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After I spent my first summer at Pontiac
as a Group Leader for the sophomore boys, the camp directors asked me to
bring my piano-playing skills to the theatre. Things weren’t great in
the theatre in 1997, despite the best efforts of director Andrea Levine,
her assistant Brett Cohen, and the campers who were in the three shows. The
sets, costumes and scenery were actually quite good, but the productions
themselves left a bit to be desired. Aside from having no live
accompaniment (the actors either sang over the cast album or a capella),
the shows were too long, cast members couldn’t remember their lines,
the sound system in the theatre was subpar, and it got very hot in
there. For 1998 the camp directors, in addition to providing a new sound
system and cooling exhaust fans for the theatre, recommended to Andrea and me that the
shows be mostly music, with very little dialogue, and that the shows be 45
minutes to an hour in length.
Andrea told me how difficult the
shows had been to put together in 1997, and I had several ideas to help
remedy that. My first idea was to produce an abbreviated script, an
adaptation which met the dialogue and time guidelines, during the
off-season and have it ready to go before camp opened. This would save a
significant amount of time and effort during the rehearsal process of
trying to see how much we could fit in and cutting on the fly. The second
was to give each principal cast member a tape of his or her songs, to
listen to over and over again whenever they could, in the bunks or
elsewhere, also saving us significant amounts of rehearsal time.
Third, and perhaps most importantly,
I felt the need to look for more offbeat, challenging, even risqué material
to perform, instead of the same old standbys that every camp and every school
puts on every other year (such as, for example, all three titles from
1997). I thought, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in Batman, “This
camp needs an enema!” I had never been a fan of traditional musicals
anyway; I wanted something modern, something with an upbeat rock score,
something outrageous, even shocking, maybe even tasteless and crude.
Naturally, Richard O’Brien’s outrageous Rocky Horror Picture
Show was at the top of the list.
Of course, Andrea and I knew that we
would really have to tone things down to make this show
“appropriate” (and I use the term advisedly) for a camp
audience. We either removed or sublimated the sexual references from the
movie, took out the cannibalism, excised the “Touch-a-Touch-a-Touch
Me” and “I Can Make You a Man” songs as well as the
“Give yourself over…” verse of “Rose Tints My
World,” and revised some of the remaining lyrics, even going so far
as to change “Sweet Transvestite” to “Sweet Mad
Scientist” (boy, would that have been lame; fortunately, we
changed it back when we realized how much cross-dressing occurred on that
stage throughout the summer). We also discussed toning down
Frank-N-Furter’s costume to a more conservative mini-skirt and tube
top.
Fortunately, as camp approached, we
realized we could probably get away with a slightly more depraved, though
still significantly less so than the original, version of Rocky Horror.
Casting and rehearsals moved us even further in that direction. We were
fortunate to find in junior Chris Teijelo a boy who was not only willing to
play Frank-N-Furter, lingerie and all, but who was both able and eager to
do justice to the part and had great fun doing it.
Most of the principal cast had
worked with Andrea in 1997. Jessica Cantor, who had played the Cowardly
Lion in The Wizard of Oz, was cast as Janet Weiss and brought the
appropriate sense of sweetness and innocence to the role. Jamie Lardner,
who had gone above and beyond the call of duty as Miss Gulch and the Wicked
Witch in Oz the year before, played Magenta; in retrospect I really
wish we could have given her more to do. She was perfect for the part,
except that we couldn’t really get her hair big enough. Ariel Cowan
(Dorothy in Oz) was Columbia, tap dancing and all. David Kaplan
(Danny Zuko in Grease in ‘97), who had a terrific voice,
played Riff Raff. Danny Exter, who was in Bye Bye Birdie in
’97, was Dr. Scott.
There were a couple of casting
problems with this show; Evan Singer auditioned and was cast as Eddie, a
part which would have been perfect for him (he was huge, even at 13), but
he bowed out, so we gave the role to Brett Kuras, who as it turned out
could really belt. The boy who was supposed to play Brad Majors also
abstained (apparently afraid to appear on stage in his underwear, as Barry
Bostwick does in the film, even though we did not have that
in our version), so Andrea asked her son Jason Shames to play the part.
Other cast members included B.J.
Shepard as Rocky, and since we had a lot more male roles than female, we
cast Pam Kornblatt as the Criminologist.
But the star of this show was
clearly Chris Teijelo, who seemed to relish the opportunity to play such a
remarkable and eccentric role. He had a great time preparing for this show
and even sang in rehearsals some of the raunchier original lyrics, which
we’d changed for the adaptation (for example, “I’ve been
making a man / With blond hair and a tan / And he’s good for
relieving my tension” was changed to “I’ve been making a
man / My number-one fan / He’ll be my greatest invention.”) and
wanted to put the “Whatever Happened to Fay Wray” verse back
into the Floor Show scene. The costume we got for him wasn’t exactly
the same as Tim Curry’s from the film, but it was similar in spirit
and unmistakably Frank-N-Furter; Chris wore a black lace tank-top, white
garters and stockings over black spandex shorts, high heels, fake pearls
and kabuki makeup; we didn’t have a wig for him, unfortunately.
He came out to sing the beginning of
“Sweet Transvestite” with a robe on, and as I was playing the
piano I noticed he was a bit nervous. I thought for a moment that he might
chicken out and not drop the robe at the appropriate moment. He did, and
the audience roared with delight. All in all Chris wasn’t as
energetic or flamboyant in the actual show as he had been in rehearsals,
but he still put forth a great performance that remains one of the best
we’ve seen.
One thing I did in this show that I
never did again was play the piano from offstage, behind the wall near the
light-switch panel; I could see the stage but the audience could not see
me. When I watched the video afterward, I realized the sound mix was off,
with the music much too soft compared to the voices, so I decided to move
the piano down to the floor of the theatre, below and to the right (from
the audience’s point of view) of the stage, where I could see and
hear better. Beginning with Damn Yankees, I
played the piano from the same spot in every show from then on, including
the ones in the new theatre.
I remember that right before the
show, Rich Kandel got up on stage in front of the camp and, remembering the
previous summer’s theatrical debacles, urged the audience to
“give it a chance.” The show wasn’t perfect by any means,
but we got through the whole thing with no major technical or performance
errors, no long pauses, no forgotten lines or lyrics; the performance was
smooth, taut, and cohesive. When it ended, I jumped up from the piano onto
the stage behind the closed curtain and repeatedly exulted, “Yes!
Yes!” high-fiving the cast and pumping my fist.
In retrospect, Rocky Horror
could have been much better; there was so much more we could have done with
it and I can’t wait to do it again. Ultimately, it was a stepping
stone, a show to put the theatre program back on the map, so to speak. I
learned a great deal from it and applied those lessons to subsequent shows.
____
Pontiac Players present
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
Book, music and lyrics by RICHARD O'BRIEN
Principal Cast
CHRIS TEIJELO as Dr. Frank-N-Furter
JESSICA CANTOR as Janet Weiss
JASON SHAMES as Brad Majors
DAVID KAPLAN as Riff Raff
JAMIE LARDNER as Magenta
ARIEL COWAN as Columbia
B.J. SHEPARD as Rocky Horror
BRETT KURAS as Eddie
DANNY EXTER as Dr. Scott
PAM KORNBLATT as The Criminologist
Directed by ANDREA LEVINE, JAY BRAIMAN and KIRSTY
LANGSDALE
Home | Next show: Damn Yankees
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