Shakina Nayfack is a Musical Directing fellow through The Drama League’s Directors Project. He is assisting on Mormons, Mothers and Monsters and The Game.
From Shakina:
Mormons, Mothers and Monsters is officially a show. The set is brilliant, the costumes superb, and the book and music still evolving even as we round out our 5th preview. The production opens on Wednesday, but we’ve already had several audiences. With their direct and indirect feedback (we have audience surveys, but mostly it’s about listening for when they laugh, when they gasp, when they clap, and when they drift off) Sam and Will have been hard at work re-tooling jokes, agitating the button of songs, and figuring out the best way to end the piece!
Knowing how to find the button of a song is probably one of the most important skills a Musical Theatre director can possess. The button, for those not hip to the lingo, is like the exclamation point at the end of a sentence. If it’s not there, the text will be read like any other statement. The button, more than the end of the song itself, is the moment where the music, the action, the lighting, the entire stage picture, all line up to signal the unifying completion of an idea. To find the button you have to arrange everything just right so on that last chord, that last pose, that final look, the song seems to wrap itself up and the audience is elevated into applause. Like when a great stand-up comedian brings a previous punch line back around to finish a set, you get that it’s over, and as a spectator find a sort of joyful reward in your own active participation. It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised… without a button, audiences don’t know what to do! You might get a few phantom claps, or that awkward silence where everyone wonders if applause is warranted…. then the actors and the action are left totally unsupported.
Of course there are also moments when you don’t want to button a song, the instances where you’d rather allow the dramatic action to spill out from the music and flow back into the next scene, and again the director must shape that current for the audience to follow. The last few days of rehearsal, where Adrienne has a work-list broken down into 5 minute increments to maximize time, has been all about buttons! Where do we want them, where do we want to avoid them, how can we tighten them up? (Agitate is the word she uses. I love that. To agitate the button means to get that damn audience to clap where they’re supposed to! It’s a real task!)
While the cast, crew, and creative team for Mormons… prepares for opening night, I’m now shifting gears and joining up with the creative team of The Game for their last few days of pre-production before we begin full rehearsals on Tuesday. (Yes, Tuesday is the last rehearsal for one show, and first for the next! This is the rhythm of life here at Barrington Stage Company… not forgetting the main-stage production Best of Enemies which begins tech rehearsals Tuesday as well, or the youth theatre production of All Shook Up, which goes into previews. It’s going to be quite a week!).
The Game, as I believe I mentioned in a previous blog post, is a musical adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos erotic french classic Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or Dangerous Liasons. More of a chamber musical, this main-stage production will feature a cast of 14 and a small orchestra, quite a change from the Four-person-plus-Musical-Director-on-Piano cast I’m about to finish working with. While not presented as part of the Musical Theatre Lab, the piece is still very much in development, as I learned at our first writing meeting yesterday. There are still scenes and songs being written and re-worked in anticipation of Tuesday’s first rehearsal, and doubtlessly changes will continue to be introduced throughout our rehearsal process.
Whereas with Mormons… I was working directly with Adrienne as Assistant Director and Assistant Choreographer, on The Game I’ll be assisting both Julianne Boyd, Barrington Stage Company’s founding Artistic Director, and visiting choreographer Daniel Pelzig. Mr. Pelzig will only be in town for the first two weeks of rehearsal, so for the final week and through tech and previews I will be charged with maintaining, adapting, and possibly adding to his choreography and musical staging, a task I am very excited to undertake!
Also, once Mormons… is up and running and The Game rehearsals are in full swing, I will be meeting with William Finn and Stage Two Producer Natasha Sinha to learn more about the one-act I’m set to direct at the end of the summer, written by Mr. Finn’s assistant, Salomon Lerner. Salomon is a very cool guy… he is originally from Venezuela, where he created and mounted Spanish translations of Fiddler on the Roof and The Producers! (You’d think he was Jewish!) Currently he is an MFA student in the NYU Musical Theatre Writing program. The project I end up directing will most likely be material generated there during his first year.
Working with William Finn, even if only peripherally, on Mormons… has been such a thrill. He is a genius and character, plus the creator of arguably one of the most important musicals written in my lifetime (Falsettos) as well as the musical most widely produced in the US last year (…Spelling Bee). It’s my hope that in working closely with Salomon I’ll get to spend some more time being coached (more like heckled, really) by Bill!
As the summer heat turns up in the Berkshires, I give thanks to BSC and The Drama League yet again, so grateful that I get to spend these balmy nights living my dream, making musicals come to life with passion and soul, from scratch!