Category: Backstage

We move rehearsals on to the stage later this week, out of the newly tiled and cleaned-up karate studio, and I am really looking forward to seeing the set that Bruce has designed and John built—the renderings look fabulous.

John Logan, the playwright, has selected lots of repetitions from the source material (court transcripts, newspaper and radio accounts) of this play. For instance, his Robert Crowe says, in his five-minute closing summation, “…there is but one penalty that is proportional to the turpitude of this crime, only one penalty that applies to a crime of this sort, and that is death.” Director Michael has been relentless in making me emphasize, depend on, trust in those repetitions. Though this play depicts a bloody crime, it’s ultimately a very talky courtroom drama, and Michael’s vision, as I understand it, is to throw key ideas into precise, high relief: judgment by a jury of peers, mercy, justice, the rule of law. Logan also retains the declamatory conventions of the pre-television age: alliteration, direct quotations from the Pentateuch.

Michael asked me to do something else that no director has ever needed to ask me before: to stop gesturing. In scene 18, Crowe and Clarence Darrow have their one duet scene, a meeting just outside the courtroom. The normally intellectual Crowe, who begins by saying, “I really don’t have to justify anything to you,” in fact spends most of the scene trying to do just that to Darrow, explaining his hardball tactics in pursuit of the death sentence. In the midst of a flailing emotional outburst, Crowe takes the personal tack with Darrow:

You know what’s happening in Chicago. You know about the gangs and corruption. It’s just creeping in. Everywhere. All because the laws are not being enforced! You like that? I want my children to grow up in a city where they can depend on the law to protect them.

And it is Michael’s wisdom to direct me to keep this passage intimate, personal, not stagey. Early on, he walked over to me during a rehearsal of this bit and took my hands in his and placed them at my sides. So I’m forced to use my eyes, my face, my voice to convince Darrow that I’m right.

Claire, who is responsible for hair, took the clippers to us last week. Most of the younger cast members are growing theirs out. I, on the other hand, am still stuck in the 1970s when it comes to the back of my head, so Claire had lots of hair to hack off back there. Crowe had a lush head of hair on his crown, however, and we’re looking for ways to train my baby-fine locks into a bushy fighting Irish do.

Sam and Ryan, playing the teenaged killers Dick Loeb and Nathan “Babe” Leopold, are scary-creepy good at what they do.

—Number 5, please.

—My name is David Gorsline, and this is from State Fair.

After years of protesting, “I don’t do musicals, if you heard me sing, you would understand,” I walked into RCP’s auditons for Guys and Dolls armed with nothing but my water bottle and the sheet music for “Isn’t It Kinda Fun.” It’s an uptempo showtune, which is what was called for in the casting announcement, and the music is by Richard Rodgers, who makes everyone sound good (this on my authority for all things musical, Leta).

At least Sue, the director, looked pleased to see me, as we have worked on one or two straight-play projects before. And Brian, the music director, had accompanied us for Seussical rehearsals, so he knew what he was getting. Elisa, one of RCP’s sweethearts, was at the piano.

This was a typical evening of wham-bam screening: with 40-plus actors to see, there’s only time to sing your song, crash through the dance combination, and be released. I made sure that I was there early (something I do anyway), so I was in the first group of twelve to sing and dance, and I was back in the car by 8.

I’m not really sure how the song went, but I got a clue from the more experienced singers on the bench next to me. One said, sympathetically, “It’s hard to go first.” This was the first time that I’ve sung this song with piano accompaniment EVER, so I’m not sure that I started on the C that I intended, but rather I may have wandered down to the G, which is the root of the chords in the intro. I got the ship righted in the second 8 bars, and Sue was bopping along with me, but Brian mercifully cut me off after the bridge.

Not everyone followed Sue’s request for “upbeat.” In my group of twelve, I heard some nice Lerner and Loewe, a couple of showcase pieces for good soprano voices, a G&S patter song, and (THANK GOD) since this was a show for adults, only one version of “Popular.” Mike (Horton from Seussical) was in the house, but not in my group, which is too bad, ’cause I wanted to hear him sing.

Choreographer Ivan then ran us through the dance combination, sort of a mashup of the steps he planned to use in the show from various songs. I unabashedly smudged my way through the bourrée that Ivan gave us, but he said he was looking for manly attitude, and I tried to focus on that.

All in all, no one fell down, no one threw up, so I’m calling it a win. Callbacks and casting decisions are this weekend. I’m only trying to get into the chorus, and maybe to do one of the character bits. This is all about pushing against the envelope.

Possibly the only job worse than being personal assistant to a certain local sports team heiress (so my sources tell me): scribble, scribble, scribble quotes from Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus:

Minions collected and stored every object [Thupa Inka, an Inca chief] touched, food waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these objects with their touch. The ground was too dirty to receive the Inka’s saliva so he always spat into the hand of a courtier. The courier wiped the spittle with a special cloth and stored it for safekeeping.

Much worse than the time I ASM’d Forum and a cast member gave me her half-consumed cough drop to hold before she went onstage.

Silver Spring Stage is getting a badly-needed makeover of the flooring and ceilings of its backstage areas, and some of the shabbier partitions are coming down, too. Decades of hard use have reduced the tile to a crumble, as you can see. I’ve been helping out shifting the movables from one place to another as the workmen move through. The new tile flooring is functional if bland, but it looks so much better than what it replaced—I promise to post an “after” picture soon.

• A headset does not fit over a cheap hairnet without shredding it.
• Performing a relaxation exercise (yoga Corpse pose) on the deck—while sound is running through its cues (thunder, fire exits announcement, a eggshell crack for the elephant bird that sounds like a chainsaw) and while lights has one of the electric pipes pulled in to change an instrument—requires great concentration.
• When you’re looking for the high note, close your eyes, relax (!), and just let go.
• And most of all,
  

  When you’re jouncing along
  On a road full of ruts,
  Getting jeered by a throng
  And performing for nuts,
  Tell yourself how lucky you are!

The special hazard on this show is confetti. In the Act 1 sequence where Horton sits on the egg through storm and changing seasons, the Cat pelts him with water from a super soaker, a bucket of autumn leaves, and a big batch of confetti. Half of the crew’s intermission cleanup consists of sweeping up little white dots of paper—from the deck, from the steps of the tree unit that Horton is perched on—and still the confetti goes everywhere. It may be worse than glitter. We find bits backstage in the green room, we find chips of it in the auditiorium, I find it in my slippers. There is show confetti in my back bedroom at home where I’m typing this.

This past Sunday was the day for more than one little thing to go wrong. In the Act 1 finale, Gertrude’s lengthy tail, made of feather boas glued end to end, parted in two. Suddenly Alexa found herself tugging against no resistance (from offstage, I’m usually holding the other end while Gertrude struggles in vain to get airborne). Alexa’s a trouper, she covered, and she yanked with all her might against nothing.

Then, late in the second Act, the Bird Girl who usually has the Who-bearing clover so that she can hand it off to Gertrude to restore it to Horton, didn’t have it. As they came offstage, there was a lot of muttering, “I forgot the clover!” and Kevin (the Cat) scampered back to find a substitute. He slipped to Horton during the next scene, and I wonder how many people noticed.

Probably the WATCH judges did. If something goes wrong in a matinee performance, 95% of the (traditionally less sophisticated) audience won’t spot it, but matinees are also peppered with adjudicators. They’re there on Sunday because they often have their own evening performances to deal with.

Sunday was also designated as an autographs in the lobby day. Don’t ask me why, but I just loathe autographs in the lobby in costume. So I got to show my “I’m crew” card, and I cleaned myself up while the rest of the cast Met Their Public. Which meant that I had to do some crew work. Now I don’t mind wet-mopping the deck, and with all that confetti (vide supra), mopping is always in order, and in fact I can Tom Sawyer myself into enjoying it a little bit. Water + swab, swab = things are cleaner.

I’m working on building up that same “hooah” attitude towards the orchestra pit cover. At CenterStage, there are two sections of the deck that you remove to make an opening for the orchestra pit. (This opening is only so that the conductor can be seen by the cast.) The first section is composed of several layers of hardwood, altogether making a slab 20 inches by 70 inches by 5 1/2 inches thick, and the other section (which forms the lip of the stage) is somewhat smaller.

To open the pit, what you do is this: walk downstairs with a buddy into the pit area; unbolt the first section from the girders that hold everything in place; on a count of three, with your buddy, push the section straight up until it clears, then slide it back (upstage) (it has casters to make this part a little easier, and usually there is crew above to help with this step); get a stance on the top of the railing that forms the conductor’s platform and push the smaller section up and out; climb out of the pit; lay the small section on top of the first section and roll them out of the way far upstage.

I don’t have a lot of upper-body strength, so I’m not one of those people that you look to first for jobs that require doing something on three. Usually Chris, Rick and Steve take this detail.

Okay, now that I’ve popped the pit cover a couple of times I can figure out how much it weighs. Figure generously on a specific gravity of 0.6 for the composition of the cover. Eurgh: 170 pounds.

Another very complimentary review of the show: this one is from Michael Toscano.

June [Schreiner] is a seventh-grader at Reston’s Langston Hughes Middle School, but she seems to be one of those kids with outsize talent who eventually could end up on Broadway. With a crystal-clear voice and lungs of steel, she radiates charisma that reaches to the back of the good-sized theater.

Potomac Stages gave Seussical a very nice notice—and a rather perspicacious one, IMO.

Michael Hoskinson… spends the entire evening in what must be a hot stuffy grey elephant costume, yet still manages to avoid letting the adorable JoJo steal the show back from him.

A theater rehearsal, in terms of the words exchanged, is a collision of specialized vocabulary and jargon from several different disciplines; as collaborators, we may stumble towards some level of mutual comprehensibility, but some dark spots of incomprehension remain. Kevin, the full-time assistant technical director of theater where RCP perform, wasn’t familiar with one of the items on the list below, collected from several weeks of Seussical rehearsals.

dance belt

I once heard this expression as the punch line to a joke in The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, and I didn’t get it. It describes a brief undergarment worn by men to avoid, um, VPLs and other mishaps under tights. A close synonym, as two or three of us muttered to Earle when the costumer explained that we would be required to supply our own, is “jockstrap.”

color note

As used by music director Matt when rehearsing “Biggest Blame Fool,” the note of a chord that provides the particular bluesy quality, and hence the one that he wanted to make sure was sung with a little more oomph.

smart casters

Wheels bolted into the base of a set piece that can either swivel or be locked into place. Dawn has designed and Steve built a couple of huge pieces for the back of the set that aren’t going anywhere without smart casters.

sitzprobe

One of the few terms of art in music not taken from Italian. Refers to the first rehearsal that brings together singers and the orchestra, generally with no other technical or acting elements involved.

Anatevka

Strictly speaking, an allusion rather than jargon, Anatevka is the Russian village that provides the setting for Fiddler on the Roof, home to oppressed Jews who struggle on gamely. And hence, per director Haley, the idea of the plaintive mood that we’re looking for in the second half of “Here on Who,” when the Whos (and the Grinch, for some reason) sing to Horton that war is coming and the truffula trees are all gone, and he is the only one who can help them.

l’istesso

Per my copy of Randel’s New Harvard Dictionary of Music, “The same tempo; hence, an indication that the tempo is to remain the same despite a change in meter and thus in the unit of metrical pulse.” Which doesn’t give me very much information that I can work with: I just latch on to whatever Matt and the band are playing and hang on.

Choreographer Heide has kept her vocabulary, both spoken and physical, simple, for which we non-dancers in the cast are grateful. But there will still be something interesting to watch.

Well, we’ve been in rehearsals for Seussical for three weeks. The big concern so far has been turnover in the cast: we’ve lost one cast member who was facing a much heavier load at work, and three of the team have had to drop out for medical reasons. So we will miss Laura, Don, Sarah, and Liz, who will still be with us in spirit come opening night in March.

It’s typical for a cast this size (25) to have some churn, but four is a lot. We have filled in with new members Karl and Katie (husband and wife), Amanda, and—well, me. In addition to my responsibilties on the left corner assisting Joan, I will be singing the small character roles of the Grinch and Yertle the Turtle. The music isn’t horribly difficult, but there will be passages when the only sound onstage will be coming from either the orchestra or me, and that’s a little scary. I’ll be wearing a green bodysuit instead of my usual blacks when I’m on headset. I haven’t asked director Haley whether I can keep the headset when I’m onstage.

On a more positive note, one of the fun things about this cast is the number of family connections. Sour Kangaroo (Lisa-Marie) will have a live Baby Kangaroo, her daughter Emily. The Bird Girls will be the ever-harmonizing Marylee and her daughters Amy and Jenny. Two of the Wickersham Brothers will be sisters Lucy and Susanna (yes, women are singing men’s roles: this is community theater, there are no men, can we move on?). And Haley’s assistant directors Jess and Jim are variously related to other staff.

Saturday at the festival was dominated by plays with a sports metaphor: our own The Gold Lunch, a 60-minute reduction of Richard Dresser’s Rounding Third from Thurmont Thespians, and a very strong production of Never Swim Alone by Daniel MacIvor from Port Tobacco Playhouse Players (thanks, Leta!).

Many of the comments and questions from the adjudicators were spot on, while others (as usual) could only be answered with, “well, yes, but that wouldn’t be the play we brought you,” or even, “well, yes, but that would be wrong.” More than one judge encouraged us to slow down and savor some of the moments, and they’re quite right, my rhythms tended to be lockstep. And another good question that I didn’t have a ready answer for was, “why was it that you and Dana separated?” I don’t know what I think about the note to pump up the just-off-the-playing-field energy. I think it can work for the first paragraph, but I’m not sure how to fit it between the opening moment on the podium and the more analytical section that begins “My ex-wife, Dana, is as formidable an opponent…”

They praised many of the technical elements, some of them lovingly timed out (staring the the anthem mid-verse) and others impromptu (cobalt blue wine glasses from my cabinet). More than one judge appreciated Ron Carlson’s phrase “her twin peninsulas floating before you.”

I am more or less satisfied with my own work. I think I made a good adjustment to the three playing sides. My focus was generally there, but I did jump forward within a line more than once.