everything the traffic will allow

So I got back to Virginia last Tuesday, having just a day after we closed “Brel” in Minnesota to rest before I went plane-hopping. Some people are invigorated by travel, but I find it exhausting - getting there is considerably less than half the fun when it involves crowded airports, cramped planes, screaming children, tired stewardesses, bad food, etc. (It’s a funny thing about airports and we Americans - we’re forced to be in cramped quaters, all doing the same thing or going to the same place and yet we really don’t want to have much of anything to do with one another during the experience - we’d rather be alone. Insular people, us.)

Anyway, Wednesday it’s back to the airport to pick up a cast member and then off to rehearsals for a concert-with-light-staging of old Broadway tunes. We pounded through rehearsals for three days and nights since we were to perform on Saturday. The rehearsals themselves were fine, I guess, all of us trying to find our balance and get used to performing with a conductor and orchestra rather than the small, flexible band we’d grown so used to. It was probably a very good move on the part of our director to hire three of us straight out of the “Brel” project - we work together beautifully by now.

The Saturday concert was a nightmare for the four of us onstage. We were woefully under-rehearsed. I think the thing went over well with the audience, but I know we were all total wrecks before going on. Maybe we had all been a little lazy in learning our music for this gig while working on the previous one, but still, another day would have been nice.

Sunday went off like a dream - everything was fine-tuned and perfect. I guess sometimes you need to get the nerves out before the show can gel. We all joked backstage on Saturday night that it hadn’t been bad for our first dress rehearsal.

Pet Peeve: Directors who cannot distinguish between something that isn’t working and something that can be improved. Or, between something that isn’t working and something they’ve just personally grown tired of looking at. I should be careful about this, though -- I think boredom is a reliable tool for a director. But it must be used judiciously. My favorite worst moment of the rehearsals for this concert came when our director (notorious for his frequency to change his own staging) decided that the blocking for the “Oklahoma” number didn’t work. He took 15 minutes of rehearsal time (after the final run) to re-stage the number -- exactly as it had been staged. We repeated the number just like we’d done it every time before then. And for some reason, he was satisfied. Weird.

I’m amazed by how good everyone sounded. The other cast members were such a joy to listen to from the wings.

After the last performance, we went out for the customary drinks (to either celebrate or forget, in this case to celebrate). Someone had videotaped parts of the performance for one of the cast and she brought her camera with her to the bar, where we could watch our just-concluded performance. I’ve always been mortified by seeing myself on film, and I think I understand why now. I am not what one might call a “physical actor”. I do it from the head and hopefully from the heart, my face I know is wonderfully responsive, but I have a really difficult time getting things into my body. I don’t dance, I don’t move particularly well, and I think my body is locked into habitual kinesthetic patterns that I’m not aware of. Ok, my first thought when I saw myself on film was “oh God I look gay”. Not exactly encouraging. I need to do something about that.

Pipe Dream

So a friend of mine from college and I have long had this pipe dream in which we run off and start our own theatre company. I’d direct, she’d design, and from the pool of talented people we both know from school and elsewhere we’d find a group of actors and other personnel.

We’re both facing the real start of our professional lives - and this seems more and more like a good idea. It’s a practical way to use what skills we have so far acquired, and to figure out the depths of our ignorance about everything else. It also seems like it would be very attractive to grad schools and future employers to say “I started my own theatre company”. Of course, maybe the most alluring reason for doing this is that we’d be able to work on just about any project our little hearts desired -- and even better if we could do it with a semi-permanent company!

Of course, right now it’s just a dream. To make it a reality, I think we’d have to answer several very important questions.

What kind of theatre do we want to make?

How do we want to make it?

I think those are the most important, though I’m sure there are a thousand others. I think it’s time we had that conversation, honestly. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

On Sunday, the Bulls get so bored (but the audience goes wild)

Today was a matinee, which I normally dread. It was also our closing performance, which I equally dread. And to make it worse, I overslept. Way overslept.

I’m still recovering from a bout of mono, which I’m going to blame for today. I woke up to the sound of my cell phone ringing. At 1:30. Our stage manager (whom I adore) was on the other end...I answered with, “I’m on my way”, and she replied “The house opens in four minutes”. Well shit. So a quick cup of coffee from the hotel lobby and a mad drive down Minneapolis’ insanely convoluted freeways later, I arrived at the theatre with 10 minutes to spare. 10 minutes to get into costume and warm up. Impossible. Getting into costume is easy, but warming up my voice, especially first thing in the, um, morning, takes about half an hour or more. I did the best I could, cussing myself the entire time. Being this late for a performance is just inexcusable. Ok, it’s not quite as inexcusable as missing an entrance or just not showing up at all. We still began on time. But still, I felt miserable. The cast and crew were cool, though, there were hugs and good-natured ribbing. Our director (an old friend and former teacher) made some stupid, snide remark -- as I knew he would -- to the effect of “so nice of you to join us”. I think that one of a director’s greatest tools is their ability to empathize with the actor -- a facility that this man unfortunately lacks completely. As though I didn’t already feel like hell for being so late, as though I wasn’t already full of self-recrimination and anxiety. Comments like that are no way to help the nervous actor give a good performance.

I don’t know if my voice ever fully warmed up -- I had to bark and scream my way through the higher passages of some numbers. Not that the audience seemed to care. And that’s odd.

In my experience, it’s the Saturday night audience that’s wired and will applaud almost anything, while the Sunday matinee is the audience made up of old women who never respond, leading to the increasing concern backstage that a team of paramedics should be summoned, just in case. Minnesota is different, I guess. The audience was wild. They clapped when the band entered. They clapped when we entered. The positively cheered when the first ensemble number was done. And they just got rowdier. By the end of the show, we were all giggling at the persistent cries of “Oh, Bravo!” from somewhere in the left of the house. Of course, they were all on their feet -- only this time at the start of the curtain call. Pretty amazing. They had a great time. And, consequently, so did we. My voice notwithstanding, we got to play with the audience and, joy of joys, they played along. No complaints or notes on the show otherwise.

Afterwards, we - the cast, set designer, and stage manager - went out for drinks to mark the end of this journey. We got loud and ebullient and more than a little risqué, but we had a great time. It’s hard to think of this as the end of the show. We’re still hanging out to the prospect of mounting the show again later in the year, and two of my three fellow cast members are following me to Virginia this week to do a couple of concerts. Still, it is always a sad occasion when a show ends, and I’ll miss these people, this time, this material.

Here’s hoping that the Opera Company that hired us will finally come through and mail us all our paychecks sometime in the next month, and here’s to the cast, crew, and band of “Jacques Brel”. Thank you all, for everything.

Saturday Night in Minnesota

There was something decidedly off about tonight’s audience.

For the first time, sold out. We more than sold out. We oversold and added seats. The place was packed, so one would naturally expect the audience to be excited, eager, wired on anticipation, practically foaming at the mouth for the performance. And one would be wrong.

This audience sat on their hands -- I don’t know why. They clapped with a minimum of enthusiasm at the ends of most numbers, but steadfastly refused to laugh, chuckle, murmur, or really focus in.

Audiences are strange creatures. An actor can always, through some kind of biofeedback, sense an audience’s attention wax or wane or occasionally focus like a laser and lift the actor up out of his skin. But beyond this immediate sense, it’s pretty tough to gauge what will work with an audience. This, more than the cruelty of the audition process, is why an actor has to become used to working on through rejection -- because occasionally, there’s no pleasing the people in the house. If an actor, sensing an indifferent or hostile reaction, begins to play to the audience, all sorts of pitfalls open up beneath his feet. He has several options, most of them dangerous, some of them damaging, and very few of them any good. He can:

(a) Push. Hit the same emotional or technical notes as last night, only with more force, even more emotion. But this usually means hammering the audience with the play, which can read as “You morons, don’t you see we’re doing something important up here?” -- never a good choice.

(b) Say “fuck ‘em” and pretend that they’re really out there loving it, or ignore them altogether. A pretty nifty feat, considering that there are several dozen to several hundred living, breathing human beings not very many feet from him, watching his every move.

(c) Pander. Related to pushing, but not as violent. Involves more mugging, sometimes more speed, the attitude of an “aside” on occasion. And occasionally an appropriate choice. The problem is that this also robs the scene and the play of its emotional truths, it’s subtlety. It also runs the (very high) risk of insulting the intelligence of the audience.

The only consistently viable option in this instance, in my experience, is a combination of two things: turn up the clarity of speech and go deeper into the story. The first one is pretty simple. One of the most basic of the actor’s responsibilities is to be heard. So you make sure that you’re articulating everything clearly and crisply, with as much resonance as you can muster. Going deeper into the story is trickier - you have to go off autopilot, accept that the show will be very different this evening, and enter into whatever story you’re currently telling with more vulnerability and honesty than perhaps you have for the past several performances. Then you hope and pray that the audience will follow you.

This is a very good lesson because it reminds you not to fall back onto a technical performance - repeating the same movements, notes, line readings, whatever that you’ve set into your muscular memory. And while the audience might not become more involved with the performance, you, the performer, learn new things about the material and experience it from a fresher perspective.

So, that’s what I did.

Who knows if it had any affect on the audience or not? I don’t. But I did find new things in each song, and that might be worth more than getting an expected reaction.

I had a couple of bad acting moments tonight. I don’t know if it was nerves at the unresponsive house or what, but my focus wandered, for just a second (the wrong second) at the start of one of my songs. I opened my mouth, and then realized that I was singing the second verse. Thankfully, do to some creative split-second reordering of Jacques Brel’s lyrics, I went back and got all the right words in. We all have off nights, yeah, but damn. Doing something like that just thoroughly demoralizes me. Thankfully, the cast was paying attention and adapted their staging to fit my new version of the song.

I’m also having some weird muscular issue just below my diaphragm, that I probably really need to see someone about.

Anyway, at the end of the show, the audience clapped long and loud, all smiles, some people stood up for the company call, we got a few whistles, and the report from a few folks outside after the show was that the audience really enjoyed themselves.

Maybe they were just scared of being demonstrative.

Reminds me of a fun theatre-history fact: some theaters in Europe used to have on staff several people whose job it was to attend every performance, sit in the audience, and laugh or applaud at all the right moments, to get the paying public to loosen up a little and demonstrate their appreciation for the show. Not a bad idea.

One more note - after the show our bassist overheard some of the cast talking about the too-quiet house. He said “It’s Saturday night. In thirty years of playing gigs I’ve seen it time and again, on Fridays the show is great and everyone loves it. On Saturdays they’re always quiet.”

So. One more show before its back to home and rehearsals for the next project.

Here’s to Minnesota Saturday nights.

2 to go

Last night’s show rocked. Very responsive, tuned-in audience. We even have repeat attendees! My favorite moment: folllowing the knee-shattering drop at the end of “Next”, the music for “Carousel” begins. In the front row, a young woman leans over to one of her friends and very audibly whispers “Oh, this one’s really good!”.

hello hopkins

Tonight one of company was sick - flu and upper respiratory problems, leaving her with next to no voice. Since we have no understudies, it was either press on with an ill cast member or do no show at all. She decided to go on, but somehow an agreement was reached that she wouldn’t sing all of her solos...especially not the opening number of the show. I was asked to. I had some preparation for this, so I’d been going over the song all day. Still, I was nervous as all hell. New stop on the tour, new audience, new theater, and now, ladies and gentlemen, new singer singing a new song! Without a net - the thrill of live theatre.

I almost didn’t make it. I lost the words a couple of times, but thankfully the song is slow and I remembered the right lyrics about one-half beat before I had to sing them. Oh my God, what a rush. It’s three hours later and I’m still high on the adrenaline.

The actress whose song I sang showed incredible grace. She took me by the hand before we went on and whispered to me how excited she was to hear me sing the number. And for that, she has a place in heaven and in my heart forever.

The show went well - but the new space threw us all. We’re on some kind of cobbled-together platform, placing our thighs at about eye-level with the audience. Good for visibility, not so great for intimate connection with a group of strangers. There’s a kind of power dynamic at play in the placement of performers and audience, and for this work I think we need to be seen as equals. The good news is that I think we maintained that sense of having a conversation which we found last week in Bloomington.

The fun part about being right in the face of an audience that you can see fairly clearly is that every time you look out, you get immediate feedback. Well-tuned (or maybe just very intuitive) actors can, I think, feel an audience’s energy and response to each moment without seeing them. But when you can see them, as individuals, it’s a very different sort of interplay. Brings a whole new appreciation for the conditions Shakespeare’s actors worked in.

Anyway, there’s this one older gentleman in the house, sitting by himself, practically scowling through the whole production. His eyes are fixed on us, he’s paying attention, but from the look on his face he doesn’t care at all for what he sees. He’s almost sneering at some points. He must hate it. The funny thing is, I would swear I’ve seen him in the audience at other performances.

Off to calm down and try to rest.

Great Blog!

my London life

Paul Miller's engaging diary of life as a director. Excellent. Go read it. Now. :)

Intro and current project

I’ve decided, due to the relative dearth of viable theatre-oriented blogs currently available on the internet, to start my own. I’m not entirely sure what rules, if any, there are here...so I’ll make some up on my own. I want to blog about professional or academic observations on theatre and a life in the theatre. I’ll try to keep remarks about my personal life to a minimum, as this is intended to be a place for my own expounding about theatre and its practice from my point of view. Huh.

More about me....
I’m a 27 year-old actor/singer/writer/director-wannabe (does that qualify me yet for Julie Taymor’s “TheatreMaker” title? Probably not...*sigh*) originally from Virginia, currently something of a vagabond.

The current show:
Right now, I’m working for a company in Minneapolis, MN, on a production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

Notes on the current show:
Actually, it’s going quite well, despite multiple annoyances.

We started working on this production (my third of this show so far) in November. We had a one-night-only performance in Duluth and then took a month off. We came back in December for the real first run in Minneapolis, which was just plain weird. To take a month off and then return? For only two useful rehearsals (a run and then, horror of horrors, a technical-and-dress in the space)? Very difficult on all of us. Lots of griping (not all of it good natured) amongst the cast.

The show took a couple of days to solidify. Duh. Unfortunately, the critics were invited to opening night. This was a fubar, since the review aren’t printed in t he local press until Sunday. The reviews were okay - yours truly wasn’t mentioned in any of them, both a blessing and a curse.

Anyway, the weird thing about this particular show - and I know this from experience - is that it just grows. It gets stronger with every performance. As the performers become more comfortable with the material, in front of an audience, walls come down -- especially the fourth wall, which is essential to this material, conceived as a cabaret.

“Cabaret is the refuge of the diehard romantic” - maybe not relevant but a fascinating idea from a former director.

The whole purpose of the cabaret is to acknowledge the audience, to tell the stories directly to them, to have a conversation with them, rather than performing at them.

I don’t know if we were ever entirely successful at this during our run in December. I only know that our Sunday matinee (closing night) was far stronger than our opening night.

We just finished a run in Bloomington, MN. After 7 weeks off (!!!) we’ve come back to tour a couple of suburbs.

(Side note - our director, recently free of his affiliation with the producing company, has mentioned to me that he may try to sell the show in other venues later in the year, acting as producer. I think it’s a great idea. I really will be doing this show for the rest of my life).

The show in Bloomington, even after such a long absence, was awesome. It started off strong and just kept getting better. People in the audience raved on opening night, and were nearly beside themselves by our closing. And this has everything to do with the space we were performing in. There’s something about space -- some Theatre just aren’t conducive to actual connection with an audience. To facilitate that feeling of connection, you have to push, which is never a good thing. Our theatre in December held just over 200, but the stage was huge, a vast expanse, and the audience (all but obscured by our lighting) was seated on a steep angle above us. In Bloomington, our theatre was small, holding only 100 in barely formal seating. Our stage was small and in their laps. Perfect for this material.

I guess I should say, for the sake of anyone who’s ever done this particular show, that my first experience with it was very intimate, performing it as a real cabaret in bars and nightclubs, so maybe my perceptions are colored by that experience -- however, that experience has proved invaluable to my education and growth as an actor. What a relief to be able to recognize that the audience -- in rehearsal just a figment, a nonentity -- is actually there! They exist! They live and breathe and, by God, you’re working for them, so how dare you ignore them! No one in the Globe was afforded the possibility of ignoring the audience, and really this seems most ideal for many productions.

But I’m digressing.

The bloomington theatre, at eye-level with the entire house, was perfect for us -- I felt that the entire cast finally took ownership of the show, finally got it. I only hope that we can carry that sensation with us into our other venue.

Our other venue:
Tomorrow night we open in Hopkins, MN. The theatre is small, seating just over 100, but this time we’re on a raised platform in front of the audience, and the footlights our director has installed are blinding, which will make it difficult to see the house. That’s a tradeoff, I guess. We weren’t adequately lit in Bloomington, but we could make eye contact with almost everyone watching the performance. Now we’re adequately lit, alright, but we won’t be able to see the faces of anyone. I’m wondering if I should bring this up -- although tonight was our tech, and it’s probably too late to do anything about the light levels. I’m almost tempted to engage our stage manager (whom I positively adore) into a bit of subversive activity. “Could you raise the house lights just a little? Or lower the stage lights ten more points than you did last night? Pretty please?”

Our director -- well, I love him to death. I’ve been working with him for years, as a voice coach, as a staging director, and as a friend. He has a remarkable, innate grasp of the theatrical. He knows his showy stagecraft, and he does it all by instinct and years of practice as a performer. But. He doesn’t grasp what a cabaret is really about. Intellectually, maybe he does, but not in practice. He can’t let go of the theatrical device...which is both help and hindrance. I can’t talk to him anymore about the need to connect with an audience, to have a conversation with them. He just won’t get it. He refuses to see that the wrong lighting can actually get in the way, or the wrong staging (our choreography is painfully showy. This isn’t a Broadway production, we shouldn’t be dancing as though it is).

Anyway, we’ll see.

What about those annoyances?
Well, there are several. First of all, our producing organization, an NPO which shall remain nameless, is the most dysfunctional company I’ve ever seen. The artistic director...well, he shouldn’t be. He’s a fantastic accompanist and a very skilled music director. But he has no business being in charge of artistic decisions for this company. He’s repeatedly failed to return phone calls or to make appropriate arrangements for it’s members. One member of our cast is an Equity actor...and she’s endured more than any actor should -- like performing without a contract, waiting weeks to receive payment, etc. Come on, this is an art, but it’s also a job. She’s a mother, for Pete’s sake! And the rest of the cast was recently contacted about the high likelihood that our paychecks would be delayed for a month or more. Nothing is more demoralizing to a troupe of performers. We love what we do, but we also expect that the people who hire us to do it will recognize our value and treat us accordingly. Luckily, we’re all able to joke about it...but it still sucks, and I doubt any of us will work for this company again.

Another problem:
One of actors has come down with the flu and her voice is shot. So we’re reassigning her songs to the remaining cast members, since we don’t have understudies. Fun stuff. If she doesn’t recover by tomorrow night, I’ll be learning the opening number to the show. Whee!

I know this entry has been long-winded. I’ll try to be a bit more economical in the future. Here’s to a great run in Hopkins!