Engaging Imaginations

As Company began rehearsals, Director John Doyle sat down with 50 musical theatre students from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, as well as the Playhouse’s own acting interns, to discuss the origins of his unique process, the amazing success of Sweeney Todd and the journey that led him to the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. Excerpted is a small portion of that conversation.

How did you originally develop this technique of using actor-musicians?

I was running a theatre called the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool — Liverpool is a very depressed city really. It’s a city where most of the industry has been taken away and there’s not very much money and there’s certainly no money for the arts at all. You know as long as you have people without homes and there are holes in the road you’ve got trouble getting money out of anybody to put theatre on … And I wanted to do a musical. I had done lots of musicals in the past where the orchestra were in the pit, you know, and you did a copy of what had once been a West End show or a Broadway show. I had stopped doing musicals for a number of years because I thought, I’ve got to find a new way because I’m bored with doing a copy of somebody else’s production. How do I do that in a form that is so specific and so set? So I gave up doing them for five years, didn’t really think about it, didn’t contemplate it all because I was too busy trying to earn a living for myself and for other people.

But I decided that I wanted to do the musical Candide, which is written by Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and various other contributors. If you know the piece at all it’s basically an opera, and I couldn’t afford to do it. So I thought, well, I’ll test it out on my board, and they said, oh yes, we’d really love you to do it. And I thought, oh, I don’t know if this is gonna really be possible. The only way I could think of doing it was to do it without having to pay an orchestra for it because the cost of orchestras in the U.K. are huge. The musicians are paid much more money than actors. So I came up with this idea that maybe the actor and the musician could be one and the same.

Now, that had been done already … there were instances of people making music on stage already but it was almost always coming out of a rock and roll, contemporary language.

And so I started by thinking I would do Candide and I found 12 people, only 12, who could play the score on any level at all. I could only afford 12. And I just, you know, really, really searched to see who I knew who could play the violin and who I knew who could play clarinet and who could play cello and so on because the score demands the classical instrument to lie within it.

OK, we started rehearsal. I didn’t really know what I was doing, at all, not at all. What did happen was that the musicians sat over there and they got up and they acted and then they sat down again, and that’s how that began. I remember the first Saturday morning rehearsal when they first played the overture. I don’t know if any of you know the overture to Candide, but I thought at that point that I’d probably have to cancel the show because it was the worst thing you’ve ever heard in your life. And over a period of years from there to now, 15 years, I’ve been gradually developing using these techniques …

So I suppose what I’ve tried to do is form and create an affordable way of making musical theatre happen, a new way of making it happen, maybe, and using skills that can only be done in live performance … It should be about a kind of instant, immediate, honest contact that asks the audience to use its imagination. If you haven’t got any money you have no choice but to use your imagination. I’m now in the privileged position of working in fairly well-resourced theatres but I still would say, please don’t give me too much money to spend, because if you do I won’t use my imagination. Therefore, we won’t go to a place that is my place to be, as opposed to some other director’s place to be.

Describe the rehearsal process for a show like Company. Do you start with the instrumental?

Inevitably you start with the music, but only for a morning. So, we start by just scraping our way through one piece. And within that same day, actually I think ... with Company, they had to look at the opening number which is quite big. So we started to get it on the floor the next day …

I just start on the floor exploring possibilities. I don’t “block” the play. I don’t pre-stage anything. I just see what we could do, and so the whole rehearsal process becomes a series of problem-solving exercises …

And I don’t know how it’s gonna end up. I certainly don’t know that at the moment. You know, we’re two weeks through Company, we’re not quite halfway through the rehearsal process, and it’s joyous and it’s frightening. Because actually it might never get on. And I need to know that. I need to feel afraid of it in order to be able to do it. It’s perverse, really. The process of trying to discover the story and the tensions of that with the artists is what I’m really interested in doing.

I was very interested in the choice [in Sweeney Todd] that none of the characters spoke directly toward one another; everything was done out to the audience. I was wondering how that came about and became part of the staging?

In part, you’ll see when you see Company, it’s the same. It’s a common denominator. It’s partly to totally acknowledge the audience’s place in the action. It’s a deliberate breaking of the fourth wall, you know? I think there’s a whole danger zone in that fourth wall stuff. It didn’t belong to Shakespeare’s theatre. It didn’t belong to the Greek theatre. It didn’t belong to the other epic forms of theatre. And there is something kind of epic about doing Sweeney Todd, which is such an enormous piece, with only 10 people where they are also the orchestra and where the two, as you saw I hope, are completely intertwined so that there is no differential between the two. And so the business of, “to the front,” is about “we know you’re there.” And we can see you. And we can eyeball you if we want to, like I’m doing with you now. And we can feel quite comfortable about that. It’s also partly linked to the thing that in a lot of situations, we don’t look at each other. You very seldom look into somebody else’s eyes in reality … And so, it’s playing with that notion, playing with the notion of our disconnections, of our lack of connection as a society.

But it’s also another way of saying to the audience, you have to work here. We’re not going to do all the connections for you. You actually have to engage your mind or your imagination to fill in the dots … So it’s non-prescriptive, it’s not pre-determined with all the answers … I think we all too often in our passive theatergoing society want to be told what to do and what to think and what to feel. So the openness of, we are all in the same space at the same time and you’re there and I’m here, encourages and discomforts, I think, discomforts the audience up to a point and also encourages the thought that they have to respond to it differently as a piece of theatre. It’s not traditional, whatever that word might mean.

After the success of Sweeney, do you find that people have great expectations from you to produce another masterpiece and, if so, how do you deal with those expectations in such a loose, experimental rehearsal process?

That’s a really good question, and it’s something at the moment I’m really struggling with. I think the one blessing is that nobody knows who I am. So I can actually walk into the theatre on Broadway and, apart from the cast, not a person has any idea who that person is that’s standing there. I really would like to keep it that way ... I mean you know theatre is not the be all and end all of my life. It’s a lot. I mean, it would be like, maybe if you told me I couldn’t do it anymore, it would be like having one arm taken away, but not two. And so that keeps it in a kind of proportion …

When I came here, when I came here to do this job, I really did feel the weight of expectation in the rehearsal room on the first day because people have come to Cincinnati to do this job with me because of Sweeney Todd. That isn’t easy. But you just have to try to let it go, and you have to try to hold on to being yourself. Any artist is vulnerable about their work. It’s part of why you do what you do. Try to work out your own mortality in the middle of it all. So that’s what I try to hang on to. Just thinking, John you can only be John so don’t, for goodness sake, go in there and try to be some other director. But it isn’t easy.

You’ve basically come up with a whole new form of theatre … a new, epic way of performing … and I’m wondering if something is lost when you put it all together? What do you feel is the biggest thing that is lost, and how do you make up for that in the staging?

Lost. I don’t know that anything is; it’s just different … Of course, if you are doing [a show] with 10 people, some of whom have got to be able to sing so they can’t have clarinets in their mouths or oboes or something else, then, yeah, you might lose something of the size of the sound. But what you gain, I think, is the clarity of the lyric. And as [Sondheim’s] probably the greatest living lyricist — well there’s no probably about it, he is the greatest living lyricist — then that’s going to be the gain. So there are pluses and minuses both ways.

And, yes, inevitably some moments in the staging or the storytelling, which I kind of prefer as a word rather than the staging, really, because staging’s got an empty quality to it to me whereas if it’s about how do we “tell” this … Yeah, some things are bound to be compromises, but any art’s a compromise. And then going back to the beginning of what you said about creating a new form of theatre, that’s just taken me really by surprise. Not you saying it, but that’s what’s been said to me for the last six months now, “Oh you’ve created a new form of theatre.” Well. God Dammit. Just by trying to get a show on with no cash, you create a new form of theatre … I mean I’m honored that you say I’ve done that, of course I am. I don’t take that, I don’t wear that lightly. I really don’t.

And yet some people say it’s a gimmick as well. You gotta get a gimmick if you want to stay ahead. It’s not meant to be a gimmick. It’s taken me my whole life to learn how to do it. It came out of the ceilidhs that we had as a family, where we sat down and made music together in a Scottish environment. Where we were a group of non-communicative Scots-Presbyterians who could show ourselves through our music. And that’s where it’s come from, that’s what it is, it’s me. And so when people call it a gimmick, I get hurt by that. But I don’t know them, so they can’t hurt me too much.

When you move shows like Sweeney or Company from smaller houses like [the Playhouse] to Broadway are you worried that what you were trying to accomplish in the style is getting lost, and do you have to make a lot of sacrifices in terms of that?

No, in fact, the production of Sweeney Todd on Broadway is more delicate in texture in a 1,100 seat theatre than it was when we did it to the 200 seats in the Watermill. I think that’s grown out of confidence from my part and in the part of the performers themselves. Yes, when I say epic, I suppose I mean, visually you’re seeing something you’ve never seen before, so it’s taking you to a world that is an unusual world. It’s the unexpected …

But I definitely want the audience to lean forward … Maybe we can just get them to listen. Maybe we can get them to lean forward. Maybe we can get them to come ‘round the campfire. As opposed to the, you know, as opposed to the “pow” of let me entertain you. And for some people that works. And some people find that hard, some people find having to commit themselves to the story, having to go in [leans forward] quite hard going …

Sometimes it’s hard to lean forward and really focus, but I think that’s good.