"Deaf cast challenges musical theater norms in production of 'The Music Man'"

by John Yang, Anne Azzi Davenport, and Alison Thoet 

[The transcript below is from a report on “Canvas,” the segment of PBS NewsHour that covers arts and health features.  This story aired on 5 July 2022.]

The classic American musical “The Music Man” has been a big hit this year with its revival on Broadway and on many regional and local stages across the country. John Yang went to the Olney Theatre Center in Maryland to see a novel take on the standard, and how art can be a model for a more inclusive society, where deaf and hearing communities live side by side.

Judy Woodruff: The classic American musical “The Music Man” has been a big hit this year with its revival on Broadway and on many regional and local stages across the country.

John Yang went to see a novel take on the standard and how art can be a model for a more inclusive society.

A note that American Sign Language interpreting was done simultaneous to the interview. That live process may affect the complete accuracy of the English interpretation.

The story is part of our arts and health coverage on Canvas.

John Yang: The spirited musical numbers, the sly scam, the Midwestern Americana, all the familiar touches of “The Music Man” are on display in this production at the only theater center in Maryland.

But [take] a closer look. This isn’t your grandfather’s River City. It’s envisioned as a place where the deaf and hearing communities live side by side, and not being able to hear isn’t the barrier. Half the cast is deaf or hard of hearing.

There were see-through COVID masks, so the non-hearing actors could read lips and facial expressions. American Sign Language interpreters were positioned across the stage. The set was created by a deaf designer with a minimum of stairs, so deaf actors don’t have to take their eyes off their signing castmates.

And a special lighting system let the nonhearing [sic] cast members know when there was a problem.

Jason Loewith, Artistic Director, Olney: There is going to be a surtitle screen . . .

John Yang: Screen.

Jason Loewith: . . . which will be particularly helpful for those in the balcony.

John Yang: Jason Loewith is in his 10th year as artistic director at Olney, one of the country’s leading regional theaters. His philosophy? Let the art lead.

Actor [in a scene]: We heard there’s a pool table in town.

Jason Loewith: The words are almost nonsense, but listening and watching the words be translated into ASL was revelatory. I thought, this is a brilliant new way to experience the musical.

And then, of course, our desire to create a community that is more inclusive by doing theater that is more inclusive, it felt like the sky was the limit.

John Yang: He wasn’t quite so enthusiastic about six years ago, when first approached by James Caverly.

James Caverly, Actor (through interpreter):

So it was akin to Frankenstein’s monster approaching the scientist and saying, make me a new wife, right? Same concept, I think, in my pitch.

(LAUGHTER)

James Caverly (through interpreter): But I would say that the pitch itself was different.

John Yang: Deaf from birth, Caverly was working as a carpenter in the theater scenery shop. After seeing Deaf West Theatre’s production of “Spring Awakening” on Broadway, he went to Loewith with an idea.

James Caverly (through interpreter): Let’s do “The Music Man.” Let’s do this!

And I don’t think that he was totally convinced on the idea at the moment. It took a few, maybe three odd-years of really pursuing it to convince him. Hey, hey, “The Music Man.” Hey don’t forget “The Music Man.”

John Yang: “The Music Man” is an American musical theater classic. It tells the story of Harold Hill, a charming traveling salesman, in early 20th century Iowa who dupes countless people into buying instruments for a nonexistent children’s band.

Marian Paroo, the town piano teacher and librarian, sees through him immediately, but then begins to see another side of him. By the time the final song is sung, they have each been transformed by love.

James Caverly (through interpreter): What I really wanted was, let’s shatter that perception that disabled people can only play roles that are designed or written for disabled people.

The world that is River City and “The Music Man” is a perfect choice for that.

John Yang: After testing the idea in a 2019 workshop with a hearing actor as Harold Hill, another twist: What if he was deaf?

James Caverly (through interpreter): So if you compare Harold Hill as a hearing man, he’s selling musical instruments. That’s believable. He doesn’t have to work additionally or extra hard to convince people that he could lead a musical band.

Now, a deaf Harold Hill is a different story. He’s a guy who really has to turn it up, really become a charmer to be able to convince a community of people that, hey, you should buy these musical instruments because, guess what, I can lead a musical band, right? Hah-hah.

So I think it amplifies the character in a way, and you have to really, really increase that art of deception.

John Yang: It makes Harold Hill not only the ultimate con man, in a way, but also what you were saying before, the ultimate salesman of dreams.

James Caverly (through interpreter): Absolutely. Absolutely.

John Yang: Caverly, fresh from his breakout role in Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” was cast in the lead role.

Artistic director Loewith estimates this production cost about 40 percent more than a traditional staging. Among the added expenses? The [dozen] sign language interpreters, a director of artistic sign language, or DASL, and two directors, one hearing, one deaf.

The deaf director is Sandra Mae Frank, a star of the 2016 Broadway revival of “Spring Awakening.” She wanted this staging to be different.

Sandra Mae Frank, Co-Director (through interpreter): I wanted to include American Sign Language, but I didn’t want it to be anything that I’d seen done before. We have had deaf and hearing mixed productions in the past, but they’re usually shadow hearing individuals voicing for deaf individuals, speaking their lines in English.

And actors would then sometimes SimCom, which is speaking and signing at the same time, speaking English and signing at the same time. And that’s very commonly what you see in the world of theater. And, with this, I wanted to do something different.

John Yang: So while all musical numbers are sung aloud, some scenes have dialogue only in sign language, with supertitles to aid hearing audience members.

For Frank and director of artistic sign language Michelle Banks, who had the same job for this year’s Broadway revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” it’s that combination of signed and spoken words to tell a story that’s both groundbreaking and promising.

Michelle Banks, Director of ASL (through interpreter): This is not just a one-off. This is not just for the arts. This can be a part of who we are as a humanity, a society, that this is how we can interact and engage with each other to look at one another fully, completely, as our intersectional identities present, how we each navigate the world.

Yes, this is beyond theater. You have to attend to the show. You may not know what’s coming next. You’re going to constantly have to be attuned, and your eyes, it’s going to be a lot to absorb, right? Your eyes are a muscle, and they may feel stretched, but that’s what the experience should be.

John Yang: Do you hope directors, producers and casting directors will take something away from this too?

Sandra Mae Frank (through interpreter): Absolutely. My hope is that, through this, this is not the last.

John Yang: As this diverse cast of actors unites their voices and hands in harmony.

The show is to run through July 24.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m John Yang in Olney, Maryland.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Judy Woodruff: What a treat. And let’s hope we see a lot more just like it.

[The Music Man (book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson from a story by Willson and Franklin Lacey) opened at Olney on 17 June; it’s scheduled to run through 24 July 2022.  Caverly stars as Professor Harold Hill and Adelina Mitchell as Marian “The Librarian” Paroo.  (Christopher Tester plays Winthrop Paroo, Marian’s little brother.)

[The current Broadway revival of The Music Man began previews at the Winter Garden Theatre on 20 December 2021 and opened on 10 February 2022.  The production, under the direction of Jerry Zaks, has run for 46 previews and 165 regular performances as of 3 July 2022.  It stars Hugh Jackman as Hill and Sutton Foster as Marian.

[(I’m old enough to have seen the original production with Robert Preston and Barbara Cook.  I must have seen the show between its opening on 19 December 1957 at the Majestic Theatre and 9 January 1959, when Preston left the production, because I saw the opening-night cast, including young Eddie Hodges, 10-11—about two months younger than I was—as Winthrop Paroo.)

[The Olney Theatre, forerunner of the Olney Theatre Center, was founded as a summer theater In 1938.  Located in Olney, Maryland, in Montgomery County, 19 miles north of Washington, D.C., it became the Olney Theatre Center in 1994, and now operates year round, with additional programs, many of them family-oriented, and expanded facilities and performance spaces.

[The revival of Spring Awakening (music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics and book by Steven Sater; based on Spring’s Awakening [Frühlings Erwachen, 1891] by Frank Wedekind), a co-production of Deaf West Theatre of Los Angeles, ran from 27 September 2015 to 24 January 2016.  It had a cast of both deaf and hearing actors who performed the show in American Sign Language and English simultaneously.  (Sandra Mae Frank, the deaf director of Music Man, played Wendla.)

[Only Murders in the Building, a mystery-comedy streaming television series created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, premièred on Hulu on 31 August 2021.  The series, currently in its second season, stars Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez; Caverly played Theo Dimas in Season 1.

[In the fall of 2019, New York City’s Public Theater revived Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. The production was directed by Leah C. Gardiner and featured a deaf actress, Alexandria Wailes, in the role of Lady in Purple.  The show transferred to Broadway on 1 April 2022 and officially opened at the Booth Theatre on 20 April; it closed on 5 June 2022 after 23 previews and 51 regular performances.

[John Yang is a correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.  He covered the first year of the Trump administration and is currently reporting on major national issues from Washington, D.C., and across the country.  Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of “Canvas” at the NewsHour.  Alison Thoet is an Associate Producer at NewsHour for “Canvas.”]

"Gained in Translation"

by  Laura Collins-Hughes

[The article below, from the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 12 September 2018, reports the preparation of Craig Lucas’s I Was Most Alive With You, a play inspired by the Book of Job that tells the story of a deaf man whose entire existence is threatened by a series of unexpected tests.  The Playwrights Horizons production of the New York première, which opens on 24 September (it's currently in previews) and is scheduled to close on 14 October, is performed simultaneously in English and American Sign Language by two separate casts on a split stage.  Three years ago, I posted a collection of articles from the Washington Post about signed performances featuring deaf performers; I entitled the post “‘Visible Language’: Signing (and Singing) a Musical,” 4 January 2015.  I see “Gained in Translation” as an excellent follow-up to those articles.]

The actor Russell Harvard sat in an armchair, draped in a blue robe and looking surly. It was late August in a rehearsal room at Playwrights Horizons on 42nd Street, and he was in the middle of an emotionally charged hospital scene.

In Craig Lucas’s “I Was Most Alive With You,” Mr. Harvard (“Tribes,” “Fargo”) plays a gay, deaf recovering alcoholic named Knox — and so does the actor Harold Foxx, who stood on a raised platform behind him. As Mr. Harvard delivered Knox’s lines in English downstage, Mr. Foxx performed them in American Sign Language upstage.

They are just two of the 14 actors in the enormously complex Off Broadway premiere of this ambitious bilingual play, a multigenerational drama that aims to be equally accessible to deaf and hearing audience members at every moment of every performance. There is one featured cast member and one shadow cast member for each of the seven characters. The shadow cast performs entirely in A.S.L.; the featured cast, in a mix of English and sign.

And the artists themselves? The director, Tyne Rafaeli, said the ratio is about 50-50, deaf and hearing — and that’s how the rehearsal felt, f with its layers of conversations occurring in English and A.S.L.

When Ms. Rafaeli had something to say to the group, she hopped up on a chair so that everyone — including three A.S.L. interpreters deployed through the room — would have a clear view as she spoke, mainly in English. When Lisa Emery, who plays Knox’s mother, grew frustrated about her A.S.L. ability, the director of artistic sign language, Sabrina Dennison, offered encouragement through an interpreter, Candace Broecker Penn.

And when Mr. Lucas used a colorful English vulgarity to describe a chaotic moment in the play, Ms. Penn rendered it instantly, vividly.

A few days after that rehearsal, Ms. Rafaeli, Mr. Lucas and Ms. Emery spoke separately by phone about the production, now in previews for a Sept. 24 opening. Ms. Dennison, who recently joined the shadow cast, Mr. Foxx and Mr. Harvard, who has some hearing but whose first language is A.S.L., spoke by email. These are edited excepts.

Rules of Engagement

TYNE RAFAELI We had to set some ground rules very quickly, because obviously any rehearsal room dealing with bilingual communication is going to be complicated, but when one of those languages is a visual language and not a sonic language, it becomes even more imperative. A very fundamental rule, which seems crazily simplistic but has proved to be enormously helpful, is that there aren’t any phones allowed in the room. Because we have already two worlds. We can’t have a third one.

RUSSELL HARVARD I come from a deaf family, and so when bits of information are being exchanged within the family, I get it immediately. I’ve become so accustomed to that, it becomes harder for me to adapt when side conversations are spoken or exchanged among other actors who don’t sign. But patience is a virtue, so I try to put my frustration aside, because I love my job. I have worked with an all-deaf cast and crew previously for a film and that was a golden token.

LISA EMERY When you’re rehearsing and you get an idea and you start talking about it, you realize half the people in the room are completely shut out of what you’re saying. So now we have to raise our hands, deaf and hearing, and be recognized, and then there’s a big flurry of hands so that everybody knows that one person is talking. It’s horrible if somebody’s signing and trying to express themselves and then I start talking. Just sort of rude and oblivious.

Pleasure, and Frustration

CRAIG LUCAS We did several workshops of the play at Playwrights so that the actors could start learning their American Sign Language. It’s labor-intensive.

RAFAELI It was very new to me. Just the fact that it’s a gestural, embodied language that takes connection between hands and facial gestures, it is inherently theatrical and inherently poetic.

HAROLD FOXX When there are two languages in a play, and it’s the first time for some actors, the work in the rehearsal room can be complex. For us deaf actors, some of us have worked together before, so we know what it takes to come together with hearing actors and make it work. We don’t expect hearing actors to be fluent in A.S.L.

LUCAS This is not a representation of the English language. This is another language with different diction and different sentence structures and syntax. It’s a very complex language actually, and very hard to learn. I’m the slowest learner in the room when it comes to A.S.L.

EMERY There are certain things that just elude me completely. The sign for Knox, my son’s name, is a K and an X, and I have to practice it every day, like on the bus. I have to just keep doing it, because I stumble on it. I only have really the one speech, but it’s taken me weeks and weeks to get it down. It’s really fun to talk with your hands. And as frustrating as the day is long — the two things, mixed.

HARVARD It’s always a pleasure to see actors learning A.S.L. for the role. It’s harder when actors have to simultaneously speak and sign the lines. I applaud them because it’s a talent. In real life, you don’t speak Spanish and English at the same time.

Working on Two Levels

SABRINA DENNISON The shadow actors will all be signing fully in American Sign Language, while the characters in the play will sign as their characters would (some fluently, some haltingly, some signing and speaking). The set will be bi-level so that both are happening simultaneously.

EMERY To be an actor and know that there is somebody who is signing behind you who is playing the same character as you — there has to be an awareness of “can she see me so that she can sign what I’m saying?”

HARVARD They’re above us on the upper stage, which makes it quite challenging because some shadow actors who are completely deaf have to stay in sync with the actors on the lower level.

FOXX My job is to shadow Knox. Since Russell Harvard is already fluent in A.S.L., I don’t need to sign at all until he speaks in English. That’s when I start signing for the character. We have to rely on body language, timing or lip-read. It takes a lot of practice.

RAFAELI For a hearing audience, the distraction can be more of a danger because we’re not exposed to A.S.L., whereas A.S.L. speakers and the deaf community, their muscle is more trained to absorb those two realities because they’ve had to fit into a hearing culture.

DENNISON Our challenge is to blend them seamlessly so that both deaf and hearing audiences will be able to follow the action, taking advantage of the access being provided without being overwhelmed by it all.

RAFAELI It’s an extraordinary thing to witness the deaf artists in communication with the hearing artists, making decisions together, finding rhythm together.