FEBRUARY 1998 ----------------------------In this issue------------------------------------------ NEW COLUMN: Opera Today CyberTheatre Monthly: Sardi's Online Voices: Harlem Vogue Rubin's Corner: The Ford Center for the Performing Arts Life in the Theatre: Cyberia Revisited The Play's the Thing: While the Directors's Away ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Opera Today "Guess what, Lynida?" I say to my wife. "What, Ty?" she grumbles unwillingly. "I bought tickets to opera at the Met!" I shout. She tricks herself into thinking she's excited by saying, "Whoopie! What opera?" Lynida has never been to an opera before. "I bought tickets to Puccini's Madame Butterfly." "Who's Puccini?" Mind you, this is the same person who when we went to go see Nobody's Fool with Paul Newman, she identified him with the salad dressing. So when she responded "Who's Puccini?" she was really stopping herself before getting into any further abashment or discomfort. "Oh, you know Puccini, hon. La Boheme, Tosca. . . " She responds with an "Oh. . . I forgot!" - sigh when you knew she truly doesn't have a clue what in the name of god you are talking about. "Are you excited?" Lynida with an elastic smile says, "Yeah! - Yeah, this is great!" A week later, we attended the 7:00 show. Her face was plain, and her words were silent. You could tell she wanted to ask, "How long is it?" "Are we going to be able to understand it?" "Is Madame Butterfly in Japanese?" From the show's opening to the finale, she was into it. She was stricken by the overwhelming passion of the piece, and midway through, she was weeping and said, "This AIN'T Miss Saigon!" Since then, she has become a true opera fan. What made her reluctant to even become an admirer of opera were the typical hackneyed images that the media has planted into the mainstream. The truth is, the opera isn't something that we, Americans give much attention to due to these hackneyed images. Europeans focus far more of their entertainment-hours and spending on opera, most probably because it was the Europeans who developed this art form. Is mainstream America capable of finding any intrigue in falsetto voices, English subtitles, classical music, and no spoken dialogue? Most of them would say no. I would say that most of them have never been given the change to explore the opera to find out for themselves. These reasons range from caricatures of snobbish opera patrons in tiaras to tickets that are really too pricey for an adventurous first-timer to give Aida a try one Friday night just as an experiment to see what all the fuss is about. The prices to attend good opera are outstandingly large, even for those of us who feel that we have a good chance of enjoying ourselves. I think that some of the opera houses should stage more scaled-down productions so that more people can attend them. Face it: it's the giant sets and the huge casts that your $100 ticket distributes out to. And for those of us who can't afford to attend live-opera, what about our opera being broadcasted on TV? Here is my predicament with this. The main television station that broadcasts operas on television on PBS. In fact, other than Bravo (a cable station I might add), there is no station that will broadcast arts programing. But does anybody watch PBS nowadays? With our PBS stations running asinine weekly cooking and home improvement shows - not to mention interrupting 90% of their programming with their "please-pledge-your-support-begs", Public television's ego could be no worse. So why don't the conventional networks such as NBC, ABC, or CBS give a little time to the opera? Of course the reason is that the public does not want to see opera, and like everything else in the world today, the networks need to make-money. And we can only hold our breath until this changes. Trystan Toole is a composer/screenwriter/playwright living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He has composed a variety of Cabaret numbers, and scores for a number of Made-for-TV-Movies. His series of plays called "The Six Sides to Howard Dice" for the Interact Theatre Company in New York is currently being done at a workshop. He also has a screenplay, which is being produced. He's been working on a loose musical adaptation of The Merchant of Venice for about 2 years and plans to get it done by the end of summer. He lives with his fiancée, Lynida. Negative Stereotypes: Manhattan Murder Mystery In a picturesque exterior shot we see Woody Allen & Diane Keaton leave the MET mid-show. She complains that she sat through his hockey game and he promised to sit through the opera. He replies that whenever he listens to that much Wagner he feels an irresistible urge to conquer Poland. *** Dangerous Liaisons In her box at the Paris Opera, Aristocratic Marquis de Merteuil introduces Chevalier Dalceny as "one of those rare eccentrics who actually comes here to listen to the music" She then begs him to "tell us what we should think about the opera." *** Cheers In a bid to do something nice for pretentious, hyper-intellectual Diane, Sam and the gang procure a box at the Boston opera, where everyone, including the presumed opera-lover Diane falls asleep before the curtain falls. *** Do you remember additional instances of negative-opera stereotypes in the media? Please post them in the Opera Bulletin Board ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Voices in Contemporary Theatre Harlem Vogue Coalhouse Walker was, of course, a piano player in the glory days of Harlem Ragtime, and perhaps it's the not-unexpected success of that musical which has led to the crop of Harlem-set plays and musicals which have begun to spring up in the leading Regional Theatres. Among the most noteworthy... Leslie Uggams, well-known for her Emmy-nominated portrayal of Kizzy in Roots, starring in Virginia Stage Company's The Old Settler, and Blues for an Alabama Sky extending it's run at Chicago's Goodman Recently nominated for the 1998 American Theatre Critics Association's New Play Award, The Old Settler is a tender and sassy love story set in Harlem in the 1940's, laced with sweet sorrow, wry humor and poetic flavor. With the imaginative colloquialism of war-time Harlem, The Old Settler tells the story of Elizabeth Borney, a mature and principled woman who has never married. She lives with her younger sister, Quilly, an earthly character with audacious style. Their lives are irrevocably altered when Husband, a wide-eyed, impressionable young man from the South, comes to board with them while he looks for his lost love, Lou Bessie. Upon finding that Lou Bessie has changed her name and much more, Husband begins his own transformation. He and Elizabeth enjoy a bittersweet romance, despite the difference in their ages and despite Quilly's emphatic opposition. Most encouraging of all, VS Artistic Director Charllie Henslie's vision for the production seems to extend far beyond the usual director's notes refrain of "I was searching for a play that would reveal our common humanity, our lifelong search for love," says Hensley, "John Henry's beautiful story, told by such an extraordinary team of artists, is a privilege to present to our audience." Blues for an Alabama Sky, a bittersweet drama by Pearl Cleage, tells the heartbreaking story of four close friends and the times and trials that threaten to break them apart. Set at the end of the Harlem Renaissance and the beginning of the Great Depression, this powerful work introduces us to Angel, the Cotton Club chanteuse who's just lost her job; Guy, her costume designer roommate who dreams of working with Josephine Baker in Paris; their neighbor Delia, a missionary for Margaret Sanger's family-planning clinic; and Sam, a dedicated Harlem doctor - who's equally dedicated to "letting the good times roll." Into their midst appears Leland Cunningham, a straight-laced young man from Alabama, who's tragic past sparks the dramas to unfold. This Month's Quotes: ""The Greek drama which is being playedout in Washington right now speaks to the heart of what House Arrest is all about, the nature of what it means to be president today, the question of what character is, who definies it and how character counts, the struggle between the press and the WHite House to communicate with the American people - all of this changes the theatrical landscape for me as much as it changes the political landscape for our country. I need to observe and understand this complicated new chapter in our history and see how it will inform my work." "I can think of one woman theatre composer at the moment. . . . and that would be Mary Rodgers. Why aren't there very many of them? There are just as many talented women musicians as talented male musicians. . . . so why don't we ever hear about women composers?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CyberTheatre Monthly Sardi's Online As part of Broadway for as long as theatre-lovers have wandered Restaurant-Row after the play to talk through the highs and lows of the show, Sardi's Restaurant - home of all those caricatures - and an equally famous house antipasto, is now online with a website at www.sardis.com that displays their menu and daily specials, accepts reservations, and of course - links to the giftshop! Admidst the Sardi's ashtrays and polo shirts, don't miss "Off the wall at Sardi's", available in hard and soft cover, in which Vincent Sardi's tells about the caricatures, the restaurant's history as a meeting place for Broadway legends. Rubin's Corner The Ford Center for the Performing Arts When Disney announced that it would build a Disney Store and theatre on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, there was a lot of excitement in New York City. On opening night everyone said that it was the beginning of the "New 42nd Street". Since the opening both sides of the street have been completely razed except for a restored children's theatre and The Ford Center for the Performing Arts. The builder of this new theatre is Livent, Inc. Livent began its circuit of theatres in 1989 with the restoration of the historic Pantages Theatre in Toronto. The first Ford Center opened in Metropolitian Toronto in 1993 and the second in Vancouver in 1995. A fourth Ford Center will open in late 1998 in Chicago. The Ford Center in New York stands on a site that was once occupied by two theatres, the Lyric and the Apollo. This reconstruction has made these two theatres into one. The Lyric and the Apollo have great musical pasts. The Lyric was known as the home of Reginald DeKoven's 1890 musical production of Robin Hood. The Lyric opened in 1903 with Old Heidelberg starring Richard Manfield. The Three Musketeers, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, played at this theatre for seven months in 1928. The Cocoanuts starring the Marx Brothers played for a long time at the Lyric. For a while in the 1920's and 30's both theatres combined film and vaudeville. The Apollo went through rehabilitation between 1979 and 1983 when such noteworthy plays such as On Golden Pond, Bent and The Fifth of July appear on its stage. By 1983 both theatres were trying to stay alive with movies, rock concerts, and even a Parisian-styled cabaret. The Apollo was a technically advanced theatre, perfectly equipped for musicals. The tower above its stage made it easy to fly scenery of every kind. This theatre became the stage and front of the Ford Center. The original proscenium and the main dome have been restored and expanded. Above the stage you can find rehearsal space that has been restored for new plays. The Lyric has become a large part of the seating area and the main entrance, which is accessible from 42nd and 43rd Streets. It historic 43rd Street brick and terra-cotta facade, with its lovely tiers of windows and balconies, have been maintained and restored. The new theatre has 1,813 seats in the auditorium with perfect sight lines from every seat. You are only 86 feet away from the stage at the back of the orchestra. The center combines the most modern technology and the finest acoustics with a traditional sense of contact between actors and audience. The large area outside the auditorium is a large lobby with its beautifully restore dome. A small store sells in the lobby specializes in Livent products plus Broadway CD's. The upper lobby and lower lobby are done in marble and oak. The seats are wider than the average Broadway seat and there is even room for you legs between rows. It is interesting that Thomas Wolfe seems to have written about this theatre and its opening production, Ragtime, in his You Can't Go Home Again. He wrote, "Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time and... there was a superb fitness in the fact that one which held it better than all others, should be a..." theatre. The Ford Theatre for the Performing Arts along with its first production, Ragtime, make a remarkable mosaic. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRE Trivia Can you identify the plays from which the following opening or closing lines are taken For as long as I could remember, the house on Steiner Street had been home...--I Remember Mama. One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit so I have t' change! --Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The Moods. Every one of us has many moods. You yourself have more than your share of them --Abe Lincoln in Illinois To all the dumb chumps and all the crazy broads, past, present, and future - who thirst for knowledge - and search for truth - who fight for justice - and civilize each other - and make it so tough for sons of bitches like you and you and me --Born Yesterday You don't see much elderberry wine nowadays - I thought I'd had my last glass of it --Arsenic and Old Lace Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of york --Richard III I'm going to be baptized, damn it --Life with Father I'm so terribly afraid that some of the cards for these last-minute presents must have got mixed. Look at them, Tracy, perhaps you can tell me. --Th ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Play's the Thing While the director's away: Caprice Woosley is taking part in the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival this month in southern California. She will return next month with news of the plays she saw, new works and old ones. Also watch for her upcoming article on one act plays, including Trifles by Susan Glaspell. Caprice will be directing Trifles at Diablo Valley College at the end of March. Thank you for being patient with our busy columnist this month while she tackles a multitude of theatrical activities. As she's just finished directing Noises Off, she invites you to take a second look at Poking Fun At Ourselves: The Play-Within-A-Play Actors are a funny bunch. Or at least they can be in the hands of a crafty playwright. Throughout history playwrights have employed the play-within-a-play to either make audiences laugh at the antics of seemingly unskilled actors, or to teach lessons on stage about our off stage lives. Shakespeare did both. In Hamlet the players present a play Hamlet calls "The Mousetrap," in order to "catch the conscience of the king." He used the Mechanicals in The Midsummer Night's Dream to present a hilarious version of a tragic love story before the court of Theseus, much to the chagrin of the Master of Revels. Others followed in the tradition of Shakespeare, like Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher who wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a play that has hecklers constantly interrupting the performance on the stage. Plays began making fun of the productions mounted by would-be actors, like in Dan Goggin's Nunsense, in which the Little Sisters of Hoboken attempt a fund-raiser in order to raise money to bury sisters who were accidentally poisoned by the convent cook, Sister Julia (Child of God). Two plays, with outrageously long titles (I have them listed later to save space here!), written by David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin, Jr. recount the tales of the Farndale Avenue Dramatic Society's disastrous production attempts. But by far the funniest look at theatre is when the "professional" actors encounter just as many problems as the amateur groups. Noises Off by Michael Frayn peeks behind the curtain of a theatrical production called Nothing On. We meet the actors as actors and as characters in the play. At times the actors blur the lines between off stage antics and on stage performances. Frayn shows the "flaws and all" side of theatre life. The funniest moments of the play are when the backstage life is seen while the front stage performance is going on. The audience sees the panic and frenetic actions as the cast tries to hold together a production on the verge of coming unraveled. It begins with (now stay with me, the actors become characters and then actors before you know it) a rehearsal of Nothing On, being directed by Lloyd Dallas. Mr. Dallas is faced with an actress, Dotty Otley, who as her character Mrs. Clackett, can never remember whether she is to bring on or take off a plate of sardines. Dallas must also contend with Frederick Fellowes, portraying Phillip Brent, an actor who needs sufficient reason for his character's actions. There is Brooke Ashton, an actress who is constantly losing her contact lenses; Selsdon Mowbray, an actor given to too much drink and must be looked after by the cast; Garry Lejeune, who while portraying Roger Tramplemain on stage, acts out his jealousy over Dotty's attention to Frederick by taking every opportunity to fight with him; the constantly joyful Belinda Blair, the peacemaker even when playing the character of Flavia Brent. Rounding out the cast are Tim Allgood, the long-suffering stage manager who is understudy to all the male roles, and Poppy Norton-Taylor, the assistant stage manager who also has a bit of a surprise for Lloyd Dallas. Throughout the course of the play, the action switches from the backstage "real" life of the characters and the front stage play being presented. Act One is seen from the stage side perspective as the play is in rehearsal. Lloyd is losing both his patience and his temper as problems keep occurring during the rehearsal which has run late into the night January 14th, the eve of opening. It is a miracle that they finally make it to the last line of the play. Act Two, which occurs a month later, is a blend of both sides of the stage as the production begins to come apart at the seams due to temperaments, lost lenses, drinking actors and understudies having to fill in at times. The whole act is viewed from the backstage perspective. Everyone, including the director, gets in on trying to keep the production moving forward. Act Three, which takes place April 6, switches back to the stage side of the production. The entire play is falling down around them. Lines are being dropped, actors are confused, accidents occur and no one is quite sure what to expect next. Before long three actors are on stage playing the same character. With the plot completely lost, the cast struggles to salvage what they can to end the play. Most everyone who has worked in theatre has been involved in a production that seems plagued with problems. There are primadonna actors who drive you crazy. There are sets that have doors that never seem to work. There is a prop missing every time you need it. There is an actor who looks at you with a blank expression when the lines are not there. Michael Frayn has captured all these elements in one production. Frayn's irreverent view of theatre life reminds me of the saying, "I can call my brother stupid, but you can't." Frayn is one of US so he can poke fun at us and at the same time poke a bit of fun at himself. The following is a list of plays that either contain a play-within-a-play treatment or give a look at the world of theatre. The synopses are quoted from the Samuel French and Dramatists Play catalogues: They Came from Mars and Landed Outside the Farndale Avenue Church Hall In Time for the Townswomen's Guild's Coffee Morning - by David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin, Jr. The Farndale Avenue ladies attempt lift-off with their Dramatic Society's unique production of a sci-fi thriller. Needless to say, high-tech effects coupled with the inabilities and disabilities of certain group members ensure that the cast remain firmly on the ground. The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery - by David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin, Jr. Every drama group has experienced the horrors of what can go wrong on the night and the ladies of the F.A.H.E.T.G. Dramatic Society are no different, with the exception that almost everything that could happen does. The Real Inspector Hound - by Tom Stoppard Two critics enter their box: one is lustful and the other is a substitute for the regular critic. The play-within-a-play opens with a feather dusting scene and a countess, her girlfriend and the roue she met through the girlfriend. They play at cards and double entendre before the roue is shot dead. Inspector Hound arrives. Strange, because nobody called him. Out of the Frying Pan - by Francis Swann Three young men and three young women share an apartment all in innocence; they are would-be stage folks. Their apartment is immediately above that of a Broadway producer who is about to cast a road company. They rehearse the play but how can they get him upstairs to see it? Nunsense - Dan Goggin The show is a fund-raiser put on by the Little Sisters of Hoboken to raise money to bury sisters accidentally poisoned by the convent cook, Sister Julia (Child of God). The Exercise - by Lewis John Carlino A completely fascinating portrait of a man and woman, trapped in the unreal and yet hauntingly real world, both at the same time. They are actors, caught up in their hate-love game, standing on a rehearsal stage living out their fears, and their fantasies with almost uncontrollable vengeance. The Two Character Play - by Tennessee Williams Two actors, a brother and sister, meet in the empty playhouse where their theatre company is scheduled to perform that evening. But apparently the other actors have deserted them and absconded with their money, so the two decide to perform the "Two Character Play," extemporizing the parts not memorized or not yet written. Anthony Rose - by Jules Feiffer A very funny dark comedy about a famous but embittered playwright who tries to exorcise the demons in this past by compulsively reworking his most successful - and heretofore funniest - play. Deathtrap - Ira Levin This ingeniously constructed play offers a rare and skillful blending of two priceless theatrical ingredients - gasp-inducing thrills and spontaneous laughter. Dealing with the devious machinations of a writer of thrillers whose recent offerings have been flops, and who is prepared to go to any length to improve his fortunes, it provides twists and turns and sudden shocks. The Night of the Tribades - Per Olov Enquist, translated by Ross Shideler The action takes place on the stage of Dagmar Theatre, in Copenhagen, where August Strinberg and his estranged wife, Siri, are preparing the first performance of this short play "The Stronger." With Siri is her friend Marie Caroline David, an alcoholic actress whom Strinberg accuses of having a lesbian attachment to his wife. As the rehearsal progresses, the lines of the play being read are cleverly shaded to reflect the bitterness of Strinberg's personal situation. At This Evening's Performance - by Nagle Jackson On tour in rural Dunsk (recently annexed by the hated socialist state of Strevia) a theatrical troupe is obliged to present corny melodramas and creaky verse plays as modern drama has been banned by their new masters. The actors seem more concerned with romantic assignations than politics until they discover that their new stage manager is a Strevian spy. All this reaches its hilarious climax in a wildly funny play-with-a-play in which the wrong man is shot, the right man is spared, and the Players of Dunsk decide to head to the border and freedom in the West. It's Only A Play - by Terrence McNally It's the opening night of "The Golden Egg" on Broadway, and the wealthy producer is throwing a lavish party in her lavish Manhattan townhouse. Downstairs the celebrities are pouring in, but the real action is upstairs where a group of insiders have stakes themselves out in the producer's bedroom, waiting for the reviews to come in. Dreyfus In Rehearsal - by Jean-Claude Grumberg, adapted by Garson Kanin The play is set in Vilna, Poland, in 1931. A group of amateur actors are rehearsing a new play, written by their ambitious young director, about Alfred Dreyfus, the French-Jewish military officer whose persecution was opposed by the eloquent Emile Zola. The performers in this play-within-a-play are all good, kindly people, but they have difficulty in accepting the relevance of the "Dreyfus Affair" to their own situation and, furthermore, are preoccupied with the concerns of their personal lives -- which leads to a series of very funny and often ironic exchanges with their high-strung director. Jitters - by David French The play begins on the set of "The Care and Treatment of Roses," an ambitious work by a budding young local writer which is now in the final rehearsal by a provincial Canadian theatre company. Whatever can go wrong do so but the show, despite all, goes on, even though the New York producer who has promised to attend never arrives. Macbeth Did It - by John Patrick Fast moving and outrageously funny, this delightful play traces the trials and tribulations of a community theatre production of Macbeth, from casting, to rehearsals, to the breathless deadline of opening night. Internet shortcuts to information on Noises Off Penguins biography of Michael Frayn Otterbein College Theatre Tech Department which also contains photos from their production Mr. Showbiz's review of the movie version of Noises Off --- Caprice Woosley is currently pursuing her BFA in theater (directing and playwriting), after 25 years working in and around the theater. She is a produced playwright, actress, and amateur dramaturg who enjoys researching plays. She is a host in the Writing Forum where she co-hosts a Writing Discussion Group. She also hosted "Shakespeare Unplugged" and "Murder and Mayhem" in the Theatre Forum. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Life in the Theatre Cyberia Revisited As many of you know, Gil Osborn, our Life in the Theatre columnist, is suffering from a painful bout of Carpel Tunnel syndrome, which prevented her from contributing an article this month. She therefore invites readers to take another look at her first column in TRE, in light of this new example of the little obstacles a Life in the Theatre throws at all of us. For twelve years I was responsible for the development of new Canadian plays at the National Arts Centre. We owned an old building about half a mile away from the main complex with room enough for a tiny black-box theatre, two big rehearsal halls, a workshop and various other smaller rooms useful for locking away playwrights until they'd finished their new draft! In this building I would produce and often direct three new plays a year as well as holding an annual new-play festival and many play workshops. I also wanted it to be used as a professional development space, so I usually hired young directors, actors, designers and technicians who needed to take the next step up from being a gifted student to a professional. We called our building The Atelier, and it was home to a lot of people both in Ottawa and across Canada. I'll talk more about what we did there in other articles, but one of the major philosophies to come out of that place was "It's alright to make mistakes". I personally believe that we need that luxury in theatre, otherwise we never progress. We did some brilliant work at the Atelier, and we had some real bombs, but whatever we did it was always interesting! Unfortunately it wasn't so easy to take that philosophy up to the main National Arts Centre complex because the budgets and audience expectations were far higher, but occasionally I would try. Here's the story of a show we did in the NAC Studio. Cyberia started in the mind of Marc Desormeaux. He wanted to write a rock opera that had a love story as its basic theme, but also deal with the sudden explosion of Internet communication between people on a personal level. Because he's primarily a composer and musician, he started with some songs that had to be knit together into a viable story line. Through its new play development programme, the National Arts Centre funded the hiring of a playwright/director to help Marc, plus a series of workshops so that he could develop his ideas. Unfortunately the playwright/director turned out to have ideas of his own, and it was very obvious from the final presentation in the workshop series that Cyberia had strayed very far from Marc's original intent of a love story on the Internet.. Interestingly enough, all the feedback from the actors involved and the spectators who attended the presentation said much the same thing...forget the politics, stick to the love! After a lot of difficult discussion, the playwright/director was dropped from the project and the National Arts Centre gave Marc some more money to write his own script and workshop the results. We later added a dramaturg who Marc trusted not to take over the project, Robert Marinier, a wonderful playwright and dramaturg who had a great deal of experience helping new playwrights with their first scripts. About this time Marc asked me to take over as director because (as he put it) I got on very well with the tech guys! We had also worked together many times as director and sound designer on new work, and I think he recognized that my impetus was to stage a text as I saw it on the page, rather than to re-write a text to suit my own ideas. There's a big difference in attitude between a director who is trying to serve the playwright, and a director who wants the playwright to serve the vision. Both are valid approaches, but Marc had been burned once and needed to feel that he had control over the process. Marc worked like the devil for one whole summer and fall and managed to create many different drafts of Cyberia incorporating all the suggestions and feedback from Robert. In the meantime, I had scheduled Cyberia as the third show in the new works series for the NAC Studio (not the Atelier) in the spring of 1997, which meant that we had a definite time line....always useful in theatre! We decided to workshop the text late in 1996, and we decided that we needed to have the cast that would perform the show in the spring so that they could provide feedback and help to create their own characters. This didn't work out as planned, so we used some of our eventual cast with Marc filling in where necessary. Marc had already found his musical director, so Francois joined us with some of the band and we spent three days at the Atelier getting through unbelievable amounts of work and just about wiping Marc out with overwork and overstimulation. After many more script rewrites, I started working with Dave Ship who had agreed to be our set designer. Now we must remember that the original idea was to do a simply staged kind of rock recital, a showcase of a new musical....of course this changed almost as soon as I started working on it. The material was just too juicy to have singers standing at mics and merely singing, so I demanded Madonna-mics (as I called them) so now we had the capability of moving our actors anywhere we wanted them. Dave's not very experienced in stage design, but both Marc and I trusted him and I knew that whatever the set was going to be it would involve a lot of construction....and there's no one better at building a set for me than Dave Ship! He's worked with me for ten years as carpenter, TD, one-time set designer and friend plus he's a good friend of Marc's, so he seemed like the right choice. Dave and I had a hell of a time designing this set. How do you stage a play when the two main antagonists spend all their time talking to each other through their computers? I insisted on two fully movable desk and chair units with desktop computers so that the computers could become an extension of the actors. They could wheel them around from the sitting position (in fact they used we finally staged a wonderful dance sequence with them for one number) and they became characters in their own right. We went through about 8 ideas, none of which felt right. We argued and screamed at each other and almost gave up, but one magic day he sketched something in desperation and it was It. Another real complication for the set design was that Marc had already committed to a company to design and create huge computer graphics that would establish the cyber-world for the audience, and these graphics needed a huge projection screen. I had decided that if we had a screen that sise onstage, we might as well use it all the time, so I also wanted to project live camera images of the singers onto the screen in a rock concert style. Soooow e were staging the play in a very small space, the script called for multiple locales, we had to make room for a band, we had two computer modules that need space to wheel around, and we also had to fit 5 actors in somewhere.....it was quite a problem! I was never happy with the final sight-lines, but we did the best we could under the circumstances. A catch-phrase between Dave and me was "When we do the stadium tour......" This phrase caught on big-time among the tech guys for Cyberia. The screen also created enormous problems for our lighting designer, Allan Ross. I had to try and stage the scenes as far downstage as possible because otherwise light would spill onto the screen, but the audience sight-lines were lousy the further downstage we got. One of those classic director problems. While Marc was working with Francois on the orchestrations for the songs, I was also bugging him to finish casting the show. It was so close to him that it was almost pointless for me to audition anyone, Marc knew intimately how each voice should sound. All I asked was that the eventual cast would be capable of acting as well as singing! We reached a compromise on this point. He decided he couldn't bear anyone else playing the lead role except himself, which I disagreed with but finally agreed to as long as he promised he would turn into a performer once we started rehearsals and didn't attempt to involve himself with the directing and musical direction. As it turned out it was the wrong decision. Marc was fine in the role, but both Francois and I sorely missed his objective vision and I think it made the whole process more complicated. Especially during tech rehearsals when both Marc and Francois were onstage and I was left to make sound and balance decisions that I was completely ill-equipped to make. In the middle of these discussions, Marc finally found a Chuck (one of the most difficult characters to cast because it called for a young male or female actor who could sing but also scream, and for my needs had to embody rebellious youth) After 3 days of auditions we hadn't found anyone in the Ottawa area, and I couldn't find anyone in the national arena either although I had searched everywhere I could. Marc found Eric by accident through his friendship with the man who ran the computer graphics/producing company, and we finally had a cast. So now we were ready for rehearsals. A normal professional theatre rehearsal day goes from 10:00 until 6:00, but I couldn't envisage anyone singing rock songs at 10:00 in the morning. In addition, I had taken over as Artistic Director of the National Arts Centre Theatre and therefore had an enormous amount of office work to accomplish; also we were in the middle of rehearsing The Glass Menagerie starring Kiefer Sutherland and his mother, Shirley Douglas, and we had a lot of problems dealing with the media attention, including the fact that our star couple hated our publicity person; plus our Cyberia musical director was only available in the evenings. So it worked out pretty well, we acted in the afternoons and sang in the evenings. My major problem was leveling the playing field. I had one extremely good actor who was playing multiple roles but couldn't sing; one actor who could sing but hadn't done much acting (and was also the composer/creator of the show); two actors who had done some acting but were primarily singers; and one young actor who had never worked in a professional situation, had never acted and whose primary singing experience was classical. It made for some interesting dynamics. Especially since the scenes were classic rock-opera....short and really only there as a lead in to the song, but emotionally charged and difficult to play for inexperienced actors. Plus the songs were written in many different styles and all of them lived inside Marc's head in their final, produced condition. Luckily the company loved each other almost instantly, so tensions were minimal and the more experienced in each field helped those less experienced. I was very lucky with the company, with the band and with the designers. They built a team despite me. We also had the problem of the "dance" numbers. I wanted to give a taste of the potential for some of these musical numbers to become full scale extravaganzas, but the budget could not include a choreographer. Luckily one of the actors was also a choreographer, so she worked with the other actors and they managed to create two numbers that hinted at the potential of the scenes. They were rough, and we completely changed one of them late in rehearsal because it really wasn't right, but at least we managed to put them in. Rehearsals progressed well although Marc was stretched to an exhausting length. We had a lot of problems explaining to our computer graphics people why we needed their work as soon as possible, and they had a lot of problems explaining to us why they couldn't do that. But we all stayed friends through the process. In theatre we are used to being totally concentrated on one project at a time, it was hard to fit in with a business which had many other projects on the go. Plus we couldn't make decisions immediately because so many times it depended on how things evolved out of rehearsal and re-writing...this was hard for them to encompass. It meant that their resident programming genius was working very late at night, but he pulled through with some wonderful stuff. Now it was up to us to showcase it properly. Technical rehearsals were a nightmare. We ran into endless difficulties because the show had grown through rehearsals into a full-scale audio-visual fest. I wanted to give the audience a taste of the potential of Cyberia as it could be done in a large theatre, so I pushed the bounds of our available equipment and the budget! Because the space was too small and acoustically wrong for a rock band, we spent inordinate amounts of time working on sound. Because both the composer and the musical director were performing on stage, I had to be responsible for balancing the sound with a very willing but inexperienced sound technician and it is not my area of expertise. Each band member and the singers demanded monitors, so we had little control over the quality of the sound in the very small house (it only seats 300)....at times we were hearing the show just through the stage monitors! We had to rent special equipment to deal with cutting between the various technologies required to project the graphics, slides and the live camera, and finally we hired someone to run that equipment live through the show. The lighting designer (a good friend of mine who I had worked with before many times) had some kind of a brain block and only figured out how to light the show half way through tech. It ended up looking beautiful, but there were some very worrying moments when I wondered if he was ever going to wake up! The stage manager and the musical director had some very tense moments. He came from the music world where the musical director is God, she came from theatre where the stage manager runs the tech rehearsals. Luckily they sorted it out. I also had to re-block a few scenes because they were impossible to light where I had them staged. This is par for the course in most shows even with the best of planning, but this time it was just one more thing that created difficulties. I had to abandon the actors for about 5 days so they were getting twitchy and nervous. All I can say of this time is Thank God for the production staff! By the time we'd finished we had most of the production department of the NAC working on our show! As always happens in theatre, the day before we opened things seemed to magically come together and we had a show. It was still hair-raisingly an inch from disaster...would the equipment malfunction being a major nightmare....but the opening night actually happened. Some people loved the show, some people hated it. Some critics saw the potential, some of them didn't. About normal for a reaction to a new piece of work. I was overwhelmingly proud of the company, the design and tech team, everyone involved. I was less than satisfied with what I had accomplished....but ain't that always the way! --- GIL OSBORNE Until recently Gil Osborne was the Artistic Director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre of Canada. She now lives in Houston, Texas and is in the process of setting up a business teaching acting and public presentation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright 1998, Mersinger Theatrical Services