Last night was my first rehearsal for “The Producers,” the next big show at the Racine Theater Guild and an under-taking which feels especially formidable. I guess I usually experience these kind of feelings whenever rehearsals get underway, but this show is uncommonly challenging on a lot of different levels- and the ensemble is handed some of the trickiest passages in the whole show. Plus, this is one of those shows to which people are inclined to attach lofty expectations because they know it so well and love it. (I saw this show twice on Broadway, and one of those times it was with the legendary Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, so I’m one of those people expecting great things out of this show.) I’m just glad that we have a cast that seems fully capable of delivering the goods in very impressive fashion and on the distant horizon I see the RTG with a colossal hit on its hands. Right now, however, it looks more like a wheelbarrow loaded with ten bags of concrete and a steep incline up which to haul it. It’s odd because with some ventures, you tend to begin them with this sense that Anything Is Possible, The Sky’s The Limit, There’s No Stopping Us, etc. and then real life gradually pokes its way through our fragile bubble of optimism and we end up settling for something much less than we hoped for. But a lot of times with shows, I experience the opposite- a sense at the beginning that the task before us is going to take all we have to give, and that still might not be enough to bring us success. And then as we get to work, you find that what seemed like insurmountable challenges are not that at all. That’s how I felt last night as I worked with the chorus for the first time. I walked into Holy Communion’s choir room with the score under my arm and an acute awareness of how tough this music is. And lo and behold, I walked out of that rehearsal with a spring in my step and every confidence that this cast will wrestle this score’s challenges to the ground – and even have fun doing it. And that’s the greatest feeling in the world.
When it comes to shows, I have and have had my irons in several different fires. On the heels of January’s The Magic Flute at Carthage, I played for Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years,” and before the echo had died down was recording the accompaniment for Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” – or should I say attempting to record it. Trying to make heads or tails of that sophisticated score was like trying to recite Sanskrit with a mouth full of Novocaine, and it was only when conductor Amy Haines was on hand that I started to make some headway. Compared to that, it has a blessed relief to record the accompaniment to “I love you, you’re perfect, now change,” which is a show I directed at the RTG several summers ago and which I actually know! Next up, recording the accompaniment to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which is the next opera we’re doing at Carthage. In every case, it’s the same essential challenge, even though Henry Purcell and Jason Robert Brown could not be more different as composers. It’s still the matter of trying to bring a great story to life through music – of contending with challenges that are sometimes piled high, both in the work itself and sometimes in the human beings with whom you’re working – and in the end creating something commendable – and along the way (one hopes) having some fun.
pictured above: the first read-through for “The Producers” a the Racine Theater Guild.