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.