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Andrea and I really wracked our
brains during the offseason before the summer of 1998, trying to come up
with a show to put between our two “must-do’s,” Rocky Horror and The Lion
King. Andrea suggested an old, obscure show from the mid-’60s
called It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman,
which sounded like a good idea; I had never heard of it, but the thought of
a musical involving Superman intrigued me.
Then I heard the score.
The songs were so unbearably
awful (written by Charles Strouse, composer of the similarly egregious and
NEVER-EVER-EVER-TO-BE-PERFORMED-AT-PONTIAC Annie, and Lee
Adams) that I clearly understood why the show closed after only 129
performances. Not to mention that the sheet music didn’t exist and
the songs seemed almost impossible to play by ear. So it was back to the
drawing board.
We got together one weekend to
see what Andrea had in her collection; we considered The Music Man
and a couple of other shows, then I thought of Damn Yankees, which
was actually the first camp show I ever saw (at Natchez in 1978; the first
show I ever performed in was a little children’s musical called The
Weather Company, in 1979 at age 8). I started humming the tune of
“You’ve Gotta Have Heart,” and Andrea said, “I have
that.” Turned out she had the complete script and sheet music.
Excellent, I thought, let’s do this.
I got my hands on the 1994 Broadway
Revival cast recording, with Victor Garber and Bebe Neuwirth, which
happily, unlike most cast albums, contained tracks of condensed dialogue to
establish plot continuity on the CD, making the adaptation much, much
easier. Figuring out how to stage the baseball scenes was a little more
difficult, but that could wait until we actually got on stage.
I had some ideas on adapting
this show that didn’t make it to the final play, such as making Joe
Hardy’s team the Mets instead of the Washington Senators, but I
ultimately decided against it, in part because the on-field competition
between the Mets and Yankees is less direct and meaningful than it was for
the Yankees and Senators in the ‘50s. I was troubled again, as I
would be repeatedly over the years, by the paucity of female roles in
proportion to male roles, so Andrea and I created the “Mambo
Girls/Demonettes” to perform the otherwise pointless
“Who’s Got The Pain?” mambo number (the only reason that
song is in the show in the first place is because Gwen Verdon,
Broadway’s original Lola, wanted another song-and-dance solo; it does
nothing to further the plot).
I was off coaching a baseball
tournament at Scatico, so Andrea handled the auditions and casting along
with Kirsty Langsdale, our dance choreographer. Half of the inter boys
division tried out, including Marc Asnis and Dan Vesey, who would become
mainstays of the theatre program in the coming years; Dan was cast as
Applegate while Marc, who had been the youngest Transylvanian in Rocky
Horror, played Joe Boyd. Justin Camacho, who had a terrific singing
voice at 11, was cast as Joe Hardy, while A.J. Strasser played Senators
manager Benny Van Buren.
We all knew from the beginning
that the star of this show would be Lauren Musacchio, who had a phenomenal
singing voice and could also dance. I still wish Lauren had come back to
camp after 1998; this turned out to be her only show but she really wowed
the audience as Lola. Dana Bergman was cast as Meg Boyd; she also had a
great voice but the adaptation had cut all of Meg’s songs except the
opener, “Six Months Out of Every Year.” Leigh Kasoff got the
part of reporter Gloria Thorpe, while her twin sister Alyssa was cast as
one of the Senators, one of two girls on the team (Leigh and Alyssa had
also been Transylvanians in Rocky Horror.)
From a pure production
standpoint, Damn Yankees was, in many ways, better than Rocky
Horror, mostly because we applied the technical and logistical lessons
we learned on that show to this one. We found that having the cast learn
their songs from the tapes they were given was a successful strategy, and
that only needed a few days to teach the music before blocking and staging
the individual scenes. We got a little better at scheduling rehearsals
around the campers’ availability and paid more attention to technical
details like curtain and lighting cues. I moved the piano from behind the
stage to in front of it on the side, which enabled me to hear the sound mix
(which was significantly better than in Rocky Horror) and have a better view
of the actors.
One thing that made life a bit
difficult for us this year and in 1999 was the fact that the stage was
being used for other purposes during most of the rehearsal process, meaning
we weren’t really able to have the entire space to ourselves, let
alone get any work done on sets and scenery, until the last day or two
before the show. Thankfully this issue was resolved in 2000 when those
purposes were moved to another location on camp.
The sets for Damn Yankees
were fairly simple; we had three large wooden frames (which were down to
two by 2000, one by 2001, and zero by 2002), two wide and one narrow. The
two wide ones were used for the Senators dugout on the left side (audience
POV), and a stadium/outfield backdrop on the right, with a tiny
“PONTIAC Motor Cars” ad on the scoreboard, along with
out-of-town scores for all the contemporary Major League teams. The narrow
frame was Joe Hardy’s locker, with an actual jersey hung on the front
of it. We made the jerseys by buying white v-neck t-shirts (which turned
out to be too big, unfortunately) and painting the Senators’
“W” logo and button-down seams on the front, with numbers on
the back. We also gathered up as many Yankees caps as we could and covered
the “NY” logo with a white “W” painted on black
construction paper.
The actual performance of Damn
Yankees was very good (Lauren, though certainly nervous and a bit shy,
was simply amazing as Lola), with a couple of minor flaws. One of the boys
playing the Senators came out for the baseball scenes wearing blue jeans
with his jersey hanging out, instead of tucked into baseball pants or
sweats like all the others; it might have made sense given that the
Senators were supposed to be such a bungling, rag-tag bunch, but it looked
awful. Dan made a classic blooper by coming out on stage before
Justin sang “A Man Doesn’t Know” instead of after, and
then making a really nice recovery: “Hey, Joe...uh...gotta go!”
Priceless.
One thing that was a problem in
this show was that the cast members were often on the wrong side of the
stage for their entrances and exits between scenes; this was mostly due to
the fact that while we had staged all the scenes individually, we
hadn’t really established continuity by running the whole show from
start to finish and paying attention to scene transitions, entrance and
exit directions, microphone exchanges, and the like. This made it clear
that we would have to do that for future shows; yet another lesson learned,
and yet another positive step for the Pontiac Theatre program.
____
Pontiac Players present
DAMN YANKEES
Music and lyrics by RICHARD ADLER and JERRY ROSS
Book by GEORGE ABBOTT and DOUGLASS WALLOP
Principal Cast
LAUREN MUSACCHIO as Lola
DANIEL VESEY as Applegate
MARC ASNIS as Joe Boyd
DANA BERGMAN as Meg Boyd
JUSTIN CAMACHO as Joe Hardy
LEIGH KASOFF as Gloria Thorpe
A.J. STRASSER as Benny Van Buren
Directed by ANDREA LEVINE, JAY BRAIMAN and KIRSTY
LANGSDALE
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