INTERVIEW: Star Trek Rat Pack braves pandemic, heads for Las Vegas
Image courtesy of Creation Entertainment / Provided from official site.
One of the highlights every year at Creation Entertainment’s annual sci-fi soiree in Las Vegas — known formerly as the Official Star Trek Convention — is the festival-ending performance by the Star Trek Rat Pack. The lounge-style concert features the smooth singing, pleasant parodies and jesting jokes of several Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actors, including Vaughn Armstrong, Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs and the man behind the curtain, Max Grodenchik.
The performance always gets the audience laughing and tapping their toes. The guys take the stage at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in the same style of the original Rat Pack, and they offer witty repartee about this beloved franchise and its dedicated fan base. The performers have been offering their odes for more than a decade, and for this year’s convention, which runs through Sunday, Aug. 15 and celebrates the 55th year of Star Trek, the concert will be extra special.
For starters, there is still a pandemic out there. Last summer’s event was postponed until December 2020, and then it was canceled for good. So it has been two years since the last Vegas get-together, and the recent surge in the coronavirus has led to many guest cancellations and modified policies. Biggs, Combs and Armstrong recently spoke with Hollywood Soapbox and confirmed that they are still on for the convention. They will take extra precautions, but they are excited to enjoy the socially distanced company of their fans.
The three actors are men of many faces when it comes to the Star Trek characters they have portrayed. Biggs was Damar on DS9, and Combs played Weyoun on the same show (Combs also pulled double duty, portraying Commander Shran on Star Trek: Enterprise). Armstrong is one of the most prolific Star Trek actors of all time, having appeared on many episodes across four series; his most popular perhaps is Admiral Forrest on Enterprise, but he also portrayed a Klingon — tough to be that one!
During their sweeping conversation with Hollywood Soapbox, the trio opened up about their COVID concerns, their time on DS9 and what fans can expect from their presentation with the Rat Pack this year. Another nice bonus: The three will offer some snippets from the canon of William Shakespeare at the Vegas con as well.
Here’s what they had to say. Answers have been edited for brevity.
On their personal safety during this pandemic …
BIGGS: Still standing, I am.
COMBS: We’re double vaccinated. We wear our masks and continue to do that, social distance, wash our hands.
BIGGS: Wash long and prosper, as they say.
On what their expectations for this pandemic convention …
BIGGS: They seem to have worked it all out with Plexiglass and shields and masks and all that other kind of stuff. Personally, I’m not too terribly concerned because we can always get away to be alone if we want, right Jeff?
COMBS: In theory.
BIGGS: And when we do the shows, we’re far enough from the audience. Personally, I’m not very concerned.
COMBS: Apparently they’ve been real conscientious about distances and Plexiglass, hand sanitizers, so we’ll take care of ourselves. We’ll watch out for ourselves and each other.
On what this year’s Rat Pack performance will be like …
BIGGS: We never really know what’s going to happen, so that makes it very interesting to all of us.
COMBS: We try to keep it that way. We have a general outline, but we don’t really have scripted filler between songs or anything like that. … It’s going to be different, for sure.
BIGGS: It’s always a great way to end the weekend. They finally came around to realizing that it was a great way that the fans really liked to end on a high like that. Sometimes we used to do it years ago on Friday night or something.
COMBS: The only downside I find for Sunday night is it used to be, maybe not so much anymore, that people would make their travel plans back home on Sunday night.
ARMSTRONG: I’m pretty excited. I’m going to see a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while, and they’re taking pretty good precautions there. So I think everybody’s going to be OK, and I’m doubly vaccinated. … We look to find a time where we can rehearse. It’s pretty difficult because everybody is working pretty hard, but we try to get the list a fair time in advance. And we did this time. There are some new things, so it’s going to take some extra rehearsal. Whatever it is, we’re going to come up with it.
BIGGS: We always arm wrestle with Max because if he had his way we would do a three-hour show with every single thing we’ve ever done, and that’s just not what we’re going to do. We want to give a good solid hour … of good stuff and then leave them wanting more. We’ve got so many tunes.
On how they first became friends …
ARMSTRONG: Jeff, I met you at the conventions. Casey and I have known each other about 30-35 years.
BIGGS: I met Jeff on the show, so we became good friends on the show.
COMBS: There were many times in the past where Vaughn and I could have met if we worked at the same theater.
ARMSTRONG: The Old Globe Theatre. I worked there for about 10 years actually off and on. I kept hearing about Jeff and the wonderful stuff he was doing. I was really happy to meet him.
COMBS: We have a lot of common ground because of that. Even though we weren’t at the theaters at the same time, we knew all the same people.
ARMSTRONG: Jeff was talking about a show he saw, what was it 30 years ago, an Othello. … I said, I was in that show.
COMBS: I didn’t know you, so I didn’t have a reference.
On the enduring popularity of DS9 …
BIGGS: As Jeff likes to say, we had a deep bench on that show.
COMBS: Embarrassment of good hitters on the bench.
BIGGS: You’ve got all the regulars and then the recurring parts, [and] the writers loved us. And they just kept writing more. Everybody really had a great deal of respect for each other, too. It wasn’t like you had two or three stars at the top that said, ‘To hell with you, it’s our show.’ For many times and long stretches, it sort of felt like it was our show because they kept writing all this great stuff.
COMBS: There were times when some of the series regulars could stay home for a week by the pool.
BIGGS: DS9 was the black sheep of the family, and they left us alone. Ergo, the writing could be really interesting.
On the difficulty of playing different alien species …
BIGGS: I had no idea about that particular creature [Cardassian]. I had no idea. You go in there, and you don’t have any idea really what the makeup is going to feel like or any of that. I was working with Marc Alaimo [as Gul Dukat], who was the classic Cardassian. He was the epitome of the Cardassian.
ARMSTRONG: It was his neck that created that makeup.
COMBS: Mike Westmore said that. He was trying to design the Cardassians, and he knew Marc Alaimo was going to be doing it. And he looked at it and went, ‘Oh, I can do that.’
BIGGS: Marc was so great in it. The reason Marc was so great in that is because he did think it was his show. He thought he was the star of the show, and he was the hero of the show and all the rest of it. That’s why he was so good in it.
COMBS: When you play a villain, and this is true certainly with Marc Alaimo, you don’t play evil. Marc didn’t see Gul Dukat as a bad guy. He saw him as justified in what he was doing. You can’t play smarmy, moo-ha-ha evil. You have to play an agenda, and that’s what he did.
ARMSTRONG: With the Klingons, I kind of knew. I was a fan of the show growing up, and then for Next Gen I was pretty excited. And I knew there would be room for me somewhere. I was kind of hoping it would be a Klingon, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t. But the rest of [the roles], I just kind of asked around on the set, and if I couldn’t get any information, I’d call the casting and say, ‘What’s the deal with these guys? What are their motivations? What do they do for a living?’ … Of course, you ask the director when you’re on the set, but I don’t know. For me anyway, I don’t know how many ways there are really to research other than asking people who have done it.
COMBS: This is a different time, and you also have to put in your arithmetic. A lot of the time we do not have much time for research. You’ve got the job, and it starts day after tomorrow. There was no internet. There was no YouTube. If you were lucky to have someone that you knew on the series, another actor, I suppose you could call them, but really you’re flying blind. I had never seen a Vorta when I played Weyoun. I just showed up at 3:30 in the morning.
ARMSTRONG: The makeup guys were sometimes very helpful. They made up a lot of these people. If you’d ask them a question, they might have the answer. Also if you’re looking in the mirror as this stuff is being put on you, you kind of think, well, what is it that made them look like this? What is in their evolutionary process that gives them this big head with the sharp teeth?
COMBS: It’s natural even if you’re not an actor. … [For] Halloween or a costume party, you dress up. Well, you feel different when you look in the mirror and dress differently. If you have different shoes on, you walk differently. You feel different. All these things were informers about how you approach your character.
On learning their characters’ backgrounds …
BIGGS: One of the scenes Jeff and I did later on in the series, he comes walking into my place, and I’m in bed with some nondescript Cardassian female. And he tells me that my wife and my child had been killed in the war. I didn’t even know I had a wife and child until that moment. If you do, you might play it a little differently.
COMBS: We are the last to know the backstory because the writers are kind of writing this stuff on the fly, on a deadline, and they come up with things. It would have been nice. No one may have even known it.
BIGGS: It would have made a difference to me.
COMBS: If you knew that you had a wife and child, you would have played scenes or moments differently in previous episodes.
BIGGS: [With] Dukat’s daughter, Ziyal, we were sitting in the makeup trailer, and I pick up the scripts for the next week. I look at it, and she’s getting made up right next to me. I say, oh man, I kill Ziyal. She had no idea she was dying. She just got up and ran out of the trailer. It was pretty funny. At least they killed her and not me.
ARMSTRONG: I had done my first episode and went to a convention at the Pasadena Convention Center, and somebody asked me what my first name was, a newsperson. I said, ‘Do I have a first name? I don’t know.’ The fan sitting right next to me said, ‘Vaughn, Vaughn, it’s Maxwell.’ I didn’t even know it. I knew him as Admiral Forrest. My first name is Admiral.
On the connections between Shakespeare and Star Trek …
BIGGS: Most of these characters are of Shakespearean proportion anyway. When you think about Shakespeare, it’s about melodrama, which is about life and death circumstances. Then, in order to be able to spit out this language, like it’s coming from an authentic place, it helps if you’ve been trained in the classics. And all three of us have been.
On the Star Trek gift that keeps on giving …
ARMSTRONG: I had no idea it would turn into 21 years of conventions, with people who do love you. They express that all the time.
BIGGS: It’s taken us all over the world.
COMBS: It’s even more fantastic when I think of myself as that little boy sitting in front of the TV just soaking up Star Trek. Never would have dreamed that years later I would be a part of that galaxy.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Creation Entertainment’s 55-Year Mission convention, featuring Vaughn Armstrong, Casey Biggs and Jeffrey Combs, continues through Sunday, Aug. 15. Click here for more information.
