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Jim Dale was only given 100 pages at a time [Posted Monday, 01/05/09 3:57 pm] [Full Blog] [Tweet This] (From Stuff We Weren't Paid to Endorse in the Freakonomics Blog) I recently took the kids to see a performance by Jim Dale, the longtime British stage actor (he won a Tony for Barnum) who is best known these days as the wildly entertaining reader of the Harry Potter books on tape [in the US]. He was reading an adaptation of a Eudora Welty story called "The Shoe Bird," which he recently recorded with the Seattle Symphony. (It was wonderful, and I encourage you to give it a listen.) Afterward, Dale took questions from the audience -- which, predictably, were about the Harry Potter series. Items of interest that emerged: Dale was given only 100 pages of manuscript at a time to read and then record, so he never knew what was coming; and in order to keep track of the 146 voices he'd created for all the characters, he often pre-recorded a bit of the characters' voices and then held a tape recorder up to his ear in the studio to remind himself.

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