Today I made quite a discovery. We were doing more table work (we have been doing staging and blocking and dancing too but I just have not written as much about that yet!) and I began to think back on all the discussions that had gone into every choice Jeannine, Amanda and Michelle had made. I began to think about all the choices we as actors had made with our director Sheryl. I realized that, by the end of all of the discussions of this new musical, there will be thousands upon thousands of reasons for every single letter, word, note found in this show. Everything will have some thought behind it.
Why is this fascinating, you may ask. I started thinking about my work on other musicals written by the greats of music theatre. I thought about my work on Carousel and Boys from Syracuse. We would talk for hours, work for hours to discover the secrets of the script. We constantly struggled to figure out why this character did what, sang this note, responded this way. We searched to reveal what Rogers and Hammerstein were thinking when they made each choice. And all of a sudden I realized that this is what we are doing. We are making all these choices and discoveries and decisions in this new work that when completed will become locked away in the script and the future artists who work on this show will attempt to unravel all that we discovered.
For example, as Jenny and I were working on a scene last night, we were playing it out, trying to feel each beat, understand the thought process for our individual character. And as we spoke the lines, certain things did not make sense. I was supposed to say "Look at me," but Jenny had just delivered such a deep line that she felt her character would already be looking at me, and I felt like Marco's response was not responding enough to what she said so I added a word to make it more of a response. We will work with Jeannine later this week to make revisions and the scene will take a new shape. Jeannine constantly is saying how wonderful it is to have actors to work on the scenes because we breathe life into them and she can see what makes sense and what doesn't. And it is so true. And now, once this scene changes, future actors who work on this script will have to look at the words and think, "why does he respond this way," and discover that Veronica is looking into Marco's eyes at that moment. They will have to find that by analyzing the text and searching for the secrets the words hold. The secrets that we made.
Again and again, how lucky am I to work on this art? - Jason Heymann
(The floor to the set is now in place!)
No comments:
Post a Comment