After Show with David Bedella is a show that consists of “informal live interviews with television, film and stage personalities, as well as music performed by Bedella and his jazz trio. The evenings will be rounded off with an open mic session.”

Bakula will appear in the first show, which will take place at London’s Alley Cat Bar in Soho, on Thursday, October 13. The show runs from 10 PM to 3:30 AM.

For ticket information, head to the link located here.

In Terrible Advice, Stanley and Jake (Bakula) are best friends, as are Hedda and Delila. Jake loves Hedda and Stanley loves Delila and plans to marry her until Jake shares secrets and gives Jake some advice.

Terrible Advice will run from September 22 through November 12 at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. The official opening night is set for September 29. Ticket information can be found here.

Photos, clips and interview excerpts are beginning to emerge ahead of next week’s Shatnerpalooza extravaganza, which will air on EPIX and kick off next Thursday with Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet. An exclusive photo is shown here in a thumbnail-sized edition and the full-sized photo can be seen by clicking on that thumbnail.

The Captains features “in-depth interviews and vintage Star Trek footage with actors Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc Picard), Kate Mulgrew (Captain Kathryn Janeway), Avery Brooks (Captain Benjamin Sisko), Scott Bakula (Captain Jonathan Archer), and Chris Pine (Captain James T. Kirk, Star Trek 2009).” Shot on location in Toronto, London, New York, Princeton and Los Angeles, so that “Shatner could capture his fellow Captains and peers in their home environments, the HD film exposes the Captains in all their “humanity”, stripped down to the barest of earth-bound qualities and heavenly thoughts. [The Captains] offers a rare and candid glimpse into the inner sanctum of each actor. The film is grand in its sincerity and reflective of the passion and compassion each Captain demonstrated over the last forty-give years on both small and large screens. The Captains is all about the working challenges and personal rewards each actor garnered from the groundbreaking role of Starship helmer.”

“My hope is to delve deeply into these actors’ psyches, find out more about them so you can… see what common denominator there is among us as actors that brought [us] to this worldwide renown as part of Star Trek,” sad Shatner.

The Captains was based on hours of interviews with the Star Trek actors. They spoke about why they got involved in acting and Star Trek and what working on Star Trek meant to them. “I remember a play I did in a camp that my mother ran,” said Shatner. “I was in a play about the Holocaust. I played a kid [saying goodbye to his dog], because the Germans were taking me. When the play was over, I looked out there and the audience was crying – and I took my bow and my father came and held me and praised me. I’m convinced that was the moment I thought hey, this is fantastic. This has got me places with my father and the audience that I’d never dreamt of. I’m convinced that’s what started me on my acting thing, this moment in time.”

For some actors, acting took priority over everything, even family. “I remember once sitting around a dinner table with colleagues, actors, directors and hearing one of them say ‘I love my job, but my family always comes first, always,’” said Stewart. “And a voice inside my head said ‘not me.’”

Brooks spoke about being the only black Star Trek Captain, paying homage to those who went before him. “Without Paul Robson, I [wouldn't be] on Star Trek,” he said. “That is to say I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here without Brock Peters. I wouldn’t be here without Muhammad Ali, I wouldn’t be here without Sidney Poitier, I wouldn’t be here without William Warfield. I could go on and on. That’s the fact of the matter and I’m not fooled.”

For Mulgrew, acting came with a price, as she had two very important jobs to do at once and inevitably, as many women find out, in that case, one will suffer. “I think that the great difference is that the female is wired once she has her young to take care of them and to raise them, and I couldn’t do it well,” she said. “You know, there were sixteen to eighteen-hour days on that set for seven years, and I had two little kids. Believe me; they resented it to this day. They never watched it, they disdained it, they had nothing but dripping contempt for it. And I don’t blame them. So the woman cannot have it all. But I’ve watched you guys and you guys can.”

Bakula spoke of aging and his gratitude for his acting career. “The longer I’m here and the more I see, the less I think about [growing older], because so many people don’t get to have what I’ve had as long as I have,” he said. “So many people don’t have as much as I have, and so I think as you get older, you know people talk about perspective, but I think you get more grateful about it every day.”

Pine, the newest Star Trek captain, spoke about his love for theater, a love shared by many actors. “What I love about theater is that there’s an ephemeral quality to it,” he said. “It happens, it comes together, it exists and then it goes away.”

The Captains airs next Friday on EPIX at 8 PM. For those whose cable systems don’t carry EPIX, a free two-week trial (details in a future article as the time gets closer) is being offered which requires no credit card and will enable U.S. visitors to watch The Captains and other Shatnerpalooza events online. For fans outside of the U.S., word is that a DVD of The Captains will be released this autumn.

The videos feature Star Trek: Voyager‘s Robert Duncan McNeill and Garrett Wang, and Star Trek: Enterprise‘s Scott Bakula.

The videos, in English, answer fan questions. The fan questions were in German at the beginning of each segment, but they are explained below so non-German speakers will know what was asked.

McNeill was asked if he thought that our future would look like the future as portrayed in Star Trek. His answer provides a realistic view of our times.

Wang was asked how he would use a holodeck, if one existed. Like probably 99% of humanity, Wang admits that it would be difficult to get him to leave the holodeck if it did exist. If he could use a holodeck, sports would be on the list of activities for Wang, but so would revisiting a few decisions he made in his life.

Bakula was asked what had changed about doing science fiction series and films since the 1990s. He explained what he felt the biggest change was since those earlier times.

The Wang and Bakula interviews are located at the referring site, on the right hand side of the page. More interviews are expected to be posted online and TrekToday will update readers as they become available.

http://youtu.be/tmin09tRQMs

The versatile Bakula sings as well as act, and came from a musical family. His musical career began early; in the fourth grade, he started a rock band and wrote songs for that band.

Bakula can be currently seen on TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, where he plays one of three men who have been friends for years.

The Trek Radio interview will be held on Friday, March 26 at 11 AM PDT (2 PM EDT, 6:00 PM GMT) and can be heard then by going here.

Trek Radio was launched in June 2010 as the internet’s first dedicated Star Trek Radio Network, and regularly hosts live interviews with Trek celebrities. Past guests have included Chase Masterson, Tim Russ, Eugene Roddenberry and Doug Drexler.

On Monday, February 28 at 10:30 PM on the Bio Channel, Golden Globe-winner Scott Bakula joins host William Shatner on Shatner’s Raw Nerve.

According to the promo for the show, “Shatner talks to Bakula about what it was like to break into the business at a young age, his time as a Broadway singer, and what an honor it was for him to play a role on the Star Trek: Enterprise series. Bakula speaks about his healthy lifestyle and how he’s implemented his philosophies into the raising of his sons.”

A preview for the Bakula episode can be seen here.

Season Three of Shatner’s Raw Nerve will include familiar television and movie personalities, including three of particular interest to Star Trek fans.

On January 31st, Shatner will be interviewing actress, comedienne, singer and dancer Carol Burnett in the first episode, which airs at 10 PM EST. Topics of discussion will include “Burnett’s rough upbringing in Hollywood, dealing with alcoholism in her family and how those life experiences shaped her career. Burnett speaks about her work as a playwright, how she was discovered and the passing of her daughter.”

Following that episode, Marilu Henner will be the guest who will share details about the “death of her parents, motherhood and healthy lifestyles. Henner also talks about a rare condition she has called hyperthymesia, which gives her a superior autobiographical memory.”

Three guest of interest who will appear in Season Three of Shatner’s Raw Nerve include Scott Bakula, LeVar Burton and Walter Koenig.

Other guests scheduled to appear in Season Three include: Rick Springfield, Florence Henderson, Penny Marshall, Carl Reiner, Jessalyn Gilsig, Kevin Pollak, Kevin Nealon and Ed Asner.

Bakula told fans attending last July’s Comic-Con that a script was supposedly being written by Quantum Leap Creator/Executive Producer Donald Bellisario for a new Quantum Leap film. His Quantum Leap fan-base loved the news, but it turns out that (so far) Bakula won’t be part of the new movie, if it is made.

“I regret that I said anything having to do with a movie script in the works,” he said. “It ended up agitating the masses, and I have to do disclaimers everywhere. There is a script in the works. Don [Bellisario] is part of it. I’m not. It’s become this whole other thing.”

In other Bakula news, the former Captain Archer was interviewed by Runner’s World. Bakula, an avid runner, talked about fitness while on the set of Star Trek: Enterprise. “We had a great gym,” he said. “My trainer put a lot of it together. We had a bunch of cool stuff.”

Sometimes Bakula would use his running time to plan out how to speak his lines on Enterprise. “I used to figure out long Enterprise speeches on the run when we were shooting that,” he said. “You’re working the whole thing out. It happens in different ways. If you’ve got a long monologue you’ve got to deliver, you have to have it memorized; for me, then you figure out how it’s going to go—I know how I want to hit it.”

Bakula hopes to participate in the Boston Marathon next spring.

Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker) was reunited with Michael Dorn (Worf) and Suzie Plakson (K’Ehleyr) on stage on Saturday, but he immediately jumped into the audience to ask his former co-stars some joking questions, such as, “What is Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) really like?” to which Dorn responded, “Patrick Stewart is really nice, but he’s not that talented. It’s just the accent.”

The three actors reminisced about the camaraderie between the TNG cast, to the point that their joking occasionally scared directors off. “[The cast was] funny enough that they didn’t have to do practical jokes,” Plakson said.

“We ran a couple directors out of the biz,” Dorn admitted, while Frakes confessed, “We were like bad children.”

Dorn defended the cast’s professional attitude once the cameras started rolling. “When they said action, we were on,” he said. But after the director yelled cut, it was a different story. “Jonathan would run around the set, singing until he [literally] fell through one of the walls!” Dorn recalled.

Frakes mentioned he’s going to be directing an episode of Chuck, and discussed his gig directing the TNT show Leverage. “Whenever possible I offer roles to them jobs,” he says of his former co-stars on TNG. “And they turn them down. I offered Brent Spiner (Data) a job on Leverage. Brent said, ‘I don’t know Johnny.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to read.’ Brent said, ‘Eh… call me when someone turns it down.” After that happened, Frakes called Spiner back and said, “‘Now you have to do it.’ And he showed up.”

Dorn penned a romantic comedy with his producing partner and revealed that former co-star Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi) is set to star in it. He shared that his dream project would be making a pilot of a TV show he wrote entitled High Flight about a flight school.

On Sunday, Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris) took the stage to discuss his role on Voyager as well as his long-running directing gig on the NBC show Chuck. “Star Trek was my last acting job,” McNeill said of Voyager, noting he’s been directing since playing Tom Paris. “They keep talking to me on Chuck, saying [I] should do a guest role as a bad guy or something, but I don’t know.”

Though he’s no longer acting, he’s still close with many of his Voyager co-stars. “On most shows, you do just move on [after they end],” McNeill said. “But Star Trek is different because it’s got [the fans], a built in family. The guys [from Voyager] have remained close. It started the first season of Voyager—we went out for a steak dinner. It was so fun we decided to make it a regular thing. We haven’t really moved on: we still hang out, the guys still get together [regularly].”

McNeill told the audience that former co-star Garrett Wang (Harry Kim) had come to Chuck to shadow him as a director. “[He's] been spending some time with me on the Chuck set,” McNeill said. “Tim Russ (Tuvok) was doing a day on The Whole Truth, which films right next door to us, so we had a mini-reunion.”

McNeill acknowledges that the closeness between the cast of Voyager is a special thing. “I [directed and produced] a show called What About Brian a few years ago, and I saw one of the actors a few weeks ago, and he said he doesn’t see anyone [from that show].”

Because Chuck, which was recently renewed for a full season, has struggled in the ratings during the course of its run, McNeill worried about the show’s survival in its early years. “I kept thinking the show would get cancelled after the first season and the writers’ strike,” he admitted. “[Now] I actually feel like we’re a hit for NBC. As Heroes was fading, as The Event is fading, we’re actually up eight to ten percent. The cast is awesome and the concept is incredible.”

McNeill enjoys being on Chuck, and finds the show’s tone is the right one for him. “I like being on a comedy,” he said. “It’s more fun. I couldn’t do a Law & Order show now. I wouldn’t want to spend my day talking about horrible crimes; I’d rather talk about fart jokes.”

When asked about his style of directing versus that of former co-star Roxann Dawson (B’Elanna Torres), McNeill shared they have very different sensibilities as directors. “She’s very serious, and I’m an idiot,” he joked, adding, “She’s incredibly well prepared. I go off instinct.” When asked further about his directing style, McNeill revealed, “I’m an actor’s director because I’m always looking for that emotional experience.”

McNeill cited “Someone to Look Over Me” and “Parturition” as favorite episodes of Voyager, along with “Caretaker,” the show’s very first episode. “I like the pilot; the first episode was so epic,” he said. “I think we shot for 28 days, which is like a feature.”

“The first season or two, there was a lot of confusion about who these characters were,” he went on. “The writers were throwing everything and the kitchen sink at us. We were confused, [wondering], ‘Do we like each other? Do we get along?’ The studio and the writers were at a loss for what the show was. Because of that, the actors had a hand in the direction [their characters took].”

McNeill had qualms with his character early on in the show’s run. “My character early on was not a nice guy,” he admitted. “He was a womanizer, he was rude to people. Everybody hated me! I hated me—I was a jerk. I told the writers, if you keep writing this guy this way, you might as well write him off because no one is going to like him.”

Despite Tom Paris’s initial introduction, McNeill doesn’t agree with comparisons that suggest Paris and the character McNeill played on TNG, Nick Locarno, are essentially the same character. “People say Tom Paris and Nick Locarno are the same, but I don’t think so at all,” McNeill said. “Nick Locarno pretended to be a good guy in the outside but was really a rotten guy on the inside, whereas Tom Paris pretended to be a rotten guy on the outside but was really a good guy on the inside.”

In addition to his job directing on Chuck, McNeill has a project at Warner Brothers entitled 30 Minutes. “[It's] about a pizza delivery place and [the] misfits [who work there],” he revealed, describing it as “My Name is Earl/Scrubs mixed with 24 and Chuck.” The director also has a project at ABC Studios about “an old Hollywood hotel where crazy things happen.”

Enterprise actor John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox) followed McNeill onto the stage for an irreverent session during which he joked with fans about everything from his co-stars to politics. “I’m left alone on stage because they’re all getting stoned!” he said of his former co-stars Connor Trinneer (Trip Tucker) and Dominick Keating (Malcolm Reed), who weren’t able to attend the convention.

Billingsley updated fans on his current projects: “I’m doing an episode of The Mentalist [right now]. Connor Trinneer is doing the same episode. I’m not the killer, and I’m not the victim. I’m [also] doing a couple of indie films.”

The actor also detailed two practical jokes he played on Enterprise lead Scott Bakula (Captain Archer). “For Scott Bakula’s birthday party—his 70th, I think—I dressed up as his first wife. I had large bosoms and a floozy blonde wig and came in with a vodka bottle, saying, ‘Scott, Scott, how could you leave me?’ I didn’t check if his children were there and they were, and they started crying. They thought I was going to their dad!”

Billingsley also pranked Bakula during the filming of “Dear Doctor” in the show’s first season. “There was a running voice over, and there was a scene in which I’m on the bridge and we stopped to pick up a disabled space ship. I recorded [a voice over] for the first rehearsal that said, ‘Look at the ass on that captain! I’d like to pull his pants down and give him a jolly rogering!’ Scott took it well.”

He also added that he wasn’t happy with the show’s oft criticized finale, “These Are The Voyages…,” joking that he would have liked to see a different ending for his character. “It would have been nice if I’d been an intergalactic god,” Billingsley said of how he would have liked the show to end for Dr. Phlox.

In spite of Star Trek: Enterprise ending too soon, plus the ending which was more of a Star Trek: The Next Generation show, Bakula looks back fondly on his time as Captain Archer. “Oh, it was a fantastic experience,” he said. “I had a ball. We had some fantastically talented people on all sides of the camera. We had great actors, tremendously creative effects people and set people and makeup people and… It was fantastic. You were working with some of the most talented people and ground-breakers in the industry, and I got to do it for four years.”

Like many others, including fans and actors alike, Bakula wasn’t keen on the ending. “I have to say that when I first read the script I was off-put by it,” he said. “I had a long talk with Rick (Berman) and Brannon (Braga) about it and they explained their idea and philosophy to me. I don’t know that I ever … Gosh, the end of anything is always hard to write. It was a little odd, but that was their call.”

What would Enterprise have been like, had it had the full seven year run? “Things were dictated by the times, by it being post-9/11, but I wanted us to hopefully get back to having a little bit more fun on the show and to get out of that whole Xindi thing,” said Bakula. “That would have been fun. I think we were pointing in that direction. I think the group was ready to go. The cast was ready to get there, and I think we could have had a blast. But we just didn’t get to go there.  And I wanted Archer to kind of grow up and lighten up a little bit.”

There are rumors that Bakula’s other well-known show, Quantum Leap, might be revived as a movie soon. According to Bakula, “I have spoken with Don [Bellisario] and he’s been approached by a producer to write a script and produce a Quantum Leap film. He’s intending to do that and has begun work on it. And my understanding is that Dean [Stockwell] and I may have a small cameo element to the movie. But it hasn’t been written yet. So we’ll see.”

If J.J. Abrams called Bakula and offered an Archer part in the next movie, would Bakula be interested? “Yes,” he said.