BUILDING SUSPENSE BY COUNTING.

BUILDING SUSPENSE BY COUNTING. I think Jim Dale would use a different method to time the opening lines of ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Dale is a wonderful stage actor who is now best known for doing all the voices in the audiobooks in the Harry Potter series. He set a world record of 125 different voices in THE GOBLET OF FIRE and then broke the record with 134 different voices in THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. (Here is one of several YouTube videos of Jim Dale doing some of the voices). I read an interview where Jim Dale described how his many years of acting in British music halls taught him comic timing. Dale said that he learned to count during his pauses. There was a different count for each pause or bit of business, and you had to experiment to find it. But if the count was 8 for one joke, you would get a laugh every night if you counted to 8, and no laugh on 6 or 10.