Why not?
It required almost nothing of me. Roughly 95% of blocking rehearsals were me saying, "Okay, then you get up and cross to the mic... then when the song's over, you go back to your chair..."
It's true that I did get to help the actors with characters, backstory, all that fun stuff. Despite the fact that most productions treat this show like it's sketch comedy, it's not; it's really rich and well-crafted. The characters are complex and nuanced, and Spelling Bee tells some Big Truths about the adult world. It's a masterful piece of theatre that doesn't get the respect it deserves.
But it wasn't very fun for me to stage.
Yeast Nation has been somewhat similar for me, though not to the extreme of Spelling Bee. With Yeast Nation I feel like the craftsman in me has been kept crazy busy, but not the artist as much. Blocking this show has been primarily about sightlines and traffic control -- so much is going on, so many characters come and go, as our writers juggle all these crazy narratives threads throughout the show.
As Sondheim has said many times, the most important question is always: are we being clear? We can't control whether an audience likes or "gets" our show; we can control whether our storytelling is clear.
Rob has given us a crazy set, an abstract kind of reef, shaped like a big raked croissant, with the audience on three sides. That will be an awesome playground for our actors, but it makes my traffic patterns even more challenging. On the other hand, Kotis and Hollmann love using a split-screen effect, so this reef naturally gives us a number of semi-isolated playing areas, which is helpful.
There are a couple big songs in the show in which we "split the screen," not just two ways, but more. In "Alone," the screen first splits two ways, with Wise and Elder talking in one area, while Second swims to the surface. Then it "splits" again, and we see Sweet feeding the poor. And they're all singing.
In the middle of "Look at What Love Made Me Do," the "screen splits" between Second and Sweet, then Wise in another "screen," then Sly and Unnamed in another "screen," then the Yeast Chorus in two more "screens." A six-way split-screen. That's not something you would have seen during the Rodgers & Hammerstein era, but audiences are so used to modern film techniques, that we easily accept stuff like this.
In the 1970s, Michael Bennett and Hal Prince experimented with using film techniques on stage (particularly in musicals), but Bennett was really at the height of his powers in 1981, with Dreamgirls, where his staging used pans, close-ups, focus-pulls, reverse angles, dissolves, etc. Today, all that is just the common visual language of modern musical theatre. Look at shows like Les Miz, Next to Normal, Passion, Sweet Smell of Success, Grand Hotel, Passing Strange, Spring Awakening, American Idiot, and so many others.
Michael Bennett died way too young, but he moved us so far ahead.
Directing Yeast Nation, I'm finding my two biggest jobs are to act as both a guardrail and a permission-giver. Those are always part of my job, but in this case, I think they are primary. As guardrail, I have to keep us all in this very specific storytelling style, and not let us lose the stylistic overlay or the core emotional honesty. Those two have to stay in balance for this show to work right.
My role as permission-giver is always my favorite part. Actors -- even the freest and most inventive actors -- usually need explicit permission to go for it. Anytime we're staging a fight, at some point early on, I have to say to the actors, "Okay, you guys, now come on and fucking fight!" And then they do, and the scene crackles with electricity, and they're then free.
I think a lot of actors -- most? -- think that extreme emotions are essentially the equivalent of over-acting. But that's so wrong. Over-acting means taking the acting beyond the material to a different (arguably, wrong) place. But extreme emotions are real. Real people experience extreme emotions every day, though most of us are fairly good at emotional camouflage.
Just as good news is not usually News, so too ordinary emotions are not particularly dramatic. No one wants to be told a story about a woman whose life is fine and she's cool with it. That's not dramatic, because there's no conflict, no struggle; and we need conflict and struggle in our stories, because humans tell stories to make sense of ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. And the world around us is chock full of conflict and struggle.
The more a story, however ridiculous, speaks to your real-life experience, even if you don't consciously recognize it, the more that story feeds you what you need. That's why people respond so powerfully to shows like Rent. You don't have to be a bohemian in the East Village to learn something of value from Angel, Tom, Roger, Mark, Maureen, and the gang. You don't have to be trapped by a man-eating plant to recognize the very human emotions and insecurities in Little Shop. And you don't have to be a Jewish dairyman to find deep resonance in Fiddler on the Roof
One of the great rules of storytelling is that the more specific the details get, the more universally the themes will resonate with the audience. And you can't get much more specific than single-celled yeasts on the floor of the ocean three billion years ago. In Yeast Nation, the royal princess desperately wants the throne, but even if you're not royal and you're not a single-celled yeast, you can still understand her feelings, insecurities, frustration, etc.
Maybe now that we're done blocking and we're moving into the theatre, my first job, above all others, is just to make sure we're telling the truth, and not getting carried away with the fun and glorious weirdness of our story's content. The funny will take of itself -- the writing is that good -- but we have to take care of the truth this show is telling, about human nature, about ambition and betrayal, about progress and sacrifice, about love and desire and primal appetites.
One of the great joys of the original Star Trek is that they could tell stories about the most immediate, most relevant issues of the moment, because those issues were always thinly veiled behind aliens and spaceships. Likewise, Yeast Nation is all about us, here, now, but that thin veil sure is a lot of fun.
I can't wait to get the actors on the set next week!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
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