I was recently chatting with a friend who has just started a year long contract on an established show in London. We had much to catch up on, but talk quickly turned to our current jobs as we were both just about to open shows; I told him how exhausted I was from my four weeks of rehearsals, and how there still didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. Nothing seemed fixed, and I was worried about what shape the show would be in for the imminent previews.
Of course he just laughed and countered with the two weeks he had had to get his head round his complex and multi layered piece, a time frame we were both familiar with having worked together in similarly frantic fashion before. In those two weeks, little time was given to exploration of text or character – indeed in a musical when there are forty plus songs to learn to play on a myriad of different instruments, as well as sing, and then the minor inconvenience of staging the bloody thing, it is the last thing on your mind.
My friend explained that he was to be taking over from an established cast on an established show which had been established on Broadway before it even made it over here, and in this particular case, it was important to the producers to keep the show true to the original in every way.
To this end, the process he underwent was more like learning a show rather than being directed in one, “this line should be delivered out to the audience”, “on this line, you run a hand through your hair”, adhering to a tried and tested format which has made the show very successful. I told him I had heard of other long running productions being directed on a grid, with each move calculated down to given co ordinates, as the actors teselate around each other like musical theatre tetris. This is frustrating to the creative, but expedient to getting a show up and running quickly, and retaining a consistency expected of such highly regarded productions.
Is this inhibiting to the actor, or are there always ways to make something your own, to invest your own spontaneity within these given perameters?
In classical Japense theatre, all performances are constructed in this way. The student copies his master exactly and learns the moves and vocal intonations (or kata) like a piece of choreography, according to ancient traditions. It is only when these have been mastered that the actor is allowed to add a touch of his personality, and breathe some inner life into the role, although only within the confines of the given kata.
These fixed poses to denote specific emotions are exactly what Stanislavski railed against when he was developing his methods. It seems patronising to the audience to illustrate exactly what every character feels at every point-how much is left to their interpretation after that? However, there is an argument in Noh theatre, that following these “moves” can be incredibly releasing for the actor.
When you focus entirely on your action and have complete control over your body, rather than worrying about working the language (which much of the native audience don’t understand anyway, as it is written in archaic Japanese) some say it is easier to tell the story effectively through physicality alone, on an almost universal level of human communication. Of course in an ideal world, we’d all like our create our roles organically, but in commercial theatre, as I have learned, employers aren’t going to pay actors to rehearse any longer than is absolutely necessary, so a lot of the time, you have to swallow your pride and replicate what is expected of you. The truly important next step to take, is to work backwards and justify the moves you have been given, and find your own journey through the piece that works for you.
A lot of this work will be invisible to the audience, but as with any research it will crucially inform your actions and inspire truth within the carefully constructed outer shell of a performance.
Image by Lumi Nara. Exit From Stage Left is a bi-monthly blog by Tristan Pate, an actor currently performing in a tour of a popular musical around the UK. See Tristan’s website for more details or follow him on Twitter here.
June 13th, 2011 at 5:39 am
I can see your underlying frustration. My response is that a staged musical is primarily a foil for the music and not significantly about developing complex characters or even narrative particularly. The dramatic content is usually pretty thin in the genre – hence it seems to be quite valid to construct / direct it in a precise, if rather mechanistic way. Your Tolstoy play is primarily dramatic and is much more about the dramatic characters, context, narrative and dramatic tensions with scope to really act, therefore there is room for interpretation. The difference in a pragmatic sense for you is that Dreamboats provides an income – and that can’t be knocked. I hope you get a chance to develop some real dramatic roles – and be paid for it. That’s the best combination.
June 15th, 2011 at 11:32 am
Firstly, I’d just like to say that Mike’s comment seems to espouse a thoroughly archaic view of what musical theatre should represent. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bock and Harnick and Sondheim didn’t become great by creating yet another Ziegfeld Follies, or 42nd Street, and even now the most enjoyable 42nd Street revivals are those that have slightly more dramatic tension than ‘I know this song, and those chorus boys can really tap…’.
Secondly, I believe the trouble with this model is that the skills required to originate a role are not necessarily analogous to the skills required to replace
At best, this is tiresome for the performers, but at worst creates a two-tier system of performers who have the creative skills to originate roles, and performers who are good at filling existing roles.
Thirdly, this approach exposes poor direction, placing a lot (if not all) of the responsibility for the truth and integrity of the piece on the individual performers. Not that this should be a problem, and the concept of the ‘Director-Proof Actor’ (www.jackplotnick.com) is something that should be taught to all actors likely to be exposed to this kind of corner-cutting, but a talented director should be able to make any arbitrary combination of hands-through-hair meaningful to a replacement.
Finally, besides the struggle the performers and creatives face with this approach, I think the audience suffers as performances become progressively more stale. Seeing Chicago recently was an interesting exercise, and I appreciated the piece immensely, but none of the performers seemed sufficiently invested, and I can’t imagine that feeling like an l-shaped block will have helped.
I don’t think integrity is served by conspiring to disconnect performers from the meaning of the piece, and good creatives (and performers) should recognise this. Audiences, however unsophisticated, can tell