GrooveLily

I’m sitting in the darkened theater, marveling at the glory of the finished set and how glowingly beautiful it looks under the lights. (Our director Tracy has started to call it “the floating jewel box.”) We are into tech, which means very long days - today is 11:30 AM to 11:30 PM - and our actors are in full costume and mics for the first time. The purpose of tech is to rehearse with lights, sound, costumes and props, and to polish all the mechanics of the show…so we proceed from light cue to light cue very slowly, making sure all the transitions are working. It can take days to get through the whole piece.

The floating jewel box

Even though in some ways our show is rather simple (only two actors and one set that never moves), in other ways it’s ridiculously complicated (the prop list and choreography of getting items on and off stage, putting on and taking off shoes and clothing, placing things inconspicuously under the bed, in nightstands and dresser drawers to be used at various times throughout the evening)…our characters have to progress visibly through more than fifty years, with very few opportunities to leave the stage or change much about their appearance. It’s the job of our ultra-organized and efficient stage manager, Patti Kelly, to keep it all under control and moving smoothly. Here are a couple of pages from her prop and costume flow chart.

Patti's flow chart, page 3

Patti's flow chart, page 4

I can’t tell you how much fun this is. People have asked me recently whether it feels odd or strange not to be performing in something I’ve written, to “give it up” to other people to do…and the truth is it’s just the opposite. It’s not as if being behind the scenes on this show is preventing me from doing something I love; far from it. it’s adding variety and balance to my life, and intensifying the joy of everything I’m doing. There was a time not so long ago when I was doing 150 GrooveLily shows a year, and was close to burning out on all of it: playing, singing, writing…when it became a never-ending relentless grind, it just wasn’t pleasant or even very creative anymore…but now that I have the ability to be selective about when, where and how often to perform means that it’s always a joyful experience, something to get excited about and look forward to. (At the moment, I am really looking forward to doing some concerts next month in Maine and New Hampshire.) Also, I am learning so much from our actors; watching them add layer upon layer of interpretation to the songs and the dialogue is extraordinarily inspiring. As a musician who does some acting but is not a trained actor, I am awed by the way Ben and Pearl can zip in and out of character, finding comic beats and accessing their rawest emotions with equal alacrity.

We are delighted with both of them. Brendan stumbled upon the remarkable Pearl Sun during his short tenure as orchestrator for GODSPELL (which was scheduled for a Broadway revival earlier this year but got cancelled at the last minute); he emailed me from the audition room saying “I JUST MET OUR HOPE!!!” and after checking her out for five minutes on YouTube, I completely agreed. We didn’t even bother holding auditions because we knew Pearl was perfect.

Pearl

We had the good fortune to meet Ben Evans in June of 2007, when he was our Charles in the very first reading of the very first draft of the very first 30 minutes of this show. He was a NYC actor that happened to be starring in a show here at City Theatre at the time - so Tracy suggested him and his equally talented wife Julie Dingman Evans for the reading. (She’s terrific, but not Asian so we couldn’t consider her for the production.)

Julie

A month after the reading, Ben and Julie left New York and traveled for a year, on a fascinating environmental road trip called YERT which took them to all fifty states. Three months into it Julie got pregnant; so they finished up their trip, and repaired to Julie’s hometown of Louisville, KY to have their baby. We held auditions in New York for Charles, and were having trouble finding an actor with the specific combination of qualities we needed: leading man, funny, Jewish, slightly nerdy but very appealing, in addition to being able to sing well in our pop-ish style. So we called Ben in Louisville, 3 days after his baby daughter Bailey was born, and offered him the part.

Ben

In the delirium of new fatherhood, he somehow agreed to do it…

and now he, Julie and 12-week-old Bailey are here with us in Pittsburgh. Ben is doing a Herculean job of mastering his role as well as being a new dad.

Ben & Bailey

At the moment, my role is to watch the proceedings, occasionally to sit in on violin, and to try to keep the whole chess game of the script and score in my head. (”Is this working? Is Hope’s character likable enough compared to Charles? Is each of them singing enough? Does the audience get ahead of the story at any point?” etc. etc…) As a naturally detail-oriented, rather obsessive person, I don’t take to the big-picture stuff terribly easily - but I’m getting better at it. This is my first experience writing dialogue (in every other show I’ve been involved with, there has been a bookwriter whose purview is the spoken text), and at first I found it terrifying, kind of like being in a giant superstore with way too many choices. I mean, give me a thorny lyric problem and I’m all over it - it’s an incredibly fun, engaging verbal puzzle - but dialogue? I could write ANYTHING! It doesn’t have to rhyme! There’s no meter! Ack! It’s easy to become paralyzed by indecision when there are no rules and no parameters. Now I’m much more comfortable, though I still feel like a bit of a script novice. Luckily, everything I’ve had to write has simply had to fit in with David Schulner’s existing (excellent, snappy) lines of dialogue, so it’s been more of a job of imitation than of creation from whole cloth.

Brendan’s role at the moment is to hide out in the dressing room with his computer and studio setup, and crank out orchestrations as fast as possible. All the actual songs are done…but arrangements of underscoring and certain scene change moments have to be made on the fly (it becomes clear during tech how long a certain costume change will take, for example, and that determines how long the transitional music must be). Luckily, Brendan has become a deft double-handed arrangement guru.

Brendan orchestrating in the dressing room

As I watch this evening, it’s amazing to see from out in the house what a huge difference a tiny change can make. To make our heroes appear to be in their mid-twenties, C.T. puts Hope’s hair in a ponytail and pulls Charles’s shirt out of his pants. Instant youth. Andrew David Ostrowski, our wonderful lighting designer, adds a bit of flicker to a light cue and suddenly it’s obvious that Charles and Hope are watching an invisible TV. Brendan asks one of the musicians to pluck the strings with a “floppy finger,” and right away, the song is completely in the pocket. Things are starting to gel, and it’s a great feeling.

Bren & Val enjoying being behind the scenes