It’s a Wonderful Life: Welcome & CONTEST!

So welcome to the 2nd show of Tennessee Rep’s 2007-2008 season–It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play!  After the compelling, darkly wonderful The Crucible, Wonderful Life presents us with a set of quite different challenges.  The story is the same one that we know and love from the movie of the same name.  However, in this incarnation, it’s presented as a 1946 radio play.  What’s great fun about this production is that we’re going to present a complete world from the moment the audience steps into the theatre.  From the production assistant carrying scripts to my voice over the loudspeaker (what we call “the God mic”), we’ll all be a 1946 radio sound stage–WTRT.  What’s a special challenge for us is that the “performance” won’t just start at 6:30pm (or 7:30pm) when It’s a Wonderful Life starts; no, when the house opens at 1/2 hour, we’ll be out there moving around and getting ready in our 1946 world.  Everything, from the preshow “curtain” speech to the bows will be in this 1940’s reality.  It really should be quite a blast for audience and cast/crew alike!

 And since this is the first day of rehearsal, our LookIn for It’s a Wonderful Life is right around the corner.  As I explained for The Crucible, Tennessee Rep’s LookIns are a chance for the public to come get a peek at our rehearsal process.  The director and designers will talk about their processes, the actors will present a short scene from the play, and there’s free food and drink.  Our LookIn this time around will be 5:30pm on Tuesday, Nov. 20th at our studio in the NPT building at 161 Rains Ave.  If you’re in the Nashville area, I encourage you to drop by and say, “Hi.”

And as I did with The Crucible, I’m holding another musical playlist contest.  During the LookIn I always play music; this year I decided to play songs that were tied to each show.  Take a look back to see the songs that won out for The Crucible LookIn–they were quite creative!  This time around you have even more options–you can choose songs based on the themes and happenings in It’s a Wonderful Life OR you can choose songs that are a nod to our 1946 settings–even better if you can do both!  Since Nov. 20th is just around the corner, don’t wait too late.  I’ll close the submissions on Nov. 19th so I can gather the music.  If you have ideas, just leave them as comments to this post–I’ll publish the winning songs after the LookIn on the 20th, and please plan on coming by to hear them for yourself!

Crucible Final Thoughts

And so another show comes to a close.  I promised you a view “from the rehearsal hall to the closing night party” so I’ll give you a few party happenings a little later.  First, the run.  The Crucible is a huge cast show in TPAC’s large (read: expensive) Polk Theatre.  So we had a jam-packed (8 shows a week), 2-week run, while we usually enjoy a 3-week run.  Now I usually believe in the adage of “leave them wanting more,” but this was one of those shows that noone wanted to end (versus those “Do we really have one more week?!?” shows).  The cast had really settled into their roles and the flow/rhythm of the show.  Add to that the overwhelmingly positive reactions from student and adult audiences alike, and we all would have enjoyed that extra week.

So was the show a “success”?  With theatre, there are many, many different ways to define the success of a show.  Sometimes a theatre does the show for artistic reasons (see this season’s The Goat)–it’s a show that the theatre strongly believes that the local community needs to see; a show that says something powerful and timely about the human condition; a show that has the capacity to transcend, to move, and to challenge.  While theatre’s always have to worry about the bottom line, these shows are produced not because they’re expected to sell out but because they have to be–and we hope that people will respond to the work and turn out to see them.  ”Success” for such shows may simply be performances that touch those who come out, that challenge and move them.  In the case of The Crucible, I would probably classify it as an artistic show that needed to be done (an American classic that hadn’t been seen in this area in ages); one that we certainly hoped people would come see.  And we were pleasantly surprised…twiced.  The student audiences (packed–the Humanities Outreach people would have added another student show if we weren’t already at our max) surprised us with their rapt attention and passionate responses to this play written before their parents were born, and the adult audiences surprised us by their strong connection to this play and by coming out in large numbers.  Both surprises were welcome from a fiscal perspective as well as artistically gratifying.

It’s always fascinating to hear people’s responses to the plays–particularly from people who know a play well and have seen it many times before.  As I said, the overall response was overwhelmingly positive.  However, as always happens, there was some spirited debate about some of those “decisions” I talked about a few posts back.  We spent a lot of time exploring the relationship between John Proctor and Abigail–they had had an affair months prior, and in the first scene they find themselves in a room alone (well, with the catatonic Betty).  We had many questions to think about:  Why doesn’t John leave?  How much attraction still exists between the two?  Why doesn’t John stay and put an end to the “witch nonsense” that very night?  At one point in the scene as Abigail is trying to seduce John, she initiates a kiss.  He pulls away but then momentarily gives in to temptation and kisses her back.  After a brief kiss, he breaks away and turns to leave.  This was the moment that sparked some debate.  For a few people, this seemed to taint John; for them John Proctor was a “noble man” who simply wouldn’t kiss Abigail; he was a man who had made a mistake months ago but was at heart a good, noble man.  And, in rehearsal, we certainly wrestled with these ideas.  But is John Proctor a good, noble man from the beginning, or is he a flawed man who finds his nobility, his goodness, in the play’s final moments?  Remember that John is content to stay on his farm while the nonsense rages in town; it’s not until the trouble comes to his very door (when Elizabeth is arrested), that he tries to put a stop to it.

But this, to me, shows why theatre is such a wonderful art form.  With a movie, a character is set.  It is performed once and will never change.  With a play, John Proctor changes every time The Crucible is performed.  In some productions, he may indeed be a noble man, whose nobility is unquestioned from the beginning, who finds himself thrust into this insane circumstance.  You can never truly “know” a character in a play, because the next time you see it, he or she will have changed.  And how a director and her actors answer those questions will change an audiences experience and ultimately the message of the play.  Which one is right and which one is wrong?  Another amazing aspect of theatre–when dealing with these choices, there is no right or wrong–there is only the difference of the choices and how they are received by an audience. 

Now, as for the party talk (you thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?)–suffice it to say that tequila shots are a well-established closing-night tradition; especially when it’s discovered that one cast member has never had one (one adult cast member, of course!). 

 Next up for us…

Crucible performance photos

And now some views from the booth…

 

 

 

Crucible performances: student audiences

With The Crucible we are in a unusual situation regarding performances.  Our first three public performances were morning shows for high school audiences.  Through Humanities Outreach of Tennessee (H.O.T.), high schools are brought in to see various performances throughout the year.  In fact, H.O.T. monies allowed us to do a large cast show like The Crucible.  What you may not realize is that high school audiences are only marginally related to adult audiences.  For the H.O.T. performances, we have upwards of 900 high schoolers packed into the theatre; their behavior is never predictable; they can be inappropriate and loud, but the energy they give off is intense to say the least!

I was curious to see how they would react to a play that premiered before their parents were born—a play that clocks in at 2 1/2 hours and deals with some quite complex issues like honor, fear, manipulation, authority, intolerance, and infidelity.  I was concerned that at least some of them wouldn’t be willing to stick with the play until the end or give the focus needed to appreciate a complex work of theatre.  It turns out that, for the vast majority of them, I needn’t have worried.

Yes, some of their reactions have been what could be called “inappropriate” (cheering when Proctor calls Abigail a whore and throws her to the floor; laughing at Mary Warren’s collapse in the face of her friend’s spiritual attack), but an inappropriate reaction is still a reaction—a sign that they’re paying attention and involved in the story.  They have never checked out on the play (a sign of a well-paced, well-directed play, in my opinion), and they are amazingly generous in their reactions.  In fact, I was astonished at how they picked up on even the more subtle critical moments in the play.  When Proctor has confessed to his infidelity with Abigail and Elizabeth is brought in and asked by the judge if her husband strayed from her, Danforth hounds her to answer the question “Is your husband a lecher?”  Finally, she answers and her unexpected (and out-of-character) answer has drawn gasps from our high school audiences.  When Proctor is faced with his defining moment in the final scene in which he has decided to whether to sacrifice honor or life, the high schoolers have cheered and broken into applause at his decision.  And they’ve caught on to even more subtle nuances in the script—such as Proctor’s joke about Reverend Parris’ love for golden candlesticks that was set up by an off-handed comment in an earlier scene.

Yes, there are allowances that the actors must make when performing for a high school audience.  The pace and energy must remain high throughout.  You can let them have their large reactions (even the “inappropriate” ones), but you can’t let it go on too long.  For, if you let them, they will take over and drive the bus (and possibly crash it!).  There will be much more chatter than you would expect from an adult audience and sometimes you just have to accept it and keep going.  But when the high school students are keyed in, the energy they give can spoil you when you finally get a “normal” adult audience.

In fact, click here to check out some of the remarkable insights high schoolers had after seeing The Crucible.

Crucible Tech Week

 (Note:  For this, our first show of the season, I’m going to assume that at least some of the folks reading this might not be totally familiar with all our theatre lingo.  Along those lines, I’ll be taking the time to explain things like blocking and the cue-to-cue rehearsal.  As we go on through the season, I’ll let that go, so if you’re the Joe Papp of your local theatre scene, bear with me!)

 Ah, the joys of tech week.  For any given production, we have 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 weeks in the rehearsal hall–time to block the show (the actors’ movements), time for the actors to learn their lines, time to do the inner-wiring work of creating a show.  For the final 1/2 week of rehearsal, we finally get onto the stage–onto the set–with full costumes, props, lights, and sound.  And for that half a week, it suddenly stops being about the actors and their work, and it becomes about everything else.

 We have only those four days (sometimes only three–!!–with smaller, “simpler” shows) to make sure that everything from lights to wigs to floor mics comes together in the polished, professional, final version that we present to the public.

 Day #1 starts with some time for the actors to walk around on the stage and (hopefully) get comfortable with their new surroundings.  In the rehearsal hall, the set was just a series of Escheresque tape lines on the floor; now they’re confronted with the real thing.  In the case of The Crucible that includes 30′ walls and the final five or six feet of floor hanging over quite an intimidating drop-off.  When we have enough time (and fortunately we do for The Crucible), we’ll actually have a full spacing rehearsal.  This is a time, without lights or sound or costumes, for the actors to worry not about acting but simply pacing through their blocking on the set and adjusting as necessary (”Yes, you’ll probably want to stop there rather than falling to your death.”)  The next part of Day #1 is what we call a costume parade.  The cast (all 19 of them) get into full costume and the director and costume designer look at them on the set under lights.  With this show, it took quite some time to see everyone in all their costumes.  Next we moved on to a cue-to-cue.  In this type of rehearsal, we start at the beginning of the show and run the opening sound and light cues; these will include the pre-show lighting look, the curtain speech light, an opening sound cue, the opening blackout, and the lights for the first scene of the play.  Then, instead of letting the actors run the scene as usual, I stop them and we jump ahead to the next cue.  In The Crucible, for instance, the first scene has several cues where lights in the windows around the set come on (this is meant to represent not only the town waking up in this just-before-dawn scene but also their growing awareness of the “witchy menace” among them).  So I’ll have the actors pick up the scene a few lines before the light cue that brings up a window and when it comes time, I’ll run the cue (”Standby light cue 3.  Light cue 3….go.”).  If the director wants to change something (call the cue earlier, make the lights come up quicker, etc.), we may go back and run the cue again.  Otherwise, I’ll have the actors jump ahead to the point in the scene when the next sound or light cue happens.  And so we work our way through the show.

 Day #2 actually begins with finishing up the cue-to-cue.  Then we take our first stab at running the show with full lights and sounds and props (the actors may use important costume pieces–e.g. a cape they must take off and drape over a chair–but are not required to).  In this run, we stop anytime a cue didn’t work just right or an actor was late with an entrance or a set change didn’t run smoothly.  The idea is not to get through the show perfectly–the idea is to find all those problem areas that we want solved before we get to a public performance.

Day #3 is when we try run the show in its entirety without stopping…and we do it twice.  We are allowed two rehearsal days that are called “10-out-of-12s”, which means that in 12 consecutive hours we rehearse for ten of them.  We run the show once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and after each run, the director gives notes and we fix any problems we encountered, which can run from adding light so an actor can make a backstage costume change more quickly to changing the focus on a light so that an actor’s face is illuminated more effectively.  This is an exhausting process and 10:00pm finds us all staggering out of the theatre before we have to be back at it the next day.

Day #4 is a luxury.  It’s a luxury that we don’t always get, as I said before.  For The Crucible, it represents a chance to have a final dress rehearsal before opening night.  By this time, tech is solid (knock on plywood), the actors are solid (knock on particle board), and we’re just tweaking and giving everyone one more chance to polish (knock on tulip poplar–Tennessee’s state tree as I’m sure everyone knows!).  This is also the last run-through of the rehearsal process, after which the director inevitably utters those famous (and almost always true!) words, “You guys need an audience.”

For those of you who haven’t been involved with theatre, this is another of those magical moments in theatre that we struggle to describe.  You can rehearse as much as you can afford, but there’s always a little something missing–an audience.  Something special, something mysterious, something wondrous happens when a show finally gets in front of an audience.  Some would say it’s simply that the actors feed off the energy provided by an audience; others say it goes beyond that to a spiritual interchange (did I mention that we struggle to describe it?).  Whatever the case, we’re never totally sure what we have on our hands until that first performance in front of an audience.  We can tell that the actors, crew, designers, and director have all done their jobs, but we don’t know what the final result will be because theatre isn’t theatre without an audience.  A movie is a fixed, static entity–it won’t change with each viewing.  Theatre, however, does change!  If an audience is generous with their attention and their energy, actors will take that, multiply it, and give it right back.  And when that happens, the results are–there’s no better word–spiritual.  So now, as we prepare for our final dress rehearsal, all I can tell you is that we’ve done our jobs–the show is ready for an audience.  After opening, I’ll be back to let you know what we have…