Pictures from First Few Weeks of Rehearsals at CRT
Updates from May, 2009 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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creederep
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jonathandallsup
It’s been a great week at CRT…almost two weeks through rehearsal for A WONDERFUL NOISE, CRT SONGBOOK, and GRIMM PAJAMAS. I was feeling a bit tired today from the week of rehearsals as are a lot of the company. But I woke up to the bustle of main street (I use that term loosely) as people were setting up for Taste of Creede (a much anticipated annual Creede event). I enjoyed the artists painting and throwing pots outside, along with the street vendors and Silver Chef cooking competition. It was a great day filled with a few rain showers (my favorite weather normally, just not on Taste of Creede Day). I sat down for a few minutes in this busy day, within this busy week, within this busy month, within this busy season and was reminded in a very eloquent way of why we at CRT do what we do. It is within a great interview with Michael Bouchard (a fantastic member of the CRT acting company) that you can find within the 2009 CRT Season Program. I will share an excerpt with you here and encourage you to read the entire interview when you come the theatre this summer!
“I try to live by an empirical philosophy…you go out and see if the world actually works that way. If it does, keep it. If not, change….I believe that an empirical approach works in art…I knew there was a better way to deliver the line and I was just waiting for the audience to tell me when I was close…So, reading philosophy , like my acting, is founded on never being content to sit back and assume I have it all correct and have no need to improve.” – Michael Bouchard
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mauricelamee
They’re Here
A day like today makes me feel sheepish in the presence of my good fortune.
We had our first meeting with our full company in the morning. The talent of the artists in the room coupled with the staggering competency of the CRT staff makes for a rather giddy Artistic Director.
In the afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting through a read/sing-through of A Wonderful Noise. I had to keep looking around the room to get my bearings in order not to float right through the ceiling of Baxter Hall into our rarified mountain air never to be seen again. How is it that CRT is doing the world premiere production of this utterly charming musical by Michael Hollinger and Vance Lehmkuhl? Isn’t this the same Michael Hollinger who’s Opus just played Off-Broadway, at the Old Globe in Sand Diego, (www.oldglobe.org) and will play in 2010 at the The Curious Theatre in Denver (www.curioustheatre.org)? If A Wonderful Noise isn’t one of the biggest hits in CRT’s history – I should take up yak milking. Don’t pinch me, I don’t want to wake up.
Other pinch-worthy news from giddy CRT alums:
Check out this review of James Bohnen’s production of Old Times in the Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124233922829321055.html#printMode
Mr. Bohnen directed productions of Our Town, The Philadelphia Story and Hamlet for CRT.
Kalyn Hemphill was in our productions of Sweeney Todd and Crazy For You. You can read about her receiving the Roger Sturtevant EMC Musical Theatre through this link:
http://www.actorsequity.org/AboutEquity/EquityAwards/sturtevant_award.asp
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Jessica
We will be producing “Opus” next season at The Seattle Rep. I had no idea that Michael Hollinger wrote “A Wonderful Noise”, too. I can’t wait to see photos of the production.
Good luck with the season! I miss you all.
Jessica
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Michael Bouchard
How Do You Memorize All Those Lines?
Anyone who has done theater long enough will hear this question asked numerous times and anyone who has seen enough theater will at some point ask it. The question itself is hardly surprising. When we watch someone sing, dance and recite monologues for two hours straight it’s hard not to wonder just how they keep it all inside their heads. When I see our resident Virtuoso Pianist Evangelos Spanos play piano I can’t help but ask, “How the heck does he remember all those notes?!”
As for Evangelos, you’ll have to ask him how he does it, but for actors there are a few techniques that we all use.
1) MNEMONICS. Mnemonics is a system where the actor uses association tricks to jog their memory. A classic one is used in remembering the order of the colors of the rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) and turning it into the name of a made up person “Roy G. Biv”. Actors will tend to use these tricks when memorizing lists in Shakespeare or songs where lists are common.
2) ROTE DRILLING. At some point an actor is going to have to sit down with the script and recite it a million times. Repetition is simply unavoidable. You start at the top of a page and read down it 20 times until you have it solid. Then you move onto the next page. Some actors keep a hand over their line to come and only read each “cue line” (the line before your own line) while others try to involve their scene partners by reading the scene multiple times together. This is as grueling as it sounds and relieving the strain is where actors get creative. Most of us like to do such work in places that make us comfortable and undistracted. Some people recite lines in the shower or bathtub, others in their room with music on. I memorized the entirety of Slabtown one night in Tommyknocker Tavern with my iPod on.
3) TIME MANAGEMENT. Just like everything else in life, how you spend your time is incredibly important. Hopefully, most shows will allow for more than 2 days to memorize a script and you’ll be able to break up the monotony by only memorizing the script bits at a time over the course of a few weeks. Typically, actors will try to get really familiar with a particular scene the night before they rehearse it for the first time. The next time they do the scene, the script will usually be out of their hand. This allows the actor to refrain from needing to memorize an entire script in one night.
4) THROUGH LINE. This in my opinion is the most important part of line memorization. The idea is to not simply know what your next line is, but to know what it is your character is trying to do or say with that line and in that scene. For example, if in Grimm Pajamas my character wants to convince his brother that princess stories are silly, but I forget the particular line, (which never happens, I assure you) I can think about what I’m trying to do at that moment in the scene and hopefully that information will cue me on my line, or at least allow me to make up one that is fitting with where the story is heading.
So if my line is “Honestly, I tried to forget the whole Princess thing”, and my scene partner Andy Brown leads in with:
“Do you remember any princess stories?”
And I “go up” (what actors call forgetting a line) on my line, the most important thing for me to know is that I’m trying to avoid telling a princess story. So, even if I can’t remember the exact line, I can still say:
“No, um, I don’t remember any… at all” or “I don’t want to tell princess stories”
Andy, still trying to get me to tell a princess story, wouldn’t skip a beat and come in with his next line “Do you remember any? You do don’t you!” and the scene would roll right along, albeit with slightly different words.
While they may not be the words our playwright Jeff Carey wrote, I still kept the story going and if I did it right, the audience should be none the wiser. Though Jeff would rightly remind me that he didn’t go through all that trouble to write particular lines just for me to forget them! (Something I never do.)
And there you have it! Now the next time you see a CRT actor on the street or in a greeting line, you’ll already know how they memorize their lines. So instead, you can ask them if they practice mnemonics in the bathroom!
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creederep
A WEEK IN CREEDE
Below is a blog from Vance Lehmkuhl one of the authors and lyricists of “A Wonderful Noise” currently in rehearsal at CRT….
A WEEK IN CREEDE
It’s hard to believe my first visit to Creede is up, and I’m heading back to Philadelphia. I’ve been here consulting on music rehearsals for A Wonderful Noise, and haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to explore the area. But I will be back in June with a less action-packed schedule.
I did at least have a chance, the day before rehearsals started, to go “up and over” the great hill that provides such a startling backdrop for this town. That was an exciting change of pace for someone who grew up in rural Ohio but has been stuck in an East-Coast city for the past quarter-century. Even more exciting, though, has been watching the AWN cast learning and crafting the songs in the musical I wrote with Michael Hollinger.
Main Street Creede
While the show has been workshopped twice (one in Philly and once in NYC) this is its first full production and it’s gratifying to watch high-caliber actors trying on the roles they’ll be inhabiting over the whole summer. All the characters are virtuoso singers of one sort or another, so it’s great to see the great singers that Creede has assembled learning music that pushes them to excel in sometimes unfamiliar ways. And of course it’s a two-way process that’s allowed me to hear and learn more about what works best with excellent voices.
Overall, my stay here has been a peak (ha!) experience, thanks largely to the steady hand of Jonathan Allsup and the gracious generosity of my hosts, Mr and Mrs. Lentz. Although Stan wasn’t able to resist ribbing me about my veganism, he’s been very accommodating and it’s actually been less work than expected finding things to eat here. That’s largely because, for a former wild-west mining town, Creede is remarkably diverse, seeming to find room, and a hearty wave, for everybody who might find themselves walking down Main Street (I soon made High Mountain Arts & Deli a regular haunt).
Looking outward from within the institution of Creede Rep, it’s all too easy to ascribe this diversity to the influence of the theater itself. But every building needs a solid foundation, and it seems CRT has flourished thanks to a populace whose vision extends further than the town’s borders, further than Snowshoe Mountain or Inspiration Point. When it comes to cultural richness, a lot of better-known places would do well to take a page from Creede.
Vance Lehmkuhl
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creederep
First Day of Rehearsal!
Today is the first day of rehearsal at Creede Repertory Theatre!
The cast is here, the crew arrives next week and music is already pouring out of every CRT building. The rehearsal hall is alive with music rehearsals, our accompanist and master pianist Evangelos is livening up the mainstage with his beautiful playing, Andy Brown and Michael Bouchard are quickly learning and relearning the wonderful lyrics and music of Grimm Pajamas in the Black Box, and…well, I bet they’re playing some sort of music down at the scene shop while they work!
Expect more updates from the rehearsal hall soon (perhaps accompanied by pictures), but suffice it to say for now that Creede and CRT is alive with the 2009 CRT Company and Season!
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avery
Totally Cool.
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Jessica Jackson
Dramaturkeys – The Imaginary Invalid
In this third installment of me leveraging our program material for the blog, I present an interview with Nagle Jackson about the upcoming Imaginary Invalid. Moliere wouldn’t return my calls, so I had to settle for this theatre luminary and all-around brilliant man of arts and letters. There’s so much to say about Moliere and his comedies, and I have to admit – I was hesitant to get too academic with this piece. Our audience needs to know that this play is hilarious, and irreverent, and derives it’s laughs from the same things we find funny today. Despite what our high school history books told us, people had senses of humor in 1673. Hypocrits, crooked politicians, cheapskates, the bodily functions that unite us as humans, and the dubious effectiveness of healthcare deserved to be laughed at then and still do. Nagle did a marvellous job of communicating this idea and I think our audiences will read this and realize that “funny is funny, no matter when it was written.”
Interview with Nagle Jackson, translator and director of The Imaginary Invalid
Who went to see Molière’s plays in his time? Did you have to be a member of the court or could anyone get in?
Molière was a popular playwright, the Neil Simon and Shakespeare of his day. Some of his special entertainments were meant only for the court of Louis, but by far the majority of his work was destined for the popular audience in Paris and on tour in the provinces. His company survived on “box office” and so he always wrote with an eye to the bottom line. If they didn’t get laughs, they didn’t eat.
By all accounts, audiences in the 17th century found this play as funny as we do. I hate to say it, but perhaps the play owes some of its success to enemas, farts, and discharge. Is potty humor timeless?
Doctor jokes are timeless because they objectify our fears so we can release our nervous energy about unpleasant realities. Bathroom humor is universal because it brings everyone down to a common denominator, e.g. the Pope puts on his pants the same way we all do! American burlesque and vaudeville cranked out hundreds of Doctor-Patient routines. Molière anticipated all that by three hundred years.
Doctors wear the mantle of ‘expert,’ making it impossible for a layman to question what they prescribe. Could it be that our mistrust of doctors is not merely funny, but also well-founded?
In Molière’s day it was extremely well-founded because doctors really knew next to nothing about medicine. Circulation of the blood was still being debated and germs were unknown. All they could do was bleed people or give them enemas; they were masters of discharge. So to couch this ignorance, they couched their opinions in Latin and quoted the ancient scholars. Physicians still love jargon and disguise their prescription in wretched handwriting. Since medicine is necessarily always an evolving science it is easy to laugh at the ignorance of earlier generations. This does not get their pomposity and pretence to infallibility off the hook, however. Molière detested doctors and with good reason: he had tuberculosis and nobody knew what that was.
Why this particular Molière play and why now?
Funny is funny, no matter when it was written. Just this past season in Paris, THE IMAGINARY INVALID was packing them in on the boulevards, Paris’ equivalent of Broadway. And, hey, what better play to do when “health reform” is the hot topic of the day? Let’s face it: politicians and doctors are always fair game.
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Jessica Jackson
Dramaturkeys – Swiss Family Robinson
In the second installment of our program dramaturgy excerpts for the 2009 season, we bring you an interview with Jeff Carey (Book and Lyrics) and me (music) about the upcoming Swiss Family Robinson. Plus, a very special look at at Jeff’s first adaptation of this family adventure tale.
The Swiss Family Robinson (the book, written in 1812) is essentially a series of lessons in morality, natural history, and self-reliance. Why adapt this material and why now?
JC: When I was a child, the movie had a profound effect on me, and when I grew up and read the book, I found it to be a wonderfully written exploration of family, survival and faith. The cornerstone of the story is about creating a life of meaning no matter what the circumstances, and a deep belief in a kind and loving Providence that watches over us all.
Jeff, you made some significant changes to the original story. What was the motivation behind these creative leaps?
JC: Since most people are familiar with the basic concept (Family–Ship Wreck–Tree House), I wanted to shake things up a bit, and look at the material from a new angle, so as to see it all more clearly. The book would have us believe that it was written by a Swiss pastor stranded on a deserted island, a popular convention of the time. In the play, the book really is written on the deserted island, on leaves! I had to have pirates, but I wanted their appearance to be completely unexpected and unconventional. And once we encountered a storm at sea, I thought about “The Tempest,” with its magical island spirit, hence the character of Oona. I wanted to write a musical that would transport the audience from the ordinary to the extraordinary, much the way the Robinsons are transported from Switzerland to a tropical paradise. I was greatly influenced by “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, and wanted to make it a generational story, chock full of magical realism. Mainly, I wanted to find a way to tell the story with song, and that brought about a raft of changes right there.
JJ: And the decisions that had to be made about how to tell the story in song were particularly fun. I tried to create a balance between two styles – the more buttoned-up, straight-laced, classic musical theatre songs (because our Swiss Family is still Swiss, after all) and the breezy, pop songs that are inspired by their new island life. For inspiration, I looked to Gilbert & Sullivan for nautical moments, Rodgers & Hammerstein for the love songs, and Stephen Schwartz because his more pop-rock style captures coming-of-age moments so well. The challenge was taking this grab bag and figuring out how I could tie it all together with reoccurring motifs and musical conventions.
Michael Bouchard is discussing. 
Michael Bouchard 3:45 pm on May 28, 2009 Permalink |
Happy Birthday you sappy bum!