Friday, September 22, 2000

'Great Expectations' for young SMT actor

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — David Pandich isn't really Pip, even though his character in Seaside Music Theater's "Great Expectations" is about 13, like him.

In real life, Pandich is an eighth- grader who lives in Palm Coast with an older brother and parents, both of whom are teachers, not an orphan in Charles Dickens' gloomy Victorian England.

But when he puts on his rags, slips into his English accent and steps onto the Seaside Music Theater stage tonight, Pandich is sure to be far more than a talented actor interpreting a plum role.

"I'll be Pip," he said, quietly but also fiercely last week, just a few minutes before rehearsal for the play began at SMT Downtown.

Pandich had sat at lunch for more than an hour that day, letting his mother outline the family's background. The Pan diches moved to Palm Coast from New York five years ago, drawn to tropical warmth, said Kim Pandich.

Tom, her older son, wasn't interested in acting. But, from the start, it was clear that David was different.

He loved the stage, even before he took his first acting program at Palm Coast's Theateriffic five years ago. He played Oliver in "Oliver," Simba in "The Lion King," Patrick and Peter in "Mame," among other leading roles on that first stage.

By the time Pandich began acting with Seaside as David in "Rags" in 1999, Willie Maurrant in "Street Scene" and a page in "Cyrano" in the recent summer season he was launched on his path as an actor, with a portfolio and an agent.

"It was clear right from the start that David wanted to perform it's his life," said Kim, who would spend that Sunday at rehearsal in the traditional stagemom role.

She wouldn't exactly be watching, she said. Instead, she would find a spot in the rehearsal hall where she wouldn't disturb the actors and director Lester Malizia and where they wouldn't disturb her as she completed her work for the coming week at school.

"Acting is so obviously what David does," Kim said, and her son nodded.

That doesn't mean he looks like an actor all of the time, or even that he's a typical actor.

Instead of fitting the usual image as a shy person who finds himself able to step into other characters onstage he's not at all shy in everyday life.

In fact, said Pandich, he likes the limelight at school and, among friends, often clowns around as he tries out another of his interests, comedy.

On stage, especially as Pip, however, Pandich won't be any more comic than he was in the wrenching Rags," when his character spoke at a funeral. That meant the actor had to feel the tragedy of that moment every time the pivotal scene ap proached, or the scene would feel false, he said.

So Pandich reached into his own life, to the serious car accident five years ago that left him with scars across his face.

"I tap into feelings I had in the hospital. I think about what could have happened and about the outcome," he said gravely. "I imagine that I might wake up and find that I lost my father or my brother in that accident; the suffering is real."

As is Pandich's sympathy for Pip, the "Great Expectations" character who faces the fact that his parents are gone forever when he sees their tombstones for the first time and who can't understand why the much-older sister who raises him is so cruel.

"I like Pip when he's young," said Pandich. "I admire him at first. But when he becomes a gentleman, he becomes kind of ... snooty."

That's when another cast member, Derrick Peterson, takes over as Pip. Other actors among them Wendy Lehr, Gary Briggle, Gary Cadwallader, Benjamin Howes and Julia Davidson play multiple roles, stepping forward at various points in the play to tell the story in a style that's a first for Seaside, narrative theater.

Pip does that, too, as a boy and as a young man, Pandich said.

He looked thoughtful, then began speaking as the narrator, in a cool and measured voice with the accents of another time and place to offer an example.

Pip lived in Kent, south of London, he said, and suddenly the busy Daytona Beach restaurant where he spoke felt like sooty, damp, chilly 19th-century London.

The atmosphere came not from costumes Pandich was in denim overalls and a slouchy T-shirt or from any scenic or lighting magic.

It came solely from the 13-year-old's mastery of accent, from his solemn phrasing, from the sheer force of his personality, molded as if by magic into Pip and projected around him.

Then he stepped outside his character, and smiled.

Pandich was an actor again, in a restaurant.

His mother seemed to shake her self slightly, and explained, "When he's on the stage, I can't take my eyes off him. I know it sounds like it's because I'm his mother, but it isn't just that. It's ... I don't know ... he loves what he does, he really does love acting. I guess he's kind of a ham."

And David Pandich tried not to laugh.

"Yes," he said. "I guess I am a ham."

If you go

What: 'Great Expectations'

Who: Seaside Music Theater.

When: 8 p.m. today, Saturday and Sept. 28-30, Oct. 5-7; 2 p.m. matinees Sunday, Oct. 1, 5, 8.

Where: Daytona Beach Community College's Theater Center, Building 8, 1200 W. International Speedway Blvd., Daytona Beach.

Tickets: $22-$20/ season package of three plays$54.

Information: (904) 252-6200.