Opening Out of Town

By David Dower

You know all those scenes in movies about “The Theatah,” where a show’s in rehearsal and the writer, director and producer all meet in a hotel room for a late-night notes session? There are generally tuxedos and high emotions and a fat cigar in someone’s mouth and zinger after zinger all flying around the room like razor blades. And if it’s a musical, someone’s at the piano banging out new ideas for the 11 o’clock number. Or that boffo opener.

I played a version of that scene last night at the Granada Suites Best Western in Atlanta. Somehow it wasn’t as glamorous. None of us looked particularly good in the beige walls and bad lighting of the Best Western. And our witty repartee was dulled by “end of a long day” energy. But we plowed on anyway, making up with tenacity what we lacked in pizzazz.

The Women of Brewster Place had just finished off their rehearsal day with a run-through of the whole musical. This milestone in the process is called the Designer Run, and it’s the first chance the design team has to see the whole show, from beginning to end, in order.  With a musical of this size, that’s a bunch of folks. Suddenly, after a few weeks of relative seclusion, the private safety of the rehearsal hall is invaded by a bunch of strangers, all staring intently at the stage and madly scribbling notes, as the performers gamely try to remember the music, the choreography, the dialogue, the blocking, and what props and scenery they move on or off stage. Ask ten actors and nine of them will tell you they hate the Designer Run. The one who actually likes it is probably the same one who used to remind the teacher to collect the homework.

The run had actually gone surprisingly smoothly from my perspective. I’d had goosebumps three or four times during the presentation, which is always a good sign. Predictably, though, the performers, director, author, and stage manager were apoplectic. So after a round of checking in to make sure nobody had been mortally wounded in this dreaded, if unavoidable, rite of passage, the rehearsal adjourned. Molly Smith, Tim Acito and I reconvened at the hotel to go moment by moment through the entire play.

The show is pretty solid in its structure so it wasn’t a matter of tearing our hair or any dramatic pronouncements like you see in motion pictures. It was more like laser surgery than reconstructive surgery. And in place of champagne or scotch there was tap water with ice. There were no cigars. There were popsicles. And we talked over each moment, zeroing in on a line or two here, the meaning of a song there, the tone of a scene, or the movement of a wall. We were focused, and serious, generous with our ideas but gentle with our words. And as we went, the play was coming more fully into focus—its tone a little crisper, its story a little clearer, its text a little leaner, its vision a little sharper. And somewhere around midnight I realized that, no matter how much we open up rehearsals and put video and sound clips on the web, trying to make transparent the process of an idea becoming a play, this is a scene the general public is never going to see.

Except in the movies.

This morning at 9am the cast reported to Rehearsal Room #2 for another of those benchmark moments in a musical’s rehearsal process: the Sitzprobe. This is the moment the band is added to the process and for the first time the cast gets to sing their songs with something other than piano accompaniment. So, this band is hot! And whatever the hangover was from the grind of the Designer Run, all was immediately swept away by the thrill of stepping to the microphone for the first time, backed by a tight six-person band with a fat bass line and some rockin’ keyboards. At 9am! The place was jumping. Diva wattage cranked all the way up to 11. Brewster Place was on its way. 

As Daniel Beaty’s character Sharita, the host of the poetry café in his play Emergence-SEE! says, “You better recognize!”

Watch Tina Fabrique and Marva Hicks singing "Sing Billie."