Following the Yellow-Brick Road
The clouds are gathering, the air thickening for a storm as 90 children, transformed into Munchkins, buzz about backstage at the Muny. Some of the girls have wired their pigtails so they shoot out from their head like electric currents. “We encourage their creativity,” says Mary Hall-Ries, the founding director of the Muny Kids and Muny Teens and, on this night, one of six wranglers herding the young thespians from the stage back to the dressing room (actually a tent set up backstage) and back to the stage again—and to and fro and to and fro.
7:54 p.m.: The audience assembles, and the children line up outside the tent, waiting to enter, have dressers turn them into the little people of Munchkinland and make their entrance onstage.
8:15 p.m.: Everyone stands stock-still and sings the national anthem. Play ball.
The action onstage comes over loudspeakers backstage. The children start gathering by the ramp that will lead them to the stage. Little people pop up from the back, right and left stage, and Nancy Sherwin, youth-chorus coordinator and one of the wranglers, makes sure that the groups are divided. The kids chat among themselves, giggle on cue and then run onstage and dance their way through “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead.” Bob Stone, in charge of the pyrotechnics, lies on the stage, hidden behind a piece of Dorothy’s house that has landed so fortuitously atop the Wicked Witch of the East. He sets off an explosion to announce the arrival of the chagrined sister, not to mention the fireworks when she reaches for the ruby-red slippers.
After Glinda, dressed in all pink and gloriously beglittered, is lifted off in her ring (a.k.a. bubble), the Munchkins run off—and the wranglers herd them backstage for another costume change. Thirty-seven of them have 30 minutes to be turned into poppies; 47 will become residents of the Emerald City, resplendent in green sparkles. As that pack heads up the ramp to the stage, Hall-Ries takes a quick glance and announces that a child is missing. Asked how she can possibly tell, she shrugs: “I just can. It’s like a big family. A very big family.” Just then the wayward one reappears, and Hall-Ries shepherds her into the ascending crowd.
Onstage, then offstage, and the 20 who can tap dance change again, this time into “jitterbugs” (characters in a scene cut from the movie). Three of the children become the menacing monkeys. Rain starts to sprinkle, then, magically, goes away. The wranglers keep an eye on the booms—the largest in the world and easily capable of smashing a Munchkin into a moth.
Sherwin acted in a Muny production of The Wizard of Oz when she was 7 years old. She’s been a wrangler for 14 years; when she lived in Philadelphia, she and her son trekked back each summer so she could resume her Muny work. Tonight the Patti LuPones and Tommy Tunes of tomorrow buzz about her, fretting about this, forgetting that, passing along hugs. Sherwin smiles serenely: “I love my job.”
—C.M.
Burning Down the House
The Black Rep’s production of King Hedley II is halfway through its run. The reviews have been good; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has noted that the play is long but poetic (it’s August Wilson, after all) and every write-up raves about Ron Himes, starring in the role of Hedley, who burns onstage like a magnesium fire. In his dressing room, about 30 minutes before curtain time, he’s applying a latex scar that’s the visual signature of his character, a man with a violent past who’s doing his best to transcend it. Himes is silent as he swabs his cheek with alcohol; from his dressing room, you can hear the other actors—Starletta DuPois, Geoff Williams, A.C. Smith, Bianca Jones and Dennis Lebby—onstage, doing vocal warm-ups. Vowels rise and fall, followed by the staccato of consonants (“... buh-buh-buh-BUH-buh-buh, kuh-kuh-kuh-KUH-kuh-kuh, puh-puh-puh-PUH-puh-puh ...”) and giggling. Himes is staring intensely into the mirror, already slipping into character as he applies a coat of Ben Nye spirit gum to his cheek, then gently pats the scar into place.
Upstairs, stage manager Katina Cross is on set, raking and wetting actual dirt used for the “back yard” portion of the set. The houses, set farther back on the stage, look so real that it’s a shock to walk backstage and see the armature, realize they’re nothing but false fronts. Himes will dig in the dirt to plant seeds in one of the first scenes—bringing home one of the play’s central metaphors—and Cross is here with a little spray canister, making sure the dirt isn’t dry and won’t go swirling across the stage like a miniature Dust Bowl.
DuPois, who plays Ruby, the mother of the title character, is sitting on a chair on the faux porch of one of the faux houses as Jones and Williams goof off, dancing around with each other, getting their energy up and stretching out their limbs. She’s been here at the Grandel nearly an hour, though it takes her only
15 minutes to get ready. “I have the makeup down to a science,” she says matter-of-factly, “but I like to be here early; I have to have time to get the world out.”
Less than 15 minutes to curtain. The actors have disappeared backstage; audience members are already finding their seats.
Lebby, who’s playing Stool Pigeon, King Hedley’s eccentric, cat-loving, newspaper-hoarding neighbor, will make three or four entrances and exits within the first 10 minutes. The house lights are down, and Lebby’s in silhouette, shaking out his hands, taking deep breaths. Cross has placed his props for his next scene—a blanket and two jugs of water—right where they’re supposed to be. A prerecorded announcement plays, unintelligible from back here (no doubt something about turning off cell phones). Then the music starts and the stage lights come up. Lebby rocks back on the balls of his feet, hesitates, then steps forward with a whole new body language, totally in character.
—S.R.
Musical Chairs
“Thirteen minutes,” he’d mutter as he passed music director David Robertson in the hall. “All this for 13 minutes.” And Robertson would grin, knowing that stage manager Mike Lynch—lanky as John Cleese, all ears and Adam’s apple and unfailing good nature—would have only a short intermission to replace the racket of stands, chairs and instruments for György Kurtág’s 13-minute blowout orchestral work with an equally elaborate choral setup for Mozart’s Requiem.
Tonight’s the test. The side entrance to Powell Symphony Hall is already clotted with men and women in black. Chorus members head for the rapidly filling green room, where a bearded, portly young man sits very straight in the center of the melée, legs crossed at the knee, holding his paperback at chin height.
Robertson arrives five minutes before his preconcert talk and walks casually to the audio rack, checking the recordings he hopes will set up tonight’s unusual program, a succession of memorials to the dead.
“All righty. Very good.” Pen flashlight in hand, he submits to the hands rigging his pocket mic.
Lynch watches, eyes narrowed. “Are you catching him, Josh? Are you getting a reading from him?” he asks stage technician Josh Riggs.
“Test, test, test, 1-2-3,” Robertson tries.
“You don’t have it turned up!”
A quick adjustment, then Lynch opens the stage door with a sweep and flourish and Robertson is out there, his modulated “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen” echoing backstage. He cues up a harsh, raucous Hungarian folk song, remarking, “This is the type of lamentation where one feels most acutely the absence of the person who is missed.”
It is music of longing and loss—but backstage there is total presence. Riggs reaches for the red mic (the other has a broken, taped-together clip) as Lynch checks the music shelf, which holds Robertson’s scores, baskets of earplugs and hundreds of strawberry Halls cough drops. As Robertson concludes, “There is this extraordinary life that can be breathed into spirit through this music,” Lynch counts, timing against the applause to swing the door open. Robertson comes through checking his watch.
“Are we going on time?” Riggs asks.
“Five-minute hold. I just found out,” says Lynch. He walks into the hall calling, “Five-minute hold, everybody go to the bar!”
“I heard a new viola joke,” a violist offers. “It’s a good one”—something about using both bullets on the violist and letting Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler live. Other violists chuckle; a horn player winces.
“How are you feeling, Amy?” Robertson asks as the first violinist passes him.
“I took Pepto-Bismol. I’m OK.”
The lights go dark backstage. “OK, you guys ready?” Robertson asks, then gives a thumbs-up and walks out. “Enjoy,” Lynch tells each musician who follows. “Enjoy yourself.” Then he races to the green room and warns the chorus, “We all need to be quiet for a few minutes; the sound bleeds.”
“Can’t we shut their doors?” someone asks when he returns.
“I’m afraid that will give them a false sense of security.”
He watches the TV screen as the heavenly soft, poignant “Nymphes des bois” floats from onstage, then the pyrotechnic Kurtág explodes. Thirteen minutes later, Robertson walks offstage, waits a beat, walks back out, bows, returns. Swiping sweat from the back of his neck, he grabs a glass of water. Musicians walk offstage smiling, clapping to him. A man hoists a huge bass drum over his head in a single fluid movement, resting it on a shelf over the doorway. Then comes the marimba, its wheels squeaking, and the lumbering celesta. Lynch is moving fast now, plunking stools anywhere they’ll fit, slinging music stands into a corner, wheeling out the new configuration. Jacket dark with sweat, he lines up the four soloists.
“I so wanted to follow you in,” the tenor murmurs to soprano Christine Brewer, gesturing to her long gown.
“I stepped on my first wife’s train,” Robertson offers dryly. “I think that was why the marriage didn’t last.”
Then they’re out, through the Alice door. Lynch sighs. “Job extremely well done,” he tells his crew. “That was the real show; you can all go home now.”
—J.B.C.
Magic of the Night
While the Phantom stalks opera ingenue Christine across the stage of the Fox Theatre, Jeffrey Wain, the assistant stage manager, stands in the wings, working a board of 16 switches. With the mastery of a maestro, he cues lighting, sound and curtain crews on a production he ruefully describes as “a technical nightmare.”
“This is an insanely technical show,” confirms Jen Salez, marketing manager for the touring production of The Phantom of the Opera, which has been on the road since 1989, setting up stage six times in St. Louis. Think about it: a crashing chandelier, boat cruising a pretend river in a fog of dry ice, floating candelabra, the demented Phantom crouching in the overhanging head of an angel and then a hollow cross, a dead body dropping to the stage.
This show demands its own “deck,” or stage on top of the regular stage, outfitted with the grooves and platforms for all those aforementioned extra flourishes. The various components of Phantom require 12 trucks and 10 days to set up. Each theater must have a steel installation strong enough to handle the infamous crystal chandelier—an estimated $250,000 worth of steel installation, according to Salez. “If it didn’t, [the crash] would be a little too real,” she deadpans. The minimum engagement anywhere is three weeks; the show’s run in St. Louis was a month, and on Broadway it just broke Cats’ all-time record.
Facing three miniature television screens, Wain tracks the “beat” of the show, following the script, sometimes tapping out the rhythm of the music, and scanning the action on the monitors—which show the action behind the stage walls, as well as the view from above and of the orchestra pit.
Wain swears that he can’t recite the show in his sleep; if he had it that memorized, he explains, he could zone out. “You need to be in the moment,” he says. When not cueing, he chats with the actors, costumed prop men, other stage managers. As the actors slip into the wings, costumers stand at the ready with bite lights—small flashlights, held in their mouths, that they bite to light. The other thespians, awaiting their entrances, gurgle, stretch and, well, act goofy. “You know if you do this every night, you have to do something to break the monotony,” Salez whispers.
The glitches break the boredom for Wain. One set of candelabra fails to make it onstage; the mirror gets stuck twice—hiccups in the magic of the night.
—C.M.
Bewitched, Bothered and Bedazzled
“Those of you who are flying have the purple glasses with water in them,” says Stacy West, artistic director of Modern American Dance Company, “not champagne!”
West and Todd Weeks, MADCO’s associate artistic director, are standing on chairs to address their dancers, crammed into a tiny dressing room behind the Touhill Center’s Lee Theatre. It’s the opening night of Chimera, the company’s ambitious dance piece that uses video projections, aerial rigging, intense choreography and unusual stage entrances and exits. Dancers come and go from all angles, sometimes even climbing over chairs next to audience members.
The costumes are designed to make the audience feel as if they’ve been transported to another world too. Lead dancer Jennifer Reilly wears just a simple white nightgown, and Trevor Harrison and 12-year-old Lily Tarbell, who play Reilly’s husband and child, are outfitted in traditional dance wear, but the remaining dancers are heavily disguised in grease-paint and costumes, transformed into creatures from the heroine’s own dream world—a bit like the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are done up Cirque du Soleil–style. There’s a tall, willowy dancer with curly goat horns and furry flanks; elf twins with prosthetic ears, sparkly green-and-purple hair and Bedazzled leotards; a feral cat with a black-and-chestnut mane; and a male dancer outfitted in a headdress from which rubber protuberances shoot in every direction, like a sea anemone.
The makeup is just as intricate, ranging from Halloweenish animal faces to butterfly-wing patterns. Under the florescent lights, with a baker’s dozen of these creatures crammed into one space, all metallic eyelashes and wings and faux fur, the effect is a little dizzying. Weeks, who conceived and choreographed the piece, wisecracks that, after watching his imagination played out onstage, “now everyone will know just how twisted I am”—but he’s moved by the moment. Everyone is. It’s time for the toast, time to debut this piece after five years of planning and months of rehearsals. Those who will fly (in harnesses or hanging from long white swags of fabric hung from the rigging) lift their flutes of water—and the earthbound creatures, sipping carefully so as not to rub off the green or yellow or black lipstick, tip back the bubbly.
—S.R.
The Illusion of Desire
Downstairs, Dr. Bartolo paces the green linoleum in his striped bathrobe, working himself into his midlife crisis. Why can’t he understand women? Why don’t they love him? Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ 2006 production of The Barber of Seville was inspired, its director told the cast, “by a biography of García Lorca, a feeling of heat and sexuality and sensuality and being deprived of that.” Now Rosina, object of Bartolo’s lust, sits in the wig-and-makeup room, tilting her capped head forward to don her wig. In a moment of fury, she will “cut off” this long black hair (pulled, sometimes one strand at a time, through fine mesh) by tugging at the wig as she snips the air.
Count Almaviva, Rosina’s real love, slides his deliberately grimy drunken-soldier disguise along the rack in his dressing room. “I have one aria to get into my tails,” he mutters. Down the hall—past the “Vom Left” sign, an hommage to the old Roman “vomitorium,” where drunken, gluttonous actors stepped offstage to vomit—repetiteur Justina Lee warns a crowd of young men in the caps and suspendered trousers of 1920s street musicians, “You guys are still a teensy bit ahead.” She slides into Rossini’s overcaffeinated, happy Italian: “‘We are so glad to be in-VI-ted’—that’s where it rushes, as you go up the scale.
They nod solemnly, try it again.
In the darkened orchestra pit, light glows only from the music stands, turning the scores into luminous sea creatures. In the hallway, Rosina’s teddy bear lies face-up on brown kraft paper, his body outlined in marker like a corpse at a crime scene, so the props assistant will know in a flash if he’s missing. A plaster Blessed Virgin statue stands to one side. “She was going to be in Barber, but she got cut,” says production manager Leigh Anne Huckaby.
Upstairs in the wings, Dr. Bartolo and another actor bow to each other mockingly, then hug good luck. Figaro, catalyst of the romantic intrigue, shuffles his “Barber of Seville, Services Rendered” business cards. Fingers steepled together, he gestures with the rollicking music; the second the tempo speeds, he wheels his barber cart around, already singing as he pushes it through the curtain.
Musicians scurry offstage, handing over their props. At last, Rosina appears in a silk kimono, swinging her arms, shifting from left foot to right, bouncing with the music. She yawns slightly—nerves—and stares at the floor. “Stand by,” the assistant calls—then, arm swinging down, “Go!”
Tiptoe far enough out onto the narrow, squeaky catwalk and you can see Rosina onstage, lying on a bed, framed by the silhouettes of black spotlight canisters. To a swell of music, she arches her back, kicks her leg straight up, slips on silk stockings. Almaviva watches, spellbound. The illusion of desire is complete.
—J.B.C.
By Stefene Russell, Christy Marshall & Jeannette Batz Cooperman
