Category: Backstage

Three of my projects from last year have been honored with nominations for outstanding achievement from WATCH: Seussical, Never the Sinner, and Guys and Dolls. I was especially pleased to see the directing and technical work on Sinner receive its due recognition.

And Leta has the wow moment: she picked up a nomination for her work as Alma in Taking Leave for Vienna Theatre Company. I am very proud of her.

Check out the spiffy new tile and furniture (at right) in the main men’s room at Silver Spring Stage. Renovations were completed to the men’s and ladies’ rooms just in time for the opening of Seascape. The best thing about the rehab is that the classic-era tulip-shaped urinal (see the “before” picture, at left) was retained. Second-best thing is that there is once again light in the stalls. Your contribution dollars at work! Thank you!

We were called for a pickup rehearsal yesterday evening in preparation for this weekend’s run. It was a refreshingly productive hour. We reviewed only choreography, so we didn’t waste time clowning through the dialog (alas, a practice all too common in the amateur ranks). Really the point of the evening was to work Ivan into the show, as he is substituting for both Billy and Zach these next three performances. It’s not uncommon to see substitutes in the chorus/ensemble. Indeed, Kelly went on for Christy our opening weekend. A lot of the community theaters around here run four weekends for a musical, and it’s hard to keep a group of eight or twelve decent singer-dancers together for that long. It is certainly the case that the orchestra roster will vary weekend to weekend and night to night. A solo line that you’re used to hearing from a violin or trumpet one evening will come from the keyboard. There are directors who make a signature of this. RCP’s production of Barnum is storied for its who’s-on-tonight cast.

I’ve also seen substitutes in speaking roles, and in straight plays as opposed to musicals. It’s an interesting challenge to work with the different energy that you get from an actor that you’re less accustomed to.

I played Dr. Pinch in a production of The Comedy of Errors about ten years ago. The design concept for the show was sort of a comic-book post-modern Anything Can Happen Day. The multi-colored set incorporated a kid’s slide. In the world of this show, anachronism was a good thing. And there was a chorus of about eight without speaking parts; they were there to give some depth to the picture, and to participate in sight gags like a twelve-man double-take. So naturally the markeup of the chorus was fluid.

Dr. Pinch’s big scene is with Antipholus of Ephesus, whom he thinks is mad. Pinch tries to drive out the evil spirits:

I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers
And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight:
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven!

Now David, my director, sometime during rehearsals gave me a battery-operated fan and said, “Use this for the exorcism, if you like, or find something else goofy.” And this eventually turned into “what is Gorsline going to pull out of his kit bag tonight?” I made an agreement with Angus (playing Antipholus) that he would see everything at least once during tech week, but once we were up, I would pull things out more or less at random. I had a rain stick, and a soap bubble pipe, and a couple of other things along with the mini-fan.

(This was not unlike the arrangement that Terry has with our director of The Foreigner that his Charlie would find a different “translation” of Froggy’s “Gomo rim jambo” every night.)

So, it must have been second weekend, and a young lady from England—Nikki I think her name was, first nanny that I met who wore Doc Marten’s—joined the chorus for her first performance. She told me afterwards that it was all she could do to keep her composure when I pulled out a hand-cranked egg beater and waved it over Antipholus like a security screener’s baton.

Lorin Buck gives us a nice writeup for the Fairfax County Times.

We’re two weeks into the run now. Audiences have been packed and enthusiastic. Some of the messages that Sue has sent our way from happy watchers have been gushing.

Lots of fun technical elements in this show. Bea and Jerry have dressed the newsstand with a panoply of old cheesy pulp magazines salvaged from eBay—racing and turf news, turbo-charged action stories, comic books, pinups and confessionals (“Why I Am a Prostitute” is one cover story). The only bad thing, for us, is that the mags are stapled closed onto the set piece. I’ll never get to read that interview with Ava Gardner.

I have a great costume of olive greens and golds, incorporating a hat that I bought for myself about 15 years ago, a bad-plaid sports jacket that somebody’s ex-husband once wore, a 40s-era psychedelic necktie with still more greens and golds, and pants (built by Anita and Maggie) with a waist that sits under my rib cage.

The orchestra sounds great. Brian has found five woodwinds (including bari sax!), five brass, acoustic bass, drums, and is filling in the rest with keyboards. I particularly like the bit in the overture where the “A Bushel and a Peck” theme is introduced with piccolo and bass clarinet.

I’m liking my fight choreography in the “Havana” sequence: Dana clocks me with a serving tray, twice, and I finish with a back fall (make your legs into a figure 4, land on your well-padded tushie, and roll the rest of the way down). The only hard part, oddly, is getting up again. Sometime during tech week I pulled a muscle in my chest trying to bounce up too quickly in the following blackout. In fact, I’m nursing a couple more dings and scrapes from this show (one of them definitely my fault) and the rest of the cast and crew seem mildly cursed as well.

I love the grammar lesson that Sarah gives to Adelaide at the end of the intro to “Marry the Man Today:”

ADELAIDE: Now doesn’t that kind of apply
To you and I?

SARAH: You and me.

I think the best thing about doing an ensemble role like this is that I’m so focused on doing my own work well (cleaning up fuzzy bits of choreography; trying to make the inner harmony I have in “Oldest Established” audible) that I’m not wasting energy worrying about what everyone else is doing. Well, that’s mostly true.

Sometimes, just before curtain, I will get all New Age and lay my hand on the floor to pick up some positivity. I think about the many times I have performed in this theater, all the way back to The Foreigner in 1989 when each night I would step blind into a trap door, with Mary Jane’s hand guiding my foot down. So last Saturday night, I placed my palm on the wooden stage deck (instead of the concrete around the edge, like I usually do) and I could the vibrations in the boards as the rest of the cast was moving into place. I felt bubbles of anticipatory energy, just the way Leta describes it.

I’m having a good time.

It’s been a busy, busy couple of weeks, but we are comfortably moved into the theater and we’re on a glide path to opening on Friday. Crew are working out the logistics of scene shifting. Here’s hoping all works out with the operational fountain that is planned for the “If I Were a Bell” scene, which is my surprise favorite, due to the tipsy abandon that Molly brings to the song.

I’m really enjoying working with Brian as a music director. A lot of the things he does (like actually conducting warm-ups, so that we will focus on following him; and his harmony exercises) I’m sure are standard practice, but they’re new to me. He has a dead-calm demeanor, which can make him hard to read sometimes, but placidity during tech week is a valuable commodity. Along with my keyboard and iPod, a really helpful tool has been MTI’s RehearScore, a MIDI-based rehearsal pianist who never gets tired. I’ve been looking forward to music rehearsals, because the music for my four songs (“Luck Be a Lady,” “The Oldest Established…,” “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” and the reprise of “Guys and Dolls”), for the most part, has been easier to learn than the choreography that goes with it.

It’s no surprise that I am one of the slower learners at choreography. Choreographer Ivan and assistant Katherine have been generous and flexible as they take a bunch of middle-aged white guys and make them look like spicy salsa dancers and jitterbugs. Building a dance, in my sparse experience, is more like fashion than anything else: it’s about trying things, piling on things, and then editing them down. From the outside, it looks like the choreographer is “making it up as he goes along.” All this can be unnerving to us short-bus dancers in the back row. When you’re struggling to execute something, it’s hard to hear, “okay, that isn’t working, let’s try this” or “there’s a little dead spot here, so we need to add something…” Now in a scene, if a director were to say, “it’s not reading, try it sarcastic… now try it tragic,” I would think nothing of it. That’s the work. But remembering which way Ivan’s “Happy Arms” move goes, and expressing something with my face at the same time, is another thing. Section leaders Chris and Mark have also been very helpful in getting us through the dances.

Most days at the rehearsal hall, my practice clothes have been a fedora, t-shirt, hiking shorts, and shiny black FBI-shoes oxfords. I look like a hapless tourist. But I am long past caring about that.

Sources are ambiguous about the precise meaning of Hollanderize in Adelaide’s line from “Take Back Your Mink”:

So take back your mink
To from whence it came
And tell them to Hollanderize it
For some other dame.

While most indicate that it is simple cleaning and reconditioning, Seymour Kass, in a 1992 letter to the New York Times and speaking from a position of authority, points to a subtler connotation:

The common meaning of Hollanderize, when I worked as a furrier for my father (“King of the Muskrats”) in the 1940’s and 50’s, was to dye the cheaper, plebeian, widely worn muskrat coats to give them the look of mink.

It’s all the more confusing, because when the verses are repeated in the fast, dance section of the song, the Girls sing instead “and go shorten the sleeves/For somebody else.”

Like Leta said when she tipped me to the post, we received a short and sweet review of Significant Others in the Silver Spring Penguin.

1. Learn from everyone.
2. Follow no one.
3. Watch for patterns.
4. Work like hell.

—Scott McCloud, Making Comics, p. 255

We struck Significant Others this afternoon, insofar as packing up some props and moving a few pieces of furniture back to storage can be called a strike. Leta and I got two solid performances in, after some technically shifty work on our part on Thursday and Friday. The flavors continued to develop over the weekend, and at least some of the fishy bits on my part got clearer. Now I regret not having a few more rehearsals to continue to sharpen things up.

It was fun to get to do a part with so much light banter: think of the fiery relationship between Walter and Hildy in His Girl Friday. And to get most of the laughs, even though I still don’t understand why “It wasn’t my fault. She was your sister.” was so successful.

Director Sharon also dressed the set as one of the outdoor lounges at an expensive wedding reception, and it looked great. We reused the table and chairs that we used for The Gold Lunch last year (which turn out to belong to Andrea, and they’re going back to her house, which is too bad, ’cause it’s nearly the only nice furniture the Stage had).

Update: In an earlier draft I neglected to mention the fabulous tuxedo that Sharon rented for me from a local shop in exchange for a program ad. It’s the first time I’ve worn clothes with bar codes on them. Leta also bargained a sparkly lavender formal (flashy, but not to outshine the bride) for herself.

I took a suggestion from Evan and learned my pages back to front, which worked well for me. I think he says something like, “as the play progresses, you’re heading for your happy place, where you are most familiar with the script.” And Husband has his longer passages toward the end of the play. Early on, the dialogue that Steve has written is a lot of short phrases and sentences, and easy to learn. But it’s full of transitions that sort of skip from to another like following stones in a stream crossing (and it was these transitions that gave me memory trouble), as Husband is trying to ask a question that he’s not sure he wants to hear the answer to. In fact, Husband never does ask in so many words, and Wife calls him on it.

HUSBAND: What did I say?

WIFE: Nothing. But I know what you were thinking.

HUSBAND: I wasn’t thinking anything.

WIFE: You were.

HUSBAND: I was. And the answer is no?

The pleasant surprise was that the rush-hour commute to Maryland was much easier to take than it was in July. Friday, I barely slowed at the big curves on the Beltway near the Mormon Temple, and otherwise had a straight drive in, so I was way too early arriving for my call. I guess everyone really did go to the shore this month.

Over the years, I’ve developed a number of tactical responses to the inevitable traffic jams in eastern Fairfax and lower Montgomery Counties. At bottom, you have to cross the triple barriers of the Potomac River, the CSX railroad corridor, and Rock Creek and its greenbelt, and you have a limited number of ways to do it. I’ve assembled routes involving Chain Bridge, Western Avenue, and East-West Highway; or University Boulevard through Kensington if I bail out of the Beltway once I get across the river; or my new tricky favorite:

• cross the Potomac on the Beltway at Cabin John, and immediately slide off onto the Barton Parkway;
• at the first exit, jog over to MacArthur Boulevard;
• cross over on the stone arch bridge, restricted for many years to one lane of traffic in alternating directions;
• climb out of the valley on Wilson Lane (can be a bad left turn here);
• traversing a lot of expensive real estate, tack left and right on Rayburn Road, Bradley Boulevard, Huntington Parkway, Old Georgetown Road, and then on to Cedar Lane;
• cross under the Beltway and turn into Beach Drive to follow Rock Creek east and downstream;
• left on Stoneybrook Drive, past the Temple campus and over the railroad, around an incredibly blind curve to the intersection with Capitol View Avenue;
• wind through more historic neighborhoods, turn left on Forest Glen Avenue at the old stone post office;
• cross Georgia Avenue and Sligo Creek;
• freestyle from here: Sligo Creek Parkway or Brunett Avenue or any of the neighborhood streets to University Boulevard;
• and you’re in Four Corners!

Jane Beard, professional actor and networker on the local scene for many years, is developing a book “to help performers break through some of the most common beliefs and fears which get in their way.” To that end, she is conducting an online survey (using one of Vovici’s competitors’ services, but no matter) to get input from performers about the barriers that they think are there. Most of the questions are checkoffs about the tapes we play in our heads while we’re trying to get work and then do work, like “the director is an idiot/inscrutable/unprepared,” or “there’s an insider list and I’m not on it,” or (one of my Top 40 hits) “what happens when everyone sees that I’m a fraud?” Jane’s intended audience is mainly performers working for pay, but the energy barriers that we put up know no professional/amateur division. If you perform for a live audience, help her out and take the survey by September 30.

The playing space at Silver Spring Stage is much more intimate than the CenterStage, where RCP performs. The first row of seats is only a few feet away, at eye level, and is usually well-lit by the spill from the stage lights. So we usually get a good look at all the humanity who come to see the show, and we’ve seen a number of specimens at Never the Sinner. There was the homeless guy who wandered in after the box office manager had closed up for the night. We wouldn’t have minded him at all, except that he started sorting through his shopping bags of bottles to be recycled, rattling the plastic bags and dropping the bottles on the floor. There was the community theater denizen who always rocks back and forth in his seat through the complete proceedings. The woman who brought her service dog with her wasn’t a problem, but the pooch got a little upset in scene 4 when Ryan and Sam start waltzing with each other, and started to bark. Everyone’s a dance critic. She got the dog calmed down for the rest of the show, but the curtain call—60 people banging their hands together—was too much, and the dog howled through it. There was the woman who seemed to be following along with a script. Maybe a WATCH judge who knocks off points for textual inaccuracies? Oh, and lest we forget, the helpful fellow at our preview performance who announced, as the lights and video projector finally went down after the announcement of the verdict, “That’s the end.”

For all the stem-winding bluster of the second act—the dueling counselors monologues—this is a show about sharp, tiny effects. Sam (Loeb) opens up his heart just a crack with a mournful, “I miss my mom,” and then he slams it shut again with, “Not that she deserves it, the stupid old cow.” Kevin, the sound designer, has built a sound plot that underscores nearly the entire play, but he drops it out to highlight Ryan’s (Leopold’s) killer speech, “to me he is like a hard, perfect gem.” Craig’s (Darrow’s) best moment is just one bitten-off word, and it comes in a passage where he tells us how horrible it will be to hang the killers: “I can see them falling through space and stopped by the rope around their necks.” Maybe the best thing about the role I’m portraying is the fabulous double-breasted suit that Eric found for me through his Washington Opera connections. Or perhaps the eye-roll and cheek-puff that I do when Robin (Germaine) goes off message for the third time during her testimony. But seriously, I think I’m doing a good job technically and using my instrument well, especially when I remember to breathe.