Charlie Powell
Set phasers to stunned! William Shatner beams into Madison on Sept. 21 to visit the Orpheum Theater and screen his 1982 film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
“The audience will enjoy it if they haven’t already seen it, especially on the big screen,” says Shatner, speaking to Isthmus from his Los Angeles office. “Then I’ll come out on stage and I’ll spend an hour with the audience, laughing and enjoying being with everybody, and informing and entertaining.”
Shatner, 87, has spent a lifetime doing just that, although NBC has cancelled Better Late Than Never, the ensemble travel show that teamed him with Terry Bradshaw, George Foreman and producer Henry Winkler, after just two seasons.
But Shatner is never one to stay still. You’d think that for him to tour with a decades-old film would be . . . illogical. But, “I’m also doing it because I have a number of things out there right now,” he says. That includes his new book, Live Long And . . . What I Learned Along the Way.
“I hope you read it, because it’s a good read and a story told from my heart,” he says. There’s also his new country album, Why Not Me.
And a Christmas album called Shatner Claus.
Meanwhile Capt. James T. Kirk continues to live in a series of novels Shatner wrote with Judy and Gar Reeves-Stevens. As of the most recent (future) stardate, Kirk is alive and well in the era of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, commanding a small, covert starship named the Belle Reve. Will there be another literary adventure for Kirk with the Reeves-Stevenses?
“It’s not in our plans,” says Shatner. But, “I love to work with them. They’re so agile.”
Another reason for his current tour is so he can experience the joy of being on stage again. Shatner’s early theatrical career is often overshadowed by his later success. Trained in his native Canada as a classical Shakespearean actor, he performed with the celebrated Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, where he understudied Christopher Plummer. As Chang, the Klingon chancellor, Plummer would later square off against Kirk in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
After Stratford, young Shatner moved to Broadway, where in 1959 he opened The World of Suzie Wong, which ran for two years. He went on to star in an English adaptation of L’Idiote. Renamed A Shot in the Dark, the French mystery-farce was later made into a film with Peter Sellers. But starring in it onstage in 1961, with Julie Harris and Walter Matthau, Shatner played the role that would become Inspector Clouseau, of Pink Panther fame.
In a 1968 interview he did during the second season of the original Star Trek, Shatner claimed that he left Broadway for Hollywood only to attain financial security.
“Although I’ve compromised my dreams, I haven’t given them up entirely,” he said at the time. “If Star Trek is a long-running success, it will mean in five or six years I can go back to the stage and do what I choose.”
It didn’t work out that way. There were still offers, but by the time they came along, Shatner was fully settled in L.A. “I didn’t want to relocate the family. I didn’t want to leave the family,” he says. “So I thought at one point, ‘Well, I guess I’m never going back to Broadway.’”
Much later he worked up a touring one-man show that played in Canada and Australia. Rewritten and restaged in 2012 as Shatner’s World . . . We Just Live In It, it was booked for Broadway. (I reviewed the show in March 2012, when it stopped in Milwaukee.)
“I’m on stage a lot,” says Shatner of his current tour. “I love stage entertaining: timing comedy and telling drama, using stagecraft all the time. I’m on stage more than most stage actors in New York are on stage.”