Lovely Article In NY Times: Where Broadway Takes Its Vacation
Lovely Article In NY Times: Where Broadway Takes Its Vacation
Lovely Article In NY Times: Where Broadway Takes Its Vacation#1
Posted: 8/4/08 at 2:08am
I couldn't sleep and came upon this lovely article about summer stock. What a wonderful theatre institution! from RC in Austin, Texas
SECONDS after the curtain fell on the final performance of “A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine” on a recent Saturday night at the Cape Playhouse here, a team of carpenters, designers, technicians and wardrobe personnel swarmed the stage and dressing rooms, tearing up floorboards, dismantling scenic backdrops and hauling furniture, props, wigs, suits and dresses through a large door in the back wall of the theater. Even rows of audience seats were yanked up and dragged out a side door in what a casual observer might have misconstrued as a bank foreclosure.
But the extensive cleanup was business as usual at the playhouse, the first stage of transforming the space, on the fly, from one show to the next. “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” was to open in less than 48 hours. Later that night ornate scenic arches, faux marble furniture and other luxurious trappings of the “Scoundrels” set would be carried through that backstage door from nearby scenery and prop shops.
Kevin Orzechowski, the theater’s production manager, and Daniel Daugherty, the technical director, led the conversion, but the staff appeared to be in constant motion. “There are certain things that have to happen, and everybody kind of knows what they are if you’ve done it for a while,” Mr. Daugherty said. They worked that night until 4 a.m.
The 48-hour changeover was a regular summer event at a slew of East Coast theaters in the days of the straw-hat circuit, when dozens of summer stock houses would burst to life every June, presenting short runs of recent Broadway hits. Most of those theaters have long since closed, and the few survivors are struggling to find contemporary identities.
“How do you reinvent yourself, which every organization has to do on a regular basis?” asked Evans Haile, the playhouse’s artistic director. One way to fight the perception that summer stock is stale, he said, is to bring in regional premieres like “Scoundrels,” which closed on Broadway in 2006.
Other former circuit theaters, like the Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine and the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, have recently lengthened their seasons and increased runs to three or more weeks. But the Cape Playhouse, so far, has not altered its schedule of short runs with minimal time between shows. Here the fast transformation is a vital part of the process.
The technical crew of 20 or so was back at 7 a.m. on Sunday, and by early afternoon a winding staircase and other scenic backdrops were being readied to drop or slide onto the stage on cue. Someone was hanging from the rafters, literally, and adjusting lights, while the director of “Scoundrels,” Mark Martino, and the choreographer, Denis Jones, tested sound cues with James McCartney, the sound designer. The orchestra was rehearsing in a nearby studio, painting continued in the scene shop, a truck showed up to remove two grand pianos that had been rented for the previous show, and the company manager, David Ricklick, was redecorating the theater lobby.
At 5 p.m. on Sunday the crew took a dinner break, and the cast members, newly arrived from New York (where they had been rehearsing for just two weeks), gathered to eat burgers and hot dogs. Many of the actors, like Dee Hoty, Brent Barrett and John Scherer, are Broadway veterans, but they are still willing to rush out here with hardly enough time to mount the show. And why not? Plenty of others have done the same.
In the theater’s lobby stands a display case containing Shirley Booth’s 1952 Academy Award for “Come Back, Little Sheba.” Her estate donated the trophy to the playhouse, where she did the stage version of “Sheba” in 1955, and it is one of many tokens on display. Others, like a poster announcing a 1964 production of “Glad Tidings” starring Tallulah Bankhead, adorn the labyrinthine backstage from which actors have made entrances since the playhouse opened in 1927.
Nearly half a million tourists visit Cape Cod during the summer, the Chamber of Commerce estimates, drawn, like some of the actors, by the nearly 560 miles of coastline. “Once you kill yourself for two weeks and you do the show, you get to enjoy,” said Rachelle Rak, a “Scoundrels” cast member who was also in the original Broadway cast. “You get to go to the beach and then come in and entertain people.”
Sunday night the actors took to the stage and the orchestra to the pit. Rehearsal was punctuated with stops as Mr. Martino or Mr. Jones jumped up to fix something. They got about halfway through the first act that night, and work continued all day Monday, both onstage and off.
“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” said Dustin Shaffer, the properties master, while sewing curtains that afternoon. “I have never been in any situation or environment this insane.”
But Mr. Martino was sanguine as opening night approached. “This is the faith part,” he said. “We give it up to the theater gods at this point.”
The 580-seat house was nearly full for the 8 p.m. curtain on Monday. The overture was perfect, the curtain rose, and the audience burst into applause — for the set. Then a train wreck.
Early in the show, a piece of scenery representing a train car was to slide in ever so smoothly from stage left, but it jammed in its tracks, and the jolt sent two wall sconces popping out of their sockets. Mr. Barrett casually guided it onstage without missing a beat in his performance, while Perry Ojeda, playing a young scoundrel-in-training, made up a new line. “They don’t make these train cars like they used to,” he said. The audience laughed, and the show went on.
Will the theater that once presented Basil Rathbone and Gertrude Lawrence continue to operate at this pace? “We’re all trying to find out how to move into the future,” Mr. Haile said.
He pointed out that the weight of tradition is not entirely a good thing, as the playhouse’s reputation makes it difficult to raise the money that will allow it to keep drawing Broadway talent and offering competitive production values. “It’s very easy to take a place like this for granted,” he said, “because we’ve been here for 82 years.”
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