As we gear up for our technical rehearsals (with lights and sound and costumes), I wanted to share a few thoughts on Herringbone. As many of you know by now, Herringbone tells the story of a precocious young boy whose family throws him into the adult world of vaudeville to help them through the Depression. Like all “play-within-a-play” pieces, Herringbone raises quite a few questions about the nature of performance: how does the emotional content of the performance affect the performer? How does a performer’s personal identity influence the tone and direction of the piece? How does the act of telling a story impact the meaning of the story itself?

In McCarter’s production of Herringbone, Roger and BD have worked with the design team to highlight these moments of meta-theatricality. Rather than using vintage props, for example, we chose to use contemporary flashlights, rulers, etc. to emphasize the narrator’s distance from the story. Did the narrator character (named Herringbone) actually live through the events he takes us through, or is the story a figment of his imagination? Even if the story is true, what are a performer’s motives for telling an emotionally draining tale? What does he receive from the experience of performing in return? These questions have been on our minds throughout the rehearsal process and hopefully will intrigue you as well. To further discuss these and many other questions hang around for one of our post-show discussions with the artists!

Posted by Sarah Wansley, Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre

BD Wong

Well we didn’t have a run-through, but it was a very good day!

I could barely believe it, but painters came to my apartment this morning at 9 to finish a long awaited paintjob in my bedroom.  So I had to get up earlier than I wanted to in order to let them in and give them keys, etc.  Then (welcome to my insane life), while I was showering, I remembered I had made an appointment with a gym trainer for this morning!  Trainer Rob Morea is also a good friend of mine who I usually see regularly when I’m not rehearsing, and I wasn’t exactly all that hot to work out this morning, but I’ve really been missing him.  So I kept the appointment, and had to show up late ‘cause of the painters, rushed to the gym, and Rob took me through a serious abs workout that I really do need for the show.  I find that I am really accessing my “core” a lot, and whenever I go to the tumbling guy, Mookie, I realize how soggy my core really is, so we concentrated on that.  Truth be told, I was kinda tired.  But this is not really that out of the ordinary for me.  Squeezing a million things into one day, or cramming a lot of characters into one play.  I left the gym with a sense of satisfaction, but also hadn’t had time to have a proper breakfast.

Dan and Roger and I were on a train to Princeton Junction that was late leaving the station, so we missed the Dinky shuttle to Princeton and kind of tumbled into rehearsal a bit all over the place.  I had a good solid nap on the train, and I ate something before rehearsal began, and we began immediately with the end of the first act (we ended with it last night and wanted to polish it today) and it’s arguably the highest energy scene of the show.  So I had that “how am I going to get it up for this?” feeling, but really, you just have to do it.  The music starts playing and you just start doing it, and before you know it it’s over and you’re winded and actually kind of satisfied.  We did some major discussing and finessing the scene and I think it’s pretty good.  It’s one of the few scenes in which all five of the principal characters are interacting with one another in an extremely complex, chaotic way.  The first act comes down with a pretty dramatic event, and this event, an event that turns the tide of the Nookin’s family’s journey (and all of the relationships within that family) needs to have a larger-than-life feeling powerful enough to makes the audience feel that any intermission is too long.  So we asked some good questions today, and are closer than ever.

Today we were visited by associate sound designer Leon Rothenberg (you might recall his associate Scott Lehrer came yesterday).  He came to observe whatever we were working on.  Scott and Leon are both affable, easy going self-professed “sound nerds” whose knowledge of both the science of acoustics and the power of music and sound effects is excitingly deep.  They both quietly observed as I stumbled through each scene, and neither of them got to see enough, but I do have some satisfaction that between the two of them they have seen the whole show!

(more…)

BD Wong

This was a super intense day. I spent the night in Princeton, and blogged while watching the convention. Planning to sleep till about 9AM, I woke up at 7:30AM to the sounds of demolition outside the bedroom window. I was too disgusted to even check what it was, but there was a bunch of loud guys knocking something down with sledgehammers. After squelching the impulse to pull up the blinds and flash them (someone’s always got a camera phone and access to YouTube), I got up and ate pineapple and cottage cheese and showered and brushed my teeth and went to my fitting.

The fitting was pretty cool. The goal is to create a fashionable, performance friendly outfit that references a period Vaudeville look but seems somewhat current, modern and not too costumey. It has been a long journey, beginning with William doing some incredible research, clipping hundreds of pictures from the latest runway magazines. This crew is great, and loves a good challenge. So the task today was to narrow down the looks and fabrics and we did that pretty successfully, but there are still some tricky parts. Everyone’s ideas about the vest make it a true collaboration. So far it is the centerpiece of the outfit. The shirt is a very modern, very bent take on the period shirt you would wear with a tie and vest (no spoilers, please), as is the necktie. What remains are the trousers and shoes. Cynthia Thom, costume department head, shopped probably more than 30 pairs of shoes online and we have slowly whittled them down to a few finalists. The fabrics swatched for the trousers were very difficult to narrow down, and because the set is very dark, everyone is concerned that too dark a fabric will cause the lower half of my body to get lost. At one point Jenn picked up one of the sheets of paper with a bunch of swatches stapled to it looking for a new alternative and zeroed in on something novel and bold. We loved the look of it and the soft feel of the fabric, then Jenn lifts up the swatch and reads the notes written underneath, and says, “No wonder! A hundred bucks a yard! Cashmere!” The upside: knowing your associate designer has impeccable taste. So we finished the fitting with a pretty good fit and shapes for the vest and fabric finalists for the pants and some favorite shoes. Bill Kirby from McCarter sound department came to discuss the mike packing (a whole other affair, an elastic undergarment type thing needs to be conceived and built to accommodate 4 microphones and 3 battery packs). Everyone was good-natured and in a great problem-solving mood, and I definitely enjoyed the process, but I was actually still groggy. (I think I am tired from rehearsals and sleeping very deeply and it takes a lot longer to fully wake up than usual.) At one point, Jenn Jacobs said, “why don’t we ask Roger what he thinks of it…” And I stared at her, no lie, paused for a few seconds, scrolling through the mental rolodex of all the wonderful new McCarter artists and staffers I’ve met, and said, “Wait, who’s Roger again?” We had a good laugh over that one.

(more…)

BD Wong

SATURDAY (8/23)

This was a pretty jam-packed day. I didn’t get up and outta the house as early as I wanted to (so what else is new). But I did get there on time for two press interviews about the show before rehearsal and two short photo sittings. These are the mildly irritating, necessary non-rehearsal tasks that go with rehearsing the show. But I will say that talking about the show gets easier the deeper we get into it, so that’s nice. You never know what you’re gonna get when it comes to journalists (I suppose this is a two way street), but these two were okay. As long it sells a few tickets, I am game. (Really, the theater gives me free lunch whenever I have an interview, so I say, bring on the interviews!)

First thing up in the rehearsal room was a big meeting about the trunk. The trunk is extremely important to our show. It is a primary piece of furniture, I dance on it, it holds a lot of props inside it, and it will even provide information pertinent to the journey of the characters painted on the outside of it, like a real touring road box. Cheryl guided the meeting from a written agenda of things to discuss and Michele Sammarco, head of the props department introduced her associate, Laura Fasano, who she introduced as the “artisan” of the department, which I love. Digging Michele and Cheryl more and more every day. Prop people are kind of cool. They make things—who doesn’t like somebody who can make things?

We went through the various issues we have with the trunk in great detail. I won’t bore you with this but it really is a painstaking process. We are depending upon this object to be so many things for us…the props need to not move around too much inside it, but be easy to put in and take out without much effort and not get all mixed up. It needs to be reinforced so that I can dance on it, but it can’t be too heavy so I can move it. At one point it needs to be locked shut very quickly, right before it is turned on its side.

Anyway the meeting was very positive and we put the idea of buying a brand new trunk on the proverbial table; that’s part of the luxury of this production. A second trunk would allow us to take the original trunk and do a lot of “experimental” things to it to make sure they were right first: these things would include different kinds of fastenings, hardware, even trying wheels on it. I’m pretty sure the trunk that finally opens the show will be like Herbie The Love Bug (that’s a good thing).

(more…)

McCarter Literary Manager Carrie Hughes recently conducted an interview with Tom Cone, bookwriter for Herringbone. They discussed the origins of the story, the development of the musical, and some of Tom’s insights into the project. Here are some excerpts of their conversation:

CH: The idea for Herringbone is such an original story. Can you talk a little bit about how you got the idea?

TC: I’m embarrassed to say it was simply I was sitting in my bathtub and I thought of the first line of the play and that was it.

CH: And from there it just flowed?

I wrote the play in about a week. It then had a history before it evolved into what you’re producing at McCarter. It premiered as a one-act play in 1975 in Vancouver, BC and went on to represent British Columbia at the cultural Olympics in Montreal, even though it was a play about America. It had had a television special with the CBC TV; it went on a national tour as a one-act play and it ended up at the Olympics. When it was there I realized that I didn’t want a one-man play, I really felt I could get more out of what I was trying to say.

I really wanted to write a play as a kind of a gift to the United States from my vantage point, having been a draft dodger and having lived here [in Canada] for the first eight years before amnesty. The vantage point of being here gave me the feel of a terrible compromise, almost like a tragic compromise that I think that we all have to deal with either personally or politically. So I wrote this tragedy for this kid. I have my own background: I was a child actor in Miami, Florida, going to theater school and being in plays for about 12 years and really being under the thumb of some demonic directors.

I really felt that it was best to write it as one person performing 10 roles. Then when I decided, after it had had this tour and been performed at the Olympics, to make it into a full length piece, I wanted it through composed as opposed to just inserting anecdotal music of some period. Some people like to couch the play in a kind of vaudeville context, but I disagree with that. I think that even though its history is attached to vaudeville, you would never see the kind of act [that Herringbone is performing] in vaudeville. Ironically, the closest thing [to our play] that occurred I didn’t know about until, I think, the production at Playwrights Horizon. The actor David Rounds was doing research and found—it was so bizarre—a little article on Ethel Barrymore having performed multiple roles on vaudeville circuits as a nine year old. So she was performing little 10 and 15 minute plays and that seemed to work for me historically. But the idea that Herringbone was just cheap jokes and it was based on certain rhythms or physical comedy, I wasn’t interested in that, so I played against the genre.

(more…)

BD Wong

The morning started out with pancakes at PJ’s, which was a first for my son and me. Not only was it yummy, my son was extremely impressed by two very specific things there: the speed with which breakfast was served (prestissimo), and the fact that you could join decades of very expressive Princeton students and write whatever you want on the walls and tables. I was actually impressed by these two things myself. Then we took a gorgeous walk through the campus to rehearsal. It’s pretty neat to walk around and about these amazing old buildings when nobody is around, especially with a little boy who has never heard crickets in the daytime, and doesn’t realize that a lot of those old-looking buildings at Disneyworld aren’t really very old at all.

It has proven to be a safe bet that my son will not complain about going to the rehearsal room because there is so much fun stuff in there. We rehearse with (among other things) a very simple doorway—a mock-up of the actual one that will appear in the show, and simply opening the door and walking across the threshold from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular gives him a particular thrill. On top of that, the unit is on 4 casters with big red handles that make them inoperable, rendering the doorway stationary. He really dug this. He has already suggested we bring this gigantic gray thing home, and has requested we paint it a very specific “medium blue”.

I bring him up because it is rather noteworthy that my son is actually eight years old during the time when I am performing a play about an eight year old boy and his parents, and playing all three of them to boot. Having the lucky experience of becoming a parent has been absolutely invaluable to my work as an actor for too many reasons than I can illuminate right now; working on Herringbone, the effect of this has been quite great. The parents in the play are rather flawed as parents, I must say (admittedly, during very hard times). Having said that, particularly in regard to the mother/child relationship, I’m pretty sure many parents will relate: she is absolutely sure nobody loves her son more than she, and is even surer that every decision she makes on his behalf is for his benefit and his benefit alone and not for her own, when often, the reverse is unfortunately true. Working toward rendering the role of Louise is really informed by my relationship to my son in this production (and my sometimes ironically simultaneous tendency to not only smother him but to immediately squelch that smothering), and equally, attempting to bring honesty to the character of young George is greatly enhanced by my empathy for my son, and my perception of whatever pressures and plans that I may burden him with—thanks to the many great (yet mundanely parental) dreams for him I often wish upon a star to realize all too easily.

So “our” babysitter came just in time for rehearsal to start, and Darren and I started delving into the choreography for the Tango number. This is a very tricky sequence, because we have completely overhauled it for this production from what we did at Williamstown. The material is a dynamic collaboration of dialogue, music and dance, but the story being told within it is sketched rather than completely spelled out. There needs to be an extreme degree of economy in the movement; each choice must provide as much information and depth to the audience as possible without becoming ornamented or over-exerted. We have chosen a nice device for showing the passage of time and place (no spoilers, sorry), as Louise and Arthur Nookin go west from Alabama with their supernaturally possessed son George in tow to Hollywood. The perpetrator of George’s “possession”, a vengeful midget vaudevillian named Lou, is really in charge here, and part of the purpose of the number is to illustrate the war that Lou and George begin over control of George’s body. So imagine illustrating, through dance, everything I’ve just described, without smoke coming out of your ears. We are all determined to make this sequence even more resonant than it was before, and all are enthused by our progress in this regard. It could be one of the cooler pieces within the show that gives Herringbone its singular identity as a theatrical experience and as a piece of collaborative music theater writing.

(more…)

BD Wong in Herringbone. Art by Danny Garber, Photos by Mara Isaacs.

With the last few rays of summer sun filtering through the windows in the Berlind rehearsal hall, the cast and crew of Herringbone is already hard at work. Like all McCarter shows, Herringbone rehearsals kicked off with a Meet and Greet for the McCarter staff to get to know the artists. As the stage management assistants and I set out nearly 50 chairs to accommodate our ever-growing staff, I couldn’t help thinking of a line from the show, “This is my cue to introduce the principle players…they don’t know there’s only one in the cast.” Although the McCarter staff and our audiences already know that the wonderfully talented BD Wong plays (and sings and dances) all 11 characters in the show, it’s definitely something you have to see to believe!

When I first read the Herringbone script, I wondered if the rather complex plot of this vaudeville murder musical would become muddied when all the parts were played by one actor. Since rehearsals have started, however, I’ve been amazed to watch how BD’s solo “tour de force” actually clarifies both the actions and themes of the piece (I don’t want to give too much away!). I’ve noticed how quickly we all started referring to the characters as if they were separate entities: “Maybe the mother moves the chair on her line,” someone will suggest or “He’s standing over by the window so she could cross to him on that music.” In addition to changing the texture and pitch of his voice for each character, BD also changes his body posture to portray a young boy, an old tailor, a middle aged woman, etc. Dan (our music director) told a great story the other day about how after Herringbone’s first production in Williamstown he overheard an audience member explaining the show to a friend and saying, “and then the tall man came in…” as if BD actually changed size for the different characters. It’s amazing how much the tilt of a head and the angle of a gaze can change our perception of who is talking…but don’t take my word for it—check out Herringbone opening in the Berlind in less than a month!

Posted by Sarah Wansley, Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre.

BD Wong

Well, you know, it’s not NORMAL being in a “one person show”.  There’s nothing traditionally “fun” about even the IDEA of a “one person show,” as far as I’m concerned.  And I’m talkin’ as either a performer or an audience member.  As a performer you think, “well I’m all alone on stage, which I suppose is ego gratifying, but in the end of the day, it’s an awful lot of work, and very difficult to reinvent the form, so why bother?”  And as an audience member, you’re thinking, “well he’s all alone on stage, which I suppose is ego gratifying, but in the end of the day, it’s an awful lot of work, and very difficult to reinvent the form, so why bother?”  You know?

But this is different.  This is a really cool show.  It’s a musical.  It’s a one person show that’s not a bunch of monologues with lighting cues in between and clever pauses where the actor changes sombreros or gets a drink of water behind a screen while making shadows of bunnies and flying birds with his fingers to keep things interesting.  It has a linear story like a real musical, it has a complete roster of characters like a bona fide three-dimensional musical, and the characters actually talk to each other and sing to each other and argue with each other and dance with each other and do stuff like ride in a car together.  It’s just that there’s really only one person on the stage.  And if, as an audience member, you just get on the train, you might just get sucked into the story and all the characters and possibly FORGET that there is just one person on the stage you might just have a satisfying storytelling experience.  Which is, of course, the goal for me.

Roger Rees (director), Darren Lee (choreographer), Dan Lipton (music director and pianist) and I worked on a kind of studio theater workshoppy production of Herringbone at the Williamstown Theatre Festival last June.  Roger was the Artistic Director of WTF  (which stands for Williamstown Theatre Festival, you pottymouth) at the time.  The production’s success eventually brought us to McCarter, but more than that, the time away from the material to reconnect with it months later here in Princeton has made the work much more interesting, and my connection to the material and the characters considerably deeper, as Roger had predicted last June.

I find myself remembering that 10 months ago in Williamstown my feelings about myself, and the play, and the way I approached the entire task of performing the play were completely different, almost as if I am now a very different person.  There are a lot of complicated reasons why this is true that I won’t go into, but basically what’s pertinent here is that I am hearing the words and telling the story now in a way that feels much more honest and deeper than before.  I, for example, no longer need to resort to “primary colors” in order to simply delineate the characters from line to line in a scene.  Instead, a more real rendering of the characters behavior and emotions can be kept alive as a character plays a scene simply because I know the material better and I have a more deep and complex understanding of the people and their feelings than ever before.  Might be interesting to ask someone who saw Williamstown and McCarter whether that’s true for the audience as well.

(more…)

Princeton Public Library

For those of you who have never attended on of McCarter’s “Live at the Library” events at the Princeton Public Library, you don’t know what you’re missing. The series brings the principals of upcoming performances at the theater to the library for discussion session. Playwrights Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, and Beth Henley, directors Garry Hynes, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Mary Zimmerman and actress Blair Brown are among the many creative talents who have appeared in the series. The events are often lively and fun, and the house can get quite packed.

At 7:30pm on Thursday, August 21, BD Wong and Roger Rees will open a new season of McCarter Live at the Library. The discussion will be moderated by McCarter Producing Director Mara Isaacs, and will be recorded for McCarter’s YouTube page and for this blog. But there is nothing like seeing it live and in person.

Get there early if you want a seat—otherwise you might end up standing or watching a simulcast video from another room!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Earlier this week, Emily sat down with me to do some video interviews on the upcoming season. I put together a little bit of her conversation about Herringbone, BD Wong and Roger Rees, and blog readers get to see it first. I had some problems with video formats, so the whole thing is overly letterboxed (Apple iMovie isn’t cooperating), but all said and done I’m pretty proud of it. You can watch it below on YouTube:

As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments. You can respond by clicking on the “comments” link below.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.