So, one of the great benefits of this particular awesome project is that I am working with one of the most talented directors in this city. She is...she made a fifteen minute speech about the play on our first day and it blew my mind. This is a play I have known the soundtrack to backwards and forwards since I was about 8, and she said things about it that are completely true, but that had never once occurred to me. (In an effort to make myself feel like less of a doofus, I see why my 8 year old self probably didn't think about the themes or character motivations of this play, and that older selves skipped that kind of thinking because the piece is so familiar - the way you know exactly how to get from your house to the store but don't know any of the road names, you just know.)
The quality that makes this director so great is that she makes sure every piece is about something. These lovely older musicals are so frequently regarded as chestnuts, with all their ideas intact from previous productions, but this director goes back to the script and score and figures out what it's actually about, then tries to get to that. It's thrilling to watch, and probably a lot harder than it looks. She makes it seem easy because she has this amazing ability to balance having her own idea with accepting and receiving ideas from the cast. (Usually you get one or the other in a director, rarely both.) But think about any story you know really well. How hard would it be to go back and just read the actual words, strip away your favorite performance of it or the way your mom read it to you at night or the significance the story had to you at a certain point in your life? How impossible would it be to try to see the story just and only as it is, and not through the layers you've loaded on top of it?
She does, and when she does, she makes really really great productions of plays people want to see but have forgotten why they wanted to see them. She reminds you of what they mean.
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