Strange (?) Inspiration Part 1

A few years back, the music director where I was working and I decided to present the Rodgers and Hammerstein revue, Some Enchanted Evening. For the first part of the process we held vocal auditions and cast the singers with the songs. I then turned to the task of how to stage the piece. 

Note that you can read all about this production in the academic paper version of my presentation from the International Conference on Silence and Laughter in 2003. “Irony Lives!: Change vs. Nostalgia in a Contemporary Staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein” is available on academia.edu. 

For this production, the staging was entirely up to me. There was a “book,” but it was extremely thin. It said things like, “Bob enters, picks up a cowboy hat, and sings, ‘Surrey With a Fringe on Top.’ Mary enters and Bob hands the hat to her and exits. She sings…” and so on.

Which is perfect for me! As a director I get to invent everything, almost like a Shakespeare play that I can set anytime and anywhere.

My next step was to take the actors to the theatre storage room where set pieces, costumes, and props were kept. They knew which songs they’d be singing, so I asked them to search for specific costumes or props that they thought would work for them. This is the collaborative part of theatre which has kept me going for almost five decades. 

The actors had a wild time searching and also free associating. One actor chose a clock because his song mentioned touching hands and seeing a face. One woman felt her song was a marriage proposal so she selected a wedding gown. And so on.

As director, I also had the chance to create. After we had all the props and some costumes, we assembled them onstage in seeming chaos. As the actors appeared and sang their songs, they would pick up and use the appropriate props. For example, the ensemble created the scene for “Surrey With a Fringe on Top” with a bench for the carriage, a fringe overhead jiggled by an actor as they “moved,” flashlights for headlights, a  porcelain chicken running by to “scurry,” and a cut-out of a tree “moving past” multiple times. When the song ended, the actors left with their props, and so the chaos of the beginning slowly, over the course of the whole performance, became an orderly, cleaned-up stage.

This production occurred not too long after 9/11 and so there was a visual reference to the twisted beams at ground zero. By cleaning up the stage, we also imagined cleaning up the mess caused by that act of terror, through the use of theatre.

Because of the collaborative and creative aspects, I’ve long considered this one of my most successful productions.