Alec Baldwin loses plot without a script

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This article was published 30/11/2018 (2576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There is an art to name-dropping.

First, you lay the groundwork of expectation by naming, say, a movie set.

Next, you drop the first name, maybe it’s “Tom.” Then you allow a pause, ever so slight, to signal that it’s just dawning on you that your audience might not be on a first-name basis with one of the biggest movie stars in the world, before adding “… Cruise.”

Alec Baldwin is very good at dropping names (he’s also adept at the “née” technique, casually referring to Lauren Bacall by her given name, “Betty,” because, you see, they were chums).

What Alec Baldwin is not, however, is a natural raconteur. Over the course of his screen and stage career, he’s accumulated a quiverful of famous acquaintances and some incredible stories to go along with them, but without a script to follow, he tends to lose the plot.

It was difficult to know what to expect from the vague show description, but it seemed fair to imagine it would be similar to John Cleese’s event as part of the Unique Lives & Experiences series — half lecture (in the longtime U.S. Democrat and President Donald Trump impersonator’s case, likely something political) and half interview, with some audience questions.

However, over the course of a draggy 90-minute Q&A at the Centennial Concert Hall on Thursday night, the Long Island-born actor fielded the softest of softball questions lobbed at him by CJOB’s Richard Cloutier, and delivered rambling, banal answers.

Never mind that most of the memories and anecdotes he relayed can be found in his 2017 autobiography, Nevertheless. No one was expecting Baldwin to open up about his latest brush with the law (or even his previous brushes), but the questions were so rote, even his candid responses should have been long ago polished into talk-show-worthy nuggets for the people paying good money to hear him talk.

Looking trim in a dark suit, the 60-year-old actor and philanthropist talked lovingly about his family — he and his second wife Hilaria have four children under age five — and occasionally delved into interesting industry dirt and dropped some funny impressions, but he veered between passion and bluster, candour and what felt like false humility.

He humbly claimed not to consider himself an impersonator, as there are so many who do it better (he should probably tell his PR team not to include the phrase “master of characters” on his posters, if that’s the case).

Most of the evening’s laughs came via video clips — though even those were a strange selection. Baldwin has had a lengthy, if erratic, career, but the producers of the show chose to represent it so narrowly. The clip from Glengarry Glen Ross omitted one of his monologue’s most famous lines — “Third prize is you’re fired” — and the one from his brilliant Emmy-winning turn as Jack Donaghy on TV’s 30 Rock was a single scene (a classic, but not representative).

A video promoting his poorly rated talk show, The Alec Baldwin Show, felt like marketing, and the clip — which featured Kim Kardashian talking about realizing her step-parent Caitlyn Jenner was transgender — allowed for several uncomfortable minutes during which Baldwin misgendered the former Olympian several times.

“I’m trying to get the pronouns right,” he said.

Try harder, Alec. Try harder.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @dedaumier