T Minus 78 Days: Decisions, decisions!

We finished three days of callbacks on Wednesday, and I haven't blogged since the beginning of the week because I have been caught up in the process of trying to figure out how to best use the people who have come out to be in the show. It is difficult to write about this while the process is ongoing, because there are issues that arise in callbacks which effect each individual actor in different ways, and it is almost impossible to talk about how the director views these situations without publicly "undressing" each of the people who are hoping to get into this tribe, and that is something I am very reluctant to do.

However, I do want to document this process and so I am going to take a somewhat obtuse approach. I am going to write about the issues that we are struggling with as anonymously as possible, without naming any names or even revealing too many details about the parts under consideration. I expect those of you who are involved in the process, if you are reading the blog, will try to identify individuals, including yourselves, from these comments. I hope that you don't because I promise you that you are just as likely to draw incorrect conclusions as correct ones.

The biggest initial dilemma we faced for callbacks is how to view the over-all tribe casting vs. potential audience expectations with respect to age and appearance. This is a very important issue for a director. We have a number of very talented actors who tried out who might not normally fit someone else's definition of "young hippie" but who showed such passion for the show, as well as their talent, that we are very reluctant to let them go.

A mentor of mine once gave me a good piece of advice. We were considering casting a boy in the role of Peter Pan, which as you probably know is traditionally played by a woman (such as Mary Martin). He said,

It is always a director's option to defy audience expectations when casting a show. However, if you do that, you had better be damned sure you are right!

An audience will accept an average performance from someone who meets their expectations, but if someone who is so unexpected based on their experience appears, that person has some serious hurdles to overcome.

Advice for actors: Please try to keep this in mind the next time you aren't cast in a part you want and you believe that the director is "prejudiced" about your age, look, height, weight, whatever. It may not be the director's personal prejudice that is involved at all, but only his/her understanding of what the audience's expectation will be, and an unwillingness to take that risk (and thus put the show itself at some level of risk).

In light of the good people who came to auditions, the question immediately came up: do we consider casting some of these people in the tribe despite the fact that they are obviously not in their early 20s? We don't have the benefit of a large "gulf" between the audience and the stage, either, as might be the case in a big theater. At Theatre on San Pedro Square, in particular, the tribe will pretty much be in the audience's lap.

Barb and Dudley and I struggled with this question for several days during auditions and callbacks. We decided to call back people based purely on talent, not on age or appearance, because we wanted to give ourselves the option of making that decision later. Now that we are done with callbacks, the question remains, will this work or not?

Barb and I discussed this at great length and we kept coming back to some of the productions of HAiR that we have seen. One of the most sincere productions of HAiR we ever saw was a small production in an open-air theater which included a cast of a variety of ages, shapes and even talent levels. However, the entire tribe had so bonded and was so committed to doing the show well that it worked and completely defied any expectations one might have had. On the other hand, a recent commercially-staged production in Los Angeles, with probably a million-dollar-plus budget and Equity talent, was, in our opinion, almost totally without any real meaning. It certainly didn't work for us and that seems to be the consensus in the HAiR community. We would much rather have a show like the former than one like the latter.

We started to identify the people who are clearly committed to this production. They tried to come to all of the callbacks unless there was no choice because of outside commitments, they have worked hard to study the materials in advance and prepare themselves and they did anything we asked them to do without objections.

After continued back-and-forth about this, the decision finally became clear for us. We might not have a tribe that is the ideal age or size or shape, but we will have a tribe with great talent, and a passion to do this show the way it should be done. We will trust to the magic of theater to overcome any audience expectations. What really matters is delivering the message of HAiR with heart and soul and we just don't see why that mandates that only a group of 20-year-olds be involved.

We made our final decisions on Thursday night and invited the selected tribe members to participate on Friday. However, we still postponed principal role casting because we had some concerns in that area as well.

We considered doing a supplemental callback but after trying to arrange it for the appropriate people, we had problems making it work. Maybe that was a message from the stars telling us that we should go with our instincts and stop trying to use too much logic.

We ultimately decided to use the same philosophy for casting the principals as we have for the overall tribe and we will cast our fates to the wind. Making the right choices based on talent and heart and desire should trump any specific "look" we thought we might have wanted.

I probably should have known this is the way it would end up because I have been burned by making mistakes before. Once, when directing The Fantasticks, I cast a man in a role that he really didn't want (he was hoping to get El Gallo) because he "looked" the part and was a slightly better actor, rather than casting another man, whose look concerned me despite being only marginally less talented and much more passionate about the part. Although the chosen actor ultimately did well, it clearly was not the best performance he had ever given (his heart simply wasn't in it), and he also made the directing job extremely difficult. I expect that had I chosen the other actor, despite his look being somewhat unusual and his somewhat lesser ability (but not by much), he would have given me the performance of his life and it would have shown in the final production.

In this case, the decisions are even clearer. And so, we reached the end of the first part of the journey. Casting decisions have been announced and we are ready to start rehearsals on Tuesday...

Look out San Jose, here we come!

T Minus 81 Days: The Long or The Short Journey?

It is now the morning after the second night of callbacks, and I have been lying awake pondering the 11+ week stretch ahead of us before opening night. By typical musical theater rehearsal standards, that is a VERY long time! It got me thinking about discussions I have had recently with several other directors of HAiR who are taking different approaches, some by choice, some by necessity.

For instance, Richard Parison, director of an upcoming production at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia (http://www.princemusictheater.org/home), starts his rehearsals the same week as we do, but his production opens on May 26th while ours won’t open until July 14th. Why the vast difference?

PMT is an Equity regional theater, meaning that most of their performers (although not necessarily all) will be members of Actors’ Equity, the union of stage actors. For these actors, doing HAiR will be a full-time job for the next two months (one month of rehearsal and one month of performances). They will work 40+ hours a week during the rehearsal period and they will do 8 performances a week right from the beginning.

By comparison, Stagelight Productions is a non-Equity “semi-professional” theater. While we will be paying our performers a modest stipend based on ticket sales, none of our actors can make a living doing our production (with the price of gas over $3.25 a gallon in the Bay area right now, some will be lucky to cover their travel expenses with their stipend). Most of them will have full-time jobs during the day and all of our week-day rehearsals will be at night (week-end rehearsals will be during the day). Because of this, we simply can’t rehearse as long every week as a full-fledged professional theater can. Our rehearsal schedule will vary from 12 to 15 hours a week, but will cover almost 3 times as many weeks, resulting in roughly the same number of rehearsal hours by the time we are ready to open.

For most traditional musicals, intense rehearsal periods like PMT’s are ideal. Learning the music, choreography and blocking is a challenge that requires constant repetition, and the concentrated effort that can be achieved in a short rehearsal period often bears the best fruit. When rehearsals are stretched over a long period of elapsed time, things learned early are often forgotten before you come back to them in later rehearsals. This results in frequent relearning that is unnecessary when the rehearsals occur in a limited timeframe.

However, that isn’t always the best approach. To consider a different example, most original Broadway productions have very long rehearsal periods (including extensive out-of-town tryouts or in-town previews), because new shows require constant changes and tuning as the directors and performers learn what works and what doesn’t. Short rehearsal periods for new musicals often result in failure, because the “gestation” time simply isn’t long enough to create the ideal show (not that long gestation always results in success, of course ;-)

But what of HAiR? It certainly isn’t a new production (it is almost 40 years old this year!) There have been many productions of HAiR over the years, both professional and non-professional, and the script is reasonably well-tested. Shouldn’t the process be relatively straight-forward?

I don’t think so. In fact, while I certainly understand the need for PMT to keep their rehearsal period compact (the cost of even low Equity salaries over a long rehearsal period would be almost impossible to recoup in the typical 4-6 week regional theater run), HAiR has another aspect that is hard to measure but is very important.

HAiR is described as “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” and at the heart of that slogan is the word “tribe”. Some may feel this is silly or pretentious, but if you take it seriously (as I do), it is one of the important aspects of a good production of HAiR. It is essential to create that tribal experience within the group of performers and staff who work on the show in order to convey it successfully to the audience.

Building a tribe, whether in the theater or in the real world, is not an instantaneous experience. Many concepts associated with “tribe”, such as “tribal customs” and “tribal rituals”, connote long-developing experiences that can’t happen easily overnight. While the physical process of learning and rehearsing a show may be accomplished in a concentrated period of time, I question whether the tribe-building requirements of HAiR can be satisfied that way.

I have had the opportunity to see many productions of HAiR since seeing it on Broadway in 1968 and in Los Angeles in 1970. The best productions are accomplished by groups which already have “tribal” experience (such as local repertory theaters with a long-standing tightly-knit group of performers), or which have taken the time during their rehearsal process to build some of that experience. The worst productions (and believe me, there have been a few!) are typically those which consider HAiR “just a show” and obviously rehearse it in that manner.

While we are certainly taking the “long journey” approach to creating our production of HAiR out of necessity, I don’t think I would do it any other way, even if that was possible. I think we have a better opportunity to build some of the necessary tribal experiences with our cast precisely because we will be spreading the rehearsals over a longer period of linear time. Indeed, it will be a slower process, and there will probably be some trouble spots as a result. Over-rehearsal is always a worry, because in every show, there comes a point when the performers simply need an audience, and a long rehearsal period delays that moment, sometimes too long. However, the benefit of letting the tribal experience percolate until it really resonates within each member of the tribe can’t be overestimated.

I expect that financial practicality makes it very difficult for a company like PMT to do that. I am sure that Richard will try very hard to build a good tribe at PMT in the short time he has available and I certainly hope he succeeds. However, I am very glad we are taking the longer journey, because I think any production of HAiR benefits from the time spent building camaraderie within the tribe, which is an essential ingredient for it to ring true.

T Minus 83 Days: The Ups and Downs of Old Broadway

We got back to the Radisson in New Jersey pretty late (we took a detour without the proper directions at the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York City and ended up spending an extra hour on the road lost in Queens and Brooklyn while coming back from Hatfield, sigh!) We had decided that we would spend Saturday in the city going to a museum and seeing one more Broadway show. Shortening our New York trip by one day meant missing an evening with my brother and his family and also one less day in New York to explore, but we felt the extra day at the Archives had been well worth it.

Saturday was beautiful. Unlike the previous week, the temperature was balmy, and the sun was out. We drove in to Manhattan, parked, and took a cab ride (Barb’s first in Manhattan) to the American Museum of Natural History. I hadn’t been there in many years and it was as exciting to me as it was to Barb. Many of the exhibits have been renovated since the last time I recall being there (over 10 years). We started out with the Hayden Planetarium’s Cosmic Collisions presentation. We walked through an exhibit which demonstrated the scale of the universe from 10 to the 26 power down to 10 to the -26th power (the size of the universe down to the size of a quark). All of this was very sobering to put our lives into a cosmic reference.

Then we went through the main attraction at the AMNH, the dinosaur exhibits. AMNH still has the largest displayed collection of dinorsaur fossils in America and it is awe-inspiring. Standing beside a complete skeleton of a T-Rex or an Allosaurus is hard to describe. Yes, we have all seen it in Jurassic Park and in photos, but standing beside the actual fossils is a completely different experience.

We had a light lunch and then finished our explorations by going through an exhibit which illustrated all of the known species of plant and animal life on earth. Another thought-provoking experience.

We decided to walk from the Museum to Columbus Circle to shop there. We bought some stuff to take home there and then headed to Times Square to have dinner and get tickets for our final Broadway show of the trip. We had a delightful dinner at Le Pigalle (we sat next to a couple of young ladies, one of whom told us she lives in Chicago but works in San Jose two days a week as a consultant and she is now looking forward to seeing HAiR in July or August!) and headed over to TKTS. Once again, Avenue Q was gone, so we decided to see the last Kander and Ebb musical that will ever appear on Broadway, Curtains. And boy, do we wish we had chosen differently ;-(

It was a sad experience to see this show. First, I had a real gripe with TKTS. When we saw the Drowsy Chaperone, we were offered orchestra tickets which normally sell for $110 for $55 each. This is the classic “50%” discount that I remember from TKTS a long time ago. When we asked about tickets for Curtains, they only had mezzanine tickets, which normally sell for $70. So I assumed we would pay $35. However, when they asked for payment in cash, they wanted $115 which is only about 25% off. I questioned them and they said it was 50% off the top ticket price regardless of the ticket you get. So someone getting orchestra seats really gets the 50% discount, but someone who can only get mezzanine seats is getting a much lower discount. I complained a bit, but I realized Barb was frustrated with my behavior (and rightly so), so I went ahead and purchased the tickets, despite feeling a bit ripped off (if I had known what we were about to see, I would have been MUCH more upset!)

We barely got to the theater and nestled ourselves into the 16th row in the mezzanine (definitely “nose-bleed country”). There was, of course, no legroom. However all of these inconveniences were going to pale by in comparison to the show that was just about to start.

I will cut to the chase. I have seen over 50 shows on Broadway in my life, including such clunkers as Carrie and Superman, and without any doubt, this show was the worst I have ever seen on Broadway. It resembled a bad community theater production, and wasted the normally incredible talents of such actors as Karen Ziemba, Debra Monk and David Hyde Pierce. In some ways like Drowsy Chaperone (noted in an earlier blog post during our first week in New York as excellent), it is a musical within a musical, this time a kind of “Columbo meets Crazy For You”, but really really bad.

What is saddest about this is that Kander and Ebb are one of my favorite Broadway composing/writing teams. Of course, everyone loves Cabaret and Chicago, but they have done other incredible shows like Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Woman of the Year, Zorba, and my favorite Kander/Ebb flop (not, in my opinion, because the show was bad, but because of awful timing coming out at the end of the "sung-through" musical period), Steel Pier. Every one of these shows, even the ones with the least commercial appeal, were at least reasonable attempts at good theater and good Broadway music. This one fails on all points.

It is cheesy, relying on cheap jokes, bad puns, wheezy “western” choreography. They took one of the best songs in the show, A Tough Act To Follow, which is a classic Kander/Ebb gentle ballad and hopped it up into an awful imitation Busby Berkeley number, complete with lighted stairs, blowing fog and a kick-line.

And then, to add insult to injury, the audience gave the show a standing ovation, doing what audiences normally seem to do these days, especially on Saturday nights. I guess if you pay $110 for a ticket (or even $55!) you have to convince yourself that you didn’t waste the money. Well, sorry folks, this time you did.

I expect Fred Ebb is turning over in his grave every night the curtain goes up on this monstrosity. It is clear this was done for the money, and like Vera says in “Chicago”, “Sorry, suckers!” It is a shame that the Kander/Ebb legacy, which was, for the most part, almost universally brilliant, has to end on this tarnished note.

We drove back to New Jersey wishing that somehow we could have ended this incredible trip on a better note. Barb tried to laugh it off… “Well, we batted .500 this trip!” And indeed, it doesn’t do anything to dampen our enthusiasm for our upcoming production of HAiR, or diminish the wonderful accomplishments and discoveries we had at the Archives. We just wish it could have been better. Sigh.

T Minus 84 Days: The Archives At Last!

(A note to the reader: Because I have had to spend time double-checking facts and other things, the final posts from the trip to New York are out of sequence. I am posting them initially in the order I release them, so you will see them as they appear. Later on, I will reorganize them so that they appear in time sequence. - Jon)

Wednesday in Hatfield, Massachusetts, started delightfully. The Old Mill On The Falls Bed and Breakfast is a wonderfully restored old grist mill that sits right on a waterfall which used to power the grinding wheels. Proprietor Ted Jarrett served us a fantastic breakfast (the first really good breakfast we’d had since we left home) of fresh fruit and homemade waffles.

We called Nina Dayton and asked her when we should come over and she said “Now!” So we got into the car, drove the short distance (it turns out we could have walked it, but it was still very cold and we had our laptop, scripts and other stuff to carry, so in the end, we were glad we drove) and in less than 5 minutes, we were pulling into Nina’s driveway.

We had already met Nina, her husband Trevor and their daughter Annie at the HAiR dinner party in New York City on Saturday, but we really didn’t have a chance to spend much time with them. That was about to be corrected! In the end, we got to spend three very full days with some of the warmest, most gracious people we could have imagined we would ever meet. They welcomed us into their global family, as well as their own smaller local family with open arms.

A bit of history: Nina was just 14 when she started working at the Biltmore Theater where HAiR was playing in New York. She had been hanging out at the theater to see the show and meet the tribe, and her friend was working at the concession counter. When an opening came up, she was asked if she wanted a job, and she signed up. She remained in that position (while still going to school during the day) until the very last performance of the show on July 1, 1972.

Nina got the amazing opportunity to perform on stage with the Broadway tribe for the final performance of HAiR, which was already expanded by the participation of many of the alumni from the previous four years of Broadway performances. About a year later, she was given permission to produce and direct a very special HAiR production utilizing half professional actors and half inner city youth in New York.

Today she is the curator and director of the official Hair Archives, and runs both the physical archives and the Archives web site, as well as some portions of Michael Butler's web sites, and his blogs. She consults on many Hair related projects and current productions of Hair.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday became a complete immersal in the culture of HAiR. We reviewed many articles and reviews written about the show, numerous script variations that have occurred going back to the original Broadway script, the revival script and the now licensed 1995 Tams-Witmark script. We looked at many photographs including the few available photos of the original set on Broadway. Costumes fared better than the sets in pictures. The set of a show is almost always in the background and most promotional photos which focus on the performers don’t show it very well, whereas the costumes are on the people who are typically photographed up close and personal ;-). Barb had a field day in learning about the styles of the original Broadway costumes.

Although there is no known video or film of an actual original first-run HAiR performance, we did get to look at a number of videos of those early tribes, from highlight clips of various Broadway and Los Angeles casts performing on the Johnny Carson, David Frost, David Steinberg, Ed Sullivan and the Smothers Brothers shows. One clip in particular demonstrated the unbelievable performing genius that was Ragni's Berger. During the Johnny Carson show, he gets up on Carson's desk while singing HAiR and throws Carson totally off his game, something that almost never happened to Johnny on the air.

We looked at a taping of the 1988 United Nations concert which covered almost all of the songs from the original production with authors Jerome Ragni and James Rado, composer Galt MacDermot, many stars who had been in original first-run productions of HAiR (Melba Moore, Donna Summer, Heather MacRae, Paul Jabara, Nell Carter, Andre DeShields, and more), Treat Williams who played Berger in the movie, as well as a number of star performers who just came out to help in the benefit performance (Bea Arthur, Rex Smith, Frank Stallone, Chuck Mangione, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and others).

We also got to view several videos of more recent productions. Some of these productions were very good, including excellent representations of the original staging and choreography. Some, as would be expected, were not as good as others, and we also observed a number of specific things that we felt were important to avoid in our show (for instance, costuming in one production was very non-period, including women in the tribe wearing high heels, something that would have been absolutely unfathomable for a group of 60s-era hippie girls).

We had also met Dr. Bill Swiggard on Saturday and we got to spend more time with him at the Archives. Bill played Claude in several of the original productions including the national Mercury Tour at the age of 19. After spending a dozen or so years as an actor, he found himself out of work in the 1980s in theater and turned to his earlier "day job" experiences as a lab technician to make a living. Bill is incredibly brilliant, and, as he saw the damage being wreaked on the theater community by the spread of HIV/AIDS, he plunged himself into finishing college despite already being in his thirties. He continued his education and ended up with both a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in immunology and a medical degree from Cornell. In 2002, he met Nina while visiting the Hair Archives, fell in love with Massachusetts and is now a noted physician there, specializing in infectious diseases. He also donates time every week to work with AIDS patients.

Bill lives in the same town as Nina and her family, and every day, after work at the hospital, Bill came by and had dinner with all of us. We discussed politics, medicine, computers, theater, people in general, and of course, HAiR. The pictures of Bill as a 19-year old Claude are extraordinarily affecting. He is a genuinely beautiful man, who also has a genuinely beautiful soul.

Bill and Nina (along with Trevor and Annie, and their delightful Jack Russell terrier Jennifer and their cat Mouse) became family to us in just a few days, making us once again admire the quote: “There are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet.” Truer words were never said.

We were originally going to only spend two days in Massachusetts, and we didn’t want to overextend our welcome, but when Nina insisted that we consider coming back on Friday, we instantly changed our plans so that we could avail ourselves of another day of her amazing support and assistance. I can honestly say that there is no way we could have become better prepared for this voyage we are about to embark on (creating the San Jose production of HAiR) than spending these three days in Hatfield. What an amazing experience! What amazing people!

After three days, we finally had to bid a teary adieu to Nina, her family and Bill. We all agreed we would keep in touch by phone, email and the blogs (the Hair blog and this blog). Not only had we learned things that we couldn’t have learned any other way but we made what are sure will be four lifelong friends.

As Barb and I drove back to New York City, we played the Broadway cast album again. Not just once, but three times. All of us (me, Barb, Nina and Bill) agree that one thing about HAiR is undeniable: the music is timeless. You can listen to it over and over again and it doesn’t become jaded or stale or boring. It remains infectious and exciting no matter how many times you listen to it!

We knew that we were now ready to begin.

LET THE SUN SHINE IN!

T Minus 81 Days: The Long or The Short Journey?

(A brief note of apology: I am behind on the blog, arrghhh! We had no Internet access for several days in New York, and then, when we got back to town on Sunday, I have been quickly reimmersed into "real life" including my normal workday at Coral8, plus callbacks for the last two nights. I still have three pending entries awaiting publication:

• T Minus 85 Days: The Archives At Last!
• T Minus 83 Days: The Ups and Downs of New York
• T Minus 82 Days: Callbacks Begin...

I will have all of these up by the end of next weekend, but in the meantime, I wanted to post this article which I have been writing off and on since we started working on HAiR. This seems as good a time as any to publish it. Enjoy!)

It is now the morning after the second night of callbacks, and I have been lying awake pondering the 11+ week stretch ahead of us before opening night. By typical musical theater rehearsal standards, that is a VERY long time! It got me thinking about discussions I have had recently with several other directors of HAiR who are taking different approaches, some by choice, some by necessity.

For instance, Richard Parison, director of an upcoming production at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia (http://www.princemusictheater.org/home), starts his rehearsals the same week as we do, but his production opens on May 26th while ours won’t open until July 14th. Why the vast difference?

PMT is an Equity regional theater, meaning that most of their performers (although not necessarily all) will be members of Actors’ Equity, the union of stage actors. For these actors, doing HAiR will be a full-time job for the next two months (one month of rehearsal and one month of performances). They will work 40+ hours a week during the rehearsal period and they will do 8 performances a week right from the beginning.

By comparison, Stagelight Productions is a non-Equity “semi-professional” theater. While we will be paying our performers a modest stipend based on ticket sales, none of our actors can make a living doing our production (with the price of gas over $3.25 a gallon in the Bay area right now, some will be lucky to cover their travel expenses with their stipend). Most of them will have full-time jobs during the day and all of our week-day rehearsals will be at night (week-end rehearsals will be during the day). Because of this, we simply can’t rehearse as long every week as a full-fledged professional theater can. Our rehearsal schedule will vary from 12 to 15 hours a week, but will cover almost 3 times as many weeks, resulting in roughly the same number of rehearsal hours by the time we are ready to open.

For most traditional musicals, intense rehearsal periods like PMT’s are ideal. Learning the music, choreography and blocking is a challenge that requires constant repetition, and the concentrated effort that can be achieved in a short rehearsal period often bears the best fruit. When rehearsals are stretched over a long period of elapsed time, things learned early are often forgotten before you come back to them in later rehearsals. This results in frequent relearning that is unnecessary when the rehearsals occur in a limited timeframe.

However, that isn’t always the best approach. To consider a different example, most original Broadway productions have very long rehearsal periods (including extensive out-of-town tryouts or in-town previews), because new shows require constant changes and tuning as the directors and performers learn what works and what doesn’t. Short rehearsal periods for new musicals often result in failure, because the “gestation” time simply isn’t long enough to create the ideal show (not that long gestation always results in success, of course ;-)

But what of HAiR? It certainly isn’t a new production (it is almost 40 years old this year!) There have been many productions of HAiR over the years, both professional and non-professional, and the script is reasonably well-tested. Shouldn’t the process be relatively straight-forward?

I don’t think so. In fact, while I certainly understand the need for PMT to keep their rehearsal period compact (the cost of even low Equity salaries over a long rehearsal period would be almost impossible to recoup in the typical 4-6 week regional theater run), HAiR has another aspect that is hard to measure but is very important.

HAiR is described as “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” and at the heart of that slogan is the word “tribe”. Some may feel this is silly or pretentious, but if you take it seriously (as I do), it is one of the important aspects of a good production of HAiR. It is essential to create that tribal experience within the group of performers and staff who work on the show in order to convey it successfully to the audience.

Building a tribe, whether in the theater or in the real world, is not an instantaneous experience. Many concepts associated with “tribe”, such as “tribal customs” and “tribal rituals”, connote long-developing experiences that can’t happen easily overnight. While the physical process of learning and rehearsing a show may be accomplished in a concentrated period of time, I question whether the tribe-building requirements of HAiR can be satisfied that way.

I have had the opportunity to see many productions of HAiR since seeing it on Broadway in 1968 and in Los Angeles in 1970. The best productions are accomplished by groups which already have “tribal” experience (such as local repertory theaters with a long-standing tightly-knit group of performers), or which have taken the time during their rehearsal process to build some of that experience. The worst productions (and believe me, there have been a few!) are typically those which consider HAiR “just a show” and obviously rehearse it in that manner.

While we are certainly taking the “long journey” approach to creating our production of HAiR out of necessity, I don’t think I would do it any other way, even if that was possible. I think we have a better opportunity to build some of the necessary tribal experiences with our cast precisely because we will be spreading the rehearsals over a longer period of linear time. Indeed, it will be a slower process, and there will probably be some trouble spots as a result. Over-rehearsal is always a worry, because in every show, there comes a point when the performers simply need an audience, and a long rehearsal period delays that moment, sometimes too long. However, the benefit of letting the tribal experience percolate until it really resonates within each member of the tribe can’t be overestimated.

I expect that financial practicality makes it very difficult for a company like PMT to do that. I am sure that Richard will try very hard to build a good tribe at PMT in the short time he has available and I certainly hope he succeeds. However, I am very glad we are taking the longer journey, because I think any production of HAiR benefits from the time spent building camaraderie within the tribe, which is an essential ingredient for it to ring true.

T Minus 87 Days: Washington D.C. (Part Two)

Tuesday was a much nicer day. Not exactly balmy, but much lessing chilling to the bone. The winds were a bit less and there wasn't much in the way of precipitation. We checked out of the hotel and headed again to Washington at about 9 AM, with only a general plan. We knew we had to get to the Vietnam War Memorial but everything else was sort of up in the air. We would try to do as much as we could without stressing ourselves before we had to depart for Massachusetts and a very long drive.

We decided to immediately try to get a ticket to see the Capitol. We were really lucky and got a timed entry pass for 2:45. That started to frame our day's plans. We had some time on the parking meter and decided to see what we could get to in the remaining 1-1/2 hours. We wanted to see the National Archives, but it was far across the Mall, and as we later realized, it was a good thing we didn't dare it. Instead we stumbled on an interesting little exhibit, the Voice of Ameria studio tour. We figured it would be fun to see what the propagandists of the government would present to us. We still had a little time to spare before THAT tour, so we crossed the street to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and spent 1/2 an hour browsing through the Our Peoples gallery. We saw the portraits of Geronimo and Sitting Bull that were used in the original off-Broadway production of Hair (with portraits of Ragni and Rado in Indian garb dropped in). We also got to peruse a little of the native American history, and it is definitely a sad story of struggles over land, culture and identity. It saddens to realize we, as a people, haven't changed all that much in over 200 years.

We went back to VOA, and it turned out that we were the only tourists on the tour (there was a very nice lady from Camroon who was interning at VOA who also went with us, but she was VOA "family" ;-) Apparently not many tourists want to be "propagandized" by the government.

In fact, it was an interesting tour. We got to see the state-of-the-art studios where VOA puts out news to most of the rest of the world. It is obviously flavored government thinking, but it isn't necessarily as right-wing as might be expected (and remember, that VOA represents the government in power so it spoke for the Clinton administration in 1992-2000). They claim to provide balance, although it is clearly "lukewarm" balance, middle-of-the-road balance, not exactly alternative radio/TV.

Interestingly, they are forbidden by law to broadcast to America. Ostensibly this is because the commercial broadcasters feared the competition from the government. However, it is just as likely that it helps preclude Americans from finding out what VOA is saying to the rest of the world. Now, with the Internet (and VOA actively uses the Internet), it is much easier for Americans to find out, because VOA can't stop Americans from accessing their website on the Internet (at least not yet! ;-) We should all be interested in this, because we should want to know what our government is telling the rest of the world.

Our tour guide was a nice fellow, who seemed to be trying to provide a somewhat objective view of his own service. For amusement, though, we were also accompanied by a silent, somewhat dour-faced lady who never said a word, and followed along on the whole tour listening and not commenting. She looked like she might belong to the CIA, and who knew? ;-) Both Barb and I, while not saying a thing during the tour to each other about it, afterwards had the same funny thought. What in the world was she doing? Watching us? Making sure that our guide didn't say the wrong thing? LOL. That is probably all just paranoid delusions we fantasized...

Or was it? ;-)

We got back to the car and headed for the Vietnam War Memorial. With our upcoming production of HAiR, we felt obliged to visit the Memorial and touch some of the names. We also had another project with our cameras but we can't go into it in detail now because it is something planned for the show. You will all just have to wait ;-)

One thing we noted at the Memorial is the number of young people (preteens, teens) who were asking questions that we of the age 40+ seem to assume everyone understands. That was a little shocking and confirmed what Nina Dayton had said to me. The key to HAiR is getting the tribe, who will mostly be 20-somethings, to "get it". Having lived through it, it is difficult to comprehend that others might not. Yet the questions we heard children asked their parents: "What was the draft?" "Why did all these people die?" bore witness to the lack of understanding. We will need to work with our tribe to make sure this is clear. It also showed how important HAiR still is today. As with the Holocaust, "We Must Always Remember".

Finally, we headed for the Capitol and got to take the grand tour. If you have never seen it, make sure you do when you go to Washington. The architectural feats are astounding (it never ceases to amaze me how all of this was done 150 years ago, long before Autocad and modern machinery, etc.!) The rotunda and its amazing art is a beauty to behold, and the Hall of Statues is quite remarkable. We also got to see the original Supreme Court (very small but stately!) where good (Marbury vs. Madison) and not so good (Dred Scott) decisions were handed down in the early 1800s.

After a few pics from the stairs of the Capitol looking out over the Mall and the Washington Monument (where I had participated in the March on Washington in 1969 and gotten arrested!) we finally made our way back to the car and started the long drive to Massachusetts. We ate dinner on City Island and the Seafood House (once again, we got an unbelievable meal of shrimp, lobster and scallops in New York at 10 PM on Tuesday night, something that is unfathomable in California!) , and finally rolled into Hatfield, Massachusetts at 1:30 AM.

The Old Mill Bed and Breakfast seemed deserted. The door was wide open, but no one answered the bell. Ted, the proprietor, had told me the door would be open but that he would come down when we rang. After trying a few times, we decided he must have fallen asleep, and we went in. All the rooms seemed available, so we just chose number 5 (a very nice cozy room) and fell into bed.

Not exactly your normal arrival at a hotel, but this has not exactly been a normal trip either ;-)

T Minus 88 Days: Washington D.C. (Part One)

Monday morning was BRRR cold in Washington, our nation's capitol. We made the drive down from the hotel in about 25 minutes, and decided to start out with a visit to the Holocaust Museum.

Both Barb and I were stunned by the powerful imagery of the exhibit. It is something everyone should see.

One exhibit in particular was very hard to view. A virtual "river" of shoes, taken from the victims of Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland, is accompanied by this poem, by Yiddish poet Moses Schulstein:

We are the shoes
We are the last witnesses
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh
Each one of us avoided the Hellfire.

It made us both weep. How an entire country of people could be mesmerized into permitting such abominable acts to happen seems beyond comprehension.

And yet, today we as a society are committing many of the same acts of ommission by not speaking out forcefully against what the government is doing as those in Germany committed by not taking an active position against the Nazis.

No, I am NOT saying that what George Bush and Dick Cheney are doing today is equivalent to what Hitler ultimately did. Yet. But Hitler didn't start out in the first year by murdering 6,000,000 Jews either. He started out by coopting the populace with his positions, by convincing them that he could be "trusted" and only then, after he had secured that trust, did he abuse it by committing acts of genocide that are incomprehensible.

On the walls of the Holocaust museum are the words of Dutch pastor Martin Neimoller, at one time an anti-Semite, but later a strong anti-Nazi who was himself imprisoned in Dachau. There are many variations of this quote but the overall intent is the important thing:

First they came for the Communists
and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews
and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.

And when they finally came for me
there was no one left to speak up.

We in America are certainly not yet at the moment when "they came for the Jews", but we very well may be at the figurative moment when they are coming "for the Communists" (the terrorists).

Should we be coming for the terrorists? I think any right-minded person would say that if you can prove someone is a terrorist who has killed (or even is definitively planning on killing) other people, of course we should.

But there must be a limit. The minute we sacrifice the civil rights of the people who commit crimes in the name of expediency or "national security", we have clearly crossed over the same line that Hitler crossed over in Germany. While we aren't (at least as far as we know it yet) committing genocide, we are jailing people for many years without due process (Guantanamo), and we are committing serious forms of torture (Abu Graib) and we are turning people over to other governments to carry out that torture because they have fewer laws that need to be skirted. We are clearly starting to become the very thing we have in past wars fought against.

It is interesting that during the "dawn of HAiR" in 1967, we protested against the war in Vietnam but that was mostly because we were opposed to the sacrifice of American lives in a useless and unnecessary cause. In 2007, we are not only sacrificing American lives in another useless war, but we are sacrificing American freedoms as well, in the name of freedom for others, and we seem less concerned today than we did 40 years ago. For shame.

Ben Franklin said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

As the Holocaust Museum warns, We Must Always Remember.

After leaving the Museum, we had a sober but very good lunch at a local cafe, Vie de France just about a block away from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. We then crossed Independence Avenue and went in to the Smithsonian.

The Air and Space Museum is a monument to what is both good and not so good in America. The exhibits on the historic genius of the Wright Brothers, Curtiss, Douglas, Goddard, etc., all pioneers of aviation, are fascinating. Seeing the actual Wright flying machine that was flown at Kitty Hawk in 1903 (recovered in new cloth but still sporting all the original wood and engine) was amazing. As a long-time fan of aviation and space (and as a former pilot), I get a thrill seeing some of the planes of by-gone eras. Getting to look at the actual Apollo space capsule that circled the moon is awesome.

Unfortunately, our adventures in the air and in space have always been coupled with the militaristic aspects of those ventures. The thrill of looking at a Saturn rocket, only used to send people for the first time on voyages of great discovery, must be tempered with the sadness that it stands next to a Titan rocket whose principal mission was to be prepared to deliver the warheads that would, if ever used, probably plunge all humankind into darkness for centuries. Seeing the Spirit of St. Louis that crossed the Atlantic on a mission of expanding horizons is juxtaposed with the F-104 Starfighter, whose only mission is the killing of other human beings.

While I have always sympathized somewhat with people who argued "Why do we spend hundreds of millions to explore the empty reaches of space when we could better use that money here on Earth?" I have also felt that exploration and invention are important aspects of our being who we are. What is sadder is that if we stopped spending Billions (and in the case of the Iraq war, TENS of Billions) on killing our fellow human beings senselessly, we would have money to not only spend on human suffering here at home but we would STILL have plenty of money to explore space. There is no reason we can't do both if we just stopped the waste of money and lives in the pursuit of power and profit.

In another of those weird little coincidences that happen in our lives, our last stop on Monday was the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and while we only had about one half hour there, we got to see many really amazing portraits. The one that tickled Barb and me the most was probably the daguerrotype of P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb.

So what is the weird little coincidence? Keep in mind our earlier visit to the Holocaust Museum and read on.

My sister-in-law Sophie Hayden (who later went on to get a Tony nomination for her performance as Rosabella in the revival of Most Happy Fella in 1992) was in the original production of Barnum on Broadway with Jim Dale. Seeing that little four-square-inch portrait of Mr. Barnum and his star attraction just as they were portrayed in the musical, taken and preserved on a metal plate since the middle 1800's was way cool!

The coincidence is that Sophie ALSO portrayed Mrs. Otto Frank in the Lincoln Center revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, with Natalie Portman and George Hearn (who played Mr. Frank, her husband). It struck me as we were heading home that we saw both of those "moments" in history at the Holocaust Museum and at the Smithsonian, just as I had seen Sophie portray them on stage. Weird and funny in a very minute way, n'est pas?

After a good Chinese dinner in the "Chinatown" section of Washington, we headed back to the hotel and promptly fell asleep.

It definitely had been a long day.

T Minus 89 Days: The Sunday Drizzle

Not too much to report for Sunday. We decided to bail on going in to New York for the afternoon before heading to Washington D.C. because it was raining pretty hard and we figured once we checked out of our hotel, we would end up soaked if we walked around the city and we wouldn't have any way of changing clothes before the drive (ok, Barb figured that out, I just agreed with her perfectly logical reasoning ;-)

The drive to D.C. was uneventful, save for the first really rude person we have encountered on our trip, that being a discourteous young toll-taker at the Delaware Memorial Bridge who was yacking on her cell phone while I tried to ask her for a receipt. After having to ask her three times to get her attention (the third time in a not so polite manner), she turned to me and barked "You could ask nicely!" (which of course I had twice, but she was too occupied to notice, sigh).

We pulled into Jessup, Maryland, about 25 minutes from D.C. and checked in to the La Quinta Inn. Not anywhere near as nice as the Radisson (and for the same price!) but way cheaper than staying directly in D.C. (pretty much the same story as NYC) and more than acceptable.

Since we had slept late, we were pretty rested and decided to see if there was any theater we could take in on Sunday evening. Turns out there was plenty, and we decided to see The Heidi Chronicles at Arena Stage. If you've never been to the Arena, it is a terrific professional theater in the heart of SW Washington (near the Jefferson Memorial). They have two stages, the main one being the completely in-the-round Fichandler Stage. I saw a wonderful production of Animal Crackers (the Marx Brothers musical that the movie came from) here about 9 years ago and this production of Heidi Chronicles was easily as good (albeit somewhat sad at the end). Great theater at a great price (rush tickets were $28 each for row C). I love in-the-round theater when it is well-done and the director of this show did a fantastic job making sure that everyone in the theater (and it is big, over 450 seats) had a great and fairly equal share of the downstage action.

We ate at the theater's cafe, but I wouldn't recommend that if you go. The food was fairly expensive and while it was pretty good, it was served fast food style. If I am going to pay $20 or more for a meal, I'd prefer to not have it served in plastic trays with plastic utensils and wine in plastic glasses. There are plenty of restaurants in D.C., go there and then go to the theater.

That's about it. We have been out of Internet contact in D.C. (the hotel had wireless but it was down the entire weekend!) so I am catching up on blog posts. Look for more in the next few days. (Meantime, we are already in Hatfield and this morning, which is actually Wednesday, we are headed to Nina's to start looking through the archives! We can't wait!)

Peace,

Jon

T Minus 90 Days: A Gathering in New York (Part Two)

After our moment at Ellen's, we continued our trek towards uptown. We were really early and decided to continue on to Columbus Circle.

Barb got to see Central Park for the first time and was mesmerized! We took a one-hour pedicab ride around the park and saw many of the places where the movie HAiR was filmed (the opening scenes at the fountain, the horse riding scenes on the streets of the Park, and the lake scene where John Savage and Beverly D'Angelo go skinny-dipping - the "nude" scene in the movie! :-) We also got to walk by the Strawberry Fields memorial and the Imagine plaque for John Lennon (very moving) and we saw the Dakota hotel where he was murdered (sigh).

After a little more walking, we arrived at Bricco's restaurant just before 7:30 and went in. The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur, but to say we had an astounding time would be an understatement.

Besides our gracious host Michael Butler, who presided over the gathering, there were a number of HAiR tribe members from the New York production, including: Natalie Mosco (in the original Broadway production on the day it opened in 1968), Marjorie LiPari (also in the original Broadway tribe on opening night and often appearing as Crissy as Shelley Plimpton's understudy). Debbie Andrews (Crissy in Detroit, Washington and later in the last few years of the Broadway run) and Dale Soules (Jeanie for the last couple of years on Broadway).

In addition, there were many other HAiR tribe members from other productions, both cast and others, including Bill Swiggard (Claude in a number of productions), Robert Camuto (Woof in several of the touring companies), Marsia Holzer (costume designer for several productions of HAiR), Matt Schicker (producer of a recent production of HAiR in New York and a director of the National Alliance for Musical Theater) and Kathy Nixon DelRosso (Sheila in the Boston production).

I also want to single out Nina Machlin Dayton. Nina not only played Crissy and Sheila in several post-Broadway productions, she also was in the last performance on Broadway and she worked most of the original Broadway run at the concession stand at the Biltmore. I know that somehow I probably purchased candy from her one of the times I saw the show in New York in 1969/70. Nina now curates the Hair Archives, and has been an advocate for helping us with our San Jose production, including putting me in touch with Michael and arranging several meetings including this exciting one in New York. She was at the gathering with her marvelous husband Trevor and daughter Annie.

In many ways, it was like any other dinner party, a lot of discussion of old times, current events and catching up on people's lives, and in other ways, it was truly remarkable. What was so enlightening was to be able to listen to (and talk with!) these incredible people who had helped to create this amazing show, and who have now moved on to other endeavors (Debbie and her husband Mike have a rock band and play and record in NYC, Dale is currently the standby/understudy for Mary Louise Wilson in Grey Gardens on Broadway, etc.) and yet to also realize how important HAiR has been to their lives.

Politics was definitely in play last night. We talked about the Bush administration, conspiracy theories about 9/11, the disaster in Iraq, etc. I got to show Michael our ad that we had run in the San Jose Rep's program for Nixon's Nixon and of course the totally "small world" event that the show was directed by Michael Butler (the director, not the producer ;-) who happens to be married to Timothy Near (artistic director of the San Jose Rep) who happens to be the sister of Holly Near who appeared in the Broadway production of Hair! Michael (the producer!) mentioned that he had been on Nixon's enemy list, which seemed to connect everything :-)

Michael also talked at length about one of his great loves, polo, and that really thrilled Barb (she once had considered playing polo in a club many years ago, but hadn't been able to afford it, but she loves the game).

Marsia helped Barb solve the problem of the White Boys' dress, telling her to go to the House of Spandex in New York to get the material, and how to put it together. Barb had been puzzling that out for a few weeks and was thrilled to come up with the answer right from the source.

After over three hours, the gathering finally dispersed and we walked back to our car... no, I guess it would be better to say we floated back to our car :-) As we drove back to New Jersey, with the skyline of Manhattan in the distance, we both agreed that we would continue to do anything and everything necessary to put on a worthy production in San Jose.

We feel we owe that much not only to our tribe and our audience, but also to the extended tribe all over the world that has made this show what it is. It is a legacy that we have chosen to take on and we will indeed carry that forward.

LET THE SUN SHINE IN!

T Minus 90 Days: A Gathering in New York (Part One)

"If we left tomorrow morning, this would still be the most amazing trip we've ever taken!" As we drove back from Manhattan to our Jersey hotel Saturday night, Barb leaned over and said that to me and I realized it was true. We still have a full week left on the East Coast, including two days in Washington, two days in Massachusetts and another weekend in the Big Apple, but after last night, we knew that this was one for the books.

Friday (the 13th!)

Just to bring things up to date, we took the Staten Island ferry in to New York on Friday early afternoon. Barb got her first close-up glimpse of the "democracy's daughter" from the ferry. We pulled into the new South Ferry building in Manhattan and it was cold and blustery. I had the same pangs I had on Thursday evening, looking at the gaping hole in the skyline left by the absence of the twin towers. I was just 18 when I was working and going to school in New York City (1969) and they were in the midst of building the World Trade Center. For two years, I watched the buildings grow up out of the ground like metallic flowers, and although I moved to California before both buildings were completed, I remember my first trip back to New York and my first visit to Windows on the World at the top of the One World Trade Center (the North Tower).

We did a walking tour of NYC on Friday, including a stop at Tams-Witmark where we delivered the last contracts for HAiR and made our royalty payments! We figured since we were going to be in New York anyway, why not have some fun and go to the Tams office itself. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let us up past the guard (who are these two weird people coming from California to sign a contract that they could have just mailed in!!?!? :-), so we handed the documents and check to one of their clerks and were on our way. We got to spend some time watching the ice skaters at the Rockefeller Center skating rink (brrr!) and on our way back cross-town, we stopped in at Saks Fifth Avenue to see how "the other half" shop (and its in the same league as NYC hotels, WAY out of the normal spectrum - Barb visited the sale racks and noted that the least expensive clothing item ON SALE was over $250! Ouch!)

We also passed by the New York City Main library building (actually the Research Library for the Arts and Humanities on 34th street) and we spent a few hours watching the film on the building of the library and browsing the reading rooms. Whoever said that Texans have the monopoly on scale needs to visit this library. 13,000,000 books for research plus another 5,000,000 for lending purposes! Amazing. For fun, we looked up RAGNI and RADO and found references to the original scripts and librettos of HAiR (hand-written!) but they aren't available except by advance reservation for research, but it was cool seeing the entries in their online card catalogs.

We took the ferry back to Staten Island late Friday afternoon and took a nap at the hotel. We nibbled on the snacks we had brought back from the city and then drove in to Manhattan around 10:00 PM and spent the evening checking out the city's late night life in the Village. We finally crawled into bed at 3:00 AM and slept soundly until 11 AM Saturday morning.

Saturday (April 14, exactly 3 months until we open HAiR in San Jose!)

When we woke up, we realized that if we were going to get to see a show on Saturday afternoon, we probably would have to take a car in and park so we did just that. The Hair gathering was scheduled for 7:30 PM so we packed up everything we figured we might need and drove in. I dropped Barb off near TKTS so that she could see what was available and I went looking for a reasonable place to park. Its true that parking is not cheap in Manhattan, but its not as bad as people might think. ICON Parking is all over the place, and I found a lot on the corner of 49th Street and 10th Avenue that charged $19 for all day until 2 AM. Again, given the price of the hotel (about $200 less than the cheapest Manhattan hotel we could find that was remotely decent), the 20 minute drive in from Jersey and $20 parking tab plus about $10 in tolls is a pretty decent financial trade-off.

Note: If you want TKTS (up to 1/2 price on most Broadway theater tickets), and you are willing to be flexible on what you see, DON'T waste your time in line. If you get there at 11 AM for the 2 PM matinees, you will spend most of the next two hours in line. By 1 PM, the line is mostly gone and Barb was able to place her order about 10 minutes after she got there!

We had hoped for Avenue Q, but it turns out we think we did better (Q was sold out). Instead Barb got two tickets to The Drowsy Chaperone, and its hard to imagine a better show to have seen as Barb's first Broadway musical. We had both heard accolades about the show, but neither of us had seen it, and it is both hilarious and touching all at the same time. Anyone who is a musical theater buff (as we both are) will be delighted by the premise (a man sitting in his apartment pining over his record - not CDs, these are real RECORDS! - collection of musicals, introduces us to his "favorite" old musical, The Drowsy Chaperone, by playing the records for us and the show magically comes to life in his apartment).

It is totally funny, filled with lots of insider jokes for musical theater aficianados, the songs are wonderful, and the cast, sets and costumes delightful. We had seats on the aisle in the fourth row orchestra for the price of $75, not quite 1/2 price but still $70 less than the normal total of $220 the seats would have been. We couldn't do this every night for sure, but considering what they charged at AMT in San Jose for a lukewarm Camelot rehash (regular price tickets were the same as we paid here), this was Broadway at its finest. Nothing like HAiR, of course, but still terrific. And in this show, they even had an overture (they actually cut the Camelot overture, one of theatre's finest overtures ever written, for the AMT show! - OUTRAGEOUS!)

The "Moment"!

After the show, we decided to walk up-town since we still had several hours before the gathering of the HAiR tribe at Bricco's. And then, we had one of those moments that stun you beyond belief.

As we walked up Broadway and were about to cross 51st Street, we heard the sound. That unmistakable "da-dum-dum-dah-da-da-dum-dum (pause) da-dum-dum-dah-da-da-dum-dum" of the bass guitar. We both looked at each other for a second, turned and saw the sign. Ellen's Stardust Diner (Singing Waitstaff). We stood there in shock, and listened as a voice came over the loudspeaker at the front door of the restaurant. "We starve, look, at one another..."

We were dumbfounded. It didn't sound like the OBC recording of James Rado as Claude. We rushed in the door, and I was scrambling for my video camera. Sure enough, there was a young man, about 25 maybe, in a red apron with the Ellen's logo, and a wireless handheld mic, singing the opening lines for Flesh Failures/Let The Sun Shine In. They were using the SAME "Hairaoke" music we have on our practice CD. And the young guy did a terrific version of the song, wandering around the restaurant singing to the patrons.

Unfortunately, the video camera battery was dead. ARRGGHH! I so wanted to capture even a few fleeting seconds of that moment! But it wasn't to be. We stumbled back out of the restaurant, both disappointed but also exhilirated. We were heading to have dinner with members of the worldwide HAiR tribe, including the original producer, just a few months before our own production will hit the boards in San Jose, and we happen by pure chance to pass by this restaurant in Manhattan when the waiter is JUST STARTING TO SING THE SIGNATURE SONG OF OUR SHOW! We both looked at each other and there simply weren't any words.

Jupiter is truly aligned with Mars... (More to come in Part Two!)

T Minus 92 Days: New York Is STILL New York!

Just a short note today... We arrived in the Philly yesterday evening and drove to our hotel in Carteret, New Jersey (the Radisson, a top-notch hotel that is about 1/3 the price of even Quality Inn-type hotel in Manhattan and is just 6 miles from the Staten Island Ferry - way less expensive to stay in and getting in to the city is FREE!) We were hungry so about 11 PM (still thinking it was 8 PM West Coast time) we drove in through the Holland Tunnel. It was really fun driving Barb around through Times Square and past Madison Square Garden at midnight and watch her eyes sparkle at all the people still out and about and all the lights...

There is definitely something about NYC that is different from every other city in the United States. I haven't been back here since 2000 and the energy still fills me up every time I arrive. We walked around Greenwich Village (it was fun pointing out to Barb Christopher Street which they will sing about in WVLO's Wonderful Town this summer!) and had dinner at a cute little place called Oliver's Bar and Grill. Where else can you find countless restaurants open and serving FANTASTIC dinners at midnight? Certainly not anywhere on the Left Coast.

One last thing... I apologize to everyone if you have tried to post a comment. I didn't realize that I had accidently turned off comments for anyone except "members" (which is no one else!) on this blog. It was certainly not my intent! Thanks to Adena DeMonte for pointing this out to me. I have fixed this so anyone can now comment (I hope!) Please try and let me know if it still doesn't work.

And by the way watch out for Adena... she directed Crystal Springs Players' Godspell with Stephen Slatten, her first directorial effort, and I thought she did a marvelous job, especially considering all the limitations she had to deal with (the theater was an "impromptu" space set up in the worship hall of the Crystal Springs United Methodist church and as is not untypical in these kinds of community theaters, her talent base was decidedly mixed). I expect to see her doing great things in the Bay area in the future! (And I look forward to seeing her at our callbacks for HAiR as well!)

We are off for the city this morning to see it in daylight. I can't wait!

Peace, Jon

T Minus 93 Days: Last Minute Update!

This is one of those "way cool" moments that I wanted to share. I just finished posting the long post below at about 4:45 AM and I saw a "you have mail" flag. I pulled up my email and there was a ticket order that was placed at 12:03 AM! We just pushed over 30 tickets sold. What's even cooler is that this was an order of 4 for OPENING NIGHT, our first sales for July 14th, so no matter what happens, we won't have an empty house that night! And they bought front row tables! I am going to write them to see whether they just got home from seeing Nixon's Nixon and saw the ad.

I think this is too much fun...

Peace,

Jon

T Minus 93 Days: 3 AM, Ready for New York!

Its been 7 days since I have written a blog entry and I feel GUILTY (I guess I should blame that on my mother!) I will be trying to write daily entries in order to chronicle our process, but this past week, post-auditions and pre-New York trip has been hectic, both at work and with respect to the show. No excuse, I know, but the best I can do. So, without further ado, let's get to it!

Callbacks

Callbacks have filled out nicely. We appear to have a Hud for the show (which had been a major gap until over the weekend). We are calling back approximately 30 people for lead roles and also to read for some of the smaller roles in the tribe (the fathers and mothers, the principals and some of the parts in the hallucination scene in Act 2). We know that many people really want to be in this show, and we will have tell some of them "No, thank you", which is always one of those difficult things a director has to do. However, we also want to have the strongest possible tribe and we have a good chance at that given the small size we have chosen. Fortunately, because of our extended run at the Historic Hoover Theater, we will be able to offer a few of the performers who are "on the bubble" opportunities for "swing" roles.

The swing actors in our production will be part of the tribe, but will only be given a small number (3-4) performances during the first 4 weeks at Theatre on San Pedro Square. This will permit some of the regular tribe members to rest during the double performance days. When we move to Hoover, all of the tribe members will perform in all of the performances, because the stage and house are bigger than San Pedro Square. So while we will only have 18-20 tribe members onstage at San Pedro Square, we will have 24-26 at Hoover, giving a few more performers an opportunity to participate in the show.

Not everyone who auditioned was willing to take a swing role. Admittedly, it is hard to put in a lot of rehearsal time (in our case, upwards of 150 hours) and then not get to even perform on opening night. On the other hand, with a run of over 30 performances, including at least 12 at Hoover, a swing performer in this production will appear on stage at least 15-16 times, which is still a longer run than many local productions offer an actor in a regular part. Plus there is some (albeit minimal) pay (and swing and regular tribe members will get the same pay). We will explain this to everyone at callbacks again, just in case anyone wants to change their mind.

I have been delinquent in posting callback scenes. Because of work commitments and getting ready for the trip, it has been pushed off and pushed off (okay, and I probably procrastinated a bit too ;-( ). Deciding which scenes to use for callbacks is always difficult, and absolutely harder in this show because there are fewer true "scenes" and I find myself wanting to include more and more pages of dialogue when I really should be reducing it. Hopefully I will get this finished this morning after writing this post and have it done once and for all (I know all the actors are waiting patiently, or not, for those scenes to appear on the website! - I'm really sorry, guys and gals!)

Ticket Sales

Well, we aren't sold out yet ;-) But we have already sold 27 tickets totally based on our ad in the Nixon's Nixon program at San Jose Rep (and possibly on some early word of mouth). Given that we haven't even finished casting the show, and that we have no subscriber base at all, I am very pleased. There are two more weekends of Nixon's Nixon, and also a smaller ad is supposed to appear in the San Jose Stage Company program for The White House Murder Case by Jules Feiffer, one of the funniest political satires ever written for the stage. Unfortunately, we won't even be able to get to see that show until closing weekend because of callbacks and our New York trip.

The Trip!

I am writing this at 3 AM (well 4:13 AM now ;-) because I can't sleep. We changed our flight to New York from the ungodly hour of 6:40 AM to 9:55 AM (which delays our arrival in Philadelphia from 5:30 to 8:00 PM, but it also mercifully spares us rush hour getting out of the airport.) Barb said I must have decided on the 6:40 AM flight because I was so excited about the trip that I wanted to make sure we got in as early as possible! I'd say I'm guilty as charged.

Now that we are on a more reasonable flight (after struggling with Southwest Airlines and their computers at midnight to change it!), I'm up early enough to have made the flight anyway (but Barb is sleeping blissfully, so it is for the best).

I've spent a lot of time in the Big Apple (including the 3 years I lived there, or near there, from 1969-71, when I saw the original production of HAiR at the Biltmore Theatre, along with countless trips for business and pleasure), but this is Barb's first time! So we are making this a "grand tour". The original plan was for a purely vacation trip, just before rehearsals got underway for HAiR. However, fate stepped in and has made this trip ever-so-much more!

When I started researching HAiR, I hooked into the blog that is sponsored by Michael Butler, the original producer of HAiR in New York. After bringing this wonderful show to the world between 1967 and 1972 in New York, Los Angeles, London, and countless other cities around the globe, plus many other productions over the past 40 years, Michael continues to be one of the strongest and passionate advocates for this show and how it can and has changed the world. I enjoyed going back into the archives and reading his posts and exchanges with various tribe members and observers about the show, its meaning and purpose. (Please check out the blog at www.michaelbutler.com - Michael posts not only about HAiR, but also about world events in general and his observations are insightful to be sure.)

Through the blog, I also was introduced to Nina Dayton, who handles managing Michael's blog and the Hair Archives site, which consists of on-line articles, reviews, photographs and many other resources about the show and its off-spring. Nina is a marvelous lady from what I can gather, who became involved in HAiR during the original run at the Biltmore because she worked (as a teenager!) in the concession booth! I say "from what I can gather" because up till now, Nina and I have spoken just twice and exchanged a handful of emails. However, that is all going to change this weekend!

After meeting Michael in Los Angeles when I went to see the Fullerton College production of HAiR, he invited Barb and I to join a group of HAiR "alumni" for a dinner get-together this weekend. We were and are honored and humbled by the hospitality these tribe members of the original show have shown us and we are obviously looking forward to it. We don't know everyone who will specifically be there (except, so far for Michael, Nina and Natalie Mosco of the original New York tribe), but it should be a very exciting evening for us.

After that, we will spend a few days in Washington (visiting the Vietnam Wall is, of course, a priority, to get a "feel" for the ominous level of death and destruction that the Vietnam War brought upon us all), and then we head back to Massachusetts to visit Nina's home where she curates the "physical" Hair Archives, a huge collection of information, memorabilia and resources about the last 40 years of Hair productions everywhere! This is definitely going to be one special trip for both of us.

Of course, we will take in several shows in New York. The one we have been most encouraged to see is Spring Awakening, although I have to say that after hearing the album, I am not sure how I will react to it (sometimes it is better to see a show before hearing the album). It seems a bit like "Rent Redux" and without any signature songs (although admittedly I haven't had time to let the music grow on me yet and maybe it will). I compare this to my first reaction to the album Steel Pier by Kander and Ebb, which blew me away (although to be fair, Steel Pier may very well be one of those shows that is better HEARD first than seen, and good thing that is, because almost NOBODY does it ;-)

We also want to see Avenue Q (doesn't everybody), and possibly one of the new Sondheim revivals (Sweeney Todd or Company) with the actors playing instruments (everyone says it works, we will withhold our judgement). Of course it all depends on ticket availability.

That's going to wrap it up for this installment, but I hope to post a few notes during the trip (thank god for free hotel wireless Internet!) And then, the day after we get back, CALLBACKS!

Keep on truckin'...

Jon

T Minus 100 Days: Unbelievable!

We are now exactly 100 days away from opening night for HAiR 2007 in San Jose, the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the birth of the first true rock musical. As our ad says, it was before Jesus Christ Superstar, before Tommy and LONG LONG before Rent!

It is hard to believe but we are making definite progress. Last's nights auditions didn't bring out much of a crowd, but hopefully tonight we will get in a few more who didn't make it earlier. And we keep hoping to discover/find/stumble upon a Hud. Otherwise we may need to go out and hire one at great cost, which is not the best thing to have to do for an amateur (well, semi-professional) musical. People seem to be reading this blog (which is exciting unto itself!) so please help us, if you know anyone who is even CLOSE to what we need, get them to give us a call!

I think I will leave the countdown on the blog title line for the rest of the headlong rush to the finish line. It will keep us all aware of how the clock and calendar will crowd us if we don't stay ahead of things.

100 days seems like such a long time, in one sense, yet anyone who has ever been through this process knows how fast that much time can dissipate and if things don't get done on schedule, it can adversely effect the end result. We will all try to keep to our schedules and budgets.

We will announce callbacks tomorrow morning (no need to wait until next week since we are almost 100% sure of all the callback decisions, barring some unexpected arrival tonight). We will also dismiss some people tomorrow, always one of the sadder moments of being a director. Everyone who came out tried their best and they should not look on this as a failure, but no matter how many times I say that, someone always either is very sad or angry about the decision. I can actually handle the anger more easily than the sadness.

If anyone has comments, please feel free to post them. I encourage it!

Thanks,

Jon Rosen

Auditions are winding down now

We had our third regularly scheduled auditions yesterday (Tuesday) and had our biggest crowd so far, but we are still lacking a Hud. We did have several big wins though, including one guy who easily can play either Berger or Claude, and several others who are candidates for one of the lead roles, plus a number of very good women. Our fill-in pianist did a reasonably good job for someone who didn't have much experience with auditions, but I had to fill in for him on a few songs because he was having a hard time. That didn't make our actors feel very comfortable (you can see it in their eyes when they know the pianist is struggling).

Please, if any of you read this, understand that I have already made allowances for this, and will continue to do so. It would be my own dereliction of my responsibilities (not to mention pure folly in trying to get the best possible cast together) to hold you accountable for a pianist who is having a hard time. On the other hand, and this is often hard for a performer to understand, directors who have listened to many people sing can usually tell within a few notes, and certainly within a few measures whether a singer is an A, B or C. Yes, there may be some close situations, and in those cases, I will give the performer the benefit of the doubt, but last night, even though there were a few people who I knew were upset because they felt they might not have gotten to demonstrate their abilities, there were no really close calls. The people who fell short did so purely on their own abilities, not because of the pianist (even if they may think otherwise). That may be hard for some to take, but it is the truth.

We have told people we will announce callbacks on Monday, but in fact we may move that up to tomorrow evening or Friday morning. We may still see a few more actors at tomorrow night's extended audition but it won't be many, and we have already made most of our decisions about who we will call back from the first sets of auditions.

We now have 3 or 4 reasonable candidates for Claude, Berger, Woof and Margaret Meade (less than 10% of the male auditioners declined to consider a part "in drag" which totally suprised us!) We are, of course, still missing any reasonable candidates for Hud, sigh. We also have 3 or 4 choices for Sheila, Jeannie and Dionne, but only 1 female actor who we feel is even close for Crissy.

One other Crissy possibility is a wonderful Equity actress who approached us early in the week, but I am not sure we can afford it. I have wanted to work with this actress for the past 4 years but we just haven't been able to make it work. She auditioned for me in 2003 to perform in the West Coast premiere of Steel Pier, but it was in San Francisco and she had to decline which turned out to be a wise choice when our show had to be shut down 4 weeks before opening because our theater was "red-tagged" by the fire marshalls... but that is a WHOLE 'nother story!

In any case, I will look into it, but I expect that it is going to be difficult to work out. Equity is very insistent on maintaining their rules and as a result, because we are doing 7 shows a week, the cost is almost prohibitive.

So we will keep looking for the "black power hippy" and the "sweet yet not-so-innocent flower child" elsewhere, and hopefully at least one more Crissy and even just one Hud will find us (or us find them).

On a few other topics...

We had hoped a huge number of men would show up with long scraggly, ratty, matty hair. As might be expected in this day and age, it didn't happen. We had our share of mullets, buzz cuts, etc, but only one person even close to having true long-hair. So Barb is now on the quest of a wig consultant who can help us out with purchasing and using decent wigs for close-theater work (this isn't a show where the closest audience member is 100+ feet away, so having good wigs will be essential). Unfortunately, we obviously can't afford the $500+ natural human hair wigs that would look "real", but on the other hand, we don't want to use the $25 costume wigs either. There are a few options here and we need to get a head start on it, so off Barbara goes! Theatrical wiggery is truly an art form, and I expect we may have to pay more than a token to get the support, but it will be worth it.

Our New York trip is around the corner... In an upcoming post, I will write about how the trip came to happen and what is planned. Some of it revolves around HAiR and is very exciting.

Please check it out!

The talent search continues...

And without a pianist, sigh ;-(

We only had 8 people last night, 7 women and 1 man, but it was a lot of fun and almost everyone is talented enough to be a prospect for the show. Our pianist, who was supposed to come down from San Francisco, took a powder and not only didn't show up, but didn't even have the courtesy to call. Arrgghhh. Lesson learned: hire people you know and hire locally if possible, at least when it is a fundamental requirement like an audition pianist.

Then again, anyone who has done theater in the Bay area knows that there are only a handful of pianists competent to play auditions well in the area (unless you want to spend HUGE union dollars which means $200+ a session which is cost-prohibitive). We had one of them on Sunday, Ben Prince, who plays regularly at Martuni's in San Francisco on Friday nights. He knows EVERY song ever written (or so it seems) and you can give him almost any music and he can play it cold. Amazing talent. Supposedly we had another for last night and tonight, but he flaked. Two of my favorite pianists locally, Bob Sunshine and Jonathan Erman, aren't available because they are doing Passover (how in the hell did I ever end up scheduling auditions on the first two nights of Passover?!!! Some Jew I turn out to be! :-)

I stepped in and hacked through the music for the folks who came to try out last night. As I told them all last night, I greatly appreciate the handicap they were under, and as director AND fill-in pianist, I am at least able to make allowances for my own mistakes/limitations (which as an audition pianist could fill a large book especially when there are no chords written in the music or it is written in the key of G# or D-flat :-) To paraphrase Emporer Joseph II (if you know your classic movies, you will get this :-) "Too many black notes!"'

I hope I can find someone for tonight.

I makes it very hard as a director to play for auditions and watch the performers at the same time and that is important. Fortunately, my team watched for me and I think we still managed to make it work. If there is anyone we feel is "on the cusp" we will probably invite them to callbacks just to let them have another chance.

We have decided to extend auditions through our originally scheduled callback days (Wednesday and Thursday) and postpone callbacks until Barb and I get back from New York. That will give us more time to seek out people for various key roles.

We are going to try to see a rehearsal of Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party at Stanford University this weekend. One cast member can't make auditions at all because they are in hell week and she has the lead in TWP, so we are going to try to check it out. There may also be a few other people we might want to try to recruit because they didn't think they could audition due to the conflicts.

I heard from the director of Broadway By The Bay's Showboat, hoping he could give me a line on a really good Hud. He tells me that except for his Joe (the Paul Robeson part, who sings Ole Man River) he has no other black males in the cast. A "white" Showboat ;-) Amazing! That would be kind of analgous to a HAiR with everyone bald.

Oops, someone already did that. ;-)

Also heard from the director of a local college production of Ragtime. This one is almost harder to understand than Showboat (the black chorus in Showboat actually has limited time in the show). She has only two black men in her Harlem ensemble. That has to be called REALLY alternative casting which is a concept I very much support, but I also think theater companies should consider their talent pool before choosing a show. Although the Bay Area isn't completely white by any means, in the South Bay (as opposed to Oakland) it is harder to find talented black actors. Fortunately, Hair only REQUIRES a few black actors, and alternative casting of other ethnic performers can be effective in most of the roles. But Ragtime pretty much requires 1/3 of the cast to be Afro-Americans from Harlem and that's a tall order if you only have 2 black people. Or a cast of 6 :-)

Ticket sales are now at 14. Its still REALLY early of course, but cool that people are seeing out ad (which is about the only way they can find out we have tickets on sale right now) for Nixon's Nixon and already going to buy tickets. We weren't sure if that would happen, but it is! The ad cost about $800 and with three more full weekends of their run to go, we have sold $280 worth of tickets. The ad may actually end up paying for itself out of direct ticket sales. And what it brings us in future sales (the old "saw" is that someone needs to see something three times on average before they buy a ticket, and this is getting us 15,000 first impressions!) is immeasurable. I'm not ready to declare it a perfect success yet, but I think it was a good decision to spend the bucks on that.

As I am writing, I got an email and it looks like we have a substitute pianist for tonight, we shall see how it works out. Keeping all my fingers and toes crossed.

More tomorrow...

Sunday audition is great!

Our first audition on Sunday went very well indeed. We were filled with a little trepidation about the response we were getting from men. We had 11 preregistered people for today, 4 men and 7 women. We had 4 postponements (emergencies, etc., but all said they would make it to Monday or Tuesday), 1 man and 3 women. And then, to our shock, we had 4 walk-in men! So in the end we saw 11 people as planned, but the ratios were switched, 7 men to 4 women! We have 23 more preregistered people to see over the next two days, but that ratio is even more unbalanced, 19 women to 4 men, so picking up more men today was great!

And the auditions went well. Not perfect, of course, but very good. We saw people who were capable of handling most of the major roles at some level, but nothing is cast in stone yet (and won't be before callbacks for sure). The only exception was for Hud, the key black male role in the show. We did have one man who showed up (accompanying a friend) who LOOKED perfect and his friend said he had a great voice. But when I went up to ask him why he wasn't trying out, he said he was Equity :-( Didn't surprise me, I guess. We will keep looking of course.

Not many questions about the nudity issue (which surprised us, we expected more). Our questionnaire asks the question (it needs to be asked, obviously) and most performers say they might be okay with it but aren't sure, which is good. We are serious about this being a trust issue with the tribe, and hopefully if people are open-minded, as rehearsals progress, that trust will build up to the point that many (even if not all) of the tribe will feel comfortable doing this. Once they see how we plan to stage the scene (which will make the nudity a much more integral part of the scene than it often is in other productions of Hair) we think they will agree that it is crucial to revealing Claude's vulnerability and conflicts.

Round two today, and we expect more walk-ins. Sunday afternoon is often harder for performers (Sunday matinees take precedence). Tuesday is the "big" day with 15 preregistered.

We can't wait to see what tonight and tomorrow bring!