Politics

The other day, I had a chance to chat with someone from a local theatre company, about some interesting politics they had encountered.

I didn't know the details, but something odd happened with their performance of "Rent" last summer.  When I was there at the end of a rehearsal, the directors were giving notes . . . yet the person that was the "main director" was out of the room, and there was some new guy giving notes.  Who was he?  Later, chatting with that "main director", he most certainly made clear he didn't want to talk about "Rent".

I had heard rumors that some people in the cast staged a revolt.  The "main director" wanted to perform the songs according to the score, and from what I heard some people in the cast wanted to perform it according to the Broadway soundtrack.  Apparently, from what I heard, these people in the cast came in with a different music director and demanded he be in charge of the singing.

What?

This made no sense.

While I'm still very curious, I don't have all the details I would like.  What actually happened was that the director's mother was putting on two youth plays, but she didn't have anyone to handle the lighting.  The director agreed to do this, but this meant he would be missing a crucial week's rehearsal for "Rent".  One of the cast members of "Rent" asked if she could bring in her voice coach, just for that week.  The other director and he had an understanding: he was just there to help out that week.  That understanding went out the window, and he took over.  For whatever reason (perhaps the lack of time before opening night), the voice coach/faux director wasn't sent packing.  The main directors just threw their hands in the air and let things go.

A huge number of the cast were now blacklisted.  The deal with the faux director was not the only issue: there was a great deal of unpleasantness, and a whole lot of egotism.  The directors of that theatre company told me that they would never work with many of this cast, ever again.  Not only that, the theatre company was working with another theatre company for this show, and people from that other theatre company were shocked at what they were seeing.  These people were now blacklisted from both theatre companies!

The first word of "community theatre" is "community".  We're not headlining a show on Broadway here.  We all work together and we all pitch in.  I've been in shows where a lot of members of the cast didn't help with set strike . . . this is inexcusable, in my opinion!  I saw this theatre company's production of "Rent", and I saw a very enthusiastic and talented cast . . . but there was no reason for the overinflated egos!  They weren't that good!

By the way, I'm on record as not much caring for the play "Rent".  Yes, I see that it openly deals with HIV.  Great.  So does "Angels in America", a much better show.  All through "Rent", I found myself looking at a bunch of intensely pretentious people that sit around whining.  Not my cup of tea, thank you very much.  The cast for this performance did a fine job (although the woman that played the exotic dancer had clearly never seen an exotic dancer), but in the end I said "yup, I don't like this play."