Oakenboard Fagin

Rehearsal began today at 10 am. I've been very tired because I've been directing a youth cast of Annie while playing Warbucks in the adult cast of the same production. Literally the same production -- same theatre, same props, same set, same Sandy. It works rather well, actually. We sell a lot of tickets. But today's rehearsal was for Oakenboard's Oliver!. I don't mention Annie at Oliver! rehearsals since I overheard a woman in the ensemble referring to Solano College as The Theatre Where They Love Gays. I think perhaps she's new. But I'm not taking any chances. I learned a long time ago that fundamentalist Christians travel in packs and will take over a production as fast as they possibly can.

Today's rehearsal began with music. Our Music Director is Bill Bradley, one of my favorite Music Directors with whom to work. He's been doing this forever and he knows how these shows work. He also knows hilarious stories about Mitchellson Mitchellson and has several amusing photographs of Oakenboard's Founding Artistic director back when he was thin, with a full head of hair, loads of ambition and that most precious of theatrical commodities: artistic integrity. He also, from what I can see in the few photographs I've glimpsed, really enjoyed smoking pot in Codornices Park in Berkeley around 1972. This may explain his current rotundity and the occasional memory jag during rehearsal ("What the fuck is that pirate doing there?! There are no pirates in this show!" while rehearsing a scene on Hook's ship for 2002's ill-fated Space-Age Peter Pan.)

What I love about rehearsing music is that we get to learn the music. Bill Bradley is very good a teaching the music, he is jolly and makes jokes that the grown-ups get but that the kids have no idea are funny. (I know for a fact that he had a promising on-stage career back in the day, but he never talks about this.) Learning music is central to a musical and the challenge at Oakenboard is that the Stage Manager has to schedule things in just such a way that Mitchellson Mitchellson is not anywhere in the building. Because if Mitchellson is anywhere in the building, he will hijack the music rehearsal and start to coach the actors on their acting while they're learning the music. This is a monumental waste of everyone's time. Mitchellson thinks it's efficient. Mitchellson also thinks it's efficient to berate actors for dropped lines during notes after the first run off book. Mitchellson is big on efficiency.

I already know the music for Oliver!, I've directed it once and performed the roles of Bill Sykes and Fagin in the same six month period in 2006. I was given the option of not being at rehearsal because I know my part, but I wanted to be there because I love the way Bill Bradley teaches the music. It's actually like a music theory refresher course, but always performance-oritented. And I like to see how the younger actors work, how they take music direction; this tells me a lot about the success of the production. It also tells me who to watch out for backstage: who is going to be talking during quiet scenes, who will probably forget props, who will miss cues, miss entrances, miss performances. While all of these things can royally fuck a show, they are also prime opportunities for ad-libs. Ad-libs, while they can annoy stage managers to no end, will forever endear one to audience and fellow actors alike. The key is not to push the ad-lib; one has to wait patiently for the opportunity. One of the secret joys of working at Oakenboard is that one is guaranteed at least three perfect ad-lib moments during the run. This is because the Technical Director is so dangerously bi-polar that the turnover rate in the crew is near legendary in height. Like two new crew members per week in a nine-week run of Big River back in 1998. And the best place to get hard-working, wide-eyed, fearful tech bunnies is the local High School, which has no performing arts department because this is California. So they have no idea what working backstage at Oakenboard will be like. I tried recruiting some Solano students to work backstage on the first Oakenboard production I ever did, and they were the ones who told me about Dangerous Dan, the nickname of Oakenboard's longtime Tech Director, Dan Wrathburne.

Wrathburne is so unstable that he has been known to follow crew around backstage, shouting at them if he thinks -- thinks, mind you -- that they are about to do something wrong. I played Billis in South Pacific for Oakenboard about two years after I did it at The Willows. During Honey Bun, Dangerous Dan thought that that week's new crew member was going to drop a bucket. This was opening night. Packed house. I've just jumped through the curtain in my grass skirt and coconut bra when this terrified 17 year old boy comes stumbling after me in seabee costume (so the crew could move things without looking like crew), a bucket flying after him and narrowly missing the back of my head to sail into the orchestra seats and brain a retired Army colonel. After the bucket came Dangerous Dan in full Wrathburne fury, and it was my challenge to alter the choreography so that I just happened to be between them for the rest of the song. Oakenboard stage managers have a way of calming Wrathburne down, a combination of colors built into every lighting plot that resets the rage button in his cerebral cortex derived from the colors of specific incendiaries and explosives used during the Viet-Nam conflict. The sudden strobes and sound effects in the Wrathburne Reset are remarkably effective. That night, most of the orchestra seats were taken by a group of military retirees. Unfortunately, one cannot predict how the Wrathburne Reset will affect every veteran. The bucket-brained colonel promptly forgot about the bucket, experiencing the first orgasm he'd had in two decades. Others were not so lucky. Ushers had to restrain at least three elderly veterans from rushing the stage. Pat Craig's review praised Mitchellson's amazing penetration of the fourth wall and the real sense of danger experienced during what is usually just a cute production number.

I get along very well with Dan Wrathburne. I think this is because I make him laugh. But he always tells me that he knew my grandfather, and for reasons that mystify me he makes certain that the crew treats me like royalty. This can be a little odd at times, but it makes my job very easy at Oakenboard. Frankly, I suspect that working with Mitchellson is what triggers Wrathburne's PTSD fugues. It's understandable. I practically had one myself during the music rehearsal today.

We were working on Be Back Soon when the door slammed open and Mitchellson strode in, eyes alight with messianic musical theatre certainty. Bill Bradley put closed his eyes, sighed, and took his hands from the piano keys, politely folding them in his lap.

"Sorry, Bill, won't be more than a minute, you don't mind, do you?" and pulling up a chair, Mitchellson opens a file folder stuffed with yellow legal pads, then fixes us with his Mansonesque stare. In a flash he snaps up a creepy black ink sketch of a monstrous vulva, shouting, "You are ALL of you WHORES!!!"

Gasps from the kids, some quite young, boys and girls both, who play Fagin's boys. One girl giggles.

"WHORES!!!" Mitchellson bellows, standing and running the sketch in front of all our faces. "And you're PIMPED to the UPPER CLASS by ..." and he spins, scanning us, his right index finger raised. I begin to cringe. "By FAG-in, not his REAL NAME, but a nickname you gave him because he always wants to stick his FAG, English for twig, IN you!"

Bill Bradley's head is in his hands by now and I am frozen in dismay, unable to disguise my deep alarm at this interpretation. I resolve to buy the Stage Manager a crate of Scotch if he can keep Mitchellson away from me for the rest of the process. I will not play the role this way, and I'll leave if I have to. But I really need the money. Perhaps I, after all, am the whore.

"Now, take it again, and Edward I want you to FUCK them with your VOICE!!! Play, Bill!"

It was a very long rehearsal. None of the children learned their music. Seventeen of the twenty-two kids have withdrawn from the show. Parents were complaining before rehearsal was over, thanks to their kids' texting and Facebook mobile. I don't know how to fuck anyone with my voice, and I'm not about to try it in that situation so I just pretended not to know the music and asked Bill Bradley a lot of questions about note durations. This really confused Mitchellson, who thought I knew the role. It's why he hired me. I'm not worried about it, though: he was surrounded by irate parents when I left, looking like a giant Norse explorer who can't find his compass in a sea of foreigners.