Wow, it’s been a while! Maintaining a blog while producing a show has been more challenging than I’d anticipated. Because you don’t want to say just anything in the blog, right? You want to say something meaningful, and crafting that takes time.

Here’s an excerpt from a blog entry I started a couple of weeks ago but never got around to posting:

After years of concert-style readings, it’s quite a revelation to see the transformation that takes place when a scene is fully staged. Sometimes, after a public reading, audience members would say to me that they saw it all in their heads; they didn’t miss the other theatrical elements at all. At the time, I felt that too. But now, as the scenes come to life before my eyes, I find them infinitely richer than they’ve ever been. The comic scenes are much funnier when they are fully physicalized. The poignant moments, too, are infinitely more moving when the actors are able to fully embody their characters, so that their reactions and choices are transmitted through action and gesture as well as face and voice. A lengthier rehearsal period also allows the actors to find a lot more subtlety and nuance within their choices. And all of this is taking place in the rehearsal space, which is also a scene shop, under fluorescent lights, with a blaring heater and a backdrop of tools, planks, and fragments of dismantled sets.

Now I sit in the theater facing scenic designer Joe Ragey’s masterful set, which is elegant, simple, and infinitely flexible, artfully integrating the wooden arches of the Ashby Stage with great swooping panels of white silk and simple wooden frames. Fumiko Bielefeldt’s costume design also involves a lot of white, the pale hues viscerally evoking the snowy Canadian winter in which most of our action takes place.

We are in tech. That means we’re setting lighting cues, sound cues, costume changes, and scenic shifts. It’s a laborious process, where each transition is repeated again and again until it runs smoothly. The band is simultaneously working its way through the songs and underscoring, while the sound department seeks to achieve the ideal balance between voices and instruments. As with most techs I’ve been a part of during a lifetime in the theater, we are behind. Yesterday we were tense and cranky, but today, in spite of the pressure, we seem to have slipped into a goofy groove, in which tension has somehow morphed into joking, laughter, and mutual appreciation.

After today, only a single rehearsal remains before our first preview, which has been sold out for over a week. Between now and then, theatrical alchemy must take place, in which these separate elements merge into a cohesive whole which is vastly more than the sum of its parts.

See you at the theater!

Today was the first day of the second week of rehearsals.

Last week we dove in headfirst with a stumble-through of the script and score on Jan. 2, followed by detailed music and dance work the rest of the week. Hearing the music brought to the life by the glorious voices of our cast was a transcendent experience. (These folks can SING! They are doing honor to Vienna’s lustrous score.)

Producing a new musical is filled with obstacles, so on the first day of rehearsal I brought a statue of Ganesh, official remover of obstacles, to aide and abet our proceedings. This particular Ganesh was given to my husband when he set up an intraocular lens factory in South India. The factory brought the cost of these lenses, which are inserted into the eye after a cataract is removed, waaaaay down. As a result, millions of people were able to see.

I figured if Ganesh could remove obstacles on that scale, producing a new musical should be cake. Or peanuts.

I bet you’re thinking, “What does Ganesh have to do with anything? Isn’t this musical inspired by the life of the Buddha?”

Okay, I brought a Buddha too. Fortunately, Buddhism as a philosophy is very non-judgmental and all-encompassing, so Buddha and Ganesh had no trouble sitting next to each other.

So far Ganesh has been doing an awesome job. There have been obstacles – ants and a broken heater in someone’s housing, printers running out of toner at crucial moments, cars breaking down on the way to rehearsal – but each of these has been removed in due course, and the important stuff is right on track. A group of creative people is coming together to tell a story. Another group of creative people – our phenomenally inventive designers – is coming together as well to create a beautiful imaginative space for that storytelling to take place. And we’re having a lot of fun along the way.

Our hearts are pure, our purpose true. We working; we are playing. We are making live theater, which is never twice the same.
Come check us out.

What’s that you say? What do I mean by “the latest version of the script and score”? Surely we’re not still working on these things less than two weeks before the start of rehearsals!

To that I say, welcome to the marvelous, maddening, endlessly unfolding process of developing a new musical! Yes it’s true, Vienna and I are holed up for the rest of this week with our fabulous orchestrator, Robin Reynolds, writing and rewriting and writing some more. New songs are emerging even now, six years into the collaborative process, and older ones are being threaded more deeply and intricately through the script. Because in amusical, much like in a symphony, it’s all about theme and variation. You hear it here and it means one thing, you hear it there and it carries an entirely different weight, especially when juxtaposed with the context in which it appeared the first time. As this is the first musical that Vienna and I have written, we’ve been developing our understanding of the musical theater form right alongside our development of the script. Fortunately, Matt August (our fearless director) has loads of experience developing and directing new both on and off Broadway. His insight, passion, and guidance have been and continue to be invaluable in the process.

And so… Onward ho! Looking forward to seeing you all at the theater in the New Year. And by the way, if you’re short of inspiration for a last minute holiday gift, how about a PAIR OF TICKETS to a transformative night out?

Yesterday we had a promotional photo shoot for The Fourth Messenger. In addition to our two gorgeous female leads (Annemaria Rajala and Anna Ishida), the shoot featured a 300-pound ice block, a fog machine (operated by yours truly) and a tub of dry ice. When publicist Evren Odcikin, photographer David Allen and I first showed up at the space to receive the ice delivery (and of course I could not help proclaiming, “The Iceman Cometh!”) we attempted to move the mammoth block onto a wooden platform. We hadn’t counted on the fact that melting ice is, uh, slippery. It literally slipped through our fingers, and photographer David Allen darted out of the way just in time to avoid being flattened. An eventful start to the day!

After that it was smooth sailing, although we had to continuously mop up the icy run-off to avoid further potential catastrophes involving water and electrical cords. Our two actresses were marvelously game and professional amidst the dampness and goose bumps. Who knew how much a 300-pound hunk of ice cools down a room?

We had tremendous fun playing with ice, smoke, and fog and creating gorgeous images which you can view on our photos page. Here are some photos of the process for your viewing pleasure!

With warmest wishes,
Your own playwright-producer,
Tanya Shaffer