A Peek Behind the Curtain - Part 4

“Into The Woods”

by Stephen Sondheim

Produced by Circle Ensemble Theatre and Co-sponsored by the Morton Theatre Corporation

July 12th and 13th at 7:30 pm and July 13th at 2 pm

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Part 4

            I decree that there is to be drama this week.  I bang the gavel.  It is done.  This week’s blog post will be devoted to my continued admiration in observing the professionalism of this theatre company from my cricket on the wall perspective. I was going to go themeless, but The Patch is a family periodical.  Themeless!  Wooo-hoo!  I can talk about gerbils racing Pinewood Derby cars or ponder, as many a wise man or poorly-drawn owl with glasses has before, exactly how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.  I could’ve done that, but I won’t have the space.  I’m far too busy watching these actors hone their craft under the guidance of the director and musical director of the show.  Instead, I’ll take you back…to two separate days last week…

~~~~~~~~~~~~(That’s the best computer key I can find to simulate a flash-back.  It’s easier on TV with the hazy fade-away shots and musical accompaniment.) 

            Here we go. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~Last Monday I got to see costuming at work.  I interviewed costume designer and fabric wizard Terri Armacost.  First I “accidentally” walked into the fitting room when the double-cast Cinderellas were being fitted.  Really, it was an accident.  Tell my girlfriend I saw nothing.  Once Terri had finished fitting the Cinderellas in sparkling white ball gowns (it’s Cinderella’s signature outfit), I came into her magic factory and interviewed her. 

             As soon as I walked back in the door she said, “Your audience for fairy tales expect sparkles, don’t they?” 

            She makes costumes out of anything.  She improvised a cape from a Christmas tree skirt (the fabric we ring around the bottom of the tree to fool ourselves into thinking that we’re not celebrating Jesus’ birth by slowly killing a tree).  It may have once been a Christmas decoration, but I saw her transform it into something that projects pride and class and the fairy tale mystery of possibility.  She’s up for the challenge, having over a hundred touring Broadway shows to her credit.

            This show gives Terri a lot of creative freedom.  Even though we, the audience, expect certain things from stories that we love, cherish and have known since childhood, “Into the Woods” is in large part an exercise in turning these preconceived notions of the Grimm tales on their heads and watching them break dance. 

             So she gets to play around a lot these days, and that seems to suit her well.  The Wolf has to be scary and even sexy.  We all know that he entices Little Red Ridinghood and her grandmother with his strength and his wiles.  “He’s kind of a dirty old man, but he’s fit, strong and sexy.”        

            We talked about Terri’s ideas on The Wolf’s meal of choice, Little Red.  “My take on her is that her grandmother dressed her up like a pageant kid like on ‘Toddlers and Tiaras’ and it wound up scarring her for life.”

            We’re all the creations of our own childhood obsessions.  Terri admitted to me that, when she was little, she used to play dress-up in her grandmother’s closet.  Her time as a make-believe “fancy lady” stuck with her.  I never knew just how much passion and blood, sweat, and tears (sometimes literally) goes into each and every aspect of staging a show, even the things we take for granted like the costumes.  Terri Armacost and her talents will be on display July 12th and 13th at The Morton Theatre. 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~OK, we’re back to real time.  Flashing forward looks a lot like flashing back.  Maybe time isn’t as linear as we think.  Maybe we can all ride dinosaurs and party with Cleopatra and Marc Anthony.  Or maybe we can just flashback again to three days after Monday.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~We’ve now flashed back to last Thursday evening.  It was an ominous night.  Thunder crackled overhead.  Glowing zig-zag streaks of lightning seemed to materialize every few minutes, right above our heads, coming from all directions to delight us, scare us, and electrocute our cats.  Trees were felled.  Rain poured down on us in fits and spurts.  Children pulled the covers tight above their heads for protection.  Thor was pissed off at Athens again.  And the actors rehearsing “Into the Woods” showed me what dedication to your craft truly means.  I thought it was some cheese-based cult with Velveeta orgies and cow sacrifices.  I was wrong, again.

            You’ve got to know that these people rehearse a lot.  They spend hours at it every evening.  The schedule has been designed so that the actors do get rotating nights off, not that that means that they actually do get nights off.  I now know that actors, at least the Circle Ensemble Theatre Company actors, memorize their lines everywhere: they keep their scripts and cheat sheets of lyrics in their cars and pockets, annoy their co-workers by breaking into song during coffee breaks, talk to their girlfriends and boyfriends in that half-singing and half-talking stage style that a lot of musicals use between songs, and act out stage combat scenes in the shower, which is unsafe but helps keep them Zestfully clean and rehearsed for rehearsal.  They have to practice before they can get with the other actors in order to practice.  And it’s T-minus 22 days till they open and counting.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~We’ve just flashed back again.  My fault, I accidentally flashed forward into the real time of the blogosphere.  It won’t happen again. 

            Where were we?  Oh yes, it was a dark and stormy night.  Actually it wasn’t dark.  The sun hadn’t set yet and the powerful orange glow on the horizon lit up Clarke County like a nuclear nectarine explosion.  The cast of “Into the Woods” was rehearsing a few of their musical numbers under the leadership of Teresa Ruiz.  As storms often do, about an hour into rehearsal, this one knocked out the power at Sean Hogan's building company (HBI) that he generously lets Circle use as a rehearsal space.  The office had one emergency light, but only one.  And the set-up for rehearsals, as I’ve come to know, especially musical ones, involves, much like rehearsals, a waiting room full of creative types, a bathroom (according to a book I once read, everybody poops, even creative types), and an acoustically-sound, well-lit rehearsal room where they rehearse.  All rooms are air-conditioned.  It’s Georgia in June.  There’s a meteorological reason that Tennessee Williams’ heroines fan themselves and swoon so much.  The South is hot.  My point is that all was going according to plan when the power went out.  While the stage manager and I searched for a breaker box (he might have known what he was doing—I was just trying to pretend I’m manly enough to understand things like electricity), the cast all gathered under the one remaining artificial light.  The sun was setting.  The heat was stifling.  Most people would call it a night and come back when there’s light to read, electricity to play the keyboard, and cool air to keep from dying a dramatic, but slow, death. 

Not these people. 

         They can work under any conditions.  After seeing them rehearse almost in the dark, in a room so hot I think I lost five pounds in sweat and I swear I saw cartoon heat lines, I feel certain that they could rehearse in any conditions (like in zero gravity or underwater standing on oyster beds while riding giant squid).  Even without her piano, Teresa led the actors in song.  She set up her music stand, placed her music book (there’s probably a proper name for it, but I forgot to ask).  She clapped the time.  They sang.  They sang over each other when called for.  They semi-sang in that stage way I described above.  They switched from song to dialogue and back again quickly.  And they rapped.  For real.  One “Into the Woods” song, a really intricate one, “sung” by about half the characters, is basically a rap.  This Sondheim fellow knows his music.  I predict big things for him. 

            If this were a different century, actors in Ye Olde Circle Ensemblé would’ve had candles to light up the night.  Nobody thinks to stock candles anymore.  Some of the younger actors did use their cell phones to provide a bit more light, but it still felt spooky and dark and wonderful like the last night of summer camp.

            When the power went out, it took them all literally about two minutes of mild confusion before they were back up and at it again.  Later Teresa told me she thought the experience was a good analogy for responding to the storms of life, much like what is portrayed in the play. (We can get into that next week, too.)

             I’ve come to realize that dealing with and overcoming adversity is as much a part of the theatre as playbills or impossible romance.  Show people deal with more challenges every day than most sewer-dwelling homeless men.  OK, maybe not more than the homeless, but they do have more routine and unexpected obstacles to be overcome than anyone else with homes.  They have to raise money for live performances in the era of streaming TV on iPads.  They have to find creative and inexpensive ways to advertise.  They have to make elaborate and realistic-looking period costumes, often from discarded fabric. They have to memorize words, dance moves, blocking (I’ll get to it next blog post), practice their vocal tone, generate tears, stage fights, learn harmony, and make it all seem so natural that no one knows just how much work goes into making it look this easy, unless of course you’re reading this. 

         I can say from experience now, knowing how tough it is doesn’t kill the magic.  It just makes you want to run away and join the theatre. 

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Postscript---  They’ve all told me that you spell the word “theatre” in what I thought was just a hold-over Britishism.  I’d been using “theater”, but the show folk say that that’s a corruption, like putting caviar on Funyuns or forgetting to turn your cell phone to vibrate when you come to the shows in July.  Remember that one.     

and A Tribute ---  I cannot end without relaying how keenly we feel the loss of Circle’s Resident Playwright Aralee Strange this week.  Aralee Strange was a great Athenian. She was one of the few locals who would have fit in perfectly in that other Athens, the one across the sea.  She was a philosopher. She believed in community.  She had true civic pride and a firm belief in making the place in which she lived a better place for everyone.  To the ancient Greek way of thinking, individuality is the basis of society. The ability to strive for excellence, no matter what the challenge, was what the Athenians so dearly believed in.  So did Aralee Strange. 

 Through her pioneering work with "Word of Mouth" (a monthly poetry open mic that transcended the realm of what most open mics accomplish), Aralee gave me, and countless others, a chance to do something I’d always wanted to try. She was a poet. But to call someone as complex as Aralee Strange merely a poet does her a disservice--though she was an excellent poet, she was also a mentor, a playwright, a friend, a filmmaker, a pusher of envelopes…an artist. 

She told me once that made a movie with Soupy Sales, a statement that would seem unbelievable coming out of anyone’s mouth other than Aralee’s.

Although there any many loving and poetic tributes to Aralee, and there will undoubtedly be many more in the days to come, the most fitting tribute will be the poetry and stories that are and will continue to be in this town thanks to her.