An Evening With Richard Skipper: The Magic of Believing!
Richard Skipper Celebrates! The Magic of Believing
An Evening with Richard Skipper: The Magic of Believing tells the story of a precocious 13-year-old South Carolina-an who decided on August 5th, 1974 that he would move to New York in five years, to the day, and try his hand at show business. Sure enough, come August 5th, 1979, equipped with a one-way plane ticket and five hundred dollars, 18 year-old Ricky Skipper kept that promise to himself, and forty years later he is still nurturing, daily, his unquenchable thirst for the business of show: “The show business bug did not bite me, I bit it – and I bit it hard. I wanted to be in show business before I even knew what show business was.”The Magic of Believing: An Excerpt from Broadway World, by Stephen Mosher Aug. 6, 2019The musical autobiography that Mr. Skipper presented was a true celebration of a gifted entertainer and a resilient human being – and it was an absolute delight. The standing-room-only audience was a veritable who’s who of cabaret luminaries, all on hand to hear Skipper’s tale, and it did not disappoint. Armed with only a few songs and impeccable comic timing , Richard spent most of his time on stage regaling with stories that anyone could relate to – especially anyone with a childhood dream of going on the stage, anyone who had been a small-town misfit, anyone from the south, or anyone with fond remembrances of New York of the 70s/80s. The over-forty crowd was so captivated by Skipper that only one person was seen tiptoeing out for a restroom break, an unheard-of feat in a two hour evening of theatre. Skipper’s ability to paint a picture with words brought to life characters one might easily find in the writings of Willa Cather or Armistead Maupin, and it didn’t matter that the characters weren’t famous enough to give the audience a frame of reference because the true star of the night was the story being told. Oh, there were famous names, make no mistake: it would be impossible for Mr. Skipper to speak about his life without some delicious name-dropping, but it wasn’t essential, except in the case of Carol Channing, for obvious reasons. Skipper’s audience hung on his every word, riotous laughter and uncontrollable vocal response ringing in the air, and while much credit goes to his director, Jay Rogers, it was clear that the time for Richard Skipper to be celebrated is now.
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