on making theater
David Amaral made up a little video from footage shot during the first weekend of previews. Take a look at what we’ve been working on for the last six months…and what no doubt will continue to undergo changes and improvements in the next few weeks. Counting down to opening!
This is the first time The Building Stage has had official previews for one of our shows, and we’re doing two whole weekends of them! Why previews now? And what are previews for?
Well, a preview is a hybrid between rehearsal and performance, in that the production team (director, deisgners) are still working on the show. This doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily seeing "unfinished" work (although more details may come into the design before opening), but that in it’s mostly finished state, we are still gaging whether things "work".
Why do this in front of an audience? Because the audience is part of the production! To only rehearse and open a play is missing a step, because we would not have ever worked with the other part of our show, YOU. The audiences reactions, lack of reactions, how they respond, and how things change with the live audience otherwise, are all important parts ot the equation. This is particularly true when setting sound levels, timings of lights and music, and in the actors timing with audience response.
Usually the production team and designers job are completed when the show officially opens. By then, we hope that much of it is set, other than the things that change from night to night and make live theater the lively place it is. The Building Stage has always worked against that theory, and our shows consider every performance informational and could help shape and change what we ultimately close the show with. This is why we haven’t had previews in such a replete way before. But, by having these official previews the next two weekends, we can then have a week of rehearsals after each one and before opening to refine and perfect the opening show, so that when the critics write about us, we know we feel confident with the performance they wrote about.
So, if you join us for previews, thank you! You just became an integral part of our process, and you’re getting your tickets a little cheaper! And you’ll see me there. 
After sixteen hours of technical rehearsals this weekend, we’ve built about a third of the show’s technical cues. One can’t help but laugh and recall codirector Joanie Schultz’s half-joke question early in the rehearsal process, “Why are we doing the Ring Cycle!!?”
Tech week, affectionately referred to by the theater world as “hell week”, is really putting into perspective how massive this show is. Now is where things get to the nitty gritty, building and compiling every technical look, sound, change, punctuation, switch and cue and making what is normally “hell week” to others, “hell month” for us.
It’s easy to forget that it’s crunch time for the cast and crew of The Ring Cycle due to the size and scale of the production. Pat King, who plays the characters Hunding and Gunther (among others), put it best in saying “It’s hard to gauge how things are going in terms of when opening is in relation to now as we’ve got four weeks. And normally I’d think, ‘Great! That’s a ton of time!’ but the proportions are all different with this. It’s a giant show.”
Giant indeed. By opening on February 13th, we will have rehearsed for five months and have a six hour adaptation to show for it.
“I’m glad we’ve had all of this time, I’ve needed it,” says Chris Pomeroy, who plays Wotan. “Even if we doubled the amount of rehearsals a typical show has, I don’t think we would have had enough time to absorb all of the intricacies of the script and to get to know these characters. The time we have had has been invaluable.”
When produced as operas, the total length of Wagner’s ring cycle comes out to nineteen hours. All of that material has been a challenge to understand and express by the rules of spoken theater.
“The arc of my character is so giant, I’m trying to find one consistent journey for her as opposed to three chapters of her,” said Darci Nalepa who portrays Brunnhilde, a character that goes all the way from warrior maiden to mortal in love to eventually the ultimate hero. All of which occurs over two generations.
Nick Vidal can relate. “It’s strange playing my own father. My challenge is to find a way to make Siegmund and Siegfried different people, but clearly related.”
As actors work to solve these difficult challenges, approaching them wouldn’t have been possible without the work of directors Blake Montgomery and Joanie Schultz.
“All of the preparation from the directors that went into this show has made the process work organically, which I think was very important to a project of this size,” says stage manager Lindsey Miller.
How do you adapt an opera? That has been the biggest question from day one and is at the heart of everyone’s work on this show. It’s also what perhaps inspired the question “Why are we doing the Ring Cycle?” But as we fight our way through tech, it seems more and more that we’re figuring it out. One can’t deny this growing excitement in everyone’s belly as we get closer and closer to opening night.
William Bullion, who takes the role of Alberich, Hagen, and others, put it nicely when he said, “This is the world premiere of an adaptation of one of the greatest works ever written—and we get to do it!”
And you know what? I think it’s going to be pretty darn good.
I think Byrne would dig the way we’re tackling the Ring Cycle! And we’re gonna do it with considerably less that $32 million! (They’re staging the Cycle over two seasons! We do it in a day!) Check out his post here!
Two stand out quotes:
Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys.
I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces.
More images from the LA production are here.
Over the past few months, we’ve traversed Wagner’s complicated landscape and have slowly pieced scenes together. Today, we stumbled through (much of) Rhinegold.
The first opera in the Ring Cycle, Rhinegold, opens with one of the most enchanting scenes in any opera. The three Rhinemaidens tease Alberich, who then renounces love and steals their precious gold. The watery spirits in this scene have inspired directors in countless ways. Joanie and Blake have decided to put our Rhinemaidens on aerial silks (which it turns out, are really made out of polyester) – a fantastic choice!
Our three wonderful Rhinemaidens worked on the silks yesterday while some company members were at the Plagiarists’ salon. Today, we began to piece the scene together with Alberich. Naturally, everyone was enchanted to watch these three lovely ladies in the air!
The actors playing the Rhinemaidens, Lucy Carpatean, Sarah Scanlon, Lindsey Dorcus, have a vocabulary of movement (and technical terms) all their own. This scene will take time to take shape, though is already quite thrilling to watch for those of us who are impaired by Newton’s laws and our own clumsiness. Rarely do directors get to block scenes in vertical space!
Even when they’re not in the air, the Rhinemaidens make fantastic shapes with the fabric to create a wonderfully watery world. Down on the ground, we worked through other difficult scenes in Rhinegold, including large sections which contain most of the cast.
Here’s another thought on posters (and taglines). The previous post on this topic can be found here.
Thought I’d put the two different versions next to each other. It may change things.
Perhaps two posters is enough. (I don’t know if we can afford the original four poster concept. Nor if I can come up with two more versions of this.)
Once again, I’d love to know what you think. Is this the direction?
Click on the image for larger size version.
Wagner is famous for his use of leitmotifs, or themes that represent characters, emotions, symbols, and themes. We are trying to preserve the ability to illuminate the story through musical accompaniment, pointing out themes, connecting ideas, guiding the audience through the piece. But we also don’t have to create 16 hours of music so we can be a bit more simple than Wagner was able. In working with Kevin O’Donnell our composer/band leader and working off some ideas from our dramaturg Stephen Raskauskas, I have whittled down the motifs into a handful of families that seem important to be able to call upon. These are the notes I made when preparing for our last meeting. I seem to have a hard time typing things up. My mind resists the ultimate categorization that demands. I get stuck putting things in a simple outlined order. I prefer to work on large pieces of paper, organizing thoughts spatially. Often scratching them out and moving them around in relationship to one another. In this case, I was debating how a couple of the motifs related to one another and how we could simplify wagner’s scheme.
Click on the image for a full size reproduction.
