Imagine that you are working on a five thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. You haven’t been able to eat at your kitchen table for weeks because it has been covered with these fiddly little bits of cardboard. There have been untold hours of work since you found that first corner piece and slowly built the edge of the puzzle. You enlisted friends and family members to help with the vast swaths of undifferentiated blue sky. Finally, it is about to be completed. You go to grab the final piece to slot into the middle of the puzzle and…

It’s not there.

…

Few things aggravate like a missing puzzle piece. All of your work cannot reach its conclusion. No matter how you look at your puzzle, you see that blank spot where the piece should be. You try to come to terms with it, but you know in your heart that it’s not the same without that final piece.

But then, miraculously, you find the final piece on the floor. You slide that final piece into the puzzle, and the unfinished work transforms into something magical. That final piece has the power to render your puzzle a beautiful success, and without it, the puzzle will always feel unfinished.

Now, by this point you are probably wondering why I am talking about jigsaw puzzles on the McCarter Theatre blog. Well, the first show of McCarter’s season, Ten Cents A Dance, had its first preview two weeks ago. It taught me, once again, that the audience is the final, crucial jigsaw piece. No matter how brilliant the lighting, how famous the actors, or how big the budget, theater is about the interaction of the performer and the audience member. It exists not on stage, but in the space between the stage and the audience. Without the audience, a play is unfinished, just like the jigsaw puzzle. The audience has the power to transform the show into a beautiful success, and I saw that transformation for Ten Cents A Dance. The surprises of where and how they reacted imbued the show with a life it could never have without that final piece of the puzzle.

Posted by Daniel Tobin, Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre

Last Thursday evening, Ten Cents A Dance director John Doyle met with McCarter friends for wine, cheese, and good conversation. It was a great group of McCarter fans that included Trustees, just after their first Board Meeting of the season, and McCarter supporters on their way to the final preview performance.

Associate Producer Adam Immewahr interviewed John about his directing process and the development of Ten Cents A Dance, which debuted at the U.K.’s Watermill Theatre in 2002 and just opened at McCarter after a run at Williamstown Theater Festival. He spoke to his signature style of using actors as the orchestra, a technique that was born out of financial need during the cash-strapped 80s and 90s. Over the past two decades, John has perfected this unconventional method of staging musicals.

John commended our Princeton audiences for their willingness to “lean forward” and truly engage in the quiet moments that are created on stage. Most of the musical theater we see today has the exact opposite effect, causing theatergoers to lean back in attempt to take it all in, but Doyle takes a different approach. Ten Cents A Dance is a testament to how compelling and theatrical his style can be.

Having an opportunity to sit down and talk was John was a great way to kickoff our 2011-2012 Theater Season. We are incredibly excited by all of the events that will be happening at McCarter this year and we hope to see you here soon! To find out more about future donor events and learn how you can get involved visit us online.

Posted by Melissa Egan, Development Assosicate at McCarter Theatre

Brendan Milburn is the composer of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and a member of GrooveLily, a pop/rock band. The post below is published with permission from Brendan, and courtesy of GrooveLily’s website. For details, visit:
  http://www.groovelily.com/

The muse receptor, the source of our orchestrational mojo for this production

The Muse Receptor, the TV to show what’s happening on stage, and various other rawk band accoutrements

Our Sound Designer, Leon Rothenberg, had to carefully design how the five-piece band would fit in this room behind and beneath the stage…

And what’s great about it is that if any band members happen to soil their clothing during the performance, there’s a washer and dryer area handy, as they’re in the Wardrobe Room

Brendan Milburn is the composer of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and a member of GrooveLily, a pop/rock band. The post below is published with permission from Brendan, and courtesy of GrooveLily’s website. For details, visit:
http://www.groovelily.com/

We are in the endgame. We are shifting tiny puzzle pieces around in the last few minutes of the show, tweaking how things land, checking to make sure we like the tone, trying hard not to hold on to something just because we did a lot of work on it and only keeping it if it actually works and contributes to the whole.

Yesterday we ran the last ten minutes of the show many, many, many times, with Doug and Rebecca making fixes to staging each time, trying to iron out kinks in the tone. And while this is a musical COMEDY, there is a lot of emotional stuff in this piece. And much of the emotional stuff is at the end. And yesterday we rehearsed these emotional beats over and over and over, and after a while everyone was very, very, very wrung out. Kudos especially to Bob Stillman, Aspen Vincent, and Bryce Ryness for investing fully each and every time. After one run-through which left actors, director, stage managers, writers and assistant director in tears and reaching for kleenexes, Aspen burst the bubble of lingering sadness by quipping, “aw, this job sucks.”

This morning I will finish sheet music for the transitions in Act 2 and return my attention to Act 1, which we are going back to polish piece by piece today. After a week working Act 2, Act 1 feels like a foreign country where we were all raised as children and are returning to after forty years overseas.

The other day in rehearsal, we had to run through the choreography in one of the dream sequences, but we were missing the actress playing the Doctor/Bad Fairy. Our choreographer, Doug Varone, graciously stepped into her role (and her costume) for the session!

Brendan Milburn is the composer of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and a member of GrooveLily, a pop/rock band. The post below is published with permission from Brendan, and courtesy of GrooveLily’s website. For details, visit:
http://www.groovelily.com/

Another read-through of Act 2 yesterday, now that they’ve learned the music at the end. Everyone feels we’ve got the overall structure for Act 2 down now, but we’re missing crucial pieces that we couldn’t see when we were down in the trees, missing the forest.

Today, Rachel is coming back to our apartment and we’ll spend the day—and only this one day—rewriting the last 10 minutes again, and trying to find a satisfying thread for the Doctor/Bad Fairy, whose fairy tale parallel we have kinda let drop without meaning to. Now everyone has a satisfying finish *except* the Doctor. While her parallel to the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale has always been a bit more tenuous, it’s now our job to make it more concrete and satisfying.

Lest you think that working on this musical is all wrestling with plot and character and sheet music software, I’d like to share a little about last night’s Company Dinner. One of my favorite memories from working on Midsummer here in 2006 was a full cast and creative team dinner at Mara Isaacs’s house (Mara being the producing director at McCarter, and the main impetus behind getting SBW to where it is today).

It seems so simple when you think about it, but when you’re in the thick of rehearsing and writing and analyzing and burying your head in the text and trying to find your way out, it can be very valuable to meet in another place with your co-laborators and break bread and have fun for a minute. And that’s exactly what we did last night. Mara cooked up a storm for what felt like thirty people, and everybody showed up with husbands, wives, kids, and a splendid time was had by all. And somehow I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and get a little perspective—we don’t have the ending perfect yet, but we will keep working towards it.

For the full text of this blog post, visit www.groovelily.com

Brendan Milburn is the composer of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and a member of GrooveLily, a pop/rock band. The post below is published with permission from Brendan, and courtesy of GrooveLily’s website. For details, visit:
http://www.groovelily.com/

At 12:20 pm yesterday, we turned in script pages for the end of the show, arguing (constructively!) about lyrics and stage directions until the last possible second.

As expected, I turned in sheet music only for the beginning of the end, a piece I titled “Typical Wretchedly Horrible World,” which is what the patients feel about their regular dreams when they’re back to their, well, typical wretchedly horrible nighttime routine.

Now I play catch-up in getting the rest of the finale on the page, and Val rewrites lyrics here and there in both acts, and we work from home.

I am so grateful that I get to do this.

-Brendan Milburn

Brendan Milburn is the composer of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and a member of GrooveLily, a pop/rock band. The post below is published with permission from Brendan, and courtesy of GrooveLily’s website. For details, visit:
http://www.groovelily.com/

Never even made it to rehearsal today—long writing session in our apartment with Rachel. Our Orderly, Bryce Ryness, and his wife Meredith and daughter Mercy came by as I was winding down with Mose at the end of the day with some Paper Mario. They knocked on the door and Mercy’s happy 18-month-old face was grinning through at us. Mercy was saying “Mose! Mose! Mose!” and Mose came up to give her a hug at the doorway.

Bryce reported that the bridge of “Still Small Hours” has gone over like gangbusters with the patients, and they’re having a BLAST with it—and he seems to also really dig the new Patients’ bridge to “Ready For This,” the song that opens Act 2.

It’s funny how sometimes the things that come the most easily—like these two bits in the middle of pre-existing songs—are the parts that are the most effective. It’s a little like tricking yourself into doing a good job by getting your mind out of the way; if you think “this isn’t a big deal. I can see how to get this job done,” then you can simply do it. And these discrete pieces, where Val and I could see point A and point B and imagine a fun way to get between them—these pieces are the ones that are so easy to bring to life, and so fun. And it’s the vast, open expanses of open blank canvas that scare the crap out of us. (Or me, at least. I shouldn’t presume to say what scares the crap out of my wife, creatively. Though after nearly 17 years together I think I have some idea of what’s going on in her head.)

We wrote up a storm—Rachel re-did approximately 35 pages worth of Act 2, and I sent out piece after piece of updated sheet music in the direction of Emilia LaPenta, our wonderful Literary Intern who is in charge of changes to script and score, and making sure everyone who needs it gets a copy of same.

In addition, it was terrific to have us all in the room together—Rachel lounged on the couch with her macbook air, frowning at it for ages at a time, refusing my offers of hot beverages or snacks, and occasionally asking piercing questions about dialogue and character. Val would interrupt me every 10 minutes with another alternate version of a particularly tricky quatrain. And I would, maybe once an hour, ask them to come listen to a computer-generated playback of something while I pressed the “play” button in finale and they followed the bouncing ball of the on-screen sheet music. Whenever any of us had anything to present, the other two would have differing, strongly-held opinions, forcing all three of us to evaluate our own positions and frequently change sides. And by the end of each of these evaluating moments, we were all, at least tentatively, on the same path and the same side.

And that, my friends, is the end result of NINE YEARS OF WRITING TOGETHER. We’ve been lucky enough, since Val and I moved to LA, that McCarter has made it possible for Rachel to come out and stay either with us or in a nearby hotel for a week at a time three times in the past year and a half, and there’s really no question in any of our minds—we do better (and more) writing when we’re in the same building and can bounce ideas off each other immediately. We make so much more progress.

Tomorrow morning, we hire a sitter for Mose so we can hear the actors read through this two-thirds of Act 2 and see where we are. Wish us luck.

-Brendan Milburn

Brendan Milburn is the composer of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and a member of GrooveLily, a pop/rock band. The post below is published with permission from Brendan, and courtesy of GrooveLily’s website. For details, visit:
http://www.groovelily.com/

Okay, I shouldn’t be writing this. I should be sleeping. But today was so great.

Firstly, we have a rehearsal pianist, Chris Ertelt. What this means is he can go over parts to the songs with the non-patients while I set up in another room and write with Val. This is heaven. Thank you, McCarter, for making it possible for Chris to be here while I write and write and write and write and write some more.

The green room in the Berlind, where I set up for good and where Val set up until she needed to get the heck away from me

Here’s where we set up at first: the green room. Nobody else was there yet, and we’d dropped Mose off at school—nothing to do but show up and actually do the work.

Then, stage management and interns of various stripes started showing up and unlocking doors, and Val set up in another room because it’s annoying being around me when I’m thwapping on a two-octave keyboard and humming and laughing when I come up with something I like.

Val, deep into it

Before rehearsal began, Michele Sammarco, Prop Master (mistress? master.) and a friendly guy whose name I didn’t catch maneuvered a big spinning wheel into the rehearsal room. I got all excited and had to start snapping pictures.

And then the actors started arriving and we had to buckle down. And buckle down we did.
For the full text of this blog post, visit www.groovelily.com

This is the first big musical I have ever worked on, so every aspect of this process is an enormous discovery. Walking into the rehearsal hall the first day, I noticed numbers taped across the downstage (front) part of the staging area. I had no idea that this numbering system is used to help the actors/dancers in musicals with their spacing. The numbers are measured beginning from the centerline and moving out to both sides (in feet). So a number 2 means 2 feet from center, 4 is 4 feet from center, etc. I took a photo of the numbering as an example. It seems like such a small thing, but is enormously helpful when dealing with a show this complex.

Garrett Ayers is the Assistant Director for Sleeping Beauty Wakes.