“Broadway’s Musical Chairs”

by Gabriel Cohen


[I’ve published articles on various backstage aspects of theater in the past, most recently “Two (Back) Stage Pros” on 30 June.  I’ve also written about the pit orchestra and theater music.  Here’s a report from the New York Times that describes a truly esoteric, inside-baseball part of that world—the replacement musician in a pit orchestra on Broadway, or what happens when a player goes on vacation or gets ill.  Like substitute teachers, there’s often not a lot of time to plan (or rehearse), but unlike the classroom sub, the replacement instrumentalist has to approximate the work of the regular player or risk throwing not only the ensemble off its rhythm, but the actors off theirs on stage as well.  Also unlike teacher substitutes, the replacement musician gets a great deal of respect from her or his fellow players—many, as you’ll read, are in great demand and can work multiple gigs just about simultaneously.]


Beneath the stage of Broadway’s Al Hirschfeld Theater lies a dark space with a low ceiling — a cross between a suburban rec room and a submarine. Shortly before each performance of “Kinky Boots,” 13 black-clad musicians file to their battle stations, each illuminated by a small light attached to a music stand. The expectant buzz of the audience filters down from a narrow opening at the edge of the stage.


As at any Broadway show, the musicians in the “Kinky Boots” pit are expected to play flawlessly for two-plus hours — even those who are sitting in for what may be the first time. During a recent Sunday matinee of the hit show, for instance, four of the musicians were substitutes, called in and asked to unobtrusively join a band grooving at the top of its game. After all, even Broadway musicians may want to take vacations, or spend the summer touring with Sting or the Rolling Stones.


“Subbing is a bit nerve-racking,” said Ann Klein, 52, who replaced Michael Aarons, the regular “Kinky Boots” guitarist, twice in July. Ms. Klein has worked as a replacement on Broadway for five years, in five different shows. She has a career as a singer-songwriter and will pick up work on tour with other artists. But substituting on Broadway pays pretty well — like regulars, subs earn union scale, $227.42 per performance — if you can deal with the high stakes. “You don’t have the luxury of rehearsing with the band,” Ms. Klein said. “So it’s scary.”


“Once,” Jeff Schiller, another “Kinky Boots” sub, recalled, “I got a call half an hour into a show, when a regular was experiencing incredible kidney stone pain.” Luckily, Mr. Schiller, who goes by the nickname Houndog, lives near the theater district. He swapped in between numbers in the middle of Act One.


Thankfully, this kind of quick-change routine is rare. Most subs get some notice before they have to step in.


Mr. Schiller, 55, has filled in on more than 40 Broadway shows, including “Phantom of the Opera” and “The Book of Mormon,” and he says that most productions follow a similar system. Each regular musician is required to name five possible substitutes, who learn their parts through a process called “watching the book.”


“If there’s room,” Mr. Schiller said, “you go in and sit in the pit and make a recording of the regular.” Then the subs go home and play along.


A regular works eight performances a week, but subs can do more if they’re playing in more than one show at a time. Indeed, Mr. Schiller has had 10-performance weeks. Part of what puts him in such demand is that he’s proficient on saxophone, flute, clarinet and a raft of other instruments. This flexibility, known as doubling, opens him to a wider range of work — not to mention extra pay.


Unfortunately, there’s a major downside to the sub lifestyle: There’s no guarantee of when you’ll play next. Mr. Schiller averages two or three jobs a week, but there are weeks when he gets none. That’s why he and Ms. Klein would love to receive regular chairs.


As recently as the late 1980s, playing in a Broadway musical was not considered the most desirable gig for a musician. Most professionals sought better-paying work in jingles and recording sessions. But as that work dried up, due in part to samplers and digital-audio software, the ace musicians gravitated toward theaters near Times Square.


But just as the competition for spots in a live Broadway orchestra has increased, the pit itself has contracted.


“The average number of full-timers per show has gone down by half since the 1950s and ’60s,” said Robert Meffe, director of music at San Diego State University, the author of a paper on the shrinking pit orchestra and himself a former sub.


According to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, there are only 349 full-time players on Broadway now. That means that all players — regulars and subs alike — must be in top form. “There’s a lot of pressure,” Martha Hyde, a frequent substitute, acknowledged.


“I subbed on ‘Matilda’ today — mostly flute,” said Ms. Hyde, who has been doing this work since 1988. “Tomorrow I’m playing second clarinet and second flute on ‘Phantom,’ and the next evening I’m playing alto sax and lots of clarinet solos on ‘Chicago.’”


“It’s a little bit like landing an F-14,” she added.


“But your job is not to stick out or make a big statement. You emulate the regular; you have to be willing to be a chameleon.”


Brian Usifer, 33, the music director, conductor and first keyboardist for “Kinky Boots,” makes sure his subs fit in. Every replacement starts in an audition phase. On a sub’s first night, though, he tends to allow the occasional error to pass. “It’s O.K. if a few mistakes happen early,” he said. “It breaks the tension.”


Both cast and orchestra can see him in the video monitors, he noted, saying: “I try not to show it in my face if something goes wrong. But when you have a sub who is good and who everybody likes, I don’t have to worry about them.”


Though the pressure and lack of job security are challenging, Ms. Hyde sees some advantages to subbing. “It forces you to keep your skills razor sharp,” she said, “and you play with more people.” That can mean more contacts for future jobs.


Even so, most subs supplement their Broadway stints with other work. Mr. Schiller has worked as a composer, arranger, touring musician, copyist and instructor. Ms. Hyde is a member of a chamber trio called the New River Ensemble, which sometimes plays live to silent films by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.


The route to a regular gig is not predictable, as seniority does not necessarily determine who gets those jobs. Contractors, hired by producers to put together orchestras in tandem with music directors, make those decisions, and personal connections can trump other factors.


Despite the competition, Ms. Hyde says that she has found much camaraderie on Broadway. She has been a regular four times, in shows including “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “1776.” Whenever she gets a chair, she hands out sub slots to musicians who have helped her in the past, but also makes an effort to aid hopefuls. “If no one gives the new people a chance,” she said, “they can’t break in.”


Tino Gagliardi certainly broke in: He played trumpet in and out of Broadway pits for 30 years, as a sub and as a regular, and now he’s president of Local 802. “Being a sub is far more difficult than being a regular,” Mr. Gagliardi said. “Regulars only have to know one book.”


“Once,” he said, “I was subbing on five different shows and was so busy that I actually walked into the wrong theater. It’s a very hard way to make a living.”


But those F-14s still need replacement pilots. The goal, as Ms. Hyde put it, is “to make it as seamless as possible.”


“If the other musicians across the pit don’t notice that there’s someone different playing the part,” she said, “you’ve done your job.”


[This article was originally published in the “Metropolitan” section of the New York Times on Sunday, 27 July 2014.  Gabriel Cohen’s debut novel Red Hook was nominated for the Edgar award for Best First Novel, and he is also the author of four other novels and the nonfiction book Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce. A writer, freelance journalist, teacher, and editor, he has written for The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Gourmet.com, Shambhala Sun, the New York Post magazine, and Time Out New York. He teaches writing at Pratt Institute and New York University.]

 

'Pageant' (1991)

[One day recently, when I was out and about, I spotted an ad on a phone booth in my neighborhood announcing the coming of a musical called Pageant.  I’d been out of town for several weeks, so I hadn’t seen them before.  Now, years ago (1991, it turns out), I reviewed a show called Pageant, a drag beauty contest, and I wondered if this was the same play.  I didn’t remember to look it up by the time I got home, however, but when I finally did, I found that the production is billed thus: “Like every beauty pageant you've seen before, Pageant features contestants desperately vying for a glittering tiara.  With swimsuit, talent, and evening gown competitions – the show includes both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat! Unlike some beauty pageants you've seen before, the female contestants are all played by men.  And the audience gets to select the winner each night.  Filled with excitement and suspense, but first and foremost, beauty.”  Well, the new production opened on 14 July, and on the 15th, the review was in the New York Times.  It is the same play, a parody of beauty pageants, which ran for 462 performances Off-Broadway from 23 April to 7 June 1991, with subsequent productions in Los Angles, San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Sarasota, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Paul, and London, as well as Australia and Japan.  I saw the performance in May and my notice for the première appeared as “Skin Deep and Heart Shallow” (which referred to Pageant and another, unrelated play) in the  New York Native on 20 May 1991.  I’ve reedited it slightly so that it’ll make more sense to a reader 13 years later (and, in some instances, just because I wanted to).]

 

The conceit of the musical spoof, Pageant, which has a book and lyrics by Bill Russell [later Side Show, 1997-98] and Frank Kelly and music by Albert Evans, at the Blue Angel, a night club on on West 44th Street in the Theatre District, is a competition for Miss Glamouresse.  The send-up is that all the contestants are men in drag, including evening gown and swimsuit.  The joke is that the book and, especially, the lyrics constantly refer to the femininity of the contestants (the opening number is “Natural Born Females”), whereas it is clear they are men.

 

The drag is somewhere between Corporal Klinger, Jamie Farr’s character on MASH, and La Cage aux Folles.  The dancers are not especially feminine and their maleness is only partly disguised.  While they have shaved their legs and underarms, they have distinctly male dancers’ bodies, particularly their arms which, though not exactly hirsute, are unshaven.  We are obviously expected to note the dichotomy of the dancers’ maleness and the femininity of the text and behavior.

 

Pageant includes two other jokes, too.  One is that the sponsor, Glamouresse Cosmetics, markets absurd products, samples of which the contestants hawk.  We are treated to demonstrations of Lipsnack, a lipstick that doubles as a snack for women with no time to eat on the run—it comes in 27 flavors from “Roast-Beef Red to Poached-Salmon Pink . . . Yum!”—and Smooth-As-Marble Facial Spackle, a make-up for pitted skin which also comes in “heavy duty for gouges and scars.” 

 

The other joke is that the contestants aren’t terribly good at this stuff.  Their talent exhibitions are all slightly off, and tacky.  Miss Industrial Northeast (Joe Joyce), who studies hairstyling by mail (“The lines at the post office wear me out!”), plays the accordion, but inexpertly; Miss Texas (Russell Garrett), who “works with the beauty-impaired,” does a lariat-twirling routine (with a toy horse), but she’s no Will Rogers; Miss Deep South (David Drake), who is a double major in Home Economics and Cancer Research at Miss Frink’s Female Academy, doesn’t quite keep her lips still in her ventriloquist act.  The whole thing is intentionally pretty hokey.

 

The performances, which also include Randl Ash (Miss Bible Belt), John Salvatore (Miss West Coast), Dick Scanlan (Miss Great Plains) and J. T. Cromwell as M.C. Frankie Cavalier, are energetic and skillful, and the evening, at an hour and forty-five minutes, goes by pleasantly.  (There was also a billing in the program—called the Beautybill, “an authorized parody edition of ‘Playbill,’” according to a note on the back, for this production—there’s also a “Standby Contestant,” Miss U.S. Territories and Possessions, played by Tony Parise.  I presume Parise, who also served as co-choreographer, would step in if, for any reason, one of the regular contestants cannot fulfill her duties.)  I particularly liked Miss Bible Belt’s sermon-in-song, “I’m Bankin’ on Jesus” (“The Bible’s my bank book!”)  The cabaret locale encourages drinking (no minimum; you can have dinner, too) and rooting for the contestants, and this obviously helps in the enjoyment.  The chap behind me had a hell of a time cheering and laughing, and there were not a few whistles from the house.  Frankie Cavalier picks five “judges” from the audience (they are preselected) who elect Miss Glamouresse 1991 and her runners-up, so the outcome is different each night. 

 

You’ll get the most out of Pageant if you either hate beauty contests or love them, but have a sense of humor about it.  If you don’t care one way of the other, you’ll find less in this show—conceived, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom [later Side Show; The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1997-2000; Broadway revivals of Flower Drum Song, 2002-03, and Bye Bye Birdie, 2009-10]—to keep your interest.

 

[I didn’t cover the physical production in the Native review, so I’ll list the credits here at least.  Pageant’s set was designed by Daniel Ettinger, the costumes were by Gregg Barnes, the hair and wigs by Lazaro Arencibia, and the lights by Timothy Hunter.  James Raitt (who was a cousin of actor John Raitt and his daughter, singer Bonnie Raitt) provided the orchestrations and musical arrangements and also directed the three-musician ensemble of piano (Raitt), drums (Jeff Potter), and synthesizer (Martin Erskine).  (I believe all the principal members of the production team for the première of Pageant are still alive except Raitt, who died in 1994 at 41.)]

 

*  *  *  *

[Since my old review is so short (being only half of that week’s column), I thought it might be useful to run New York magazine’s and the New York Times’s original reviews, both of which were also rather brief, as well.]

 

“STATES OF SCHLOCK”

by John Simon

New York, 27 May 1991

 

But color is certainly not lacking from Pageant, which may be the rowdiest yet also sweetest farce in New York today.  Playing at the Blue Angel nightclub, this drag-show takeoff on Miss America and other beauty pageants is both angelic and a bit blue.  Written by Bill Russell and Frank Kelly, directed by Robert Longbottom, and with albert Evans’s music arranged and orchestrated by James Raitt, this deft parody, funny without being too fey, satirical without becoming too savage.  It is in fact consistently droll and often a hoot, and everyone involved in it did and does handsomely, which is arguably better than prettily.  The men enacting the competing beauty contestants are neither pretty nor effeminate, which considerably heightens the hilarity.  Go!

 

[This was part of an omnibus review covering several performances, and the headline is a travesty of States of Shock, the title of a Sam Shepard play running at the American Place Theatre which Simon obviously didn’t like.]

 

*  *  *  *

“THEATER IN REVIEW”

by Stephen Holden

New York Times, 8 May 1991

 

There has never been a beauty contest quite like the Miss Glamouresse competition, a fake television special being held nightly at the Blue Angel under the title “Pageant.” At each performance, a panel of judges selected from the audience chooses between the same six finalists who compete in the traditional categories and hawk such Glamouresse beauty products as Smooth-as-Marble Facial Spackle and a nutritious lipstick called Lip Snack that comes in 27 shades and flavors.

 

When Frankie Cavalier (J. T. Cromwell), the ceremony’s leathery-faced answer to Bert Parks, introduces the contestants, he lauds them for being “each and every one a natural-born female.” They are not, of course. Amusingly costumed as parodies of regional stereotypes, Miss Texas (Russell Garrett), Miss Great Plains (Dick Scanlan), Miss Deep South (David Drake), Miss Industrial Northeast (Joe Joyce), Miss West Coast (John Salvatore) and Miss Bible Belt (Randl Ash) are drag performers who gleefully caricature the smiles, swivels and teary-eyed nonsense of it all.

 

For her talent segment, Miss Great Plains, whose name is Bonnie Louise Cutlett, delivers a screamingly funny dramatic recitation called “I Am the Land,” which begins portentously with the lines, “I am a handful of dirt,” and goes downhill from there. Karma Quinn, the new-age-fixated Miss California, lurches through an interpretive dance called “The Seven Ages of Me.”

 

Ruth Anne Ruth, Miss Bible Belt, sings a money-obsessed country-gospel song, “Banking on Jesus,” which declares, “My wealth earns interest that’s eternal.” Miss Industrial Northeast, Consuela Manuela Raffela Lopez, clomps around on roller skates while playing “The Beer Barrel Polka” on accordion.

 

“Pageant,” which was conceived, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom and written by Bill Russell and Frank Kelly, belongs to the same camp genre as the popular musical revue “Forever Plaid,” a tongue-in-cheek tribute to squeaky-clean male pop groups of the 1950’s.  [Forever Plaid, conceived and directed by Stuart Ross, was produced by Gene Wolsk at the Triad Theater (then called Steve McGraw's Theatre) on West 72nd Street, ran for 1811 performances between 20 May 1990 and 12 June1994.  James Raitt was the musical director of both shows. ~Rick] Although its style is broader than “Forever Plaid,” “Pageant” also celebrates and ridicules kitsch American culture with the same sense of enjoyment.

 

It is also one drag show that is not at all misogynistic. The contestants are portrayed as a lovable bunch of big-boned gals. It is the ritual itself, which forces the contestants to behave like obsequious wind-up toys, that is under hilarious attack. Indeed, the roles could have been played by women. Having them played by men, however, carries the whole charade to another level of zaniness.

 

[The current revival of Pageant opened for previews on 29 June 2014 at the Davenport Theatre on West 45th Street west of Times Square and is scheduled to run until 1 September.  There have reportedly been a few updates to the script to bring it from 1991 up to 2014 (references to Twitter and Duck Dynasty), but it’s apparently otherwise the same play.  (Other up-dating include the addition of an African-American contestant—Miss Bible Belt—and one with “a thick, vaguely Hispanic accent”—Miss Industrial Northeast; in the première staging, all the cast was Caucasian.)  When I first saw the ad on that phone booth, my second thought, after wondering if it was the show I’d seen all those years ago, was that Pageant didn’t strike me as a play that would have a life 13 years after it first ran.  It was kind of a nonce show. (I confess that I, for one, have no desire to see it again.)  In the Times, Charles Isherwood seems to agree: “[B]ack in 1991, when the show made its debut, the idea of a beauty pageant parody featuring men in drag seemed novel and a little loopy.  Today, when a man in a spangled dress would hardly raise an eyebrow sashaying down Main Street in Disneyland, the concept feels almost quaint.  Beauty pageants, for that matter, have now practically evaporated from mainstream culture.”] 

“I Think Icon, I Think Icon”

by Nelson Pressley

[The following article appeared in the Washington Post on 22 December 2013 in the “Arts” section (sec. E).  Nelson Pressley is a review writer for the Post and previously reviewed for the Washington Times. “I Think Icon, I Think Icon” discusses the work of actors playing roles in three well-known musical standards (Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and The Kings and I) that a previous (and renowned) performer made famous.  Think about playing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady after Rex Harrison or Guinevere in Camelot following Julie Andrews.  It can be a daunting prospect—I, myself, have confessed that certain iconic roles are always associated in my mind with specific performances I saw as a youngster (see “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010)—and Pressley interviewed three Washington-area actors who took on just such a task.] 

So, just how hard is it for actors to play characters made famous by other actors?

Ways you can tell a stage role is for the ages:

An actor just won’t let go. Take Yul Brynner and “The King and I”: From the premiere of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in 1951 through national tours in the 1980s (“Et cetera, et cetera,” as the King of Siam would say), he performed it 4,625 times.

The part is a prize magnet. In 1962, Zero Mostel won a Tony Award as Pseudolus, the wily Roman slave in Stephen Sondheim’s musical comedy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” In 1972, so did Phil Silvers. In 1996, so did Nathan Lane.

“Gypsy” also delivered a Tony trifecta, with the ferocious Mama Rose paying off for Angela Lansbury in 1975, Tyne Daly in 1990, and Patti LuPone in 2008. Bernadette Peters didn’t win in 2003 — but then neither did the Mother of Them All, Ethel Merman, who originated the part in 1959.

All three musicals are currently on area stages, raising the question: What can an actor do that’s new? How do performers cope with the long shadows of movie versions, beloved cast albums, Broadway performances etched in lore? After all, there are no purists like show purists, like no purists we know . . .

“Anybody who plays that role is wrestling with the ghost of Yul Brynner in audience’s heads,” says Paolo Montalban, the current King in the Olney Theatre Center’s “The King and I.” 

“People are obsessed with the hair thing,” director Mark Waldrop says, meaning everyone wants to know: Will this king be as bald as Brynner?

“For me, that shadow was never there,” Joe Calarco says of “Gypsy” legends. (Calarco’s staging of “Gypsy” opened at Arlington’s Signature Theatre Dec. 17.) “And I think Sherri” — longtime Signature actress Sherri Edelen — “got over that very question way before rehearsal.”

Actors in revivable plays from Shakespeare to David Mamet deal with the issue all the time, of course.

“It’s not about reinventing it,” says Alan Paul, director of “Forum” at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall, with Bruce Dow ringleading the clowning as Pseudolus. “It’s about making it your own. . . . So much of the evening depends on the charisma of the leads. There are many great actors, but you can count the number of personalities out there who can fill the stage with life. I felt that Bruce had that.”

Here, then, are some of the ways to beat the nerves of tackling an iconic part — or, as the “Forum” lyrics put it, to stay “calm, controlled, so cool that I’m cold.”

‘Gypsy’ 

“I was scared,” Edelen says. “It’s pretty big. But I trust Joe with my life.”

To Calarco, Edelen’s triumphs as Mrs. Lovett in Signature’s “Sweeney Todd” and as Margaret Johnson in “Light in the Piazza” with the Philadelphia Theatre Company (winning a Barrymore Award, Philly’s Tonys) made Mama Rose a natural next hurdle.

“She has that powerhouse voice,” he says, “and she’s a fearless actress.”

So how do you deal with a long shadow?

“I try not to think about it, for one thing,” Edelen says. “And I try just to tell the story. The psychology of the story was what was interesting to me, not Mama Rose, or what a monster she is. I looked into the ‘why’ of the actions.”

“Monstrous” is indeed an idea that clings to Mama Rose, who thrusts her kids onstage and schleps them through fleabag theaters across the country.

“I don’t like that word,” Calarco says. “Everything she does, she does out of love — or she thinks she does. I like her very much.”

If “Gypsy” has a moment of truth for its leading lady — a signature scene or song that the audience will be waiting for – it’s the big breakdown number, “Rose’s Turn.” Calarco suggests that there may be scenic tactics to help illustrate Rose’s madness, but most of it will rest, as ever, on the performer’s shoulders.

“It is Rose’s show, and that is her soliloquy,” Calarco says. “Sherri says it’s King Lear, it’s Medea — and it really is.”

Some performers learn parts by listening to recordings, but Calarco reports that Edelen had this role memorized before the first rehearsal while steering clear of CDs and YouTube (except, she says, for background on Gypsy Rose Lee and her family).

“She wants to learn it the way it is on the page,” the director says. “She’s very pure about that.”

She knows the show, of course: She played one of the strippers in Signature’s 2001 edition. Yet she says she’s never seen a full stage production.

“Which is good, isn’t it?” Edelen says. “If people out there have a preconceived idea, I don’t know what it is.”

‘Forum’ 

An actor’s first thought about landing one of these formidable roles?

“I was terrified, because I certainly know I’m nothing like Zero Mostel,” says Dow. “It was originally written for Phil Silvers. It was offered to Milton Berle. I am more North American WASP than Borscht Belt comedian. So there was an element of terror involved.”

All that first hit Dow when he was cast as Pseudolus for a “Forum” at Canada’s Stratford Festival a few seasons ago. Dow dropped out of the show early when he suffered a virally induced paralyzed vocal cord; when the production transferred to Toronto, he alternated with another actor.

The approach was more cartoonish in Toronto, Dow feels, and is more heartfelt here. “What I hoped I could bring to it was a simple honesty and earnestness,” he says, adding that vaudeville shtick naturally then gets plopped on top.

Director Paul is an unabashed fan of the 1996 revival with Nathan Lane, but he doesn’t think “Forum” is quite like “Gypsy” or “King and I,” with songs that buffs know cold coming in.

“I think a lot of people know ‘Free,’ people know ‘Everybody Ought To Have a Maid,’ but they’re not waiting for it like ‘Rose’s Turn,’ ” Paul says. “So I think Bruce and I were remarkably free from a preconceived version of it.”

“Zero had a beautiful grotesquerie about him,” Dow says of the Mostel’s Pseudolus. “And Mr. Lane can have a Snidely Whiplash evil grin, but I think that is not in my wheelhouse. Grotesque I get. And I happily go there.”

To YouTube, or not to YouTube?

“I’ll watch whatever’s out there, sure,” Dow says. “But I think it’s important that I know what’s in my skill set and what isn’t. I’m not someone who likes to come in to rehearsal prepared. I like to come in and play.”

Like Edelen, Paul sees Lear in these kinds of roles — the material is rich, and it won’t be the author’s fault if the show flops. Dow knows that means some folks will be primed to see things a certain way.

“You have audiences who will want to see Dolly come down the staircase in a red dress,” he says. “There’s nothing you can do. If you want to see a live performance of ‘Forum’ starring Zero Mostel, you’re setting yourself up for a disappointment.”

‘The King and I’ 

Brynner won a Tony for the 1951 Broadway premiere and an Oscar for the 1956 film. Then he kept rebranding himself as the king, playing the role in the 1972 CBS sitcom “Anna and the King” and taking the musical back to Broadway and on tour into the 1980s.

“Yul Brynner still owns that role,” Waldrop says. “He’ll always own that role.”

He shaved his head for that role, and therefore so have many actors ever since. Montalban, best known for playing the Prince in the 1997 ABC/Disney TV version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” volunteered to shave his head, too. But research indicated that wasn’t how the mid-19th century king of Siam really looked.

“So that wouldn’t even be about the piece,” Waldrop says. “That would be about Yul Brynner.”

Along with “Miss Saigon,” “The King and I” is a cornerstone of the musical theater repertoire for performers with Asian backgrounds. Waldrop says, “There were certain times in rehearsal when it was really clear that everyone in the room knew the show better than I did.”

This is the Phillipines-born Montalban’s eighth spin through the musical, though only his second turn as the petulant king; previously, he played the young lover Lun Tha. It’s good to be the king, in the thick of the story all the time, he says — not that he watched other kings and murmured to himself, “If I ever get my hands on that part . . . .”

For Montalban, the aim seems to be to hit certain marks with authority, including the king’s physique – and yes, he is often shirtless and barefoot, though his dark hair is only slightly shaved on the sides and fully tufted on top. Also pivotal is the climactic waltz with the English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens (played at Olney by Eileen Ward), “Shall We Dance?”

“You really have to deliver on that,” the actor says, “the chemistry that finally blossoms, that longing in the audience for them to get together.”

Montalban knows that the audience experiences a giant collective “Yul Brynner” thought bubble the moment he steps onstage. “I have those first seven seconds of them making all the judgments they want in the world,” he says. “Then I have the rest of the show to earn my own place in their attention.”

How effectively it works — well, as Paul says, it boils down to charisma. But it also depends on how deeply an original is embedded in any given spectator’s mind.

Montalban tells the story of a gentleman who recently approached after the show to say he enjoyed the actor’s performance.

The man added, “I would have liked it more if you’d shaved your head.”

Words and Pictures?

Late last month, I went with my mom to see the movie Words and Pictures, which opened in New York  in May but hadn’t come to the Washington area until early in June.  I don’t normally write about film on ROT—the closest I’ve come, not counting some film pieces I republished but didn’t write, were “Everybody Comes To Rick’s” (17 May 2009), an article about the play on which the movie Casablanca was based; “Der Illegale” (5 July 2009), a post about an old German TV miniseries that had been based on an actual espionage case; and “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” (25 April 2013), a reminiscence on the original telecast of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—and I’m not going to critique this one or analyze it as a piece of movie art.  I’ll say that it’s a perfectly all-right romance (some reviewers said “rom-com,” others, “rom-dram”) which many film journalists likened to Dead Poets Society because of some superficial similarities.  But I caught what I see as an ironic twist which doesn’t appear in that other (or any) prep school-sited film and I’m not sure it’s intentional.  

Directed by Fred Schepisi (Roxanne, Six Degrees of Separation, I.Q.) from a screenplay by Gerald Di Pego (Born Innocent, TV; Message in a Bottle), Words and Pictures recounts the story of Maine prep-school English teacher Jack Marcus (Clive Owen—Gosford Park, Closer, Sin City, Hemingway & Gellhorn) who laments his students’ lack of interest in the power of the written word.  (I’m with him here: I’m a recovering writing teacher myself.)  Once a celebrated poet, Marcus hasn’t published in years and has taken heavily to drink, putting his job in jeopardy.  The editor of the Croyden Prep literary magazine, which had been a prize-winning journal in part because of his own contributions as well as the work of the students he published, he learns that the magazine may be dropped as an unproductive expense in this digital, on-line world.

When Marcus meets Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Lovers on the Bridge, The English Patient, Chocolat), a painter and new teacher who was once celebrated for her canvases, he immediately finds her a challenge.  Delsanto, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis which is slowly but inexorably robbing her of her mobility and independence, hasn’t exhibited—or painted, for that matter—for a long time.  The art teacher disparages words as a conveyor of meaning and import—almost as if she knows that this will set Marcus off.  “A picture is worth a thousand words” becomes her mantra, and he responds with, “There is no frigate like a book” (Emily Dickenson, 1873/1894).

The two flirt and provoke each other with equal relish—à la Beatrice and Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing.  (Most reviewers saw an attempt to reflect Hepburn-Tracy and a couple compared the pairing to Ryan-Hanks.  But I instantly recognized Shakespeare’s witty middle-agers.)  When Delsanto is introduced in the faculty lounge, the two teachers immediately start needling.  Delsanto, a muffler artistically wrapped around her neck, tells Marcus she teaches honors art and Jack quips, “Hence the scarf,” and says he teaches honors English.  Delsanto replies without missing a beat, “Hence the hence.”  (That’s meeting cute at an elite prep school!)  The clash isn’t just between Marcus’s words and Delsanto’s pictures, of course, or between the eccentric and contrarian English instructor and the stand-offish and demanding painter.  It’s also between one teacher who treats the students as if they were his promising but slacker little brothers and sisters (or, perhaps, nephews and nieces), and whose students all call him “Mr. Mark” (except the class clown who calls him “Captain Jack” after Walt Whitman’s 1865 “O Captain! My Captain!”), and another who takes a sterner and colder tack, becoming known as “The Icicle,” “The Ice Queen,” or “Frigid Fresco. “  (Of course, this is a scriptual conceit: Owen’s Marcus is never really that cool—he wants to be liked, even loved, but his behavior and unrelenting iconoclasm make that difficult for colleagues, students, and family—and Binoche’s Delsanto—she wants to appear challenging and unaccommodating, “not the kind of teacher you’re going to come back and visit”—is more passionate, about her art, about her students, and about Marcus than she’s made out to be.)

Marcus conceives a plan to focus his students’ attention on their writing: he declares a contest between words and pictures and challenges Delsanto and her honors art class to prove which has “more worth.”  Marcus teaches his English students that writers evoke original images that pictures can’t capture because they exist only in the mind; Delsanto counters by insisting that a painting can convey feelings words can’t express.  Words are “lies” and “traps,” Delsanto warns her art students (some of whom are also in Marcus’s English class).  “Words are your gods,” the English teacher counters when one student of both teachers reports Delsanto’s pronouncement. “And somebody has insulted your religion.”  The best work of her art students and his writing students will be published in the next issue of the literary journal—which Marcus had insisted normally doesn’t run pictures—it’s all words.  (Ultimately Marcus proposes that Delsanto paint a picture about a poem he’ll write and both works will be published.)  Delsanto and her art students accept Marcus’s challenge, and the battle commences.  

Of course, it’s a silly debate, like the one over whether actors are creative or interpretive artists or whether Shakespeare wrote his plays, but buy the premise . . . buy the bit.  It’s a false dichotomy—who says we have to choose one medium over the other?  (Just before the final presentation of the Words and the Pictures to the assembled school, I had a brief thought about artists who use both words and pictures—like William Blake, for instance, a writer and a painter who integrated text into his images, or Jenny Holzer, who uses words as pictures—or at least visual imagery.  They didn’t choose.  The Dada poets, conversely, used words not so much for their meanings as for the pictures they could make on the printed page.  This idea never came up in the movie.)  It doesn’t help the argument that, first, Delsanto is as articulate and verbal as Marcus, though we don’t know if she writes as well as she speaks, and second, that Marcus, despite Di Pego’s characterization that he’s “an English teacher who loves language, worships language,” is as much focused on vocabulary as text.  He plays a game involving polysyllabic words that’s unrelated to their meaning or use (and at which Delsanto is the only faculty member who can keep up with him and even beat him) and he constantly specifies, no matter the circumstances, the etymology of words he or someone else uses.  In that last scene, in which the two sides rehash their arguments from earlier in the movie but in muted, less strident terms, Marcus ultimately declares that writers are also artists, so there’s not really a conflict since both—all—kinds of artists “take us to another place.”  (I can’t explain why it took anyone in the film this long to see that—except, of course, that there wouldn’t be a movie if the two artists had reconciled their pretended clash before the last scene.  I guess I blame screenwriter Di Pego for this bit of contrivance.  “I wanted to put them in a world that challenged me,” he acknowledged of his characters.  “I wanted to be challenged with language.”)  

There’s also a secondary irony than the one on which I picked up: when “words fail” Marcus, he communicates his feelings to Delsanto via music, which is neither words nor pictures!  This idea isn’t developed, just suggested.  What’s central to the story, of course, is that the man of words can’t write and the woman of pictures can’t paint.  Delsanto fights back, devising mechanical contraptions to help her overcome the RA, while Marcus gives in to the blockage and takes refuge in the bottle, sinking so far into his debilitating morass that he, first, steals a poem from his son to pass off as his latest work (he comes clean before a public deception occurs) and, then, actually destroys Delsanto’s newly produced and best canvas in a drunken frenzy.  (Okay, the main characters lean toward cliché—the drunken poet and the aloof, antisocial painter—but Owen’s and Binoche’s vital, honest, and uncompromising performances humanize and redeem them and the film in the final analysis.  Sorry, but I couldn’t resist a little reviewing, especially of the acting.)  But all that aside, the real twist in Words and Pictures for me lies in the question, In what medium is this story told?  Cinema: a medium that depends on both words and pictures, pretty much simultaneously and equally.  

Okay, yes, there are many films that are more visual than literary and others in which the language overshadows the images (not even counting the silents, which, despite occasional title frames, had no choice but to rely on pictures to communicate).  But by and large, a movie needs both the script (or at least the dialogue, whatever its origin) and the cinematography to work.  (Since I’m bringing up the visual aspects of cinema, I should credit Schepisi’s director of photography, Ian Baker, and his production designer, Patrizia Von Brandenstein.  Their work was integral to the impact of Words and Pictures from the perspective I’m considering.)  In the movie, Marcus’s scenes are mostly verbal as we focus on the words he devises and the ones he quotes, but Delsanto’s scenes are strongly visual because we watch her struggle to combat the body that’s betraying her and her dynamic, highly physical method of painting (augmented by her inventiveness in overcoming the impediments her RA throws up before her creativity).  If Jackson Pollock was an action painter, Binoche’s Delsanto is a hyper-action painter.  While we need to listen to Marcus, we have watch Delsanto to get all of what Binoche shows us.  It’s telling, I think, that writer Di Pego, a former high school English teacher himself, rejoices that among the writers he chose for Marcus to quote were “some wonderful image-makers” and in the next breath recounts that he was awed by seeing On the Waterfront at 13.  “That movie just shook me,” Di Pego says, “and made me want to be somebody that could tell stories.”  (I guess it’s no surprise that this man became not just a writer, but a screenwriter—a man who composes in both words and pictures.) 

(It’s a tangential sidelight to Words and Pictures that not only did Di Pego select the writers Marcus cites in the movie—the screenwriter names novelists Ian McEwan, John Updike, and Jeanette Winterson—but that he wrote the poem at the center of the story, which Marcus passes off as his own latest work but had really been composed by his son.  Likewise, the paintings we see Delsanto create in the film were actually painted by actor Binoche herself—some before she made the movie and others expressly for the production.  It’s not so much art imitating life or vice versa as life and art getting all tangled up together.  Words and pictures.)

So, here’s a story ostensibly about the tension between words and pictures which is told in a medium that uses both, requires both.  As I said earlier, I don’t think this was an intentional consideration of Schepisi’s movie since nothing’s made of it.  I looked at a few reviews on line and no one mentions this and in the interviews of Di Pego and Schepisi that I saw, they don’t speak of it, either.  It’s possible that the writer, director, and others had the same thought I have, but it doesn’t feel as if they meant the idea to be part of the interpretation of the story or the production.  Nonetheless, it’s there.  Well, at least it is for me; no one I mentioned it to saw its significance.  Maybe it’s a little too “meta” for most moviegoers to contemplate.  

I’m not even sure how it would fit into an interpretation of the movie, which is probably too slight a vehicle to carry the weight of such a reflection.  Why, in the end, set up a conflict, however contrived and artificial, between words and pictures that’s played out in an art form, cinema, that inherently contradicts the notion that either language or imagery is primary in expressing ideas or feelings because it demonstrably works on both levels at once.  In addition, as I observed, a movie specifically about the dichotomy, false though it is, of the verbal and the visual must take conspicuous advantage of movie’s capacity to tell stories in either words or pictures, as well as both words and pictures.  So, by telling this story in a film, Di Pego and Schepisi, a film writer and a filmmaker, have, in a sense, sabotaged their own argumentative point.  

[I said I wasn’t going to assess the artistic worth of Words and Pictures, and I won’t (aside from my brief comment on the acting). I will say that I rather enjoyed the movie, even if it's not a great film, but most reviews across the country were cool to blah.  (The New York Post dispatched it in three short paragraphs!)  Some praised the work of Owen and Binoche even as they dismissed Di Pego’s script and Schepisi’s directing; others found the actors’ work unimpressive in contrast to their past films.  A few noted that for a summer movie, particularly in light of the competing films being released right now, it’s a passable diversion.  I don’t even disagree with much of the criticism offered, though I didn’t find the movie’s faults as devastating as some reviewers clearly did, but on the whole, I found Words and Pictures pleasant, fun, and enjoyable.  The two central performances are strong and sincere, often nicely nuanced (especially Binoche’s Delsanto) and the script is literate, if not profound.  It doesn’t hurt the film that some of Binoche’s paintings are quite powerful.]