Just finished talking with Dorothy and the folks at the Embassy Bar & Grill.  They’re right across the street from KWLT, facing King Street. She’s offering a 10% discount (excepting alcohol) to all TenBareToes patrons upon providing proof (tickets or a print out of your ticket confirmation email) for the night of the performance you are attending.  The food there is wonderful and we’re hoping to have a long lasting relationship.

So, if you’re hungry before the show, head on over with your tickets & they’ll make sure you have a great meal before you amble across the street to KWLT to see the show.

I don’t know how it is for other companies, professional or amateur, but the final month before opening night, and the last two weeks in particular, really drive home the magnitude of the undertaking that is theatre. Especially since the play polishing with Philip Akin of Obsidian Theatre in mid-April, it seems like the production clock has been running down at twice the usual speed. There have been two build days in my garage (the theatre is too small to house a workspace of its own), the polishing, the move-in and set build, all in addition to the regular rehearsal schedule. The last two weeks, starting this past weekend, have looked like this:

Saturday: Build day #2
Sunday: early morning truck rental and loading, load-in @ theatre, set building, rehearsal, initial set painting
Monday: rehearsal @ theatre
Tuesday (blessed non-theatre night)
Wednesday (tonight): final build & painting @ theatre
Thursday (tomorrow): rehearsal @ theatre
Friday: light hang
Saturday: Tech Weekend officially starts (cast call is 10am, I’ll be there an hour or more early)
Sunday: Tech Weekend continues with either cue-to-cue or a full rehearsal
Monday: Tech/Dress 1
Tuesday: Tech/Dress 2
Wednesday: dark night
Thursday: Opening Night and the ON After-Party
Friday: show night
Saturday: show night
(Sunday: I’m in Stratford for 8:30am for the Festival’s all-day Directors’ Workshop)

And in case it’s not already looking like rather a lot, there are day jobs, and families, and the other typical dross of daily life (eating, sleeping, doing laundry, et cetera) mixed in with the theatrical commitments for good measure.

It’s these final two weeks leading up to opening a show that really test the mettle of a director; of the entire company, really, especially for amateurs since we don’t have the dubious luxury of doing this as our day jobs. Our art has to squeeze around the margins of other life necessities. And sometimes, it comes with one hell of a toll to pay when all is said and done.

It’s at times like this we find out who in any given company has the mettle to match, and who does not. It’s not that we start out assuming anyone lacks the desire for the production to succeed, but the hardcore types are the ones who put their kids to bed then go back to the theatre to finish painting something, or who drive all over town purchasing supplies for the build on their lunch hours or en route to pick babies up from day care. I stopped sleeping about three weeks ago, personally, and spend my late night hours coordinating emails and schedules, plotting changes to music and image transitions, hunting for sound clips, sometimes sighing quietly into a late-night single malt while I try and clear my head.

Stuff gets done, and it’s amazing to watch the speed with which things happen. There was a time not so long ago while the theatre at 9 Princess street was being rebuilt, that KWLT productions (this was in the time before TenBareToes) rented show space from other companies and had ONLY the two days of Tech Weekend in which to move in, build, paint, hang lights, set levels, run the cue-to-cue, and generally maul everyone towards dress rehearsals. Those weekends were exhilarating, glorious messes that I appreciated for what they were and hope to hell I never have to live through ever again. It’s hard enough handling a one-week move-in process, which seems downright luxurious by comparison; it’s a testament to my cast and crew that we get this far and do this much work ourselves — my cast IS a large part of the production crew — without falling to knives at every available opportunity by Tech.

There are great moments of silliness; since Liaisons, my chief grip has referred to her stage crew as “flying monkeys”, and the choreographed intricacy of set changes as “the Monkey Dance”, so it was only a matter of time, really, before the grips were teaching each other how to do a proper monkey dance (after we’d sorted out the what-goes-where part of the set change in question, mind you; we usually remember to handle business before mayhem, though sometimes the two are not as distinctly separate as a director might wish). And there’s always some chaos as we deal with first-time uses of new set properties, and doorways that aren’t now where they were in rehearsal space. But at the same time, there’s nothing like seeing the actors pull their headspace together once they are IN THE THEATRE; there is something so intrinsically different between being “in rehearsal” and being “on the stage” that even without the lights, the audience, the costumes, there is still suddenly far more show there than there was even a week ago.

The whole process, rushing madly past me as it always does at this point, takes my breath away.

Tomorrow will be our final regular rehearsal. This process has been significantly longer than my previous shows; another luxury of working under the TenBareToes banner that I have very much appreciated, and only rarely despaired. We’re still so focused on getting through the final aspects  of the on-stage development, that the nearness of that bittersweet moment when I officially hand the show over to Stage Management and stop messing around with things hasn’t really been felt yet. I know it’s coming, but there’s still so much to do between now and then that I’m putting off the inevitable grieving process. (Also, I can’t cry at rehearsal; it will mean I owe the cast & crew the first round of drinks at the opening night after-party if they think the show has finally over-powered me… though at this point, my SM and I may well be the last people standing in that regard; did we mention this play was a powerhouse??)
So we come down to the wire. All the technical details are now in play, or will be in the next 48 hours. The tension across the company builds towards climax and denouement; art imitating life, though perhaps with fewer spoilers. This company has done some truly inspiring, moving work with this production; I honestly believe that, in the midst of all the personal learning and growth opportunities, we have met my own goal of raising the bar, even a smidge, on what “amateur theatre” is capable of achieving in terms of performance quality and acting craft (we have Philip to thank for most of that). If we can translate into performance nights what we’ve frequently managed to create in rehearsal space, then I don’t think anyone will remain unmoved by the magic that is Shadowlands.

For those of you who’ve never participated in one of these, the short version of “what is a play polishing” is when a production brings in another set of eyes, usually a mentor or otherwise experienced director, to come and see the production prior to the final weeks of rehearsal to give the cast & director feedback on the way the show is coming together.

It isn’t about redoing the play.  It is, in my experience, best described with the metaphor in the name.  It is a way to add a final polish to the show.  With a foundation that’s solid, polish adds luster that makes the whole thing more enjoyable.

Today, Karen’s mentor, Philip Akin of the Obsidian Theatre Company in Toronto, was in to do the play polish.  Speaking as an actor & a director, I was excited & really appreciated the exercise.  Listening to someone who knows exactly what to say to get the point across (40 years of experience will do that) make the process really easy to see. Speaking as the artistic director of TenBareToes, I have to thank Philip for his time & effort today because I know Karen’s show will benefit from it.

The show I saw today was really good (and moved me to tears more often than I care to admit it).  When the cast has had a chance to incorporate Philip’s suggestions today during the coming 2 weeks, it will only up their game.

I realise I was only there today as the producer for Shadowlands, however I have a very full brain now because there was so many opportunities for learning.

That tomorrow night I go teach the final class of the workshop on directing prep is not lost on me.  I just hope I am doing my karmic turn & providing my experience to them in turn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kr8YgfY3q8

I’m so pleased.  Come to our world.  There’s always another door to go through.

Like this:

Meet “Aslan” – the cast/crew mascot for Shadowlands.   He is fulfilling his role as a way to give them an outlet when they work very hard.

They want him to have a show credit.  I haven’t entirely convinced the producer of that. 

He is awfully cute though.

[This guest post comes courtesy of the fact that it's now less than 6 weeks to opening night, and directors always hit the point of needing to distract themselves from the rising panic right about now. -KBG]

The great thing about community theatre is the opportunity to wear many hats, often simultaneously. As director, I find it’s a lot of fun to get my fingers into a number of different pies, if only because there’s no-one else doing them, or because explaining exactly what I want to another person would take too long. Sometimes I’m getting my hands dirty in non-directorial tasks because they’re simply big tasks and we need all the hands we can get, like building and painting sets and set pieces*.

One task that is always a delight for me, even when I leave it to the last minute and have to scramble madly to find what I want, is selecting the music for a show. There has always been music in my life, and its impact on the mood of the moment is something to which I have always been fairly sensitive. Because I DJ’d my first gig in 1981 (I’m that old, yes; move along now), I have also had plenty of opportunity to see how music moves *other* people as well, and to make musical selections that manipulate people in the way I want them to go in any given moment. In its own way, being a DJ is not that different from being director actually, now that I think about it… but I digress.

Each director I know approaches the question of the production soundtrack a little differently, though generally there is a preference for finding music that fits at least thematically with the scripted material. I like music that is largely unobtrusive, and for dramatic productions, thought-provoking to those who hear it. I always wonder when I see other shows, “What was the Director thinking when s/he choose this piece?” I envy those directors in companies with the time and budget to include original compositions; I know Anita managed it with the inaugural TenBareToes production, but there was no way I could pull those kinds of strings in time for Shadowlands, if only because I didn’t know what I wanted far enough in advance to get that rock rolling.

Generally within a week or two of rehearsing the closing scene for the first time, I start looking for the bows music, since getting that right is often the trickiest piece for me. I have, until Shadowlands, generally stayed away from lyrical closing music simply because finding the right combination of up-tempo (even in drama, you want something with a beat that encourages audiences to clap, and also, not leaving them on a completely down-turned energy is a reasonably good idea) and thematically-consistent lyrics is harder than you’d think, especially in drama. I got very lucky this time out, however, in finding an artist last fall with a single that just knocked me back on my heels as being so incredibly fitting that I suddenly couldn’t conceive of NOT using this particular track for the bows. No, I’m not disclosing it here; you’ll have to come see the show.

Throughout the rehearsal process, and sometimes starting long before we even get into rehearsals, I’ll start a file somewhere and just keep jotting down music ideas and song titles as they come to me through innumerable channels. Once the cast gets off-book and we start to pick up momentum in the rehearsal process, I come back frequently to the list to see what themes are developing. In this case, I’m noticing a lot of 80′s music is occurring; it works with the story, even though the story is set almost 30 years earlier, largely because there is an innocence in 80′s pop music, as if we were the first generation to fall in love and sing about it, that I find fits with the idea of Jack and Joy falling in love in their own kind of innocence and naivete. There are also several simple orchestral/instrumental pieces; I’m quite partial to the cello and have been since I got drunk one night in my youth and played Yo-yo Ma’s Bach Cello Suites on repeat until I was both sober and bedazzled. Nowadays, the powerhouse combination of YouTube and iTunes makes it nigh-unto-impossible to NOT find exactly what I’m looking for, sometimes even before I know what it is I think I’m looking for. Again, I have been very lucky on this production to find some exceptional music in that category as well.

This production will also mark my first foray into some extremely simple visual-media usage. The script has a lot of non-scene scene changes that roll over each other. Given the limitations of our venue, I needed to express changes in location and, more importantly, the passage of time without breaking my stage crew with an enormous number of hard resets of the stage (we survived that with 2009′s Dangerous Liaisons, but only barely; that’s a story for another time). Once again, the internet has come to my rescue with some amazing stock photography available under Creative Commons licensing that covers exactly the kind of thing I want to do. Seriously, I believe Creative Commons licensing may be the best thing to happen to the arts-creating world
since possibly forever. As with the music, the selection of images is crucial, and for this first experiment, I went looking for images of Lewis’ home, the actual college in which he taught at Oxford, seasonal transitions that captured the impression of the location if not the age (less stock photography from the late 1950′s under CCL than one might think, or want; also, I want colour, not B&W). So there’s an interesting mess of location and seasonal shots that will, if I make my selections carefully, appropriately echo the thematic tones of the play if not the actual locations and whatnot.

Personally, I find this aspect of the production development an exciting challenge. It’s something so different from directing the cast while designing set and lighting on the fly (‘cuz that’s just how we roll in community theatre), and over which I can exert near-complete control, that is also so quintessentially part of the experience as a whole. It’s another part of the process of making magic that seems to increase the power of the magic for me rather than dispelling it when I’m busy working behind the curtain. So the next time you’re sitting in the theatre before the show or during the intermission, or clapping your way through the bows music, lend your ear to the musical selection and give yourself a moment to be affected by it, whether you appreciate the music itself or not. Someone probably put great thought and care into the musical development that, to your ear, seems so seamlessly incidental. It might actually be quite appropriate, and if there are lyrics, they might shed some perspective on what’s happening in the play itself, or foreshadow things to come. It’s another open door through which you can, should you so choose, invite yourself deeper into the theatrical magic.

Don’t just walk through it… dance, if you can.

——–
* — Actually, building things is more of a not-so-secret delight than anything. In contrast to the cerebral work of directing many people through an entire full-length script, being able to break out the power tools and just Design & Build Stuff from scratch is really just all kinds of awesome. And messy. And loud. And fun. And did I mention the messy part? Yeah… Awesome

Waterloo, ON (March 19, 2012) – Coming this May, TenBareToes Entertainment Inc returns with William Nicholson’s passionate & powerful story, Shadowlands, based on C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed and directed by Karen Grierson.

This character driven drama holds many moments of lightness as it follows the story of Lewis, after Narnia fame, as he meets & falls in love with an American divorcee, Joy Gresham.

Especially with Hollywood bringing the beloved “Chronicles of Narnia” to the big screen, most people are at least peripherally aware of C.S. Lewis as the creator of a beloved world of talking beasts and grand adventure. Some might even know the man behind the childrens’ books as a witty and erudite theologian and academic. Fewer still are aware of the man who found love late in life in a way that would ultimately challenge both his understanding of himself, and his faith in God.

Karen Grierson, director of the production and professional relationship counselor, has loved the story since she first read Lewis’ journals, published under the title A Grief Observed, for a grief counseling training course in graduate school. “When I first picked up the script, the whole production just unfolded in my head—that’s how I know I’m holding a property that I just HAVE to do,” said Grierson.

Lewis’ deep entrenchment in the role of a quintessential Oxford don—the brilliant, slightly-absent-minded professor in the male-dominated academic world—is shaken by the unexpected arrival of an American fan. In her own way, Joy Gresham epitomizes everything that Lewis is not: brash and forward, prone to questioning everything, experienced in both love and loss. Their developing attraction to each other is a complex process that must work through his inability to understand the essence of intimate emotional connection, and through her experiences of deeply loving emotionally-unavailable men. Yet somehow these two unlikely soulmates manage to find those rare points of connection that allow love to root, and grow in such a way that when tragedy strikes, something transcendent and greater than either of them remains.

Performances are May 3-5, 10-12, & 17-19, showtime 8pm at the Kitchener Waterloo Little Theatre, 9 Princess St. E., Waterloo. Early bird tickets are $13 till April 1 and can be ordered from the company website, http://www.tenbaretoes.com/shadowlands.

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Please contact Anita Kilgour, Producer, at akilgour@tenbaretoes.com or 519­-502­-4736 for more information.

This is my first production with TenBareToes, and one of the advantages of doing this production under Anita’s banner is a key component in making great magic: being able to guarantee having all the right components as opposed to selecting from only what comes to market (or, in this case, auditions). There are ways to work with open audition policies to better stack one’s casting odds, but being able to skirt the risks by going straight to hand-picked resources cuts through a lot of the uncertainty that sometimes unsettles community theatre productions from the get-go. There are no guarantees in life, nor in theatre; I have had to do three recastings in the production as life got in the way for some actors, but I will say this for the Kitchener-Waterloo community theatre pool: there is a wealth of talent out there, and recasting as a necessary evil becomes less a chore and more a challenge in narrowing down options.

As we get into the second full week of Shadowlands rehearsals, two things become abundantly clear to me as a director: cast well, and you’re more than halfway to that magic; and I really love the directing process (you’d think this part would be obvious by the time someone has helmed four productions… I never said I was a quick study). Last night’s rehearsal was an example of the first point as some of the cast begins to gel into onstage and personal relationships. We get there a little faster in some productions when the majority of the cast has worked with each other at some point in the past (some more recently than others; I’ve picked up several cast members from the previous 10BT production of The Odd Couple), but that we get there at all is always the kind of thing for which directors will hold their breath. That easy camaraderie goes a long way towards making the working relationship through the difficult scenes and the seventh-inning stretch of rehearsals flow more smoothly. When we know when and how to make each other laugh as well as focus, you know there’s a solid interpersonal structure at work behind the illusions they’re also weaving on stage.

Recently on a workshop application form, I was asked to describe my style of directing, and while I’m pretty sure I botched the question by trying to be authentic instead of artistically-pretentious, I’m also reasonably certain I managed to convey the fact that I love this gig. It’s been interesting to watch what passes for a “style” develop over four reasonably different types of shows, from being over-prepared with semi-blocked scenes in my first show, to a very lax and largely-unprepared slide into this one. Last night, just before rehearsal (in our second week on the schedule), I finally marked up my script with scene divisions. I normally have the massive binder I refer to as either the Big Book of the Play or The Brick (depending on what kind of day I’m having), but my sheet protectors still have Frankenstein’s marks all over them, and I haven’t even finished loading the script for Shadowlands. And yet, there was no doubt in my mind that I was as ready as I wanted to be when we hit the read-through more than a week ago. My direction this time around is less about telling my cast where to go and how to be, and more about getting them to think about what they’re doing, what they mean, what they think. This is all part of what Obsidian Theatre’s Philip Akin (one of my mentors) calls “intentionality”, and a skill I am learning to develop both as a director , and as something I help my actors develop. I have learned that the high points of the rehearsal process, for me, are less about the moments when the actors successfully convey something I’ve directed them to do, and more about the moments when I ask them a question about intentions that stops them. If I get, “That’s a really good question,” and a pause while they work it out for themselves, I know they’ve come one step closer to getting inside the characters they are portraying. Every moment of connection that leads to a deeper expression on stage is where the real magic lives for me.

(And it’s fair game when they in turn ask me something that makes me think. I’m very much about learning from them as much as I hope they can learn from me. Over the years, I’ve also gotten far more comfortable with saying myself, “That’s a really good question to which I do not have a good answer, or possibly even ANY answer; let’s try and work something out.”)

Ultimately, I know we’re making magic when we hit those moments in which, even as Director who knows the script, who knows these are actors in a rehearsal room, who knows the cues, the light changes, the soundtrack, the grips’ choreography, the spikes on the floor, the flubbed lines, I can still hold my breath and just watch wide-eyed as the characters come to life and the moment of the story just flows over me like a wave. In those moments I forget to be the Director, because what’s happening on stage is so compelling that knowing the trick doesn’t save me from being carried along in it. The fact that it’s a learning process for all of us doesn’t mean we lose the magic at all; sometimes the greatest magicians are simply those who understand the power they wield well enough to walk that fine line between “acting” and “being”, where the magic becomes so compelling that, as young Douglas says in Shadowlands, we simply want it to be real. And for a moment, it is.

That’s why I love what I do, and why the magic will never go away for me.

I’m doing it again.

Once again, the workshop is limited to a dozen people.

The workshop dates are weekly on Mondays from March 12, 19 & 26, April 2, 9 & 16.   These will take place at KWLT, 9 Princess St. East in Waterloo.  Start time is 7pm.

I had a lot of fun with the first group and I learned things as well.  I’m really hoping people can make it out for this second round.

He approached me last fall with a proposal.  He has a new script that he’d love to get some feedback on & was hoping we could do some good at the same time.  Would TBT be interested in staging a reading of his new play for an audience in a pay-what-you-can set up with the funds raised going to a good charity and give him a chance to get feedback from the audience, actors & director (yours truly) after the reading.

Always being one for an interesting idea, I said it sounded like fun.

I’ve had a chance to look over the script (The Waffle King Murders) and I have to say, I’m really looking forward to this.  It’s a really fun script and has a very classic detective story a la the 1940′s to it.  I’m talking to some of the talented actors from the area and we’re getting together during the day on the 25th and going over the script as a group in preparation for the evening’s reading.

I really hope you can come out to have fun & help support the good folks at KW’s Out of the Cold program.  You can let us know you’re coming by signing up here.  And thank you to the awesome folks at KWLT for providing the space for this!

Thanks all!