Grrrrrr….

Nice article in the Marin IJ today (Thank you, Mark) which focuses mainly on the the process of getting this “Dickensian-Beast-of-a-Christmas-Show” up on stage. I look a bit stupid in the photo (I was really focused.. ) but that’s OK (There’s only so much you can do with by big ol’ lantern-jaw, Meghan Roberts). Because of a weird shadow, it also looks like I have an alien growing out of the left side of my rib cage, but enough analysis for now…

Aside from my role in King Lear being misspelled (“Perillus”…soooooo close….. ), I think it captures well the difficulty of the process. There’s an intensive “back and forth” between Julian & myself that doesn’t normally occur when doing full-cast shows because there are so many details. The article almost made it sound a little like we were at each other’s throats (“There appears to be an uneasy rapport between this actor and director – but a rapport still…”), but that’s not the case at all. I know that when Julian’s directing, he’s used to the director overseeing and having final “say” on every little detail (like most shows!). But since this project is my “baby,” we share in those details. Sometimes I catch things he doesn’t see and sometimes vice-versa (actually, more often the latter). But when we disagree on how something should be presented, we always discuss it and come to an amiable conclusion.

Charlie Varon was really good at this. Sometimes when I’d do a section for him he’d sit there quietly for quite a while, absorbing what I’d just done, and formulate a question or comment which drove to the heart of the problem at hand. Though he had some suggestions for developing the adaptation which I think were in a different direction than I wanted to go, they were great exploratory exercises which almost always revealed something useful. There’s definitely a faint “Charlie Stamp” on the way I’ve been going about things.

But the biggest stamp is Julian’s…followed by my own. I enjoy productions where the director’s vision is crystal clear. The production can fail or succeed, but it almost doesn’t matter to me. I think it can almost entirely overcome a poorly written play if the director makes something out of it. But when you start from something as well-written as A Christmas Carol, how can it fail?