'Visible Language': Signing (and Singing) a Musical

[Two schools of thought in teaching the deaf arose in the 19th century in Washington, D.C., symbolized by the leaders of those two intellectual streams: Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) and Edward Miner Gallaudet (1837-1917). Bell, the inventor of the telephone, first became known for trying to find ways for the deaf to communicate and Gallaudet took the idea further, believing that the deaf, like people with hearing, could manage advanced education.  Gallaudet was named the first principal of the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, later renamed first Gallaudet College and now Gallaudet University, the nation’s, and probably the world’s, premiere higher-education institution for the hearing-impaired.  The conflict drew in the First Lady of the United States, Caroline Harrison (1832-92; wife of 23rd President, Benjamin Harrison), who’d been a music teacher, as well as the most famous of all the deaf students, Helen Keller (1880-1968).  

[This historical tale is the subject of an unusual play, Visible Language with book and lyrics by Mary Resing and music by Andy Welchel, told musically in both spoken English and American Sign Language.  WSC Avant Bard, a 24-year-old troupe (formerly known as the Washington Shakespeare Company) specializing in classic theater, and Gallaudet University’s Theatre and Dance Program co-produced Visible Language and WSC Avant Bard artistic director Tom Prewitt directed.  All performances of the musical, performed at Gallaudet from 21 October to 16 November, were in ASL and spoken English, and all were captioned.]

“A D.C. FEUD ON HOW TO TEACH THE DEAF TAKES CENTER STAGE”

by Celia Wren 

[This article appeared in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 26 October 2014.]

Sometimes, a historical showdown begets memorable theater — think of the political struggles recalled in Shakespeare’s history plays, or the courtroom clash that inspired “Inherit the Wind.”

Now a new work is joining the canon of dramatized historical conflict. “Visible Language,” a world premiere musical in American Sign Language and English, evokes a famous 1890s blowup between Edward Miner Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell over methods for teaching the deaf. With a book and lyrics by Mary Resing, music by Andy Welchel and a cast of deaf as well as hearing actors performing in ASL and English, the musical runs through Nov. 16. 

“Visible Language” tells a D.C. story: Edward Miner Gallaudet was the first president of the college that became Gallaudet University. Bell, better known as the inventor of the telephone, also worked as an educator of the deaf; he lived in Washington for part of his life. The disagreement between the two hearing men laid out in Washington’s political circles: Gallaudet advocated for the use of sign language in --deaf education and communication, while Bell believed it was critical to teach the deaf to speak and read lips.

The heart of “Visible Language” is “this ideological battle over the future of deaf education. And we see that play out between two strong-willed men in Washington, D.C.,” at a time when the city was coming into its own as a locus of power, says Ethan Sinnott, director of Gallaudet’s theater and dance program.

It’s an inherently dramatic story, but Resing says she stumbled across it only after Open Circle Theatre asked her to pen a musical that featured both speech and ASL. It wasn’t terra incognita for Open Circle, which focused on including people with disabilities in professional theater and which mounted a 2007 version of Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” that made use of ASL. 

Resing has a passion for dramatizing local stories, an interest she pursued as artistic director (until 2013) of Maryland’s Active Cultures Theatre. So to find a topic for her new project, she canvassed the local deaf community, asking “What is the story that deaf audiences think needs to be on the stage?”

“Unanimously, the response was the story of Alexander Graham Bell and Edward Miner Gallaudet and the fight over speech versus signs,” she remembers.

Resing came to realize that the quarrel between the men reflected their different backgrounds as well as their educational outlooks.

Gallaudet’s father, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, had been a pioneer of education for the deaf in the United States and a proponent of signing. (He is Gallaudet University’s namesake.) Bell’s father, on the other hand, had been a teacher of elocution who developed Visible Speech, a system that broke speech down into elementary sounds and that proved useful in teaching the deaf to vocalize.

Bell and Gallaudet both believed that they had the best interests of the deaf community at heart, Resing says.

“Gallaudet advocated for sign language because it was very easy to teach” and thus cost-effective, making it possible to educate “as many people as possible,” she says.

By contrast, teaching a deaf person to speak can be labor- and time-intensive. But, Resing says, Bell thought the practice was necessary: He feared that reliance on signing would leave deaf people isolated from mainstream society and economically disadvantaged.

Resing strove to reflect these issues in her book and lyrics for the musical. Suzanne Richard, Open Circle’s artistic director, was for a time attached to the project as co-director with Tom Prewitt.

Part-way through the musical’s development, Open Circle went on hiatus. Prewitt was not willing to let the musical lapse, too. 

After he assumed the artistic director post at WSC Avant Bard in 2013, that company signed on as co-producer with Gallaudet.

Speaking in ASL in an interview at Gallaudet, with an interpreter translating, Sinnott says he felt the project was a good one because “Bell and [Edward Miner] Gallaudet are two iconic figures within the deaf community, and, irrespective of whether history has a deaf or hearing lens, there is always a tendency to mythologize and romanticize the titans of an era.” 

For instance, he says, many deaf people view Bell as “the bad guy — the Darth Vader of this story,” because Bell was interested in eugenics and how eugenic measures might lessen the incidence of deafness in the general population. That line of inquiry can seem horrifying today.

At the same time, Gallaudet is “easily framed as a champion,” which is simplistic in a different way, Sinnott observes.

“Part of the importance of this show and production is that it challenges people to take a look at what actually happened rather than subscribing to just the flat, non-nuanced” and “larger-than-life” versions of the characters, Sinnott says. In general, he says, theater should push people outside their comfort zones.

“Visible Language” may do just that with its approach to bilingualism. The musical tells its story in both ASL and English without recourse to role-doubling or translators who stand outside the world of the story. Instead, Resing wrote scenes and songs in which deaf and hearing characters converse in both languages. For instance, a scene chronicling a chat between Bell and Gallaudet becomes bilingual because a deaf character, Ennals Adams Jr., is present, and for his benefit, Bell and Gallaudet sign as they speak.

But because there is no constant source of simultaneous translation, the musical’s voiced and signed dialogue tracks sometimes diverge. Occasionally, a deaf character will sign a witticism that a non-ASL-conversant theatergoer may not understand, for instance. Deaf and hearing audiences who are not fluent in the other form of expression “won’t have exactly the same experience — but they will have parallel experiences,” says Prewitt.

The potential resonance of the strategy — and the related logistical challenges — were evident at a rehearsal in early October. Aaron Kubey, director of artistic sign language, and assistant director Tyler Herman were polishing a duet that featured the characters of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, Keller’s teacher. In the scene, the deaf and blind Keller (played by Gallaudet graduate Miranda Medugno, who is deaf) and Sullivan (played by hearing actress Sarah Anne Sillers) arrive in Washington. The two characters express their excitement and anxiety in a duet: Keller signs, and Sullivan sings words that are close to Keller’s but not identical.

During the rehearsal, Herman tried to sync the signing and singing with the music. Meanwhile, Kubey urged Medugno to be more expressive when conveying Keller’s bewildered reactions to the vibrations and smells of a Washington train station.

In offering these suggestions, Herman spoke and Kubey signed, and an interpreter translated each remark into the other language so everyone could be on the same page. (Prewitt says two ASL-English interpreters were scheduled for each rehearsal — standard procedure to accommodate simultaneous conversations and interpreters’ need for breaks, he said.)

Kubey, as one of the key deaf artists involved in a production whose writer, composer and director are hearing, was also keeping an eye on a macrocosmic goal. As he put it in an interview, speaking through an interpreter, he has worked with assistant director Charlie Ainsworth (who is deaf) “to make sure that the deaf perspective is recognized, valued, and accurately incorporated” in the musical.

Kubey’s additional duties include making sure that the actors sign in a way that is consistent with their characters. An older, high-status character would likely use a more formal signing style, whereas a young student character might sign in a more casual way. The style of expression needs to be as consistent as it would be in a speaking role. After all, “sign is our voice,” Kubey says.

It’s all in service of the play’s broader theme, which, in Resing’s words, is that “everybody wants to be heard, everyone has something to say” despite “all the ways communication can go awry.”

“Communication is never simple,” Resing says. “It just isn’t.”

[Visible Language ran from 21 October to 16 November at the Gilbert C. Eastman Studio Theatre, Gallaudet University, 800 Florida Ave. NE.  Visit www.wscavantbard.org or gallaudet.ticketleap.com.]

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“COMMUNICATING WELL THROUGH SIGN AND SONG”

by Nelson Pressley

[This review was originally published on 30 October 2014 in the “Style” section of the Washington Post.]

“I want to communicate,” goes an early chorus of the musical “Visible Language,” and that fundamental message is delivered in song, American Sign Language and supertitles projected above the small stage at Gallaudet University.

That range of expression is the real drama of this fascinating show, which hinges on the 1890s debate between telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and Edward Miner Gallaudet, the university’s founder and its president for decades. Bell, who also worked as an educator of ­hearing-impaired people, believed that they should be taught to speak, and the less dogmatic Gallaudet favored sign language. By mixing hearing and deaf actors in a production that communicates in so many ways all at once, “Visible Language” makes the debate engagingly immediate.

To be clear, this collaboration between Gallaudet’s theater program and the 25-year-old WSC Avant Bard is far from the most polished show in town. The acting is highly variable, the scenes move in blunt strokes and the production makes a disappointingly dull villain of Bell, whose wife, deaf from age 5, was taught lip reading and continued to speak.

Still, Mary Resing’s script and Andy Welchel’s bright, jaunty songs (with lyrics by Resing) make plain how deep and personal the issue is. A black student named Ennals, appealingly played by Aarron Loggins and based on a real student at Kendall Green (as Gallaudet was known at the time), is full of potential. Will signing — not speaking — limit the options of students like him? Helen Keller, played by the wonderfully expressive Miranda Medugno, arrives with Anne Sullivan (a nicely tart Sarah Anne Sillers), and they finger-spell and sign, with Keller even taking speech lessons from Bell.

Perhaps Bell — the subject of a one-man dramatic bio by PBS newsman Jim Lehrer last year — can’t help but come off as imperiously smug here as he insists on audible speech, and actor Harv Lester doesn’t really come up with more than one note for the role. In the teaching scenes with Keller that include a quick sardonic chorus, Bell’s method is so time-intensive and expensive (and unsuccessful, as dramatized) that it comes across as elitist. The pupils, played by Gallaudet students, understandably resist.

If the drama sometimes flattens out, director Tom Prewitt’s surprisingly big production is consistently multilayered. A four-piece band (piano, bass, drums and reeds) is positioned above the small stage, and 16 actors play the historical figures and composites. By creating such a densely populated village, Prewitt and Resing boldly explore the conflicts while celebrating the variety of ways to get one’s message across. (Aaron Kubey is credited as director of artistic sign language, which apparently draws from older and current versions of ASL.) Everyone wants to be understood, and “Visible Language” makes you want to lean in and understand.

[Visible Language: Book and lyrics by Mary Resing, music by Andy Welchel. Directed by Tom Prewitt; music director, Elisa Rosman; choreography, Tyler Herman; choreography for “I Want to Communicate,” Kriston Pumphrey; scenic design, Ethan Sinnott; lighting, Annie Wiegand; costumes, Elizabeth Ennis; sound design, Neil McFadden. Visit wscavantbard.org or gallaudet.ticketleap.com.] 

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[A related theater event took place earlier this year at Washington’s Studio Theatre.  I think it’s appropriate to look at this somewhat different instance of deaf actors and acting, this time in a non-musical, and how hearing actors and directors work together with hearing-impaired performers on the professional stage.  The following article was originally published in the “Arts” section of the Washington Post on 5 January 2014.]

“SENSE & SENSITIVITY”

by Peter Marks

A hearing cast and crew working with a deaf actor in Studio’s ‘Tribes’ is an eye-opener for everyone.

On the first days of rehearsal, when everyone tends to be a little formal, anyway, Michael Tolaydo was conscious of dealing even more gingerly with a castmate, Joey Caverly, because he is deaf.

“I think it’s part of my nature, but at the very beginning I felt that I needed to treat or talk or ask questions a bit too carefully,” the longtime Washington actor said of the settling-in period for “Tribes,” Nina Raine’s comedy-drama of iconoclastic parents and drifting offspring, at Studio Theatre. And why mightn’t he? Working with a deaf actor was, despite his many years of service on the stage, new to Tolaydo, and it took a small amount of contact to understand that interpersonally speaking, he didn’t have to adjust much at all.

“What’s also been interesting is that I don’t in any way see Joey as someone who’s ‘special,’” Tolaydo said, a few weeks into the rehearsal period. “I see him as special as an actor. I don’t see him as special because he doesn’t hear.”

It is noteworthy that in an art form so receptive to experiments with language – and in a city housing the nation’s flagship college for deaf students, Gallaudet University – the opportunities for hearing and non-hearing actors to coexist onstage remain incredibly rare. Some troupes with a heavy emphasis on the physical have made inroads in and around the city: Faction of Fools, a commedia dell’arte company, is now based at Gallaudet and offers some roles to deaf students, and the movement-based Synetic Theater in Crystal City has cast actors who are deaf, principally in its wordless reinterpretations of classics.

Limiting employment possibilities further is the reality that few deaf characters find their way into mainstream plays, “Children of a Lesser God” and “The Miracle Worker” notwithstanding. And even when they do – as in the case of the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning “Clybourne Park” – the role of a deaf person often goes to a hearing actor.

That is one reason that “Tribes,” a play that explores family miscommunication in many forms – including in the way it treats a deaf son – can be such an extraordinary crossover vehicle. The pivotal role of Billy, the deaf young Englishman in love with a woman who is the child of deaf parents and gradually losing her own hearing, has been going to deaf actors since its world premiere at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2010; a subsequent, highly regarded off-Broadway production, which ran for nearly a year, featured Gallaudet alumnus Russell Harvard as Billy.

In the Studio production that begins performances Wednesday, director David Muse has followed that practice, casting Caverly, a 2011 Gallaudet graduate who played Billy last year in a production in Boston. And in so doing, Muse not only is, like Tolaydo, collaborating with a deaf actor for the first time, he’s also taking a crash course in how to make deaf artists and audiences full partners in a theatrical venture. 

For the 24-year-old Caverly, a native of Royal Oak, Mich., “Tribes” is that actor’s dream role, a meaty dramatic part in a rip-roaring play for an influential company. To boot, the family dynamic Raine conjures struck very close to home. He, too, is the son of hearing parents. “As a deaf person, reading that play, it reminded me of my own growing up,” Caverly said, sitting in a Studio lobby with an American Sign Language interpreter and some other members of the production. “I mean, it gave me chills.”

Muse said he never seriously considered casting anyone but a deaf actor as Billy. But fully integrating the performance of an actor whose presence calls for additional pairs of ears and eyes in the rehearsal room requires some stretching by a theater company. “It was a lot of work, even more than I anticipated,” Muse said. “Much of it I’ve figured out as we’ve stumbled forward.”

‘Living in the deaf world’ 

“Tribes” takes place in the London household of Tolaydo’s Christopher and his wife, Beth (Nancy Robinette). He’s an academic, she’s a writer, and both have raised their three children in a home of free-thinking, progressive ideals. They’re such laissez-faire guides that they’ve never bothered to learn – or to teach their deaf son – to sign, and in their determination to treat Billy exactly as they do their hearing children (played by Richard Gallagher and Annie Funke), we get a sense of the shortcomings of their choices. It’s far from the only issue in the play, but in its examination of the relationship between Billy and girlfriend Sylvia (Helen Cespedes), and theirs to the rest of his family, Raine explores the emotional fault lines in what Ben Brantley in the New York Times called a play “that asks us to hear how we hear, in silence as well as speech.”

To help him with the play’s treatment of deafness, Muse turned to Ethan Sinnott, chairman of the theater department at Gallaudet, who in bringing Faction of Fools to the university campus was acting on his ambition of finding more post-academic possibility for his students. Muse said he’d learned that for rehearsals alone, he needed the services of not one but two sign-language interpreters, so that they could spell each other and the deaf participants in the show would not be left out of conversation at, say, rehearsal breaks.

Katrina Clark, a hearing Washington actress fluent in ASL, was hired as lead interpreter, with the responsibility of coordinating the other interpreters; half a dozen would be required, both for the rehearsal period and for deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences. During the run, 11 performances will be signed or captioned, and one will be described via audio. 

And interpreters weren’t the end. “Ethan said right away, ‘Well, you need to have another member on the production, and you may not even know it,’” Muse explained, recalling how Sinnott introduced the idea of recruiting a director of artistic sign language, “as a bridge between communities – a dramaturge of signing.”

The consulting position went to Tyrone Giordano, an actor and yet another Gallaudet graduate who’s performed with companies such as Los Angeles-based Deaf West Theatre, which among other achievements staged a highly successful version of the musical “Big River,” with both hearing and deaf actors. It falls to Giordano not only to make sure that the signing is accurate and fluidly handled, but also to ensure that the experience of deafness is accurately portrayed.

He’s a sort of ambassador of deafness. “Basically, I have to make everything look authentic,” he said, through one of the interpreters. “It’s the whole embodiment of living in the deaf world.”

His job was especially relevant for Cespedes, a hearing actress who had never signed before being cast as Sylvia. “Tribes” presents peculiar challenges to hearing and deaf actors alike. While Caverly has to create the illusion that Billy knows only rudimentary sign language, Cespedes has the opposite task: playing the daughter of deaf people, she must look as if she has been signing all her life.

Studio enrolled the actress in a month of ASL classes in her home city of New York and had her work with a private tutor, and then brought her to Washington to spend a week at Gallaudet. A lover of languages, Cespedes embraced the immersion, and her interactions with students helped her develop a grasp of some of the nuances of a system of communication wholly foreign to her.

“I would say that really, as a novice, what I’ve learned is how it’s really in the face,” she said, of the act of seeming fluent. “How the signer uses their face and doesn’t use their face is an instant giveaway.” (Members of the production cited the debacle at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, and the immobile face of the impostor at President Obama’s side, as an example of exactly how not to look as if you know how to sign.) Giordano has been Cespedes’s guide, using a video camera and other tools to help her refine her technique. 

“He’s been an incredible resource and teacher and helper for me, and he’s made a lot of those choices about how we’re going to express something,” she said.

Of her assignment in her scenes with Caverly, and being the one who is supposed to be the authority on ASL, Cespedes laughed as she recalled something the actor confided to her: “It’s my job to be bad,” he said, “to make you look good.”

The give-and-take 

At a recent afternoon rehearsal onstage in Studio’s Mead Theatre, the cross-talk had an extra dimension. Muse sat in the front row, presiding over a stop-and-go run of the opening scene, as Clark signed for Caverly, seated at a long kitchen table with the rest of his dramatic family. Giordano sat a few rows back, occasionally signing with someone on the other side of the room.

“It’s ultimately about figuring out what the family’s like and what Billy’s role is in it,” Muse said to the actors, before suggesting that Caverly rise from the table, to separate himself and begin to give an audience some sense of his isolation. “Feel free to take a little bit of focus, if you know what I mean,” Muse said, as Caverly gazed at both him and Clark. “Take a minute to establish yourself.”

Caverly, who explained in a subsequent e-mail that “due to the emotional turmoil that the play has, it can be taxing on me,” was not feeling this particular suggestion from his director.

“I don’t think I get up,” he said, through Clark. “I think I settle down here.”

Muse dropped the idea and moved on. Reflecting on the exchange afterwards, the director said Caverly “remains one of the most open actors to attacking scenes in different ways,” but in this case seemed to think the notion was stage-y. In the give-and-take, it was another learning moment for Muse.

“I’ve found that in terms of adjustments I’ve had to make, it really doesn’t have to do with the communication piece,” he said. “It has to do with my paying attention to things I never had to before. For instance: Is the shirt a signer is wearing patterned or solid? If you have too much pattern, it can distract a deaf audience member. Or if there’s a big sequence of signing, am I staging it in a way that it’s open to everyone in the audience?”

The practical concerns even apply to the seating at the kitchen table. “Joey or Ty would say, ‘That’s not where he would sit.’ It all has to do with the reality of a deaf character in that place,” Muse said. “And when they say it, I think, ‘Of course!’” 

[Tribes by Nina Raine was directed by David Muse, Studio’s artistic director.  It ran in the Studio’s Mead Theatre at the Logan Circle home of the troupe from 8 January-23 February 2014.]

“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.”

More on Movicals

[In December 2013, two periodicals ran articles on stage musicals based on films.  Readers of ROT will recall that on 20 September, I posted my own article, “Movicals,” which traced the history and discussed the dramaturgy of the genre.  (Neither of the following articles, republished here from Playbill and the Washington Post, uses the term “movical” for the type of stage play they cover, and both make at least reference to some musical plays that are actually based on books from which popular or successful movies were also drawn.)  The connection between these two recent articles and my own blog post seemed strong enough to warrant revisiting the subject and bringing the two newer pieces to the attention of ROT readers.

[The Playbill article, “Lights! Camera! Action!” by Stuart Miller, who also writes for the New York Times, appeared in the December 2013 issue of the program magazine (the on-line version of the article was dated 25 December) and spotlights one particular musical play that’s on its way to Broadway: Rocky, based on the 1976 film of the same title, due to open on 13 March at the Winter Garden Theatre.  The second article, “Live, onstage . . . from the screen” by Nelson Pressley, was published in the “Arts” section of the Sunday Washington Post on 29 December.  It focuses on productions that were currently on D.C. stages at the time, but Pressley, a review-writer for the Post, discussed the movical in general from that viewpoint.  Both articles reinforce some of the same points that I made last September, but they also update the discussion and raise some issues I omitted.  Together, they’re good follow-ups to my post, so I bring them to you in the interest of completeness and continuing coverage.  ~Rick]

“LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION! —

Broadway’s Newest Musicals Draw Inspiration from the Silver Screen”

by Stuart Miller

Thomas Meehan, Marsha Norman, Susan Stroman and Stephen Flaherty chat with Playbill.com about adapting popular Hollywood movies into musicals for the Broadway stage.

*

When Sylvester Stallone first asked Thomas Meehan if he’d write a Broadway musical of Rocky, he said no. Meehan essentially wrote the book on writing the book for films turned into musicals – he scripted Broadway’s version of The Producers, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Young Frankenstein and Elf – but he feared that Rocky was too iconic, still seared in the memories of most Americans.

“Then Sylvester brought me to his house on a mesa at the top of Beverly Hills and we watched ‘Rocky’ together,” he said, “and it reminded me how well the story was constructed, how much it was already like a play. So I said yes.”

Making movies into musicals is nothing new for Broadway – since My Favorite Year in 1992, nearly every season has had one. Just as Hollywood seems increasingly in thrall to superheroes and young adult novels, Broadway is turning with increasing frequency to Hollywood for stories with recognizable brands. This season brings not only Rocky but Bullets Over Broadway and The Bridges of Madison County (technically an adaptation of the best-selling novel). Not to mention the forthcoming Aladdin, from the Disney movie musical, and Ever After, from the 1998 Drew Barrymore film.

“It’s very tricky,” said Marsha Norman, who wrote the Bridges book, when it comes to figuring out what stays, what goes, and where to put the songs. This year’s trio of iconic movies-into-musicals all feature experienced hands: Norman (The Color Purple), Bullets director and choreographer Susan Stroman, (The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Big Fish) and Meehan, who brought in Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (My Favorite Year, Ragtime) to write the score.

“The process is similar in that you start with the screenplay and figure out how to re-structure it into a musical,” Stroman said. For starters, movie screenplays build over three acts while plays have two, “and you need a cliffhanger so people come back after intermission.”

Additionally a movie may have 80 locations while a show cuts that down to eight or ten. “Then you have to decide which scenes to keep and how to incorporate them,” she said. “Then you have to identify where the songs [go].”

With Mel Brooks, she would say, “I need you to write a song here called ‘Break a Leg,’“ but Woody Allen is using classic period tunes “so we had to sit and go through the American songbook and find songs that could push the plot forward.”

Meehan said sometimes Flaherty and Ahrens would ask if they could take one of his scenes and make it into a song, using his dialogue as lyrics.

That’s when the transformation really begins. “Once you start down this road of turning it into a musical you never go back to the movie,” Stroman emphasized.

Certain storylines have to be simplified. “Woody [Allen] had to lose a few of the gangsters he loved,” Stroman said, while others were added. “I invented new characters and new scenes,” said Meehan, adding that his early days writing parodies for The New Yorker of everything from James Joyce to “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” has enabled him to capture the voices of Mel Brooks (for whom he also wrote in television and movies), John Waters and now Stallone. (Next up for Meehan is an adaptation of Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve.”)

Norman said her favorite part of Bridges has been expanding the viewpoint to include the remote father, quarreling teenagers and a secondary couple in the model of Fred and Ethel Mertz, who “give the viewpoint of the community looking in, raising the question of how you live your own life with everyone watching you.”

Everyone emphasized that movies don’t translate straightforwardly to the stage because they speak different languages. “I remember in the movie of ‘Bridges’ there’s an incredible moment when Meryl Streep is in the truck seeing Clint Eastwood in the rain through the windshield wipers,” Norman said. The theatre can’t recreate that, but “what the movie lacked – and what only a musical can do – is let people sing the size of their emotional life. The real power of music is that it fills you up and expresses what’s inside you.”

Flaherty said the music replaces the movie close-up. “I wrote a song for Adrian that goes beyond the movie – it’s about what she doesn’t say, it’s her interior life,” he said, adding that even in the musical’s climactic fight scene, the team wrote songs so the audience hears what the titular character is enduring.

Rocky presents several challenges that go beyond the typical screen-to-stage adaptation. For starters, so many scenes are part of our collective pop culture landscape. When Flaherty first saw the movie, “my best friend and I came home and started pounding ground meat in my mother’s kitchen.” That famous meat-punching scene is about to be parodied in Stallone’s latest movie, “Grudge Match.”

Additionally many of the most memorable scenes are actually intimate moments more suited to an Off-Broadway play. Meehan insisted on sticking with those scenes. “It’s a big musical with a huge set and cast and millions being spent but there’s a row of them in Act I that last 15 minutes,” he said referring to the Thanksgiving scene, Rocky and Adrian ice skating and their first time alone in his apartment.

The showstoppers were challenging, too. It took a week of watching boxers in a Brooklyn gym for Flaherty to “crack the nut of how to write the music for the prize fight and to figure out how to fit the vocals in there.” He and Meehan heaped credit on fight choreographer Steven Hoggett and director Alex Timbers for figuring out how to re-imagine the fight scene itself as realistic, soulful and theatrical.

Then there was Bill Conti’s soundtrack, still unforgettable nearly four decades later.

Meehan – who had persuaded Stallone to forgo Hollywood tunesmiths for Flaherty and Ahrens – insisted the show have an original score... and include Conti’s music.

“The music is part of the movie’s DNA,” Flaherty said. “To deny it exists would be crazy. I had to find ways to weave it in and out of my score, to embrace it yet to stay ahead of the audience. Sometimes I disguise it, sometimes it’s just in the rhythm or in a harmonic progression – it is there but I use it surprising ways.”

Yet Flaherty said, “Rocky is in an odd way my most personal score ever.” As a teen, he was struck by how much Stallone’s characters were like the people in his working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood, so “I wrote this imagining my neighbors watching it and any time I felt the writing getting too fancy I’d crumple up the paper. I wanted a gritty urban score.”

Flaherty said after he and Ahrens wrote the first four songs, they journeyed to Philadelphia where Stallone was filming “Rocky Balboa” to see what he thought. “Lynn sang Adrian’s part, but I’m 5-foot-4 and I didn’t have the guts to sing the part of Rocky for Rocky himself, so I brought an actor along,” Flaherty said.

They started with the defining number, “Fight From the Heart,” and when they finished Stallone slammed his fist down hard on the table.

“I didn’t know why he did it at first,” Flaherty recalled. “Then he said, ‘That’s it. You’ve nailed it.’“

[This article was originally published in the December 2013 issue of Playbill.]

*  *  *  *

“LIVE, ONSTAGE . . . FROM THE SCREEN”

by Nelson Pressley

How extreme is the craze for adapting movies into musicals? Consider what’s singing out at the Kennedy Center:

“Elf the Musical,” based on the 2003 Will Ferrell hit, is currently hopping through the Opera House. “Flashdance – The Musical,” an expansion of the hugely popular 1980s movie, is also running in the Eisenhower. Last month, a tour of “Sister Act” wimpled through.

That undeclared mini-festival is just the tip of an iceberg that may be sabotaging ingenuity in one of America’s proudest native art forms. And while the run on Hollywood titles may suggest a gold rush, the formula for success is inscrutable. Offbeat triumphs were nabbed by minor movie titles such as “Once,” “Kinky Boots,” and “Grey Gardens,” while such Hollywood blockbusters as “Ghost” and “Catch Me if You Can” – the latter by “Hairspray” songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who would seem to know how these conversions work – flamed out fast.

The one sure thing: Like a Netflix menu, the titles keep coming.

“Big Fish,” “Far From Heaven,” and “Little Miss Sunshine” all lifted their newly musical voices lately in New York. Big musicals due on Broadway this winter and spring: “Aladdin,” “The Bridges of Madison County” (a successful novel made even more popular by the Clint Eastwood-Meryl Streep film), “Bullets Over Broadway” and “Rocky.” Just announced for off-Broadway in March: “Heathers.”

The fad is international: “American Psycho,” “The Bodyguard,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “From Here to Eternity” are all running in London’s West End.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter” is in the works. So is “Dirty Dancing” (now on U.S. tour, and playing in London), “Ever After,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” and even “King Kong,” a rock spectacular that has already conquered Australia and stars a one-ton gorilla puppet 20 feet tall.

Even the most highbrow composers can’t resist the lure of musicalizing movies. The property Stephen Sondheim kept saying he’d like to get around to in the past decade or so but never did? “Groundhog Day.” And what has “Light in the Piazza” composer Adam Guettel been working on since the plug was pulled on his unfinished version of “The Princess Bride”? “Days of Wine and Roses” and the 2004 Danny Boyle movie, “Millions.”

Michael John LaChiusa’s “Giant,” first seen here at Arlington’s Signature Theatre several seasons ago, finally made it to new York (briefly) last year. That LaChiusa worked from the Edna Ferber novel is moot, marketing-wise: Audiences hear “Giant” and think Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. Likewise Signature’s premiere musical next spring, based on the Iris Rainer Dart novel that became the Bette Midler screen smash, “Beaches.”

Isn’t this dependency on Hollywood-branded titles strangling Broadway’s originality? According to the composers of the musicals scrolling through the Kennedy Center, it ain’t necessarily so. (That’s from “Porgy and Bess,” touring through the National Theatre this month and adapted by George Gershwin from the DuBose Heyward novel.)

“With ‘Sister Act,’ I was resistant,” says composer and uber-adapter Alan Menken, whose first stage hit was 1982’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” and who owns eight Oscars for songs and scores of the movies “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Pocahontas” and “Aladdin.” He helped convert “Mermaid” and “Beast” into stage hits, and his new musical of “Aladdin” just opened in Toronto en route to its first Broadway performances in February. Last year Menken won his first Tony with “Newsies,” adapting his own score from the 1989 Disney film; a January workshop is scheduled for Menken’s new musical of the Disney film “Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“People were saying, ‘Oh, my God, everything’s coming from film, it’s getting uncreative,’” Menken says by phone from his home in the New York area. “But I think it depends on where it comes from, and what you do with it.”

The “Sister Act” title “felt tired,” Menken said, but he warmed to the challenge of revitalizing it for the stage. The 1990s story was relocated to 1970s, allowing Menken to pen disco songs and R&B tunes.

In the end, he says, “I loved it. Once you throw that gauntlet down, you find yourself doing it.”

Menken argues that movies are a natural source for musicals, just as books and plays were for so many standards written in Broadway’s Golden Age, from “My Fair Lady” to “South Pacific.”

“Most of those hit shows were based on things they read, or based on plays,” Menken says. “We’re in a different culture,” he adds, wondering if adaptations of TV series will be next.

The turning point

“Elf” composer Matthew Sklar suggests that “The Producers” in 2001 was a turning point. The tidal wave of 1980s and 1990s megamusicals finally crashed, and “The Producers” reintroduced the world to musical comedy.

“After 9/11, I think people wanted to laugh,” says Sklar, whose musicals with lyricist and book writer Chad Beguelin include “The Rhythm Club” – an original show that premiered at Signature Theatre but never made the Broadway leap – and the short-lived 2006 Broadway musical of the Adam Sandler comedy “The Wedding Singer.” (Beguelin is currently writing the book and additional lyrics for “Aladdin.”)

But it was Disney and the 1994 “Beauty and the Beast” that really unlocked Pandora’s Box. That show ran 13 years and paved the way for “The Lion King,” which has been an unrelenting smash since 1997. The first week of this December, “The Lion King” grossed nearly $2 million for its eight performances on Broadway alone, filling 93 percent of the 1,597 seats in the Minskoff Theater and averaging $155 a ticket. National and international tours continue, sweetening the pot.

Even though Menken asserts that the lure of Hollywood dates to Gershwin and Irving Berlin, the aggressive theatrical arm of Disney in the 1990s plainly paved a new avenue for Hollywood execs to tread. Film studios increasingly opened their own theatrical divisions after the Disney hits and the next decade’s successes of “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and “Wicked.”

“Now you literally have heads of studios coming in wanting to be deeply and directly involved,” Menken says. “By film standards, it’s practically dirt cheap to put up a musical.” (The new musical “If/Then,” which recently finished its five week pre-Broadway tryout at the National Theater, cost $10 million.) “If a show is successful, they go, Wow! Then it’s like a streetwalker with a Cadillac: ‘Hey, honey, want a title?’ I get that all the time.”

“Flashdance” composer Robbie Roth confirms. “I am most often approached by people interested in adapting movies,” he says from his home in Toronto.

Roth is new to musicals, and he is emphatically not what the producers are hawking. “Featuring the No. 1 Hit Songs You Love,” the “Flashdance” ad copy promises. Living up to a familiar story, characters and maybe even sound can be tricky.

“People come in and are excited to hear ‘Maniac,’” Roth says of “Flashdance,” which made its 2010 debut in London and has been retooled for its ongoing U.S. tour. He has written over a dozen original songs for the show, which is aimed for Broadway but hasn’t clinched a date yet.

Roth, 40, likes writing for the stage after years of penning pop tunes and working in rock bands. He has an original show in the works – but also another adapting gig with “Drumline.” For “Flashdance,” he says, “My job is keep it in the world of ‘Maniac’ and ‘Gloria’ and all those songs so it didn’t feel like a cross section of eras.”

“You have to manage the expectations and hope people enjoy your show,” Sklar says. For “Elf,” the tasks were to make the cast smaller and get the story off the North Pole and into New York faster. The upside, Sklar says from Manhattan, was being able to compose a relatively traditional score with big band overtones.

A silver lining

Still: Aren’t all these adaptations trumping fresh ideas?

“There are a lot of original musicals being written,” Sklar contends. He points to producers who have shepherded new material to success: Kevin McCollum of “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights,” David Stone of “Next to Normal” and perhaps “If/Then.” “There are a few producers on Broadway that get them there. But it’s a difficult thing to do.”

“There is still an excitement and an urge to write original material,” Roth says. “Whether it has the same opportunity to be heard, I don’t know.”

If not, is the obstacle producers who won’t bankroll something they haven’t heard of? Or audiences leery of paying $100 and up for tickets to something they know nothing about?

“Those things feed each other,” Sklar says. “Producers are reluctant to put money into something if they have no idea who the audience is going to be. It’s just so expensive these days.”

Menken, who pleads guilty to signing on for a cynical project or two during his career, says, “There are certain titles where you roll your eyes: They did it because of the title. But that’s probably true of any number of musicals going back through time.”

Then Menken notes one of the silver linings for composers: royalties, and the fact that songwriters have a hard time getting paid now in the age of digital sharing. “ ‘A Whole New World’ made me a lot of dough,” Menken says of his 1992 “Aladdin” ballad with lyricist Tim Rice. “Live theater is one of the few viable ways for a composer to actually make any money. That’s why so many rock musicians are coming to Broadway. I’m sure Elton John makes more from his theater projects” – “The Lion King,” “Aida,” “Billy Elliott” – “than from his albums.”

Menken recalls what it’s like to start from scratch, pushing uphill to get backing for something brand-new. These days, he’s mainly interested in work that can actually get done. So he likes the support of a producer – Disney – with the infrastructure to develop a show and put the result onstage. And that may well mean working with established titles and ready-made projects.

As Menken says, “There’s a ton of those things around.”

[The article above was originally published in the “Arts” section of the Washington Post on Sunday, 29 December 2013.]