Glad some folk enjoyed my ramblings. You're just enabling me to keep going. Yes, that tour was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The Che on the recording is Nicholas Rodriguez, who has done quite a bit since then. He was Curly in the recent Arena Stage "Oklahoma" and went on as Tarzan on the B'way quite often. He's also an out gay soap star.
I bring up that last point because, he wasn't originally the Che of our production. He was actually playing Jesus in our producer Wolfgang Bocksch's concurrently-running tour of "Jesus Christ Superstar" and to dredge up publicity, concocted a tabloid romance between his Jesus and his Eva (Caren Lyn Manuel) which nobody believed for a second for obvious reasons. Wolfgang made her go to all the JCS opening parties to be photographed, and he came to the Evita openings to be photographed, blah blah blah.
Ticket sales weren't going so well at our first two stops in Munich and Basel, so Wolfgang decided to unceremoniously dump our perfectly capable Che and throw Nicholas into the production to get PR mileage out of two "stars in love" doing the show together. And since he was firing the Che, he decided to fire a bunch of other people for good measure. Well, not fire them exactly. He made very clear that he wasn't "firing anyone." However, in his thickly accented words in a speech to the company, "Some of you won't be playing your parts anymore..."
And so Nicholas took over and sales were good enough in Berlin that we added two weeks and picked up a run in Linz, Austria, where we recorded the album. But by that point everyone was ragged and tired and had been out longer than we'd planned, and several actors were so frustrated with the craziness that they refused to sign recording releases. We recorded the album by splitting the signal from each channel - rather than record it from the theatre's board, we ran each channel both to the board in the house to be mixed live, and also to a remote studio in a truck outside the theatre to be recorded and mixed separately.
None of the first sopranos in the production agreed to the recording, so their mics weren't recorded and we had to have someone come into the studio later to overdub the first soprano on all the ensemble numbers.
In order to generate more publicity midway through the Berlin run, Wolfgang decided to plant a story in the press that Caren's 4-month-old Yorkie Buster had been kidnapped from the theatre. Wolfgang stopped by the theatre to tell us this one night after the show, with Buster right there with us. But it backfired a bit when dozens of people started calling the theatre claiming that they'd seen someone walking with a Yorkie and maybe it was Buster. So they roused Caren out of bed early to have her come in for an emergency presser with the dog to say that everything was fine, the dog was back again, and they made up some story that a soccer fan had been watching the World Cup with the crew in the theatre cantina and swiped the dog, but felt bad and brought him back to the theatre.
I like to think of Wolfgang Bocksch as Werner Klemperer's larger, angrier, flamboyant younger brother who produces musicals. But, as our wise sage of a Stage Manager said once as we were sitting in the office after a show venting about some latest Wolfgang ridiculousness, "If he weren't crazy, we wouldn't even be here in the first place." Which is true - he's a guy who gets a whim to throw up a show, so he gets the original sets and costumes and does it mostly right.
Except in the case of "Evita", the tour regrouped in the fall without me (I had gone on to assistant conduct the "pre-Broadway" production of "Dorian" at Denver Theatre Center), played a few weeks when suddenly Wolfgang just up and disappeared. Nobody in the office could find him - he just packed up all his stuff, and fled. The office didn't know what to do, so they just closed all his shows and sent everybody home. He finally emerged a few weeks later, discovered what had happened, and reportedly threw quite the fit. Not long thereafter word spread that he was arrested for tax evasion, and from there I do not know the rest of the story.
Updated On: 4/18/12 at 06:06 PM
