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RONN LUCAS
Ventriloquist
If you ask Ronn Lucas what's the hardest part about being the world's best ventriloquist, he'll tell you: "It's ironing all of those damn little shirts!" Out of modesty, he won't tell you about the twenty-plus years of practice he took honing his skills to a point where no one comes close to his kind of perfection. It was the New York Times that labeled the 35 year old "The World's Best Ventriloquist". The London Times said the same thing a year ago. It's a title that doesn't seem to want to go away. "I'm really just the best in my price range," demures Lucas.
As a seven year old TV-watcher growing up in dusty El Paso, Texas, during the sixties, Ronn Lucas' interests in "The Howdy Doody Show" and "The Magic Land of Alacazam" inspired childhood hobbies of puppetry and magic. Then one day on another TV show, guest-star ventriloquist Edgar Bergen made a live baby appear to talk. The infant's mother was fooled. She believed that her tiny child was a genius. Edgar then revealed his cheeky friend, Charlie McCarthy, whose comedy asides stole the show. Lucas was riveted. Watching this ventriloquist and his dummy perform was like watching his two favorite hobbies. But with ventriloquism, magic and puppetry merged and became one.
There were some serious questions that needed answers. How did the ventriloquist talk without moving his mouth? Can someone really throw their voice? How does one buy a dummy? Ronn Lucas absolutely HAD to know.
Young Lucas read every book In the school library about the art of ventriloquism, and then wrote to the larger Texas State Library for more. The books came. For his seventh Christmas, Lucas received a ventriloquist doll from his parents via a mail-order catalogue. A career was launched.
He practiced. And he practiced. By the age of ten he could talk almost entirely without moving his mouth. Eight years later, as senior in high school, Ronn Lucas grew so skilled he could call himself out of the classroom on the P.A. system.
After his graduation, Ronn Lucas stayed in west Texas and performed everywhere that allowed him, from Cub Scouts to strip joints. Lucas did children's birthday parties by day, and played bars and honky-tonks at night. Strangely, it was the roughnecks and blue-collar workers of that rough environment that took a particular liking to Lucas and his acts.
"To put it bluntly, they'd never seen anything like me," says Lucas. "Not live anyway. They were either going to laugh at me or laugh with me, but I sure wasn't going to be ignored. I learned that ventriloquism could be an adult art form, if done right. Still, I had to learn to duck and think fast."
"I found that things I said through my puppets could sometimes start fist fights. One night a drunk heckled me so I heckled him back. lie cursed the dummy and the dummy mocked him in return. The audience roared! Then he stepped up onto the stage and was stopped by his friends just as he pulled his arm back to slug... the dummy!! He was so inebriated, he was going to hit the puppet."
For ten years Ronn Lucas and his characters traveled the entire U.S. by car struggling through store promotions and shopping center shows, before finally landing a plush job touring the oceans of the world for the famous and elite Royal Viking cruise line. As tempting as it was to relax and take advantage of an easy booking, Ronn instead challenged himself to be the best ventriloquist in the world. For his ship's audiences, Ronn began to experiment, and he built several new characters. His act grew until he literally became a one-man variety show. Having developed his puppets and a new look, Lucas left the line in 1981 and moved to San Francisco for phase two of his development: a formal study of comedy.
While in San Francisco, Ronn Lucas was introduced to Jim Richardson, a teacher at the University of Marin. Jim taught a radical comedy course (radical even by San Francisco's standards) where the objective was a mathematical approach to comedy and humor. Few comedians accepted Professor Richardson's pure clinical direction, but armed with a puppet and Richardson's particular perceptions, Ronn subjected himself to the acid test. He entered the Sixth Annual San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition; a marathon thirty day contest held at 20 clubs through-out the Bay Area. From a field of 140 competitors, Ronn Lucas walked away with first place. He then went on to New York to compete in the National LAFF-OFF championships held by the SHOWTIME cable network. He won that one too.
One of his New York judges was Harry Rigby, the producer of the Broadway show "SUGAR BABIES".
"SUGAR BABIES" (the tribute to the golden age of Burlesque starring Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney) was well into it's second year as an established Broadway hit. Daring to toy with his own production, Rigby removed a song-and-dance scene from his show and literally made a spot for Lucas to perform his own material. The experiment was a success. Ronn Lucas stayed with the show for three years.
In 1983, Lucas toured with "SUGAR BABIES" for a two-year tour of other major U.S. cities. Reviewers for local papers raved about Lucas and his puppets. "I don't know why; I was only on stage for eleven minutes," says Lucas with a wry smile. "But then, they were a VERY strong eleven minutes..."
A week after the "SUGAR BABIES" tour opened in Los Angeles, Lucas was invited to play the "Tonight Show" by Johnny Carson who had seen him on SHOWTIME. That was the first of subsequent guest spots on "Night Court', "The Today Show", "Entertainment Tonight", "The New Smother's Brothers Comedy Hour", and a most notable dramatic role on "L.A. Law". Recently, Ronn Lucas has had his own one hour comedy special for the Disney Channel called "Who's in Charge Here?" for which he was nominated for an Ace award.
In November of 1988 Ronn Lucas was one of several variety acts invited to perform for Her Majesty the Queen, at the Palladium in London for the Royal Variety Arts Gala. It was a career highlight. The finicky British press loved him. From that show, Lucas returned to the U.K. in February of 1989 to host THAMES Television's new-age dance and variety program "THE HIPPODROME SHOW".
Those two British successes evolved "THE RONN LUCAS SHOW", a 90's styled variety show for Thames TV with Ronn as the host. The show ran for an experimental 18 episodes on Great Britian's TV Channel 3. It quickly rose to average in the top 10 of British TV ratings.
Wherever he goes, Ronn Lucas brings skill and laughter to all who see him. Lucas' present character's include BUFFALO BILLY, the foam-faced Texan; a seven-hundred year old female troll named TILLIE; a break-away punk rocker called CHUCK; and most recently (the rage of British TV) a fire-breathing, rapping, teenage dragon named SCORCH.
In more ways than one, Ronn Lucas and "Company" are an act that can truly speak for itself!
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