12 minute read
Drama
I normally start planning a show a couple of years before we open, but seldom have I had such an extended and challenging rehearsal process as we have had for this show.
Auditions for Urinetown (a very clever and funny ‘meta’ musical) happened in November 2019 and we cast some incredibly talented young performers, looking forward to another CGS/CGSC partnership. Work commenced with a series of singing workshops, organised by Mr Ben Bishop, and comprehensive design meetings where the creative titans Mrs Jennifer Bennie and Mr Mark Wager helped fully form my interpretation of the show. It was an auspicious start.
Term 1 2020 launched our usual busy rehearsal schedule as we created and refined our show. Ms Miranda McDonald created some truly fantastic routines, and our guest choreographer Jack Migdalek brought the Fiddler on the Roof inspired number at the beginning of Act Two to energetic life. Mrs Bennie and her assistant Ms Breanna Handfield made and adjusted costumes creating characterful individual and group looks. Our Production Coordinator and Assistant Director Ms Jess Doutch filmed rehearsals both on and off stage, as has become tradition, for a cast memory documentary of the process, as well as keeping an archive for those who missed rehearsals and for checking choreography later in the process. Mr Mark and Thomas Bevans built, painted and textured the physical world of the play. Mr Bishop pulled the chorus and numbers together in his forensic, fun and energetic manner. Drama classes continued as normal and Ms Penelope Wood continued to plan the Middle School Play and audition roles for The Great Gatsby.
VCE Theatre Studies students were given their assessment plays and some workshops by the inspirational Emily Godard who shared her passion for the highly physical and satirical clowning theatre style of Bouffon. Year 11 developed an interpretation of Agamemnon set in an aged care facility, and Year 12 interpreted A Clockwork Orange with great physicality and dynamism relishing Burgess’ highly mannered language and confronting tale. Public performances of these pieces were heartbreakingly cancelled due to the first of the pandemic restrictions. Themes of state control and aged care resonate in retrospect.
Worldwide lockdown arrived with the Senior School Musical about two thirds developed needing a tantalising few weeks of work to complete. The uncertainty of when public audiences might be allowed led us to move both the musical and the Middle School Play to later in the year, and the difficult decision was made to change the House Play Festival into a House Film Festival as Term 4 looked to be filling with rescheduled events. Drama classes went online into theory, the viewing of the many fantastic live captured streamed dramas from around the world, and to monologue and storytelling pursuits.
We experimented with Zoom rehearsals for the musical, but the cast found them initially unappealing and plans for a couch choir version of one of the numbers was shelved. Those that did attend seemed to enjoy themselves, but before we consolidated our virtual position we were back to school, back to face-to-face rehearsals (albeit with some distancing), the Middle School Play started rehearsals (with energetic Charleston workshops on
Sundays from Tim Mc Dowel) and we were full steam ahead. We wisely continued to video sequences after mid-year exams from the show but made special efforts to run some in full costume and make-up photographed as well by Ken Nakanishi.
Three rehearsals later new rules came into force and Years 6 to 10 returned to distance learning. The Middle School Play had to cancel the now forbidden Sunday dance rehearsals and Ms Wood took her rehearsals online. In the Senior School we continued to rehearse with boys and some girls.
Into Term 3 we continued with Year 11 and 12 boys only, with girls joining us on Zoom. It continued to amaze me how dedicated everyone remained to the shows.
As we continued through the term the Heads of Houses decided reluctantly to make House Films a voluntary project with no points being awarded for the Prefects’ Cup this year.
Stage 4 sent us into a tailspin and the Middle School Play was rescheduled to the end of Term 1 2021 with its dedicated 2020 cast. It became abundantly clear that we were going to either limit our work on Urinetown to a documentary memory video shared with the cast with no performance at all or seek unlikely streaming rights for a YouTube production. Unlikely because streaming had developed under COVID as live capture performance rather than montage, and the latter was all we had!
Zoom rehearsals continued and Ms Jess Doutch put together a complicated overview of all previously filmed video footage with the plan to create a more comprehensive documentary of the show charting our journey from audition to cancellation!
Without much hope I wrote a letter to Music Theatre International (MTI) explaining our position and pleading in the name of our talented and dedicated cast (especially the Year 12s) that we might be allowed to present the show in video montage online. To my grateful surprise after MTI (AU) approached the authors who approved the license for streaming for us and all other schools currently producing the show! We then went into overdrive collecting footage, capturing Zoom rehearsals, and getting the cast to record themselves in a couch choir manner to provide Ms Doutch with what she needed to edit the complete show. Mr Stuart Feldt applied himself to post-production, Mr Bishop and Campbell Phillips to mixing audio, and, when we found the orchestral tracks we had hired had totally different tempos to the rehearsal tracks we had used to record vocals, Mr Johnston (a veritable wizard of digital audio workspaces) edited practically every bar of the whole score for our use over many tens of hours.
The Senior School Production opened on 9 September and played online for four evenings with our unfinished found and foraged footage film montage. I think the authors would approve.
Next year’s shows will need to be COVID compatible, but ‘the show must go on’.
Mr Andrew Stocker
Head of Drama
Urinetown
Urinetown (“The title is awful!” as Little Sally tells us) is a multi-award-winning satirical comedy musical inspired by Brechtian agitprop theatre, a very “meta” production attacking greed, love, revolution and even the Broadway Musical Theatre form itself.
Little Sally (Mia Suda) and Officer Lockstock (Rhys Denison) narrate the show, committing absolutely to the absurdity of the dialogue, and were pivotal in setting the self-referential tone of the musical (“nothing kills a show like too much exposition”, says Lockstock, Little Sally responds, “or a bad title even, that could kill a show pretty good”!) and they make thoroughly appealing guides. COVID-19 was more of a challenge than the show’s title as the final version of the show was by necessity a “found and foraged footage film montage” to quote the director, rather than a live staged version. It was during the opening number that we started to see how the presentation of the piece would unfold with some characters on stage, in costume with props and on set whilst other characters are cut in from home on Zoom. Initially, this was surprising and almost confronting, but it took remarkably little time for the story to come to the fore with the extremely clever editing having characters looking and interacting on screen. The oppressed masses huddled in the poorest filthiest urinal in town, run by the rigid authoritarian Ms Penelope Pennywise played with enormous relish by Grace Edge. The role has a demanding vocal range and complex lyrics which she handled with confidence and ease. We were then introduced to her assistant, the dashing young everyman Bobby Strong (an extremely engaging performance from William Lewis). Later that day in the offices of Urine Good Company, CEO Caldwell B Cladwell discussed the new fee hikes with Senator Fipp (a suitably nefarious Sam Parmenter), and McQueen (an effete and obsequious Rhys Campbell). In the song, Mr Cladwell the vocal strength of the ensemble cast impressed as did Ms McDonald’s splendid choreography (cleverly quoting the style of classic Broadway show-stopping numbers) and James Thorn, replete with burgundy velour suit and floppy fringe, had great fun playing the villain of the piece. His commensurate command of both singing and acting skills consistently dominate the stage. Under the baton of Mr Bishop the singing was tight and the many layers of harmony and changes of tempo are deftly achieved. The stage looked appropriately spectacular with Mrs Bennie’s very clever costume design with character revealed with every stitch, and Mr Wager’s Art Decostyled fountain with animated fishbowl desk underlining corruption in the profligate use of water by UGC’s executives. A pastiche of a US Marines’ spinning guns tattoo routine with bloodied mops was followed in total contrast by the dashing young Bobby Strong and Hope Cladwell (Josie Parton) falling in love in Follow your Heart (a chance to showcase Josie’s charming voice and William’s dulcet tenor). The technicalities of presenting a romantic duet supported by dance where none of the singers or dancers were in the same location was a testament to Ms Doutch’s often-invisible editing skills. Hayden Whiteford’s ghost of Hamlet’s father and Cooper Carbone’s interjections never failed to raise a smile.
In the following graphic staging, Dr Billeaux (Jack Hu in full mad scientist mode) and his team shoot, electrocute, bludgeon and set about by chainsaws a poor rabbit, with pieces of fur and flesh flying everywhere; a hallmark Mr Stocker’s invention with
Mrs Bennie’s elaborate costuming and Mr Wager’s clever detailing. It was a big song and dance number involving the whole cast but as we were reminded, “Dreams only come true in happy musicals and certain Hollywood movies, but this isn’t one of those.”
Snuff That Girl in Act Two has some of the earliest footage on an empty PAC stage with the cast in school uniforms as the gang plots kidnapped Hope’s murder in their secret underground hideout. This not only documented the emerging production but also demonstrated the talent of the cast under the skilful hand of Ms McDonald. Thomas Ng, Mackenzie Young, Lexie Smith, Hugh McGlone, Arman Cakmakcioglu and Cooper Carbone led the nefarious bunch with highly comic menace. Later in the story, Bobby confronts Cladwell with Hope as leverage, but Cladwell ignores the plight of his daughter, and Bobby is led blindfolded to the top of the UGC building to learn the truth; Urinetown is death! Lockstock and Barrel throw him off the building, cackling maniacally. Of course, killing the hero counters all traditional musical narrative.
Little Sally returns to the hideout in a shocked daze, reporting in comic understatement and earnest delivery that “the meeting didn’t go so well” with Bobby’s last words sung from beyond the grave (Tell Her I Love Her). As the rebels are about to murder Hope, Ms Pennywise offers herself instead, proclaiming herself to be Hope’s mother, cue much gasping and cries of “slattern!”. Hope convinces the rebels to let her lead them and they march to UGC. Officer Barrel, Senator Fipp and Mrs Millennium (Erin Johnston) are caught in their rampage (the complex Chicago-esque We’re Not Sorry). Mr Barrell’s unexpected declaration of love to Officer Lockdown is a sudden moment of subversive humour. Hope proclaims that Cladwell’s reign of terror is over and he too is led to the roof and thrown to his death.
The people celebrate their freedom (in negro spiritual style I See A River), but their bliss is short-lived as the water runs out. As Little Sally points out “What kind of musical is this? The good guys take over and everything falls apart” and the show ends with our heroine, Hope, spouting meaningless clichés. Ultimately the message of the piece is a bleak one, its environmental concerns as relevant today as they were upon its release in 2001, and as Little Sally points out “I don’t think many people will come and see this musical. (Why is that?) Because people don’t want to hear that their way of life is unsustainable, and (she adds) the title’s awful” which of course it is, despite the pun. The Director Mr Stocker and Musical Director Mr Bishop’s high standards, creative vision and boundless enthusiasm succeeded in leading our willing cast into the intricacies of a pastiche of many musical styles and a darkly comical plot with tropes as well as unexpected twists. Congratulations to Costumier Jennifer Bennie with the help of Breanna Handfield and Mark Wager assisted by Thomas Bevans (set and props). Miss McDonald (choreography) and guest choreographer Jack Migdalek (who’s dance was unfortunately unfinished by circumstances), were essential as the choreography “keeps the musical light”, as Little Sally observes. The Production Coordinator and Assistant Director Jess Doutch’s filming of rehearsals and editing as well as Ken Nakanishi’s publicity photos were integral as was Mr Barry’s poster design. Mr Feldt worked on postproduction with Mr Bishop and Mr Phillips mixing audio and integrating hired orchestral tracks and surgical work by Mr Johnson who spent tens of hours editing the tempo of practically every bar. An enormous thank you to the cast as well as all of the production and design teams for their incredible perseverance and for coping with adversity, without which we would not have the fascinating document that the 2020 Production became.
Mr Jason Hall
Drama and French Teacher
