There are no second acts in American lives but there are in Stage Door Jonny. In the last act of conversation for this series of the podcast, Sir Simon Russell Beale tells Jonny about playing Hamlet for his mum and the challenge of grieving onstage, who he fixates on in his audience about once every couple of months, the actor he thinks is the top dog of his generation, improvising Ibsen and the bastard who invented the matinee. He also manages to beautifully articulate what might actually be the manifesto for this podcast: an actor onstage at a particular high water mark of feeling and an audience who understands in the same moment that they are that character too. Simon definitely says it better.

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