'The Diary of Anne Frank' Online

[On 19 May, I published “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report” on Rick On Theater.  That was my collaboration with Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to ROT, reporting our impressions of putting on a live play-reading online.  In that post, I mentioned that after seeing Kirk's presentation, I watched an online performance of The Diary of Anne Frank and that I’d be blogging on it soon.  Well, now here’s my report on that experience.

[Social Dramatics, as Kirk and his group called their reading, was my first experience with any kind of online theater.  Anne Frank is my first full production of a play intended for virtual performance.  I have tried to cover this performance as a total theatrical event, though I am by no means technically proficient regarding IT and computers.  I have done my best, however, to describe my experience with Anne Frank both as a piece of drama and as a virtual production.]

My cousin Bill in New Jersey called me one afternoon in early May, just to check on how I’m doing here in the city during the coronavirus pandemic.  I mentioned that I had become occupied with my blog, trying to find material to fill the slots that would ordinarily be taken up with my play reports. 

With the closing of the theaters in mid-March, I was bereft of my staple topic for Rick On Theater.  I had several shows scheduled in May and June, plus some my theater companion and I were considering, all of which got cancelled, along with everything else.  Aside from being fodder for the blog (blodder?), I missed it.

I also mentioned that I had just watched a play-reading on Zoom (see my collaborative post with the playwright Kirk Woodward, “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report,” on 19 May), which had been my first experience with virtual theater on the ’Net.  The next thing I knew, Bill sent me an e-mail with a link to a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank online “because you clearly missed going to the theatre.”

I hadn’t heard about this production, described as “a special presentation created by artists in isolation,” but Bill reported, “This is supposed to be spectacular.”  So I began watching Anne Frank on Wednesday afternoon, 13 May.  It wasn’t what I expected (based, of course, on my vast experience with online performances, which now numbers three).

The background to this event is that the company, the Park Square Theatre, is in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the play was going to be presented on stage in a traditional production for audiences of over 12,000 middle and high school students (scheduled for 19-22 May). 

In other words, this Diary of Anne Frank wasn’t conceived as an online production.  (Park Square presented Anne Frank before, almost annually since the early 2000s; this was to have been its 21st staging.  Several members of this cast had been with the Park Square production for as much as 10 and even 20 years.)

The coronavirus pandemic scuttled those plans, but instead of abandoning the production, Ellen Fenster, the director, reimagined it with the technical assistance of Aaron Fiskradatz, a Twin Cities theater artist and “Zoom technologist.”  The cast had already been rehearsing their lines on Zoom, so the company simply transferred the entire show to the ’Net.

When it became clear that there was no way to assemble to record the staged version of The Diary of Anne Frank, the cast began rehearsing and recording a Zoom presentation of the play.  It was released on 21 April, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), and originally scheduled to cease streaming on 15 May; it was extended to 24 May because of the response.

There were two ways a viewer could watch the performance.  The video’s divided up into either two acts of five scenes each or 10 individual scenes.  I chose to watch The Diary of Anne Frank scene-by-scene because it was easier to make notes or check details between scenes that way and to cease my viewing session when I needed to.  Either way, the whole video performance is a little over two hours long.

When I was looking on the ’Net for information about this production, I found that Terry Teachout reviewed Park Square’s online performance in the Wall Street Journal.  It occurred to me that Park Square got something of a lagniappe from this happenstance: 

People all over the country—and beyond—got to see the work of this vibrant regional company and they even snared a review in a prestigious national paper, something they would surely not have gotten in Saint Paul. 

Teachout, in fact, acknowledged that Park Square was a “troupe new to me” and proceeded to praise the cast and the production to a national and even international readership.  He even called C. Michael-jon Pease, Park Square’s executive director, and congratulated the troupe, telling Pease: “You’ve got one hell of a company of artists.”

I won’t recount the plot of Anne Frank; I presume most readers are familiar with the 1955 play or the 1959 film adaptation.  (Those who aren’t can easily look the play up in Wikipedia or the movie, which has the same plot, on either IMDb or Wikipedia.)  Both are adapted by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from the book The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. 

Like the diary, the play is an account of the lives of the Frank and Van Daan families and Mr. Dussel, Jews of Amsterdam, Holland, after they went into hiding in an attic above Otto Frank’s former business premises from July 1942 until their discovery and arrest by the Nazi Green Police in August 1944.

(In her diary, which the budding writer revised and edited in May 1944 for potential publication, Anne made changes from her original version, written strictly for herself.  Among other alterations, the diarist had given some characters pseudonyms and the play—and my account here—follows the diary. 

(The real names and histories of the Van Daans, Mr. Dussel, and Mr. Kraler are known, but they play no role in the conception and performance of the play.  Curious readers can easily look them up.)

The Franks were German Jews and after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor (prime minister) of Germany in 1933, they fled to Amsterdam where Otto had been invited to manage a branch of the company for which he worked.  Then the German army occupied the Netherlands in May 1940 and the Franks were trapped. 

When the Gestapo and the Green Police—so called because of the color of their uniforms, this was the Nazi force with the task of policing the civilian populations of the German-occupied countries—started rounding up Dutch Jews, Otto Frank (portrayed in the Park Square production by Michael Paul Levin) prepared the three-story attic as a hide-away.  

The door to the stairway up to the attic—known as the Secret Annex in the Dutch edition of Anne’s diary—was disguised as a bookcase; it was only opened after all the workers of the company had left the building.  On 6 July 1942, Frank; his wife, Edith (Laurie Flanigan Hegge); and their daughters, 16-year-old Margot (Eva Gemlo) and 13-tear-old Anne (Sulia Rose Altenberg), moved into the hiding place. 

The Franks were accompanied by another Jewish family, the Van Daans.  Hans Van Daan (Jon Andrew Hegge) was Otto Frank’s business associate; he came with his wife, Petronella (Julie Ann Nevill), and their son Peter (Ryan London Levin), also 16.  Peter had brought his cat, Mouschi.  A few months later, the two families were joined by a dentist, Albert Dussel (Charles Fraser), who was in trouble and had no place to hide.

In the play, Otto Frank gives his youngest daughter a blank book when they arrive at the Secret Annex; in reality, he’d given it to her on her 13th birthday, 12 June 1942.  In either case, Anne began using it as a diary right away.  The famous book, which survived the war, was covered in red-and-white checkered fabric and had a little lock on the front.  (Poignantly, the diary Altenberg used in the performance matches this description.)

Since the office below the attic was still in operation during the day, the secret occupants above had to maintain strict silence and other restrictions.  Their needs were looked after by two trusted employees, Miep Gies (Sarah Broude) and Mr. Kraler (Jim Pounds). 

On 4 August 1944, the Green Police raided the attic and its occupants were arrested and taken away to various concentration camps.  Anne ended up in Bergen-Belsen with Margot and the woman represented in the play by Mrs. Van Daan.  Edith Frank died of starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945 at 44; Margot died of typhus at 19 in March 1945 at Bergen-Belsen and Anne died soon after at the age of 15.  The real-life Mrs. Van Daan died in mid-April 1945 either at Theresienstadt concentration camp or on the way there; she would have been 44.

Of the men, Mr. Van Daan was murdered in the gas chamber shortly after arriving at Auschwitz in early October 1944; the first of the eight Secret Annex occupants to die, he was 46.  Peter died of an unrecorded illness at Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945; he was 18.  The real-life dentist represented as Mr. Dussel in the play died at 55 in December 1944 in Neuengamme concentration camp of “enterocolitis,” a catch-all term that covered, among other things, dysentery and cholera. 

Only Otto Frank survived.  He ended up at Auschwitz where in January 1945, he was liberated by Soviet troops.  He returned to Amsterdam where Miep gave him his daughter’s diary, which she had saved from the remains of the group’s belongings in the ransacked hideout.  He edited it and in June 1947, the first Dutch edition of the diary was issued under the title Het Achterhuis (“The Secret Annex”).

The English translation was published in both the United States and the United Kingdom in 1952 and became a best seller.  The diary’s been published in over 70 languages, including German and Chinese, and is still one of the most widely read books in the world. 

In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of Anne Frank’s death, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition was published, restoring the entries which dealt with Anne’s feelings toward her family, her burgeoning womanhood, and her reflections on her Judaism and the Holocaust that Otto Frank and the original publishers had removed.

Otto Frank remarried in 1953 and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he had relatives.  In 1963, he established the Anne Frank Fonds (fund) in Basel to promote the global distribution and use of The Diary of a Young Girl.  When the city of Amsterdam issued a demolition order for the building in which the Franks and the real-life counterparts of the Van Daans and Mr. Dussel had hidden for over two years, Frank and another of Miep’s helpers in the protection of the hiders started the Anne Frank Foundation in 1957 to preserve the site.  The foundation purchased the building in 1960 and it now operates as a museum and memorial.

Otto Frank died of lung cancer on 19 August 1980 in Basel.  He was 91 and was survived by his second wife (who died in London in 1998 at 93) and his stepdaughter (now 81 and an active speaker on her family’s experiences during the Holocaust).  There are no longer any blood relations of Otto Frank left living.

Miep Gies was remarkably not arrested when the Green Police raided the Secret Annex.  She survived the war to greet Otto Frank when he came back to try to locate members of his family.  She lived on to 100 years of age, dying in 2010.  She received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as Israel’s Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations, awarded to honor non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide. 

Mr. Kraler in the play is also a stand-in for a real person.  He was arrested with the Franks and the others and used as forced labor in the Netherlands until March 1945.  Among a large group of prisoners being marched to Germany when an Allied bombing raid raised confusion, he took the chance to escape. 

Making it back to Holland by April, he hid out until the country was liberated by the Allies in May 1945.  Widowed in 1952, he remarried and emigrated to Canada.  He, too, was awarded the Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations and died at 89 in 1989 in Toronto.

The diary was adapted for the stage in 1955 by Goodrich (1890-1984) and Hackett (1900-95), opening at the Cort Theatre on Broadway on 5 October 1955.  Originally produced by Kermit Bloomgarden (1904-76) and directed by Garson Kanin (1912-99), The Diary of Anne Frank ran for 717 performances before it closed at the Ambassador Theatre (to which it had moved on 26 February 1957) on 22 June 1957.  It received the 1956 Tony Award for Best Play and four other nominations.  It also won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 1956 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. 

Goodrich and Hackett adapted their play into a film script and in March 1959, Twentieth Century Fox released the movie version, produced and directed by George Stevens (1904-75).  In 1967, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) aired a TV movie based on the stage play and in 1980, 20th Century Fox Television made another television film for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC); both versions had star-studded casts.

A revision by playwright Wendy Kesselman (b. 1940) of the Goodrich and Hackett adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank was presented in October and November 1997 in Boston at the Colonial Theatre, directed by James Lapine (b. 1949).  It transferred to Broadway’s Music Box Theatre in December 1997, running for 221 regular performances and 15 previews.  The production was nominated for the 1998 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

In January 1987, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) ran a four-part TV miniseries based on The Diary of a Young Girl.  The BBC broadcast another adaptation of the diary in January 2009 in five half-hour episodes.  (It was aired on the Public Broadcasting Service [PBS] in the United States as part of its Masterpiece series in April 2010 as a single 100-minute broadcast.)

In 1968 Grigory Frid  (1915-2012) composed an operatic version of The Diary of Anne Frank.  The one-hour monodrama in 21 scenes for soprano and chamber orchestra was first performed at the All-Union House of Composers in Moscow in 1972.

Soon after the war, Meyer Levin (1905-81), a U.S. journalist serving as a war correspondent in Europe, read Anne Frank’s diary.  He’d been one of the first journalists to see the concentration camps as they were being liberated by the Allied forces and he was devastated by what he’d seen.  He couldn’t write about it—until he read Anne’s diary.  He actually wrote a dramatic adaptation of the book, but was beaten to the stage by Goodrich and Hackett.

He reconceived his play as a radio drama and on 18 September 1952, the eve of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), CBS radio broadcast Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.  (It was critically praised and the network rebroadcast it in November.)  On 14 September 2009, Jennifer Strome, who had rediscovered Levin’s radio script in 1999, produced a private, live performance of Levin’s radio play at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.  On 15 September 2012, Strome produced and directed a free on-demand podcast of the radio play to commemorate the 60th anniversary of its CBS broadcast in 1952.

The Diary of Anne Frank, in almost any of its forms, has become a perennial favorite among regional theaters, community groups, and college and high school drama programs.

First, let me say that the work by Park Square was excellent.  When I say it wasn’t what I expected, that’s not a criticism.  I was just surprised.

It wasn’t a full production in terms of staging.  There was no set or lighting; there were costumes and some props (both of which were scrounged from each actor’s home—though the costume bits all still looked period-correct).  There were even costume changes from scene to scene.

The actors, who all appeared from separate rooms in their homes, were seated.  (The video was recorded on Zoom, then edited and assembled—I’d guess by Fiskradatz.)  They each appeared in a box with a neutral background (each a different color) and there was no movement aside from hand or arm gestures and facial expressions.

It was halfway like a reading, except that the actors were wearing costumes and using some hand props—and the dialogue was memorized, not read from scripts.  Because there was no movement, the actors all read their stage directions, which was a little odd at first, since stage directions are written in third person.  Someone off camera read the general stage directions while the screen was black—which I found a little disconcerting because at first I thought maybe something was wrong with my computer or my connection.  (There wasn’t.)

As I noted, each actor was in a separate box and all the actors “on stage” were seen in gallery view.  As characters entered or exited, their boxes appeared or disappeared—and the other boxes rearranged themselves randomly.  Sometimes while a character was speaking and someone else entered or left, the box of the character talking popped into a new location.  I found this flustering because, while I could continue to hear the actor, it took me a second or two to find where the speaker reappeared.

There was only one instance when the actors left their boxes in view of the audience—that is, they didn’t turn off their cameras.  That was the final exit at the end of the play (“Our time here has come to an End,” act 2, scene 4), after the Germans raided the Secret Annex.  Each actor gathered her or his belongings and, starting with Mr. Frank, stood and walked out of the box in silence, one by one.  The empty boxes all remained until only Anne was left on screen. 

                                                              

Anne took out the red-and-white checked diary; the screen zoomed in on her box alone as she wrote her final entry, detailing the departure.  Then the screen returned to the view of Anne and the seven empty boxes as she gathered her things and exited.  The screen went black. 

A local reviewer—who’d previously seen a full production of Park Square’s Anne Frank—reported of this moment: “The last scenes of the play, watching each face as the reality of what is happening dawns, are even more gripping and dramatic than the stage version.”

It was one of the times in the presentation when the actors used the boxes as if they were not only their set, but their world.  Instead of looking toward the door on the stage set that would have been the entry point of the Green Police, they all looked around the perimeters of the their boxes, as if they were expecting the Germans to penetrate the virtual frames.

According to actor Ryan London Levin, this was the result of director Fenster’s guidance.  She had told her actors to imagine that their Zoom boxes were, indeed, their worlds—the way actors are often trained to see their stage environment.  When they heard a thief downstairs from the attic after working hours, they were directed to respond as if he might break into their boxes. 

Despite the small issue of not always finding the on-screen speaker, however, I found myself perhaps more engaged in the online performance than I sometimes have been at in-person shows.  As I reported in the article on online theater, there were reasons for this.

                                                                                            

Because the actors appeared in close-up one-shots, each in a separate window, there was little doubt most of the time who was speaking.  If the actor used facial expressions, I could see them very clearly.  Further, the actors all looked as if they were performing for me—as if I were the only spectator.  (In a live-theater performance I attended where that was literally true, I was very self-conscious.)  That made it hard to look away, even though I knew they couldn’t see me.

Not that there weren’t some technical glitches.  The audio and the visual images were out of synch occasionally; an actor’s speech sometimes didn’t match her or his lip movements.  The sound sometimes dropped out and the video froze once or twice. 

Since this is a Saint Paul company, I don’t know any of the artists—actors, director, or desigers.  According to the program—there’s a PDF of the original one intended for the stage performances—some of the actors are Equity members and some are not.  I’d say the production is the equivalent of a very good Off-Off-Broadway performance, maybe a baby Off-Broadway one.

The acting, which was close to readers’ theater, was quite good.  I’m pretty sure Sulia Rose Altenberg is several years older than Anne (for one thing, Altenberg’s played the role for a few years at Park Square), but she captures the 13-year-old’s childishness, her inquisitiveness, her precocity, her sense of humor convincingly.  Ryan London Levin personifies the diffidence and sensitivity of the teenager that’s Peter.

If I had to imagine an Otto Frank, I couldn’t have done better than Michael Paul Levin.  He was entirely convincing in his efforts as de facto pater familias to keep everyone in the attic on an even keel despite the horror of their situation, while at the same time his tenderness with Anne as she goes through not only the adjustment to their straits, but her transition from a little girl to a young woman. 

A note about the performance of Levin’s Otto: he used a pronounced German accent, while the Dutch characters spoke ordinary American English.  Laurie Flanigan Hegge’s Edith Frank also had a slight German accent (the vocal coach was Keely Wolter) and the two Frank adults both handled this credibly. We remember that the Franks were recent refugees from Germany whereas the other characters were either native-born Dutch or had been in the Netherlands for a long time. 

I assume the rationale for the Frank daughters not to have German accents is that they both came to Amsterdam as little children in 1933—Anne was four and Margot was seven—and had been going to Dutch schools.  I thought this was an excellent decision on the part of Fenster and well executed by the cast.

All the cast handled what could have become a collection of clichés behaving predictably gently and with heartfelt conviction.  Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan could have been played as one-note selfish, spoiled, and egotistical social-climbers, but Jon Andrew Hegge and Julie Ann Nevill found the sympathetic aspect of the characters despite their often cold behavior.

I was much impressed with some of the physicalizations the actors accomplished in spite of the restrictive environment of the online production.  They managed to make the few gestures they did seem coordinated with one another—as one actor reached out to hand some object to another, the second actor appeared to take it—even though the props themselves were different objects.

One remarkable example was a tug-o’-war Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan have with the woman’s beloved fur coat (“A New Year,” act 2, scene 1): Hegge and Nevill were each in his and her own Zoom box—but it really looked like they were pulling at opposite ends of the garment.

Part of this might have been the conviction by the actors that the few objects they used as props, as directed by Fenster, had been selected by the actors very carefully.  Ryan London Levin explained that the director had suggested they “find objects in our house to use as props . . . that are special for you.” 

Another accomplishment that touched me was the way the cast handled the Jewish customs in the play.  The main one is the celebration of Hanukkah (“Hanukkah in the Attic.” act 1, scene 5), with the lighting of the candles and Anne’s handing out small hand-made gifts, and then her singing “Oh, Hanukkah.” 

I have no idea how many of the cast are Jewish, but surely not all of them—yet they all made me feel like these were traditions they knew—except Charles Fraser’s Mr. Dussel, who’s character is clearly a secular Jew and doesn’t know his faith’s traditions, comparing Hanukkah to “Saint Nicholas Day.”  (The historical dentist was, in fact, a devout Jew.) 

Two other impressions: part of the hiders’ situation is very reminiscent of ours during the current pandemic—though far more dire, of course.  The theater’s own promotional material draws a parallel with “a country experiencing social isolation and anxiety about the future in unprecedented ways.”  The theater couldn’t have predicted this situation when they selected and scheduled Anne Frank (announced on 28 February 2020; Minnesota’s stay-at-home order didn’t take effect until 28 March), which is weird.  

I found watching this story emotionally hard.  I’m generally not good with Holocaust stories—I avoid movies on the subject—because it makes me really, really angry.  Knowing how this story ends—I read The Diary of a Young Girl when I was in middle school and I saw the 1959 film (which came out when I was 12)—makes it even harder.  This is not a play I’d have chosen to see in a theater.

The  Twin Cities reviewer in World magazine, a bi-weekly Christian news magazine published in Asheville, North Carolina, Sharon Dierberger, called the Park Square online production “the most creative and emotional rendition of The Diary of Anne Frank you may ever see.”  Dierberger observed that “Anne Frank’s hiding in the secret annex is particularly apropos considering the isolation today’s pandemic is causing around the world,” but admonished that “viewing it will leave you counting your blessings instead of your days without dining in a restaurant.”

The review-writer felt that “the personal nature of the players looking directly into the camera heightens the emotion of each line.”   She added:

The simplicity of the format and close-up expressions of each wonderfully well-cast actor are surprisingly effective.  I didn’t expect to be so drawn in, especially because I’d seen the actual play in the same theater years earlier.  That production was moving.  This was even better.

The Minnesota writer especially found that she “empathized with Anne’s adolescent ruminating and older-than-her-years philosophizing.”  She continued: “Sulia Rose Altenberg portrays Anne, and has found the right balance of innocence and angst.”

“Michael Paul Levin, playing Anne’s father, is believable as the patriarch trying to buoy up the attic occupants, maintain peace, love his family well, and remain ever-hopeful,” Dierberger wrote.  With respect to the whole ensemble, the World reviewer “could feel my own temperature rise watching family members struggle to get along in close quarters, share rations, and wait, wait, wait.”

The big PR coup for the Park Square Theatre was Terry Teachout’s Wall Street Journal review.  The WSJ reviewer labeled the theater’s production “the most stirring staging of ‘Anne Frank’ I have ever seen.”  He went on to elucidate that it was

a version that employs the unique properties of Zoom in a way that heightens the intrinsic drama of the play itself, subtly connecting the terrible truth of the Frank family’s desperate attempt to hide from the Nazis to the infinitely less consequential but still painful solitude in which so many of us find ourselves forced to live.

Teachout observed that the play “tells an emotionally overwhelming story with a simplicity that brings it within reach of just about any cast imaginable.”  Of the production, the WSJ review-writer reported: “It is acted by a very, very strong 10-person ensemble.” 

Further, he affirmed of “the play’s climax,” the scene of the hiders’ departure from the Secret Annex, “that Ms. Fenster and her ingenious colleagues have come up with what might well be the very first Zoom-based coup de théâtre, a scene of stunning intensity whose mere memory reduces me to tears as I write these words.”

“To watch Park Square’s ‘Anne Frank,’” declared Teachout, “is to be given an exciting preview of what Zoom will make possible for other theater companies who are capable of using it with comparable imagination.”  In conclusion, he added: “Rarely has a revival of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ been so timely.”

"Can You Say 'Sempre Molto Rubato'?"

by Peter Filichia

[This is a post from Masterworks Broadway, a website of  Sony Music Entertainment, from 7 April 2020.  I’ve amended Filichia’s discussion about tempo markings (that’s what the rhythm instructions are called, I learned) by inserting the year the plays or revues he names as examples  were created (not necessarily their Broadway openings) and the name of the composer (or the arranger in cases where the songs have been repurposed from another genre such as pop or rock ’n’ roll). 

[For the sake of brevity, I haven’t added the other creative artists’ names, such as book-writer or lyricist, because they aren’t responsible for the musical tempi of the songs.  (My additions and comments are enclosed in square brackets.)]

Although directors aren’t supposed to give line readings to actors, composers and lyricists seem to be allowed to “direct” their singers and orchestras.

Take a look at sheet music for various songs, and far more often than not, you’ll find a word or two at the top of Page One that says exactly what’s expected of those who’ve chosen to perform these ditties.

Most of the sheets I surveyed had “moderately” written all over them. PINS AND NEEDLES [1936 revue with music and lyrics by Harold Rome] (which you must hear – and not just for Streisand) has that word on the vast majority of its songs. [Barbra Streisand, a newcomer at the time, sang on the 1962 25th-anniversary recording of the score.  She’d done a one-performance revue in Greenwich Village the previous year and was appearing in I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962; music and lyrics by Harold Rome), her Broadway début at 19, at the time of the album’s release.]

GREASE’s [1971; music and lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey] “Summer Nights,” THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE’s [2000; music by Jeanine Tesori] “Forget About the Boy” and PROMISES, PROMISES’ [1968; music by Burt Bacharach] “Half as Big as Life” all use the term, too. But “moderately” for the HAIR’s [1967; music by Galt MacDermot] “The Flesh Failures” and the title song of ALL SHOOK UP [2004; songs of Elvis Presley arranged by Stephen Oremus]? Wouldn’t you assume that those songs would ask for more than that? And “moderately” for GUYS AND DOLLS’ [1950; music and lyrics by Frank Loesser] “Luck Be a Lady” and for GYPSY’s [1959; music by Jule Styne] “Rose’s Turn”? Out of the question!

Onto “The Longest Time” and “Uptown Girl” from MOVIN’ OUT [2002; songs by Billy Joel with additional arrangements and orchestrations by Stuart Malina]. Which would you think Billy Joel marked “moderate rock ’n’ roll” and which “bright rock ’n’ roll”? I’d think “Longest” would be moderate and “Uptown” bright, but it’s just the opposite.

Some songwriters embellish their “moderatelys.” SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS’ [2002; music by Marvin Hamlisch] beautiful “Don’t Know Where You Leave Off” is “moderately flowing”; SHOW BOAT’s [1927, music by Jerome Kern] “You are Love” is “moderately fast” and MARIE CHRISTINE’s [1999; music, lyrics, and book by Michael John LaChiusa] “Cincinnati” is a “moderate cakewalk.” Leaving no room for doubt is STARTING HERE, STARTING NOW’s [1976; music by David Shire] “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of My Life”: “moderately with suppressed excitement.”

Other songwriters preferred the Italian word “moderato”: Oscar Hammerstein labeled ME AND JULIET’s [1953; music by Richard Rodgers] “The Big Black Giant” as such but THE KING AND I’s [1951, composed by Rodgers] “Shall We Dance?” as “moderato brightly.” Other variations on the theme include PURLIE’s [1970; music by Gary Geld] stirring opening number “First Thing Monday Morning” (“moderato intense”) and ON YOUR FEET’s [2015; songs of Gloria Estefan arranged by Lon Hoyt] “Mi Tierra” (“moderate salsa”). RAGS’ “Blame It on the Summer Night” – one of the subtlest sexual songs ever – is “moderate bluesy.”

All this moderation would seem to bolster the arguments of those who’ve always said that musicals are middle-of-the-road entertainment.

Italian is used quite a bit. THE PIRATE QUEEN’s [2006; music by Claude-Michel Schönberg] “She Who Has All” is “adagio”: slowly. URINETOWN’s [2001; music by Mark Hollmann] “It’s a Privilege to Pee” is “agitato.” Penelope Pennywise may well be agitated, but she’s not nearly as agitato as those waiting in a long line to relieve themselves.

What song from SWEET CHARITY [1966; music by Cy Coleman] is tabbed “rhythmically”? No, you’re wrong: “The Rhythm of Life” has that designation of –here’s that word again – “moderately.” It’s “Where Am I Going?” that’s labeled “rhythmically.”

There are some notations that lend themselves to editorial comment. TICK, TICK . . . BOOM’s [1990; composed by Jonathan Larson] “Real Life” calls for “a slow pulse.” Yeah, real life is like that sometimes. Did Bernstein, Comden and Green purposely label ON THE TOWN’s [1944; music by Leonard Bernstein] “I Can Cook Too” “hot and fast” because it’s a good description of Hildy Esterhazy, who sings it?

In that musical about Jesus Christ [Jesus Christ Superstar, 1970; music by Andrew Lloyd Webber], “Superstar” is labeled “maestoso”: majestic. Little did Lloyd Webber know then that the word would also be the name of the theater where he’d have his biggest-ever hit.

Some describe their songs by the dances they inspired. BYE BYE BIRDIE’s [1960; music by Charles Strouse] title song requires “a twist beat.” WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN’s [1964; music and lyrics by Ervin Drake] “You’re No Good” asks for “beguine tempo.” ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’s [1978; music by Cy Coleman] “Veronique” demands “French can can,” while MY FAIR LADY’s [1956; music by Frederick Loewe] goes farther south with its “tempo di habanera” for “The Rain in Spain” as does MAN OF LA MANCHA’s [1965; music by Mitch Leigh] “tempo di bolero” for “The Impossible Dream.” THE PAJAMA GAME’s [1954; music and lyrics are by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross] “Hernando’s Hideaway” doesn’t just note “tango tempo” but also adds “with a voice of mystery.”

                                                       

[A note about the song in Bye Bye Birdie to which I think Filichia is referring: The only song that fits the description of the “title song” is, clearly, “Bye Bye Birdie.”  That song wasn’t in the original 1960-61 Broadway production.  It was added for the 1963 movie (sung over the opening credits by Ann-Margret as Kim McAfee) and then inserted into the score of the 2009-10 Broadway revival.  Strouse also wrote the “new” song for the film.  ~Rick]

It’s “Fox trot tempo” that Cole Porter heard for “All of You” in his SILK STOCKINGS [1954; music and lyrics by Cole Porter]. But it’s also what Kurt Weill stated for “Army Song” in THE THREEPENNY OPERA [1928 (German), 1933 (English)]. Could you see yourself cutting a rug to this song? (If you don’t know it, you should; it’s grimly funny.)

[It’s impossible for me to know which version of Threepenny Opera Filichia means here as there are several English versions of both the text and the songs.  While Weill’s music is the same, each translation would have somewhat different tempo markings.  The best-known English version is the 1956 translation, produced successfully Off-Broadway in 1954, by composer-lyricist Marc Blitzstein.  Another possible version that Filichia would have seen was the 1976-77 production of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival at Lincoln Center, from a translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett.]

Many uses “polka” in their descriptions. For HIGH BUTTON SHOES’ [1947; music by Jule Styne] “Papa, Won’t You Dance with Me?” is correct, for that’s the dance that takes place mid-song. Less easy to discern are FANNY’s [1954; music and lyrics by Harold Rome] “Be Kind to Your Parents” (“rhythmically, like a polka”), JACQUES BREL’s [formally (despite the death of Brel in 1978) Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, 1968; music and (original French) lyrics by Brel, English translation by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman; arranged by Wolfgang Knittel] “Marathon” (“tempo di polka”) and WILDCAT’s [1960; music by Cy Coleman] “Give a Little Whistle” (“polka tempo”).

Jerry Herman [composer for the shows that follow] labeled MAME’s [1966] “We Need a Little Christmas” “brightly, as a polka.” As for his title songs, we might well expect to see “with spirit” for MILK AND HONEY’s [1961] and “with a lilt” for MAME’s. We may question “moderately” for “La Cage aux Folles” [1983] and “medium strut” for “Hello, Dolly!” [1963] – a bit tame for one of Broadway’s greatest production numbers. But would you have guessed that “Dear World” [1968] would be tabbed “with dignity”?

Celebrities often say they really knew they made it when they became a crossword puzzle clue. Fine, but another way is being mentioned in sheet music. GODSPELL’s [1970; composed by Stephen Schwartz] “Turn Back, O Man” is “a la Mae West.” KINKY BOOTS’ [2012; music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper] “Take What You Got” is called “Mumford-esque,” referring to British folk-rock band Mumford & Sons. THE WEDDING SINGER’s [2006; music by Matthew Sklar] “A Note from Linda” loftily notes “a la Pachelbel’s Canon.”

And then there’s THE PROM’s [2016; music by Matthew Sklar] “It’s Not about Me,” which starts off “recitative, a la Eva Peron.” But if we get technical, what’s meant is Lloyd Webber and Rice’s Evita [from the musical of the same name, 1976; music by Lloyd Webber], and not actually the former First Lady of Argentina.

Some titles belong in the Department of Redundancy Department. ONCE’s [2011; music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová] “Falling Slowly” is marked “Slowly.” HOW TO SUCCEED [in Business Without Really Trying]’s [1961; music by Frank Loesser] “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm” offers “happily,” although it does also caution “but not too fast.”

The longest description? Probably LITTLE ME’s [1962; music by Cy Coleman] “On the Other Side of the Tracks” which has “Deliberate tempo, intense and driving (not too fast and done with a gradual build).”

The shortest? Many have no notation at all. Richard O’Brien did few for THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW [1973], probably assuming his songs would speak for themselves. And if you were looking forward to seeing how Mel Brooks described “Springtime for Hitler,” you’ll find no notation at all, which is the case for most of his songs in THE PRODUCERS [2001]. However, “Betrayed” is labeled “freely,” which is rather ironic, given that Max sings it in prison. ONCE ON THIS ISLAND’s [1990; music by Stephen Flaherty] “Ti Moune,” sung by our heroine’s foster parents, also is labeled “freely” although both mom and dad don’t want her to be free.

What are Stephen Sondheim’s [composer-lyricist for all the following, with various librettists] labels? We have COMPANY’s [1970] “Marry Me a Little” (“allegro appassionata”: fast, with passion); FOLLIES’ [1967; premièred 1971] “Losing My Mind” (“sempre molto rubato”: always very much with some feeling of time); A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC’s [1973] “Send in the Clowns” (“lento”: slowly); PACIFIC OVERTURES’ [1975] “Pretty Lady” (“andantino dolce”: slightly slowly but sweetly); SWEENEY TODD’s [1979] “My Friends” (“misterioso”); MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG’s [1981] “Our Time” (“andante”: on the slow side); SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE’s [1983] “Move On” (“tranquillo”); INTO THE WOODS’ [1986] “On the Steps of the Palace” (“allegretto e grazioto”: moderately quick as well as pretty); ASSASSINS’ [1990] “The Ballad of Booth” (“larghetto”: slightly faster than largo but slower than adagio).

For a guy who doesn’t much like the musical he wrote that was set in Venice, Sondheim sure uses a lot of Italian. What’s more, he marked “Agony” in INTO THE WOODS as “a la barcarolle,” which roughly translates to “in the way gondoliers sing.” And considering his battles with Richard Rodgers, you’d think he’d even avoid “allegro.”

[Peter Filichia, who also writes a column each Monday at www.broadwayselect.com and can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com, is a former theater reviewer for the Newark, New Jersey, Star-Ledger and television station News 12 New Jersey in Edison.

[When I read Filichia’s post, I immediately sent the link to my friend Kirk Woodward because I was sure it would amuse him.  Kirk e-mailed back, “As it happens, I was just looking at ‘Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer,’ a collection that includes the songs in ‘Tomfoolery,’ and he puts great instructions on many of the songs.”  He appended a list of the Lehrer songs and their tempo markings, which I thought would make a great addition to Filichia’s comments :

“The Irish Ballad” – Authentically

“Be Prepared” – Trustworthily, loyally, helpfully, friendlily, etc

“Fight Fiercely, Harvard!” – Loyally

“The Old Dope Peddler” – Wistfully

“The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be” – Westerly

“I Wanna Go Back to Dixie” – A little too fast

“The Hunting Song” – Blithely

“I Hold Your Hand in Mine” – Tenderly

“My Home Town” – Nostalgically

“When You Are Old and Gray” – Liltingly

“The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz” – Mit Schlag

“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” – Vernally

“The Masochism Tango” – Painstakingly

“A Christmas Carol” – Merrily

“The Elements” – As fast as possible

“Bright College Days” – Adagio, con brio

“She’s My Girl” – Torchily

“In Old Mexico” – Immoderato

“We All Will Go Together When We Go” – Eschatologically

“National Brotherhood Week” – Fraternally

“MLF Lullaby” – Wiegenleidig

“The Folk Song Army” – Earnestly

“Smut” – Pornissimo

“Send the Marines” – alla collo di pelle

“Pollution” – Calypso

“So Long, Mom” – a la Cohan

“Who’s Next” – disarmingly

“I Got It from Agnes” – infectiously

“Silent E” – With ease

“L–Y” – Rapid–L–Y

“The Vatican Rag” – Ecumenically

[My response to Kirk was simply: “The ‘L-Y’ notation sounds like part of the lyric of a song from [the musical] 1776!”  Kirk agreed, adding “certain-Lee!!!”

[Obviously, it helps to know something about Tom Lehrer (b. 1928) and his (often dark) satire.  (Both Kirk and I are longtime fans.)  I’ll let ROTters look him up themselves, but I’ll tell you that Tomfoolery was a musical revue made up of Lehrer’s songs.  It premièred in London’s West End in 1980 and ran Off-Broadway in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1981-82.

[The tempo markings above are jokes.  Some are obvious (“The Old Dope Peddler” – Wistfully; “The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be” – Westerly; “Send the Marines” – alla collo di pelle: the tempo instruction is faux-Italian for ‘in the style of the leathernecks,’ a slangy reference to the Marines) and others are puns (“Smut” – Pornissimo; the pun is on pianissimo, which is Italian for ‘very softly” and is an actual tempo marking). 

[Some are just wonderfully silly (“Be Prepared” – Trustworthily, loyally, helpfully, friendlily, etc; “Be Prepared” is, famously, the Boy Scout motto and the Scout creed is: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”  (I was one back in the day.)

[There are also a couple of German instructions—not a language usually used for music annotation, which is partly why it’s funny.  For “The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz,” making the musical instruction  “Mit Schlag: is humorous because it means ‘with whipped cream,’ which is how all German desserts are served and Germans loooove their whipped cream! 

[(The waltz is the specialty of the Viennese—Lehrer’s intro to the song names Austro-Hungarian composers Franz Lehár and Johann Strauss—and Wiener Schnitzel, while not a dessert, is an Austrian dish—wiener is German for ‘Viennese’—that’s on the menu of nearly every German restaurant.) 

[In “MLF Lullaby” – Wiegenleidig, wiegenleidig means ‘cradled’ in German: the song is a satirical lullaby about the “Multi-Lateral Force,” a collective nuclear deterrence for which Germany, just a scant 20 years after we had fought a world war against them, would get nuclear weapons.  The plan was never implemented.]

Theater Online – A Preliminary Report

by Kirk Woodward and Rick

[“Is the theater really dead?”  The folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel asked that musical question in “The Dangling Conversation” as far back as 1966. Of course, it wasn’t then – it did pretty damn well for the ensuing 54 years – but is it now? Has the coronavirus put it down in 2020?

[The theaters here in New York City, across the U.S., and around the world are closed. As I write this, the Broadway League has announced that their theaters won’t reopen until Labor Day, September 7, at the earliest. At least one Broadway show, Disney’s  Frozen, has announced that it won’t reopen after the restrictions on gatherings has been lifted.

[Playwrights, composers. actors, dancers, singers, pit musicians, directors, choreographers, musical directors, stage designers, stage managers, theater and production managers, talent agents, PR reps, concessionaires, and a whole host of other people who work – worked – in live theater are unemployed and sitting at home searching for things to do. Especially for ways to ply their trades.

[But is the business of show dead? Is the art of drama deceased? Have stay-at-home, social-distancing, wear-PPE practices killed it?

[Not according to my friend Kirk Woodward, playwright, composer, actor, director – and some of his (theater) friends. Not if they have anything to say – or do – about it!

[On Friday, May 1, and Monday, May 4, Kirk and his fellow theater addicts from in and around Montclair, New Jersey, held an online reading of four short comic plays written by Kirk. They were originally intended for presentation on the stage, but things being how they are . . . . 

[The readings, produced by Martha Day, were presented on Zoom, with all of the three cast members working from their homes – the same as we viewers – and began streaming at 7:30 each evening. As each member of the invited online audience joined the “meeting” – apparently it doesn’t matter what you’re doing on the site, Zoom calls them all meetings – her or his name appeared on our screens.

[Kirk introduced the evening – and between the plays, he returned to introduce each one, and the actors, individually. At the beginning, however, the playwright proclaimed that the very fact of this online reading is proof that theater can’t die, no matter how many times someone declares it dead or tries to kill it.

[Hear! Hear! 

[Now, I’d never watched anything online like this before. I’m half a luddite. I seldom watch videos on my computer – hell, I don’t even like to read much on the laptop, though I have to a fair amount. Kirk’s one-acts were the only plays I’d seen on the computer screen (until a week or so after the reading). 

[So this was a new experience for me. And even though it was a sit-down reading, I looked on it as a live performance online – and I anticipated there might be something I could write about for Rick On Theater (especially since I no longer have in-theater performances about which I can report).

[Kirk, of course, was presenting the readings online, a first for him, I believe. We chatted by e-mail a bit about our opposite perspectives – spectator vs. presenter – and the day after the first session, Kirk sent me a draft of a proposed article for ROT examining his experience from his side of the event.

[I made him a proposal: let’s collaborate. Kirk’ll write about producing a live online reading and I’ll comment on watching one.

[So here’s what we came up with. To avoid writing a Kirk-said-then-Rick-said back-and-forth, we’re both writing in third person. (Don’t try to figure out the logic of that – I don’t think there is any.)  You might be able to tell where we each hand off the baton – or the word-processor cursor – because of the change in voice. It doesn’t’ matter; it’s not a test.

[Just go with it. We may yet manage to say some things revealing. Or at least mildly interesting.  ~Rick]

The world of theater has been through a lot over the past two and a half millennia or so. Several times one might have thought that theater would simply die out – for example, in the “Dark Ages.” It never has.

In 1900, live performance was one of the few sources of entertainment that people had. Over the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-First, the phonograph, movies, radio, television, and virtual communications platforms have each dealt serious blows to theater. Yet it continues, and in fact, one may feel, is doing better in quality, and in some places in quantity, than it has in a long time.

But theater involves people getting physically together, or it did until COVID-19 shut down public gatherings in many countries, including the United States, where Broadway theater, for example, closed altogether. Theater as a group activity, for the moment, seemed to be over. However . . .

Kirk Woodward, one of the authors of this piece, has done various things in theater for decades, one of them being writing plays, with over thirty produced in some form at various times. While observing social isolation like everyone else, the thought occurred to him that he could easily arrange for a few actors to read online some one-act plays that he had recently written, so he could at least hear, if not exactly see, the plays being performed.

Apparently at the same moment that idea occurred to him, it occurred to a significant number of people in the theater community, because by the time he’d recruited three excellent actors (Martha Day, Tara Moran, and Craig Woodward) he’d already received three invitations for online play readings, and the invitations continued to arrive.

Indeed, there have been any number of well publicized examples of online performances of various kinds, mostly music, but theater has had some assays as well. A cast of over 50 stage luminaries got together, virtually speaking, to celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday (which actually fell on March 22) in an online concert-cum-seranade of his theater songs (Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration), streamed on Sunday, April 26.

The new Broadway musical Sing Street was supposed to start previews on March 26 for an April 19 opening, but the coronavirus shutdown put the kibosh on all that. So on April 30, the cast offered Sing Street: Grounded – At Home With the Broadway Cast on Facebook.

Perhaps the most innovative online theater project, though, was Richard Nelson’s latest Apple Family play, What Do We Need to Talk About?, presented on YouTube Live and at the Public Theater’s website on April 29 with the original Apple Family cast from the Public’s premières of the trilogy. Nelson wrote (and directed) the 70-minute, intermissionless play to be performed virtually. (Subtitled The Apple Family: Conversations on Zoom, the play is still streaming until June 28.)

As he said in the introduction to this article, however, Rick had never seen any of these or other theater presentations online before Social Dramatics. So, as Kirk is viewing this experience as a first-time online director and playwright, Rick is (quite literally) seeing it as a first-time virtual spectator.

In a tip of the hat to restrictions on physical proximity, the group called itself Social Dramatics. It held two online rehearsals of the four one-act plays (“The Error of Comedies,” “Question and Response,” “Elemental Thunder,” and “Shtick ’Em Up”), and presented online readings on May 1 and 4, 2020.

Clearly online play readings were an idea whose time had quite literally come, and other theatrical uses of online resources are undoubtedly in the works, but this article restricts itself to play readings, for reasons which become clear when we think about the considerations involved in doing plays online. Here are some of those considerations:

Play readings essentially don’t cost anything. On a professional scale, of course, there are significant production costs in broadcast performances, but not in the more homemade variety discussed here.

Zoom, the most frequently used online video meeting applications at the moment, costs nothing if you don’t mind the restrictions on its free product – a session can only last so long – and it costs only a small amount for more extensive monthly service. No theater rental costs, no heating expenses, no staff to pay.

When the virus restrictions were applied, Zoom rapidly became the most popular method of online visual communication. There are other products, of course, such as FaceTime, but Zoom is platform-agnostic – it can run on any system – and was designed for business rather than personal use, so it offers an important measure of flexibility.

Zoom is easy to install, has relatively few features so the inexperienced user is not likely to be too confused, and is readily accessible. The “meeting” organizer, with the application loaded on their computer, sends an email to likely participants that contains a link and in some cases a password. The participants click on the link, answer a couple of prompts, and they’re “in.”

Never having done anything like this before, Rick wasn’t sure how it would work. By e-mail, Kirk assured him that it was as simple as he indicated and it was. Simpler, actually: there had been no need even for a password; just clicking on the link initiated the whole thing in one go. Even the technically semi-literate can navigate this system!

After logging on, Rick’s screen was black and, not having seen this site before for any reason, he thought something might have been wrong. He’d logged in a little early to make sure he had time to do anything necessary—for instance, he keeps his speakers off most of the time and he wanted to be sure to get them turned back on before the reading—and it simply turns out that before the scheduled time of the “meeting,” there’s nothing on the site. 

Rick didn’t know that—he was expecting perhaps something like the TV test pattern of the old days—so the black screen nonplussed him. Then Kirk’s image popped on and all went smoothly from then on.

More or less. Kirk greeted Rick right away, so he knew his New York City participant was online—it seems the names of everyone who joins the meeting flash on the screens—but no one could see Rick. His “box” (the screen-in-screen image) was totally black, 

At first, people at the other end thought someone was experiencing a glitch, but then Rick realized what the others were seeing was the result of his having disabled his laptop’s camera. (Not being dressed for public appearance—ahem!—Rick left the camera that way. The others could hear Rick but not see him.)

A little like a theater before a performance starts, everyone was chatting, including Kirk and Martha Day, one of the actors who also served as producer. Aside from the vast distance separating us (aside from Rick in New York City, Kirk reported that there were viewers from California, Maine, and Florida as well), the main difference in this part of the evening I could see between this online reading and an in-person one in a theater or auditorium is that the conversation was mostly about the event we were about to witness.

Wherever there is technology, there are people trying to misuse it, and initially Zoom was not completely prepared for hackers and online vandals. A number of instances of intruders into meetings got wide publicity. Also, Zoom was making data available to other businesses without user consent. These conditions appear to now be largely resolved.  

To continue: online readings are difficult to monetize. This applies both to those who organize the events and to those who participate in them. There may already be ways to sell advertising time for online readings; such opportunities seldom go untried for long, but it is uncertain how well they would work. 

Again, revenue for online performing is always possible at the professional level. For example, the recent One World: Together at Home concert on numerous TV networks, “curated” by Lady Gaga, raised almost $128 million to benefit health-care workers.

Barring such a scale of performance, though, nobody is likely to make much if any money directly off a virtual reading of a one-act play. Zoom readings won’t make much money, barring audience generosity. Still, at least there’s virtually no cost in doing a reading over Zoom, and . . .

You can show off your wares online. That was the idea – to let people see the plays, and to find out by doing so what value they might have. Similarly, actors can let people see their work online; this might lead to more work, and at a minimum it can remind people of what they can do.

(After seeing Social Dramatics, Rick did see another online performance: Park Square Theatre’s Diary of Anne Frank from Saint Paul, Minnesota. This had been intended for staging in a theater for a live audience, but it occurred to Rick that Park Square got something of a lagniappe from this happenstance:  People all over the country—and beyond—got to see the work of this vibrant regional company and they even snared a review by Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal which they would surely not have gotten in Saint Paul.  [I intend to blog on this online performance in the immediate future.  ~rick])

And . . .

Nobody has to pay to see the results. For the first Social Dramatics Zoom reading there were some 36 “attendees,” and none had to pay for a ticket, or worry if they’d have a good seat, for that matter. They didn’t even have to stay focused on the performance if they didn’t want to. They could talk. They could eat. (Very Brechtian!)

There’s no “tech” in the theater sense – no costumes, sets, lighting effects, and so on. Under ordinary conditions most readings wouldn’t have that kind of tech anyway. There can be, of course, if desired. If you want to dress up for a Zoom reading and, say, aim a flashlight at your face for effect, you’re free to.

As a matter of fact, Zoom actually will give you various free electronic backgrounds if you’d like, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, or outer space. Theater tech is a lot of work, and it’s a pleasant change not to need to worry too much about it. And one doesn’t have to, online, because . . .

This was actually a pretty interesting technical aspect of the event for an initiate to online theater. While most of the attendees were in ordinary home spaces—many with bookshelves behind them, which is apparently the setting ot choice for broadcasting from home if you watch news anchors and talk-show hosts working from their houses and apartments—except one who sat in front of a large image of the Golden Gate. 

Rick thought it might be a poster mounted on the wall in front of the computer; he was pretty certain the viewer wasn’t in San Francisco or Sausalito in front of a window looking out on the bay. He asked Kirk the next day if it was CGI, and Kirk copped that was.

Online play readings by themselves can be quite effective. The biggest variables, of course, are the quality of the material being performed and the skill of the performers. Given acceptable levels of both, the audience’s imaginations will do the rest of the work, as happened years ago with radio dramas, which of course also were ordinarily read, not memorized.

In the case of in-person play readings, it is always clear that the actors are reading, because they’re holding scripts and frequently looking at them. On Zoom, one can look at a script and still appear to be making eye contact. The actors can have scripts in front of them while for all intents and purposes looking into the camera.

As a result, an online Zoom play reading is likely to be more effective than an in-person reading. There is one important exception to this. At the present time, Zoom cannot handle music played simultaneously among people at different locations. It won’t sound simultaneous. It will sound cacophonous.

The laws of physics determine how fast can one hear what another Zoom station is doing, and with music the laws of physics win hands down. If you see a video that appears to show people playing music simultaneously across the web, you’re seeing an illusion – the parts have been separately recorded and then mixed together.

Rick had no complaints about either the quality of the material or the skill of the actors, but it seemed that rather than feeling free to let his mind or attention wander, he found himself more engaged in the reading than he often has been at in-person readings. There were two reasons for this, he decided.

First, the actors appeared in close-up one-shots, each in a separate window. (This was also true of the Anne Frank performance.  Kirk addresses this aspect of the Zoom reading specifically below as well.) There’s never any doubt who’s talking, which there can be with a line of actors all sitting six or eight feet away from you in a row of chairs. In addition, if they use facial expressions as they read, you can see them very clearly.

Second, they all look as if they’re talking directly to you. While that may not be realistic in a fully staged performance—it’s actually rather Nineteenth-Century. That makes it hard to look away, even though you know they can’t see you. (When the reading started, in addition to Rick’s blacked-out video, the attendees turned off their cameras so the actors couldn’t see the spectators during the reading.)

Assuming the reading itself is done well, which this was, it seems to be quite an intense experience. The only sort of odd thing was that due to the location of the computers’ cameras plus the way the actors sat before them, it looked a little like the viewers were looking up at them—not quite at eye level,  It was noticeable at first, but not disconcerting—and the impression passed fairly quickly.

Another advantage to Zoom readings: Actors don’t have to memorize. (Though Rick noted that he wasn’t sure that the actors hadn’t learned their lines, it wasn’t evident they were reading from scripts.) In a regularly staged theater event, the the process of getting from script to performance can be arduous, and except in the rare cases of photographic memory, it’s a process that takes time. This is not to say that actors hate to memorize lines, but it is nice now and then to get a break from it. What’s more . . .

Your audience can be anywhere. Zoom works across distances, oceans, and continents, as well as national borders. There can be a Zoom get-together with a person in Japan who might as well have been next door. Your audience can come from anywhere. It can include people you haven’t seen in years, people who live in distant states, people who have never come to see you in a theater.

To some extent, Zoom provides focus. Each Zoom speaker appears in a box, as Rick observes above, and in “gallery view” these boxes appear all on the screen at one time, up to twenty-five boxes. However, it’s possible to ask everyone in the call to “stop video” – to take their pictures off the screen – except the performers, creating a strong focus on the readers.

However, Zoom was created for business meetings, not theater, so it’s not possible to arrange the order in which actors appear on the screen. It might be fun to put two specific boxes side by side so the actors could appear to be talking to one another. It appears that the technology doesn’t allow that control; if it happens, it’s more or less accidental.

Still, Zoom is a marvelous tool for theatrical work up to a point, and I doubt that that point has been reached yet. It seems likely that a lot of theater people are thinking hard about what else they can do with the tool. The results should be exciting to see.

There’s a saying, “You can’t keep a good [person] down,” and that saying applies to theater too. It’s astonishingly resilient. It may even be that the instinct to dramatize is a basic human function. In any case, if theater is kept down in one way, it’ll spring up in another. This is – not just “virtually” – true, and a wonderful thing.

[In response to the assertion above that “the instinct to dramatize is a basic human function,” let me cite a statement I made 34 years ago in an essay I wrote about documentary drama (“Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” posted on Rick On Theater on October 9,2009):

The drive to perform fact – to teach or explain events of import to the community – is as old as performance itself. The first historical performance, the precursor of the documentary drama, must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party danced around the campfire to replay the day’s success.

[I was writing about the documentary play, but the premise is equally true of fictional drama as well.

[Incidentally, that final paragraph was part of Kirk’s contribution to this collaboration. It seems he and I think along similar lines. I put my thought on paper half a lifetime ago, but we came ’round to the same notion eventually!]