.

“I had to learn to see how important virtue is,” he says softly. “Yes, the rage bursts out of him, like, like….” He reaches for an image. “What they felt in America when Bin Laden was killed. That collective national rage. I think we’ve all felt the visceral adrenalin rush of getting even.

“But The Tempest shows us how unstable the human condition is. You have to be nimble to survive.”

You have to be nimble to survive. That could be Joy’s mantra. He’s had his ups and downs in a career spanning nearly 40 years, but now, at 59, he’s riding about as high as he ever has.

Born in Montreal in 1951 of two Newfoundlander parents, they returned to St. John’s when he was only 3.

Show business never occurred to Joy until Grade 10 when “My high school principal, Brother Bellow — a lovely name for a guy into music — got ambitious and decided to put on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in our AV room with a tiny, tiny stage.

“I was the tenor lead in The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance, but then I forgot about it and switched my devotion to basketball until the fateful summer of 1969.”

He clicks the eyeglass frames together again and the effect is just as electric.

“I was a counsellor at a camp in Algonquin Park, guiding canoe trips, on the lake Tom Thomson drowned on. But on one of our off times, I hitchhiked to Stratford.

“I saw Ken Welsh play Hamlet and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. The Black Swan coffee house was thriving then, so replete with the magic of hippies and folk artists. People would put candles out with their fingers and I thought it was sorcery.”

He was being tugged towards acting, but at the same time, he got a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford and so off he went across the Atlantic.

“I came back on my first spring break. CODCO had just been formed and they needed someone, so I joined up.”

Those early experiences with the iconic Newfoundland comedy company “were like a comedy college for me. We always had to get out there and perform with bold faces, even if the show wasn’t completely finished. That has helped me so many times in years to come.”

He was acting in a communally written play in Newfoundland a few years later when he got a call from Susan Rubes, asking him to fly to Toronto to audition as Peter van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank.

Starring in the production were Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.

“Oh my God, they were two heroes of mine. Have you ever seen them in The Tiger Makes Out? The first time I’d ever seen comedy and heartbreak at the same time. They were geniuses at combining the two. Chekhov would have loved that couple.”

And they loved Joy. He not only acted in the show in Toronto, but went with it to New York, where his reviews launched him into a film career, playing shifty characters in films like Atlantic City, Ticket to Heaven and Ragtime.

He got consistently great reviews but felt he was getting typecast, until 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan, playing wacky comedy off both Madonna and Rosanna Arquette.

“That definitely redressed the imbalance,” he laughs, “and I got to play the field, as it were, for a while.”

For about 15 years, he coasted along, constantly working on a series of TV shows and movies, but never quite recapturing the flash impression he had made at the start of his career.

“And then there was a moment around 2000,” he recalls, “when I had moved to Los Angeles, expenses were high and jobs just weren’t coming in. And so I started to think, should I at least be supplementing my income with teaching? You know, that kind of thing.

“I was looking for anything other than acting to give me some psychic stability and my doctor said ‘Cook your own meals, because then you have control over something in your life.’”

He got onto a series called MDs that broke his losing streak, “but I never will allow myself to forget those times when my credit card debt got high and I had to keep my nimbleness.”

When CSI: NY came along in 2005, he didn’t just embrace “the joy of playing a character every week,” but admits that “the comfort zone is that paycheck. You’re just so happy to be getting stable work in a profession that’s so notoriously unstable.

“I still look for the challenge every week, looking for clues to make it work beyond the words on the page. The great gift to me in life is that CSI has given me the freedom to indulge my passion for the stage.”

Joy, in fact, hadn’t been on the stage in 12 years (“not unlike Prospero’s 12 years on the island,” he notes wryly), but on this one hiatus, he has done 3 shows, one in New York, one in Newfoundland, and this one in Barrie.

“I really had never even thought about playing this part, but my daughter Ruby got cast as Miranda and asked who was playing Prospero. They told her they didn’t have anyone yet, but wondered if her father would be interested.”

Joy’s eyes twinkle more brightly than Hammerback’s when finding a fatal bullet.

“Oh yes, he was interested. He most certainly was!”

The Tempest will play at the Georgian Theatre in Georgia College, 1 Georgian Drive in Barrie, from July 1-16. For tickets call 705-735-924 or go to www.theatrebythebay.com

source: http://www.toronto.com/article/690838--csi-barrie-robert-joy-tackles-the-tempest

Citation :

JOY STARS IN ‘THE MASTER & ME’ SHORT FILM

Posted by Rachel Trongo - 15/07/12 at 01:07 pm

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CSI: New York actor Robert Joy (Dr Sid Hammerback) will star in an upcoming horror/comedy short film titled The Master & Me. He’ll play Dr Dalca, a modern day version of Dr Frankenstein who is exiled from his Romanian castle after he tries to bring the dead back to life. Several years later, the man resurfaces, continuing his work in America and unleashing zombies on a major city. Dr Dalca’s former servant, Ygor (Irwin Keyes), must track down his master before it’s too late.

The Master & Me will be completed later this year, and the 15-minute film will premiere exclusively at Nuke The Fridge Con on November 10, 2012. The official Facebook page for the movie is here, and you can find a trailer embedded after the jump or at NukeTheFridge.com:

source: Talk