Meet Philip Watt | Private educator, theatre producer, actor, trumpet player

Being an independent educator has allowed me to continue in the arts, both music and acting, while engaging with students full-time. Being my own boss in the world of letters has allowed me to develop a teaching style and performance standards that I don’t see anywhere else. As a one-on-one instructor to about 25 students a week, I guide them to build unique permanent writing portfolios. They attend, or now are graduates, of Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Carnegie-Mellon, University of Chicago, Stanford, and many more. They sometimes study with me for years, and I facilitate their growth in reading, writing, and critical thinking. I provide a variety of units which throw them into advanced English study after a relatively short period of time. Mr. Watt’s Literary Services is a word-of-mouth business: I often teach siblings, then their cousins, and their family friends. One of my dearest wishes for this opportunity to share my work with a broader audience is that you would read student work on my website – if you find a particular student that wows you, look through their portfolio – recent long-term students have won Gold in the Scholastic Awards for Novel category, as well as Gold for Poetry. My first degree was in Acting, from Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (CCM), and I took a Master in the Arts of Teaching from Bard College when I was in my late 20s. Full scholarships to both… thank you Michael Burnham at CCM as well as the MAT faculty at Bard.

I’ve also taught acting for animators since 2004 and am currently teaching (spring 2022) at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

What is acting for animators? I compressed the sensory work process of the Method into a 5 day workshop in 2004. Animators learn of a 200-year old paradox about acting from Denis Diderot, see how Joseph Talma expressed it in the early 1800s, and then see how Constantin Stanislavsky figured it out! We then go into rehearsal for their short performances where they develop character bodies and a collapsible set, and fellow animators sketch their classmates in search of key frames. All of this is brought into performance. In essence, animators experience getting into character and then, through performance, have acting skills hardwired in. When the class is over, they have a skill that they can use for years to come and have embraced acting as a sister art (a much older sister) to animation. I taught the class from 2004-2012 at the Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark, and at Filmakademie since 2008. I’ve also taught the class at Moholy-Nagy School of Design in Budapest. My long term goal is to teach my method at more schools, and speak and give demonstrations at FMX and other animation conferences.

Overall, one could liken my process to a drawn-out meditation. It takes years to bring an original play to the stage. And time is stretchy, for sometimes it happens faster than you would think. That’s why the attitude I cultivate is a mixture of meditation and obsession. For instance, with the Dylan Thomas adaptation: I read Thomas’s letters when I was 16, and they helped form my artistic identity. Fifteen years later, while leaving the NYC Department of Education, I was already adapting his poems, letters and short stories into my play, “Dylan Thomas, 19”. I toured the country as Thomas, playing at UNLV, the William Inge Theatre in Independence, KS, Rutgers University, in San Francisco, and even in Maine, at the College of Art. Even writing about it now causes me to want to go over to my bookshelf and pace around, intoning his poems. For who knows, if I start doing that more and more, I’ll be transformed, make new discoveries, and I’ll desire to adapt a new play from his words. This time it may be entitled, “Dylan Thomas, 29”, and I’ll need to again get rights from his agent, David Higham Associates (last time they gave me 16 months to tour the US). I have also adapted the work of Stephen Crane into a play, centering on his special 25th year. Guess what it is called? “Stephen Crane, 25”. That has only had one performance at PianoFight in San Francisco, but I adore Crane as well.

Thomas’s way of producing elaborately complex poems that retain a narrative spine drove me to discover the play hiding in his letters, poems and short stories; with Baker it is his place in the pantheon of jazz legends, his struggles with addiction and his playing. I’ve played trumpet since I was in kindergarten, and I absolutely love Baker’s talent! His singing and his bebop chops are famous for they are equally rooted in purity and depth. He survived unabated drug use for decades, jail, and even the loss of teeth (broken by a drug dealer). As I am in recovery myself, and some say I resemble him a little bit, I perhaps bring a performance that theatre audiences crave. Chet left a long trail of wreckage in his past. But always shining out from the charnel pit of his bad habits and abuse is the legendary musicianship. One wonders about his alchemical process: from the raw materials of an addicted mind and body, he consistently produced the gold of musical art. Even today, after being gone for 36 years, his contributions to the art form lie undiminished, and the purpose of my plays exploring his life is to add one gloss to his legacy.

Even now I am trying to get two new one-acts about Baker’s life mounted on the Los Angeles stage! See below for the promo that Aaron Cruz just helped me cut – there you will see synopses of the plays, as well as archival footage and photography from past productions. I believe in this special hybrid: a jazz play, because audiences experience both the behind-the-scenes life of jazz players in the 1950s, as well as a performance within a performance, with of course, real jazz musicians playing and crossing over into acting. The playwrights featured in this time around (it’ll be the 4th production of plays exploring the life and legacy of Chet Baker) are two talents who have already written full-length plays on Baker, which I produced for San Francisco and New York stages. Barry Eitel (a recent MFA grad in playwriting from NYU’s Tisch) and Stephen Delbos (professor of English at Charles University in Prague, and the poet laureate of Plymouth, MA) – these two writers will share the bill.

My acting career began when I was 15 at my high school in rural Union, Missouri (thank you Mr. Sutton for asking me to audition – if I had not been serving three nights of detention for unceremoniously drooling while asleep during English class, I never would have walked by your room). Fortunately for my participation in the arts, my family moved to Saint Louis in the spring of 1992. That summer I auditioned for Excalibur Productions, a semi-professional troupe run by Darryl Maximilian Robinson, a Chicagoan. Max, a 6’3″ African American with a silver tongue and a firm grasp of the classics, cast me, and my first season on the stage was amazing: “Waiting for Godot”, “As You Like It”, “The Lion in Winter”, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (introducing me to Dylan Thomas), and finally, “Master Harold… and the boys”. Being reviewed by the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch and performing 4-6 week runs during my junior year made me an actor quickly. Then I had the great fortune to study with Harry Governick, a hardcore Method teacher. Harry had lived at Actors Studio West and knew and learned from the master Lee Strasberg, and brought unrelenting, severe, and pure Method training to Saint Louis, and I was an avid student. After being accepted to CCM, I went off to the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in NYC before entering conservatory, so by the time I entered college, I’d fused with the technique and it was CCM who broke that down into more workable pieces. As a sophomore I was cast in a play at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati in the lead role of a play entitled “Two Weeks with the Queen”, receiving my Actors Equity card by the stroke of a pen. Using the income to further my career, the summer between my junior and senior year I came here to LA for the first time and took a 3-week workshop with the LAPD: the Los Angeles Poverty Department, run by the great John Malpede. We did street theatre and lived in Skid Row’s SROs. We did outreach to the homeless, worked in battered women’s shelters and even acted as liaisons for the destitute applying for benefits. Then something magical happened to top off this wonderful year in the arts. The coordinator for the LAPD showed me the Breakdown and there was a Michael Jackson video being cast, and they were seeking an actor who could portray a homeless boy. After taking the bus to Francine Selkirk’s casting office in the Valley twice, I got the part! Nic Brandt, the director, told me that Michael personally cast me. We shot, would you believe it, in Skid Row, and that was my film debut! The video is called “Stranger in Moscow” and is a work of art, the cinematography itself notable for influencing “The Matrix” (look for the shattered glass following the baseball the zooms right past my line of vision). Well, that cemented my desire to come to Hollywood, and the next summer I came out with a friend, and we lived at the Villa Elaine on Vine Street (the same summer that Remy Zero lived there, and you can listen to their album entitled “Villa Elaine”), and I met and signed with my agent William Kerwin. I lived in LA for 6 years and appeared onstage at UCLA’s Freud Theatre as Crookfinger Jake in “The Threepenny Opera” with Theodore Bikel and Patrick Cassidy among others, and as John Huff in the Colony Theatre Company’s production of “Dandelion Wine”, the musical about Ray Bradbury’s childhood. Being that I was playing his fictionalized best friend, and that Bradbury came to see the show about 8 times during our 4 month run, I got to know the legendary author a little bit, and we corresponded for a few years! In film, I got into SAG in 1999 with a national commercial, and then went on to play the Prom King in “Monkeybone” and appeared in another music video, this time Eve 6’s “Tongue Tied” with Katie Holmes. I then came full circle by re-approaching the Method and spent a few years as a working observer at the Actors Studio while Martin Landau and Mark Rydell were the heads there. The Greenway Court Theatre became my favorite theatre to play at, and I did three productions there before my time was up in LA, before moving on to grad school at Bard College. In NYC I created some original work with CCM pals at Jimmy’s #43 Back Room (featured in a recent Woody Allen film) but mostly was absorbed in cutting my teeth as a teacher, though I did perform off-Broadway with the Oberon Theatre Ensemble in a production of “Much Ado About Nothing”. Also, I walked into voiceover recording in NYC by creating the role of Herbert Moon in RockStar Games’ “Red Dead Redemption” in 2009, and can be heard in “Red Dead Redemption II” as well.

In San Francisco, in addition to the Chet Baker plays, I played the Riddler in the “BatKid” experience and the film, and I played the Elephant Man at the Brava Theatre.

And while I don’t consider myself disabled, I do have a hand condition called amniotic band syndrome, which has shortened and sculpted, you could say, my fingers. I served on the Performers with Disabilities Caucus at SAG when Melissa Gilbert was president (after working on her campaign). We passed by-laws which required casting directors to seek out performers with specific disabilities for the first round of auditions, if the role called for it.

If it was the second or third Sunday of the month, I’d take my friend to Hotel Café to check out the Sunday Night Revue led by Arthur Autumn. It’s a great way to catch local LA musicians pouring themselves out in tribute. Recent revues have been on the following bands/artists: Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Radiohead, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, and more.

I had the joy to play with Rilo Kiley when they were on the rise between 2000 and 2004, so Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennett, Duke de Reeder, Mike Rock (and then Jason Boesel). It was incredible to play with them at the Troubadour, the Henry Fonda, the Roxie, Silverlake Lounge, the Satellite, the Knitting Factory (LA and NYC) and other venues! I can be heard on their “Take Offs and Landings” as well as Blake’s The Elected: “Sun, Sun, Sun” and “Me First”.

I recorded with Elliott Smith almost a year before he died, at his place in Echo Park. Has anyone heard the posthumously released work? Are there any horn tracks? It was a strange 11-part tune. Thanks Blake, for the introduction. We recorded for about three hours and he paid me with a pack of Camel cigarettes! He was one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met.