Theater Talk

12 Q 4 Christine Jones: Creating “Theater for One,” Designing “American Idiot”

Davi Napoleon — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:17:11 +0000

American Idiot and Theater for One make Christine Jones the
designer of one the biggest–and the smallest–shows on the
Rialto.

It takes an original mind to think so far inside a box that the whole concept of theater gets turned on its head until it finds itself right side up. And it takes an unusual designer to create a stage space that doesn’t allow room for many design elements.

Scenic designer Christine Jones’s Theatre for One goes way beyond usual definitions of intimate theater, allowing a single spectator to experience the work of one performer in a tiny space. On May 14, the project comes to Times Square, where about 300 ten-minute performances will occur.

Not that Jones is a stranger to large scale projects. She was recognized with Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for her first venture on the Rialto, Julie Taymor’s The Green Bird. She also created the Tony-nominated design for Spring Awakening and is in the process of adapting her design for American Idiot, on its way to Broadway from the Berkeley Rep for a March 24 opening. See a trailer for the Berkeley Rep production here.

Jones juggles her design career with caring for her two small children–actor Dallas Roberts, their dad, is sometimes away on location–as well as with teaching at NYU, where she studied with John Conklin. That, she says, means she must limit projects to those that deeply interest her.

After assisting Tony Walton for a time, she began designing at major regional theaters, including the Hartford Stage Company (Mark Lamos discovered her), the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Center Stage in Baltimore, the McCarter in Princeton, the Yale Rep in New Haven, the Seattle Rep, the South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, the Wilma in Philadelphia, and the American Rep in Cambridge, where I first enjoyed her imaginative and whimsical designs. She’s also designed Off-Broadway and for opera companies.

In an interview with David Johnson, editorial director of Live Design magazine, Jones said she works from the text, beginning with how characters will use the space she is creating. She does research to enhance this understanding before she begins model building. She told Johnson she wanted to be a dancer before she got involved with a theater company in Montréal, where she grew up, and before she started studying literature at Concordia University there.

When we spoke a few days ago, she was excited about doing a big show on Broadway and a tiny show on Broadway. “I’m enjoying the juxtaposition of doing these two shows,” she said. I asked her a few questions about each.

Thinking Inside the Box

Photo by Danny Bright

DN: Theater for One would be less surprising to me if an actor had come up with the idea. But designers, well, designers usually want a larger canvas. What draws you to it?

CJ: Ultimately it all comes down to the relationship between the actor and the audience. I’m interested in exploring the relationship in its most pure form. Any staging and design happens to support and enhance that, but at its core, that’s what at the heart of a theatrical event. The idea of taking public events and making them private is compelling. A relationship is hard to achieve when you’re dealing with the ratio in a typical 500 seat or 1,000 seat theater. There’s no question that both people are dependent on each other for the piece to live. I love getting back to what we do and why we do it. We go to theater to experience something outside of ourselves and to connect with a story or piece of music. My goal in any theater is to try to make it feel like it’s being created for each spectator.

DN: That’s an amazing idea. How did you come up with it?

CJ: I was at a wedding, and a magician performed a magic trick in close proximity to me. I had been thinking about sacred spaces, and that was the light-bulb moment. I felt what a charge it is to experience something you would normally witness in a public arena in a more private and intimate way.

I’ve continued to experiment. What happens if you perform music? What kinds of texts lend themselves to this? I have a toy pianist and a magician. I’m also working with excerpts from books. In Times Square we’ll have literature, poetry, music, dance, and theater.

DN: What sort of theater?

CJ: I’ve asked playwrights to write new pieces for particular performers. The more I do this, the more I am interested in the idea of it being a kind of gift exchange. The playwright writes for a performer who passes that gift on to an audience member. The more personal each part of the process is, the more palpable the energy.

DN: And they’ll write monologues?

CJ: In a way, they’re dialogues. There’s no need for the other person in the booth to say anything, but the other person becomes a character. It happens without you realizing it…The playwrights also have to imagine that Times Square may be buzzing in the background. The booth is not fully soundproofed.

DN: It sounds like Times Square might not be a perfect venue?

CJ: Putting Theater for One into a theater is easy. You have a dimmer system, an audience waiting area, a backstage for performers to wait for their turns….I see this as something that could be put into the lobby of a theater…..This is an opportunity for me to learn a lot of the other areas that go into making theater. It requires reaching out to writers and performers and asking anybody I know who knows anything about theater how you sell tickets, how you raise money.

DN: Are you a one-person production team?

CJ: I have a great stage manager. Maybe I’ll have my dad come and help me man the booth.

DN: And you’ll be projecting the performances from the booth so that passerby can see them, too?

CJ: A part of me was feeling I had this responsibility to open it up, but it’s best to honor what it is, so we’re not going to do that. Projecting it is such a pale version of what the live performance is. Someday, I hope we’ll have multiple booths or a booth up for a longer time. For now, it will be there for ten days.

Moving through Time on Broadway

DN: There’s a lot of buzz about Green Day’s American Idiot. The band won two Grammys for

American Idiot at the Berkeley Rep

the rock opera and a nomination for a new release, 21^st Century Breakdown, that also figures in the show. People are predicting a long run for this production, billed as the story of young Americans struggling to find meaning in a post 9/11 world. You’ve done two other Broadway musicals. What draws you to this one?

CJ: It’s largely the same team of people, (as Spring Awakening) and it even feels thematically like there’s a kind of connection between the two. Spring Awakening is the story of youth trying to find a voice in the late 1800s, then fast forward to 2002, not exactly the present but almost, and again a story of people trying to find a way within society and find a voice. The lead character is played by the same actor. We left him in 1871 and pick him up again. Working with the same lighting designer (Kevin Adams) and director (Michael Mayer) makes it feel like we’re creating the next chapter.

Also, relationships develop with a technical director and scene shops and props people-it’s great to continue working with people I have such a good time with.

DN: The show originated at the Berkeley Rep. Are you bringing the scenery in or doing something new in New York?

CJ: We did it there, and they were amazing. They did such a phenomenal job of creating the set we have brought that set with us. It’s at Hudson Scenic and its being tailored to fit into a different theater. I worked with them for The Green Bird and Spring Awakening, so it’s my third go-round with them.

DN: What is that set like?

CJ: It’s a unit set that has that has pieces that fly in and fly out and move within the set. It’s an extremely kinetic environment. The concepts of the room are active, even though the room doesn’t shift.

I got excited about doing theater in Montréal, after seeing a lot of the French companies that combine multimedia work and dance. This is one of the most physical productions I’ve done.

DN: How does that physicality affect the design?

CJ: All the furniture pieces are on wheels, and a scaffolding piece is on a rolling ladder. Performers rolling around on things and climbing interact in an extremely choreographed way with furniture elements in the room. We have people flying at a couple of different moments.

DN: What sort of changes has the design been going through since it left Berkeley?

CJ: Basically, we added a few scenic elements for particular numbers and made some adjustments in some of the video and lighting. It’s an organic process. We let ideas reveal themselves and then we know we need another element to come in.

Because this is a group of people who know each other, there’s a real flow of communication, and it’s a really generous process. It’s a big show, a challenging show. It doesn’t have a book, so we’re working extra hard to tell the story through design and staging.

Some people may say there’s not enough of a book, and some Green Day fans may say it’s too much like a musical, but nobody can deny the sheer force of energy that’s coming off the stage.

Watch for a story here about American Idiot: from Berkeley to Broadway. Also coming in Theater Talk: Can Playwriting Be Taught? Playwrights share their views. Plus interviews with two members of the Trinity Repertory Company & Brown University/Trinity Rep Conservatory consortium, and an interview Robert Brustein.

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Why Didn’t You Get That Role?

Davi Napoleon — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:39:25 +0000

Why didn’t you get the part?

Why didn’t [Insert Name] Theater want to produce your play?

Tootsie auditions

I have the answers. All of them. And, while it may be you need to train more before you’re ready to take your place on stage, or that your script needs a workshop and three more rewrites, there are other answers. Better answers.

Robert Kalfin, who has directed on Broadway, off-Broadway, and at some top regionals, tells actors who are about to audition for him that they shouldn’t feel they’ve failed if they don’t get the role. “If I’m looking for green and you’re a terrific blue, I’ll go with someone who’s green, but that doesn’t mean you’re not just as good,” he explains.

5 possible reasons why you didn’t get the role

Mary-Louise Parker or Jeremy Irons wanted it. You’re a little better, maybe, but you aren’t a huge draw.

You were paid more than Equity minimum last time you performed at [Insert Name], and [Insert Name] is looking for someone less expensive.

You selected a monologue from a play the director did in Seattle last year. She remembers the polished performance she got from her lead after collaborating on a character concept during a long rehearsal process. You have your own ideas about the character.

You look a lot like the director’s mother, father, estranged brother-in-law.

You are taller or shorter or heavier or thinner than the director imagines the character is. You ooze blue; he wants green.

5 possible reasons why Theater [Insert Name] isn’t doing your play

[Insert Name] has a budget for two-character plays. Your play has 86 characters and requires 19 set changes.

[Insert Name] was trying to balance its next season and they already had a comedy with tragic overtones.

Your play is brilliant-but not right for [Insert Name]’s audience.

Your play is brilliant-but none of the actors [Insert Name] uses regularly are right for the lead roles.

Nine playwrights submitted scripts that were perfect for [Insert Name]. They do eight shows a season.

Share your experiences

I’d like to hear from people on both sides of the audition table. In the comment box below, please share your experiences:

Why didn’t you get that role or see your play produced this season?

Why didn’t you cast some of the good actors who auditioned or produce some of the fine plays you read?

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7Q4 Ron Daniels: On Directing Film, Opera, Theater

Davi Napoleon — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:48:39 +0000

Ron Daniels

Ron Daniels was born in 1942 in Brazil, and if you saw his productions of Shakespeare or Chekhov, you know he was born to direct plays.

I discovered Daniels in 1992, when he was associate artistic director of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, MA. Okay, other people discovered him before I did, in London, where he was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, for a time. And others before them, when he was working in São Paulo, Brazil, at Teatro Oficina, which he co-founded.

He’d also done quite a bit of acting in other countries and directing in and out of the United States, at places like the Guthrie, the Yale Rep, and the Long Wharf.

So when I looked him up recently, I was surprised to learn that he’s not directing theater much these days. He’s pursuing his first love, which turns out is the movies. And he’s been directing a lot of opera, too.

Theater, film, opera: Directing is directing, right? Just how different from each other could they be?

I figured I knew the answers until I asked Ron Daniels the questions.

DN: What draws you to the movies?

RD: I’ve always wanted to make movies. I never saw any theater until I was 17. I was born in a little town across the bay from Rio, and there was no theater in the town. There was a movie theater literally next door to my building. Then I came to the States and went to Camp Rising Sun, and I directed my first play, and acted, and fell in love with the theater. I became a theater student and professional actor, but I always wanted to do movies.

I had done two plays with Naomi Wallace at the A.R.T. and the Public, and

The War Boys

we started working on a film script. It took ten years to raise the money for it. The War Boys is not a commercial piece. We worked with a minimal amount of money, minimal support, and fabulous actors, a fabulous crew.

DN: How did it go?

The actual directing of the movie was about avoiding disaster. We knew we had 23 days and not a second longer to get all the film into the can. The day’s quota of scenes had to be fulfilled no mater what happened-sandstorms, disappearing props. It was nerve wracking and scary, and the bizarre thing is it all looks so calm and controlled and completely different from what it actually was. I had a very good director of photography and a very good editor.

The War Boys

DN: How did you avert disaster?

RD: You look at the last scene of the film, for instance, and perhaps you don’t realize the light changes considerably. That scene was shot on four days in four different locations. On the day we were scheduled to shoot it, we were in the desert. We could see a storm approaching. By then, we were not only on a tight schedule, some of the actors had to leave. We were only scheduled for that location for one day, and by the time we resumed in another location, they had already left and the arm that descends with a gun isn’t necessarily the arm belonging to the same actor. You can play all sorts of tricks like that.

Costumes disappeared and we needed the same costumes for different scenes. The day we shot the boat ride, the release of the boat didn’t work. I’m pretty sure this sort of thing is normal.

The incredible difference between working in theater or opera and the movies is, to a very large extent, you’re working under reasonably controlled conditions. You know when previews start and when you open. You know you’re going to rehearse in a quiet room. The model of the set is presented to you, and when it becomes the set on stage, there are very few surprises; it’s a bigger version of little model.

You don’t know if the play is going to work, or if actors are going to come up with the goods, but in the movies nothing is controlled. You arrive on set you booked, and there are two other film crews there. You have to improvise. We never knew exactly when the film was going to start shooting. There was no predictability but a continual sense of endless obstacles.

DN: Did that drive you crazy or fuel your creativity?

RD: I was scared, partly since I knew if I didn’t get everything I had to get into the camera by the end of the day, my investors would have no film to show for their investment. In the theater, if you lose your set, you can still perform.

DN: Yet, after doing a short and then a full movie, you have only one theater production in the works. You’re working on several film scripts, in different stages of development. You’ve written a horror movie and co-written a Southern gothic thriller and an urban comedy. You’re beginning a project about the British army. And you want to make these movies. After all you’ve been through, why? Why??

RD: I’ve worked all my life in the story-telling business, and yet I have nothing to show for it. I have people’s memories of productions and photographs, some reviews, yet nothing to show for a lifetime of working in theater. That’s okay. That’s what you expect. Theater exists at that moment, and that is its joy and uniqueness.

Madame Butterfly

On the other hand, now I can dub a copy of my movie and send it anywhere. I can’t change performances anymore. It’s no longer a living thing, whereas I’ve done a production of Madam Butterfly with 15 different Butterflies in different cities. It’s still a living thing, the same, but different. I’m not saying that anything is better anything else.

DN: So tell me about opera. You’re doing Mozart’s Cosi van Tutti in Arizona, then a new Tosca in Colorado, then a new opera inspired by the film Il Postino, with Placido Domingo singing the role of Pablo Neruda-I heard that’s scheduled to open in LA next summer and then move on to Vienna and Paris. So, what is it like to direct an opera?

RD: Apart from all the ideas you may have had about the work, in opera, ultimately it’s the music that dictates what you have to do. The music dictates, bar by bar measure by measure. If something needs to be done, you can sense it. In theater, there’s a rhythm and dynamic, and you have to discover that dynamic. In opera, that dynamic is presented to you.

Another interesting thing about opera, in theater, I divide the stage in half, and I sit on the center line. When I’m directing opera, I sit slightly to the right. The person who sits center line is quite rightly the conductor, who is also, by the way, a performer. The relationship with the conductor and singers is a much closer one that the relationship between the stage director and the singers. The conductor knows the opera far better than you do.

One of the things a stage director does not do in opera, unless he does it with great diplomacy or even through different channels, he doesn’t have anything to do with the actual music. The tempi and anything to do with the actual singing are established by the conductor. If you think he is taking this too slowly, it is his domain, so often you have to rely on a word to the artistic director.

DN: Does any of that feel restrictive?

RD: Freedom is awareness of necessity. That’s very much what happens with the music.

The music does something else as well; the music allows the work for to soar. Not to denigrate any actor, but when you’re working with singers, they have been vigorously trained and they are vigorously prepared from the first day of rehearsal. If the singer isn’t off book and can’t sing the role flawlessly, there is likelihood he would get fired. It is conventionally thought that the theater actor must arrive tabula rasa, without any notion of the part. That’s not what all actors do, but many refuse to learn the part until the play is blocked.

Also, in opera you’re dealing with much larger organizations. When you do an opera, you’re dealing with a cast of 60 or 80 or100 people, so to a very large extent you have to have done a lot of homework. You’re not going to sit around the table for days on end discovering what the play is about, working through all the themes, and agonizing about its meaning. You don’t have time for that.

On the first day of rehearsal you’re already moving the singers around. You are giving them the interpretation through the staging and through your notion of character, and they, too, have notions of their character.

DN: I’m happy to hear you’re managing to direct some theater also–

Henry IV at A.R.T.

Taming of the Shrew in San Diego this spring, for instance. How is collaboration different in the theater?

RD: In theater, you are much more vulnerable, and the actors are much more vulnerable. The experience is much more intense. In opera, the music tells you, so you’re safe. In theater, you get to know the people you’re working with much more closely because they don’t have that musical technique and that safety net to rely upon.

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What’s Wrong with Facebook? Let Me List the Flaws

Davi Napoleon — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:33:07 +0000

I know what you’re going to say. On the face of it, we’re talking about a wonderful tool that allows me the luxury of never leaving the house when I want to spend time with loved ones. I don’t need to go to gatherings or parties. I don’t need to yap on the phone. Facebook Friends are always there, whenever I need them. If they haven’t updated in the last two hours or so, I can always poke them.

It’s no problem that I’ve lost track of some close friends. If these so-called friends cared about what I do each day, if they wanted to get birthday greetings from me, if they missed seeing photos of the kids, they’d start a page and add me, right?

And hey, Facebook encourages honesty and integrity. I can’t say one thing to my friends, another thing to my family. All my Friends, including some of my editors, a few of my sources, and people I hardly know, receive exactly the same intensely personal messages from me.

Still, there is something deeply wrong with Facebook.

The lists.

Facebook provides places for me to list my favorite music, TV shows, movies, quotations, and books. Maybe you’ll think I shouldn’t make a big production out of this, but, and this has been bothering me from the day I signed on, Facebook does not ask for my favorite productions or my favorite theater artists.

I took a look at how some of my Facebook theater Friends cope. Playwright Russ Schwartz takes a line from Sam Shepard as one of his favorite quotations. Playwright Jason Sebacher includes Twelfth Night, Angels in America, The Zoo Story, Waiting for Godot, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Arcadia among his favorite books. On his page, director Keith Paul Medelis puts Edward Albee in an exalted position. Musician, composer, sound designer Bruce Richardson includes quotations from Oscar Wilde and Tom Stoppard. Among the quotations on lighting designer Nick Van Houten’s page are words of wisdom spoken by other lighting designers, Jennifer Tipton, Peggy Eisenhower, and Howell Binkley. Ragtime is one of his books, but it isn’t clear if he’s referring to the musical or, you know, the thing with pages.

Some of my theater Friends haven’t gotten around to any of the lists. Go figure.

Whose Hamlet is it Anyway?

The problem with listing plays as books is that they’re incomplete books.

The Facebook Friend-makers must know this on some level. They provide a category for favorite movies, not favorite screenplays, which only represent part of what you see on screen. TV? Same thing.

Movie lovers can decide if they like Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet or Campbell Scott’s Hamlet or Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet. They can make distinctions not only between different interpretations of a role but varied interpretations of the play-turned-movie by those who adapt and direct it. Hamlet is never just Hamlet, a play by William Shakespeare, and that’s what makes Shakespeare’s play so good.

But if I want to list my favorite stage Hamlets, where’s the place for that?

Facebook needs new categories, theater categories: Favorite actors, favorite directors, favorite producers, favorite scenic designers, favorite lighting designers, favorite sound designers, favorite projection designers, favorite playwrights, favorite productions.

Hell, Facebook categories ought to be at least as complete as those for the Tonys. Best actor in a musical, best supporting actor in a play, best regional theater.

Of course, there also should be a category that both Facebook and the Tonys miss: favorite theater critics and essayists.

So I made my own lists, covering all the categories, and I began to post it here.

Which is when I figured out the real problem with Facebook.

The Lists.

My lists were a mess. I left out artists I loved. I put some in who blew me away with recent work but whose overall achievements I didn’t really know. The lists didn’t say a whole lot about me and, more important, they said nothing about the artists.

Because they were lists. Not reviews. Not thought out explorations of roles performed, sets designed, plays written. Just lists. I was telling friends and readers what I liked but not why.

Hey, so maybe Facebook lists aren’t so different from Tony Awards, after all.

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This Las Vegas Judge Rules

Davi Napoleon — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:57:57 +0000

When parents at a local high school tried to stop student productions of Rent and The Laramie Project, District Court judge David Wall denied a request for a preliminary injunction, ruling that no irreparable harm would occur if the shows went on.

It’s easy to understand why parents wanted to stop the shows. One day the kids are doing Rent, the next they discover La Boheme, and then before you know it, they’re seriously into opera. After that, who knows? String quartets?? And Laramie? It’s a documentary!! What next? The History Channel??

It’s a slippery slope, let me tell you.

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Bustin’ with Bliss: 5Q4 Ernie Harburg

Davi Napoleon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:46:39 +0000

Some things are worth working for and waiting for. A commemorative stamp. A book. A pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, for instance.

Ernie Harburg is used to waiting. It took him five years to convince the United States Postal Service to feature his dad, lyricist Yip Harburg, on a 37c stamp that was finally issued in 2005. Harburg traveled around the country meeting members of a selection committee that shifted every couple of years. Eventually, Yip’s great friend, actor Karl Malden, was part of the committee, and Ernie knew who to approach. The rest is postal and theater history.

It took Harburg even longer to get a book out about the Del Rio, a bar and restaurant he co-owned in Ann Arbor, where he was a University of Michigan social psychologist and epidemiologist. From 1970 to 2003, owners and workers shared in a unique collaboration that included decision by consensus and some profit sharing. Like father Yip, Ernie’s interest was less in running a business than in creating a world.

With his late wife, Torry, daughter of a labor union activist, and two other partners, he invented a space that welcomed everyone. Local members of the Democratic Party gathered. Lesbian, gay and straight couples felt equally at home. And budding jazz musicians developed their chops at the Del; there was never a cover charge. Harburg wanted to tell the Del story even before the place closed, but finding a collaborator and a publisher took time. This month, the book hit the shelves, and Harburg’s selected collection of his dad’s lyrics is likely to see print next year.

“With a little bit of luck and a little bit of tenacity, you can make a lot of things happen,” Harburg

said, as notices for the Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow began to pour in, these ranging from favorable to out-and-out raves. Now he’s waiting and working toward a national tour of the show, a CD, maybe an animated version.

But this is far from an overnight success story. In 1981, shortly after his father’s death, Ernie became president of the Harburg Foundation and began planning the revival.

I asked him to tell me about the obstacles he encountered on the road to a pot o’ gold.

DN: So why didn’t we see this show in the early 80’s?

Ernie Harburg

EH: It was hard for the producers to get financial backing for the original because of the belief that the show indicated liberal or left-wing positions in an atmosphere of Cold War.

In the 80’s, we couldn’t get any producer on Broadway to take it up because of what they called ‘racial matters.’ The senator is based on two real people, a senator and a representative who used to talk about “Communist Niggers” on the floor. But you weren’t supposed to say anything in the 80’s because of the PC thing. Producers didn’t like the social agenda and racial aspects, but they all admitted the score was fantastic.

DN: What changed? Was it hard to find a producer to do this in 2009?

A maverick producer, a young guy, second generation, David Richenthal, had an unusual track record. He just did straight plays, the best American plays, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller. He dug the serious intent of Finian’s Rainbow. Almost ten years ago, he said he wanted to do it, then he disappeared for three years, then he came back, and then he disappeared again. The third time, he showed up when Obama got elected. They wanted to try it out first in Encores to see what happened, and they got very positive reviews.

David set out to put the show on. He met with the director and artistic director. Deena [Deena Rosenberg, who created the musical theater program at NYU, is Harburg’s wife] got the producers to hire an excellent playwright, Art Perlman, to adapt it to the current year, and Deena found some of the actors. All in all, it shaped up good.

Although “socialist” has again become an oft-used accusation by conservatives, the major issues of our time include easy credit and its consequences, the pressure of necessity versus pleasure for poor people, the way people divided by race work against each other instead of together for mutual economic benefit.

Finian’s Rainbow opened in ‘47, but everything in there is just as contemporary today. Then, it was one of the most daring shows in the musical theater. It required collaboration among 50 people, and it was very difficult. Yip was always the muscle on his shows. He would be everywhere and do everything, so he was a one-man executive putting up shows. The same thing with Finian’s, at that time, racism was very very strong, even though the civil rights movement started when guys got out of army. This was not a musical comedy and not a musical play. It was a musical satire, and it was original, not an adaptation of a novel. He could say whatever he wanted, and consequently he said a great deal about racism and about the economy. The critics couldn’t knock it because the score was sensational. Every song was show-stopping quality.

Racism is not as overt as it used to be, but it still exists. Black and white are not the only factors any more. By the way, there is still no black person in the Senate. All are white and rich. Some things haven’t changed at all, the huge divide between rich and poor, Southern racism. The mark of a great work is that it is timely and timeless at the same time.

Of course, the satire of our economic system is particularly relevant right now, given the nation’s deep financial woes. Yip and his collaborators, Fred and composer Burton Lane, didn’t like to hit people over the heads with political messages. They couched their politics in witty whimsical dialogues and songs that are classics–but also, in the case of the satiric ones, are more than entertainment. They’re social commentaries in miniature–Necessity, When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich, and so on.

DN: So George Bush did one good thing—he made this revival relevant. Still you made a lot of changes in the book, and maybe the most talked about has to do with a white senator who learns to empathize after a leprechaun transforms him into a black man. In the 1947 original production, a white actor wore blackface for those scenes. Now, you have two actors of similar builds, one white, one black. Is this a change you wanted?

EH: I’ve been watching different versions since 1982, and I had a list of wants. First on the list is you can’t have a man putting on shoe polish. We Harburgs and the director and producers accepted that there be two actors, one white, one black. The press and the public completely buy into this, and I’m amazed and delighted at how well it works.

We also talked about the use of sharecroppers. It can’t be just a chorus line, the usual routine that came up in 1920s with Ziegfield. It had to be a Greek chorus, a community losing land.

The ending has changed over the years, too. Yip and Fred changed the ending in 1980 and since then it has been different in every production from Goodspeed to Hess to Irish Rep to Broadway. In 1947, Yip and Fred thought nuclear energy could be a positive force for peaceful change. When they realized countries wanted nuclear energy to make bombs, they took out the lines near the end implying this. They put in the ending lines, “Sharon, where is Glocca Morra,” “It’s that faraway place, a little beyond your reach but never beyond your hope.” Finian is a character who brings hope wherever goes. He brought it to Rainbow Valley when he arrived, and he takes the power to give it away with him when he leaves. After those lines, in the new ending the ensembles sings, “So to every weeping willow…,” a reprise of Glocca Morra. Glocco Morra in Gaelic means “Lucky Tomorrow.”

DN: People love Yip’s lyrics now as much as they did in 1947. Is it partly because we crave a lucky tomorrow?

EH: In 1947, no one had ever heard them, so the score was brand new and immediately highly praised. Since then, musical theater aficionados know many of the songs, and most people have heard Devil Moon and Glocca Morra. But most are not in everyone’s ear like, say, Rogers and Hammerstein songs. So for most people, it seems they are hearing a new score, for the first time. When that score moves from Gospel and blues to folk music to Broadway ballads to Irish-inflected gavottes and Americanized European waltzes, each song tops the next.

DN: You were raised by your aunt in a working-class home, while Yip was in California, writing lyrics. When he brought you out there, it was culture shock. You had a first-hand look at the idle rich. How does this inform your understanding of Yip’s work?

EH: After that, I went to Antioch, then to the Army, and I had plenty of time to read and think about things, like religion, which I rejected. After the War, I went to Europe with Tori, and we saw the devastation there. It reminded me of Yip’s parents coming over from Russia and settling on the lower East Side [of New York] in a six-floor walkup with no electricity and no hot water. Yip learned to play the harmonic and the guitar, and the first thing you hear in Finian’s Rainbow is a harmonica, after the orchestra stops. Then the hero, Woody, has a guitar, which he can’t play—those were the two musical instruments.

When I cameback to New York, it was the Depression, and Yip wrote his first major song, the anthem of the Depression, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Then he wrote April in Paris and Paper Moon, in the space of three months. But in college, he majored in science because he wanted to make money and get his parents out of the sweat shops.

He was captain of the neighborhood baseball team when I was growing up, and he taught me how to throw a curve ball and explained the Bernoulli’s principle. He paid me to write poetry, and I did–five cents a poem was a lot at that time–but I followed the research path.

Yip wrote the first feminist and civil rights musical, Bloomer Girl, and the first an anti-war musical, Hooray for What! He was a Rooseveltian social democrat, but he was labeled a Communist pinko and blacklisted from Hollywood. He said Broadway was the only place an artist could practice his craft, if he had money.

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Photo of Ernie Harburg and stamp courtesy of Harburg Foundation, photo of Finian’s Rainbow courtesy of Richard Kornberg and Associates

Swine Flu: Coming to a Theater Near You

Davi Napoleon — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:57:22 +0000

Okay, so you’re at the theater, and it’s intermission. Since you washed your hands before leaving home, you can have a snack without wasting time visiting a crowded restroom just to wash again, right?

All you’ve done, after all, is hang on to a subway bar or turn the door handle of a cab, touch the tickets you picked up at the box office, pocket a tag that allows you to retrieve your checked coat, take the program from the friendly usher, and touch your armrest briefly as you sit.

The latest from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that flu activity is widespread in 48 states, week of October 18-24, 2009, and the best way to prevent it, short of a vaccine, is to make like Lady Macbeth and wash obsessively.

Here’s a 30 second clip that had me laughing until it reached the last chilling frame.

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Photo from CDC website.

Thanks to Paul Courant, who allowed me to sit in on his team-taught public policy class at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and to Janine Maddock whose share of the lecture focused on Swine flu. Maddock showed the toothbrush clip in class.

Humping in the Aisles: Love’s Labour’s Not Lost in Ann Arbor

Davi Napoleon — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:56:53 +0000

A curtain never went up and lights never went down when the University Musical Society (UMS) brought the Shakespeare Globe’s perky Love’s Labour’s Lost to the Power Center in Ann Arbor. Musicians played in the lobby before the show began, and actors garbed in lush Renaissance gowns fed us grapes during intermission. Spectators howled with laughter at bawdy bits and vulgarisms that clarified the text. In this frankly theatrical production, actors used the aisles as entrances and playing spaces—one found his way to a spectator’s lap for a time—and we felt so much a part of the rollicking event that by the time we stood as one to applaud, it felt as though we were applauding ourselves.

This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to see the Globe under Dominic Dromgoole’s direction. About six years ago, UMS brought in the Globe’s delightful Twelfth Night, staged by then artistic director Mark Rylance, who cast men in all the female roles, as had been done back in the day.

Dromgoole, who directed this production, gave no sense that he wanted to recreate anything from the past. Actors spent time around a table before physical work began so they could be on the same page, with a shared understanding of each line, and then they went wild. As for larger concepts, Dromgoole says he has none. The company works collectively, and he doesn’t try to put a big idea ahead of the process. For this play, he was careful not to let the dark end of the play intrude on the lightness that precedes. “It’s always the great crime to start at the end … [of a play] that’s full of optimism,” he said to a group that gathered for a talk after one performance.

Composer Clair van Kampen says there are two elements that set the tone: the characters are young, and the better part of the play occurs outdoors, allowing a story that involves a king and princess to unravel unencumbered by the formality of English court life.

As the Globe Turns

The trickiest business about touring, most companies agree, is adapting a show quickly to a new space. In London, they do this production in an outdoor space. In the United States, they are adjusting to indoor acoustics and assorted stage configurations. Jonathan Fensom’s whimsical scenery seems relatively easy to move and set up, but you would think that actors engaged in fast physical comedy might find it difficult to move comfortably about a new space. Maybe because the actors have worked together for a time, and not just on this show, their comfort with each other makes it easier to become comfortable in new surroundings. It makes little sense to single out any performance in a company so tight, but I would advise readers to go anywhere round the globe to see Fergal McElherron’s Costard. Just saying.

Does the company have to adjust to American audiences? It didn’t in Ann Arbor, and I doubt it will—not when a production is as lucid and as over-the-top funny as this one is, and audiences here get it so easily.

I’m constantly impressed by the University Musical Society’s ability to find productions that remind us what theater is and can be. Next up: UMS brings the Maly Drama Theater from St. Petersburg to do Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Next for the Globe’s Love’s Labour’s Lost: Philadelphia PA, Berkeley CA, Davis CA, Santa Barbara CA, Santa Monica CA, Holyoke MA, and New York, NY.

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Compulsory Casting: Is the Demand Legit?

Davi Napoleon — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:32:35 +0000

Here’s the story: When playwright Rebecca Gilman (photo left) adapted The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for the stage, she wrote speeches for a character who is deaf and mute in Carson McCullers’ novel.

Here’s the problem: Henry Stram, the actor playing this deaf and mute character, can hear and speak. The New York Times reports that the production at the New York Theater Workshop drew protests from deaf actors and advocacy organizations for the deaf and disabled.

Some insist that Gilman rewrite the character and that director Doug Hughes recast it. Gilman has said she will consider rethinking the role for future productions; Hughes will let his casting stand.

This isn’t the only time political considerations in casting have taken center stage. In 1990, for instance, Actors’ Equity Association, the union for American actors, rejected an application for a British Caucasian actor to play a Eurasian character in the Broadway company of Miss Saigon. Many in the media and in the union itself objected, and AEA reversed its decision. Some argued that casting without considering a person’s race, nationality, or other personal characteristics didn’t close acting opportunities for minority actors; it created new possibilities.

What if it didn’t? Must playwrights, directors, and theaters adopt social criteria for artistic decisions?

It would be a better world if there were more roles for deaf actors, sure. There are playwrights who tell stories to change minds and rouse people to action and directors who form companies to serve the disabled. These are valuable social/political endeavors, but they are not always primarily theatrical endeavors.

Art has a purpose, too, and it mustn’t be compromised.

I came to this view early on, while doing a book about the Chelsea Theater Center, which was once in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Peter Barton, a playwright you will not have heard about, wrote an exquisite play called Dawn Song. In 1975, the Chelsea billed its upcoming production as “a collage poem of images, sounds, and words, evoking our loss in the story of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce tribe.” It would “evoke hallucinogenic images, using words, video, and film instead of organic chemicals.”

Barton, a documentary filmmaker who had studied playwriting at Yale, gave me the play to read, and I knew why it attracted the producers. Thematically and theatrically large, with fights, chants, and dances, the play told the story of the wrenching compromises Joseph had to make and his determination to keep the struggle for Native American rights alive.

You’d have thought everyone in the Native American community would have been thrilled to see this show go up. You would have thought wrong.

Chelsea asked Charles Haid to direct. Haid was an actor and director for the TV series Hill Street Blues and Barton’s friend. He cast the show with the best actors available, many of them non-white, none of them Native American.

Members of the Native American Theater Ensemble (NATE) became enraged. Didn’t they have the right to play the roles in a play that depicted their culture? If Chelsea did not recast, NATE would do what they had to do to close it—sit in, perhaps, or picket.

Chelsea was not a political theater. “This time, because they knew they would be protested against, they were put in a position where they had to take a political stand,” said Dale Soules, who was to appear in the show.

Barton did not attempt to describe Native American life realistically. His characters leapt through time and space, confronting their former selves. Film sequences were to extend and comment on the action. The language was poetic, stylized, capturing the rhythm of the runners.

But if Barton was exploring his own culture or universal themes, NATE wanted to know why he was “using” their culture as a metaphor. “They didn’t know the first thing about us. The characters didn’t speak the way we speak…but we could have fixed the script, because the play said some very good things about us,” said NATE performer Jane Lind.

Although some sequences had been filmed and actors were in rehearsal, Chelsea dropped the play. Several months later, NATE lost its state funding, moved to Oklahoma, and soon folded. Barton tried to get funding to produce his play himself, without success. To the best of my knowledge, Peter Barton never wrote another play, and it is a huge loss.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter must go on, as written and as cast, or the integrity of theater art is jeopardized once more.

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What Should Obama Do with His Nobel Benjamins?

Davi Napoleon — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:00:35 +0000

Tired of the attacks on our new president, Jason Zito commented in a Facebook post: “Oh please. I’m totally fine with Obama getting a Nobel Peace Prize. You try closing a U.S. torture camp, promoting nuclear nonproliferation in Iran and beyond, reaching out in a new way to the Muslim world for the first time in history, stopping blockage of needed cutting-edge health research, making the Supreme Court an accurate representation of the population, increasing friendly diplomacy with both allies and enemies, standing up for victims of violence here and abroad, working to end an unfounded war, refocusing war efforts of a world super power to where they are actually needed, beginning to overturn military discrimination, and working hard to make sure the nation’s poorest people get taken care of.”

That says it all.

Well, almost.

There is another reason to give the man a prize: President Obama has declared this month National Arts and Humanities Month.

“Throughout our Nation’s history, the power of the arts and humanities to move people has built bridges and enriched lives, bringing individuals and communities together through the resonance of creative expression. It is the painter, the author, the musician, and the historian whose work inspires us to action, drives us to contemplation, stirs joy in our hearts, and calls upon us to consider our world anew. The arts and humanities contribute to the vibrancy of our society and the strength of our democracy, and during National Arts and Humanities Month, we recommit ourselves to ensuring all Americans can access and enjoy them,” the Obama proclamation begins.

Bravo!

The Nobel winner surely deserves the recognition, but what should he do with the cash prize? The New York Times says Obama will donate the $1.4 million to charity. Which ones? In the spirit of the month, he might select three theaters and divvy up the loot. These might be—I’m considering geographical diversity here—the Yale Rep in New Haven, the Steppenwolf in Chicago, and the Intiman in Seattle.

There are other worthy theaters, of course, and there are museums, opera houses, dance companies, and more. So Obama might contribute to the under-funded National Endowment for the Arts. Sure, 1.4 mil isn’t going to make a large dent in what struggling not-for-profit arts institutions need to survive, but a donation to the NEA would be a symbolic as well as material gesture, setting the stage for a cultural renaissance in America.

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