Entertainment Prepare to laugh: Dan Challacombe is in the house
Entertainment
Prepare to laugh: Dan Challacombe is in the house
- Details
- Published on Friday, 11 April 2014 00:00
- Written by Paul Gordon
He’s one of those guys who makes you laugh simply by walking onto a stage. That’s because his face is usually wearing the look of some oddball character in a comedy at any one of the stages in the Peoria area.
He has done countless roles in the region and the loudest applause is often directed toward him during curtain call. It is always deserved in the eyes of the audience and greatly appreciated by this local man of a thousand faces.
Dan Challacombe is as nice and humble a guy you are likely to meet anywhere.
“I still get nervous before every show. Not just the opening night of every show, but every performance. I’m always worried that I won’t be good enough, that the audience won’t like me,” the 52-year-old Dunlap native said. “Then, when they laugh at me that first time, I know everything is going to be fine.”
These days Challacombe mostly performs at Conklin’s Barn II Dinner Theatre in Goodfield, finding roles in almost as many plays as theatre owner Mary Simon. And because all of the plays there are comedies and many of them farces, Challacombe is right at home. “Yeah, it’s true. If there is a strange character in one of the shows, odds are I’m going to play it,” he said, feigning displeasure.
Then, with that sparkle that’s almost always in his eyes, he adds, “I love to make people laugh.”
He tried a dramatic role once, playing the rapist who gets the tables turned on him in “Extremities.” It was, he said, the most challenging role he’s ever played and it was the most eye-opening, as well, at least his eyes. “It convinced me I much prefer to make people laugh.
Challacombe is the youngest of six children, and the only one who became a performer. His mother, a homemaker while he was growing up, sang in church choir but that was all. His father, a farmer and later an insurance salesman, never took the stage.
Challacombe enjoyed the arts, but started out doing visual arts. He liked to draw and paint in high school, never appearing on stage but often accompanying musicals at Dunlap High School on the piano, an instrument he still plays. His first time on stage was as a freshman at Eureka College in “Godspell” in the fall of 1979.
Later that year he performed in a variety show at the college, doing a skit with another student. It was then he heard what became the music to his ears. “It hit me while we were doing that skit that people were laughing at me. At me! I loved it. I was hooked.”
His first community theatre show was in the summer of 1981 in a show directed by the late Leonard Costa. “I found it was a great way to meet people and to just have a lot of fun. Then a couple years later my first lead role was also at the tent, in “Pippin.” Then tent was like a whole other world to me. I kept going back there and trying the other theatres.
“I don’t know if I can play just anything on stage, but it is a lot of fun to try. And that is really the great thing about acting. You can be somebody else, anybody else. I am just as happy playing a small character role as I am a lead role,” said Challacombe, who listed Tim Conway and Steve Martin as among those from whom he’s drawn inspiration.
He’s not afraid of physical comedy, such as taking a fall if the script calls for it. “When they are planned, I’ll do it,” he said. He then related a story about coming off stage one night during a blackout and, after realizing he’d gone the wrong way he backed up a few feet – and landed on his back in the orchestra pit.
It wasn’t until he’d climbed out and slunk to the backstage area that he realized he was in pain. “Everybody in the cast was laughing at me. I laughed too, but it hurt every time I did.”
But that kind of feeling is prevalent in comedy theatre. Laughing at yourself, that is.
“If there is something wrong, you gotta shake it off before you go on because you can’t fool an audience,” he said.
Challacombe met his wife, dancer-singer-actress-choreographer-teacher Tamra Challacombe, in the theatre, of course. The first time he saw her he was in the audience to see her perform in a show, “Dames at Sea,” at Peoria Players.
“I asked somebody in the cast to introduce me. Then later she came to a cast party for a show I was in and we talked some more. She had black hair then, I remember. Then later we were in ‘Company’ together at Corn Stock. I was playing Bobby and in a way it was the story of my life. I was in my mid-30s, didn’t really have much interest in getting married, just having fun. Well, my character and Tamra’s character had a bed scene together and after the show closed I said, ‘well now that we’ve been to bed together, want to go out?’ ‘’
Just a few months later, he proposed. Then in September 1998 they were married at the tent at Corn Stock Theatre. They now have four children, all daughters, and the oldest two already are performers. Claire, 15, sings and acts and Sophie, 13, is a dancer. Alexia, 7, and Vivien, 5, “will probably get on stage too,” he said.
Tamra doesn’t have as much time to get on stage these days because she is head of the academy and education at the Peoria Ballet, where she also teaches. She tries to do at least one show at Conklin’s each year, Challacombe said.
While Challacombe gets paid for performing at the Barn, it isn’t enough to pay the bills. A graphic artist by profession, he used to work in the planning and zoning department for the City of Peoria, but was laid off about five years ago. “I’m a big believer that things happen for a reason and that was one of them. I was feeling burned out and wondering what else I could do with my life and, well, the city told me to go find out,” he said.
He has used his talents as an artist to freelance work for various organizations, he has been a substitute teacher and he drives a school bus for the Dunlap School District. “I walk a block to work every day. Now how great is that?”
He also is a server at Conklin’s, which he said helps not only because of the tips but because he can connect with the audience. You can catch him acting and serving both in the current production at Conklin’s, “Another Round of Beer for Breakfast,” which runs through April 20.
Still, Challacombe likes to occasionally step away from Conklin’s and do a role in community theatre, even though it doesn’t pay. “But sometimes there is a role I just really have to play. So I go for it, if I can,” he said.
The last such role like that was the evil dentist in “Little Shop of Horrors” at Corn Stock Theatre in 2007. “I’d been dying to play that role and I got the chance. I loved it,” he said.
Other favorites roles through the years have included the cop in “Urinetown,” which he played twice, Toby in “Sweeney Todd,” Frankie in “Forever Plaid,” Billy Flynn in “Chicago,” and the cab driver in “Run For Your Wife.”
While his roles have been plentiful and meaningful, Challacombe said, “I still feel a little bummed every once in a while when I realize I’m probably never going to be a movie star or a Broadway star. But then I try to always look at the glass as half full and that’s when I realize I can’t complain. I have a beautiful family, I’m doing what I love and getting paid for it, I’m paying the bills, we’re happy.
“When I’m on stage I always try to convey to the audience a feeling of ‘come play with me, we’re going to have fun.’ Because that is, really, how I feel. I feel that and it’s a great feeling. I am blessed.”
