The journey from central London to Peckham is tedious and holds no scenic splendours other than the rather bizarre sculpture outside Tesco on the Old Kent Road. On the day that Trudy Mason died I had taken the tube to the Elephant and Castle and then a bus towards Peckham. The meeting I was going to was at the studio of a young opera designer somewhere off Trafalgar Rd. I got off the bus three streets away and as I zigzagged my way past tower blocks and derelict playgrounds my thoughts turned to dinner. We had friends coming and I was cooking. If I did a risotto starter did we have any Arborio rice? Was asparagus good at moment? Did I have time to go to Borough market to pick up some decent cheese? Distracted by culinary fantasy I stepped off the kerb to cross a quiet residential street, as I did so a car came round the corner at high speed, it clipped my right leg and sent me spinning onto the pavement. I was not badly hurt, very shocked certainly and my leg was completely numb but I was much luckier than Trudy who had been crossing the road from her Mum’s house to her Nan’s on the other side a few doors down. The car caught her full on and threw her into the air. She landed head first on the curb, I saw her skull shatter and I knew immediately that she would not even be ‘dead on arrival’ but ‘dead at the scene’. A woman passing started screaming, I must have passed out because the next thing I remember I was lying in an ambulance with an oxygen mask over my mouth, my leg was no longer numb but hurt like hell, the woman was still screaming.
In A&E I slowly came out of shock and reran in my mind what had happened. A nurse seeing me sitting up came over.
“The little girl died” I said. It was a statement and not a question. After a moment’s pause she nodded.
“How do you feel?” she asked
“OK I guess. Is my leg going to be alright?”
“Just badly bruised. No breaks. There is a policeman who wants to talk to you. Are you up to it?”
“Yes why not?”
A young constable came over.
“Thank you Mr Irwin for talking to us so soon after the accident”
“What about the driver?” I asked “He didn’t stop did he?”
“No he didn’t. Can you tell me anything about the car?”
I told him three things that I knew about the car. It was a black BMW, all the windows were blacked out and that it had the letters ‘EMD’ in its number plate.
A couple of weeks later my statement was read out at the inquest. I wasn’t asked to attend, I’m not sure why, but I went anyway. From a conversation with a local journalist on the steps of the Coroner’s court I learned that Trudy’s Mum was a single parent, that Trudy, who had been eight years and fifty three days old on the day she died, was the youngest of three, that she had a twelve year old brother Kelvin and a fifteen year old sister Sophie who played the clarinet.
Two weeks after that an arrest was made. I knew this because my ‘Witness Liaison Officer’ Penny rang me to tell me. I went out and bought a copy of the Peckham Advertiser and read that Alvarez Camargo had been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and remanded in custody. His application for bail had been refused. The story hinted that Camargo had drug dealing connections and was probably not a nice person. There was a murky photograph of an overweight black man with a moustache. Penny told me that the case would come up in a couple of month’s time and that until then I shouldn’t discuss the case with anyone. Needless to say I spent the next couple of months discussing the case with everyone and when I wasn’t doing that I mentally rehearsed my evidence (described as crucial by Penny) and pictured the defence’s cross examining barrister, who in my mind’s eye ranged from Charles Dance to Rumpole. At one point in my conversations with Penny I brought up the question of witness intimidation.
“Oh Mr Irwin you’ve been watching too much television. I don’t think you need worry about that” she said cheerfully.
Eventually she rang to say that the court date was finally set and I received notification from Southwark Crown Court to attend in a fortnight’s time. One evening about a week before the appointed date I was walking home along one of the quiet streets that lead from the Old Vic to the Borough when a car pulled up along side me, two men in balaclavas jumped out and threw me onto the floor in the back. My head was forced down until my nose was jammed into the laces of a shiny black shoe, I could smell the leather. I had no doubt what was happening, as Penny had rightly suggested, I had seen this sort of thing on television. After only two or three minutes the car pulled up and I was rolled out into an alleyway between two shops. The two men started to kick me, I squirmed about trying to protect myself. At first they said nothing but then they started to shout “Do you know why we are here? Do you? Do you?” After only the third kick I came to a very rational but highly immoral decision. I wasn’t going to give evidence against Alvarez Camargo. I would have told my attackers this had I not been so severely winded that I couldn’t speak. As they continued their work in a very professional way (they avoided kicking my head), they started to recite the name of my son’s school, the address of the office where my wife worked and the name of the ward of the care-home where my mother lived. At last I managed to gasp out “I won’t give evidence, I promise, I promise” I begged for mercy and they stopped. One of them bent down and whispered in my ear “If we have to come again we will cut out your tongue”. They walked back to their car.
“Wait! Wait!” I said. They both turned to hear what the man grovelling on the tarmac had to say. “I have a message for him. Get him to call me. They have phone cards and so on in remand centres don’t they? I’ll give you my mobile number”
“We know your mobile number” one of them said and they got back into the car and drove away.
I recovered enough to call my wife who drove the few hundred yards to pick me up. She tried to take me to hospital but I refused, at home she had to help me up the stairs to our second floor flat. She, like me, understood exactly what had just happened. As she helped me take off my ruined clothes she said nothing until the full extent of the bruising was revealed then simply “Oh Jesus”.
We sat on the bed together.
“I can’t give evidence against him” I said
“No you can’t” she agreed.
This was easier said than done. The police and Penny in particular were unlikely to let me off the hook. They had my original statement and I could probably be forced to appear whether I liked it or not and I could easily face a charge of perjury. I hadn’t come up with the answer to this problem when, two days before the trial, I received a call on my mobile from a number that I didn’t recognise.
A deep voice said “You have a message for me”
I hadn’t really expected this call but nevertheless I had thought about what I would say if it did come.
“Oh. It’s you. Er I just wanted to say that…I just wanted to say…” I petered out unnerved by the total silence from the other end. “Listen I know that you are a bad man, probably a very bad man, but I don’t believe that you meant to kill Trudy Mason that day. I also know that there is nothing you or I can do to bring her back but you must promise me to do something for her mother and family. I don’t mean money, this is nothing to do with money, this is not Africa where you run over a child and give the parents the price of a goat or a cow. At some point in the future her mother needs to believe that good things can still happen. Do you understand? I er …I want your word of honour on this”. Asking a man like Camargo for his word of honour was patently ludicrous and the silence continued, I thought for a moment that he had rung off but then he said “OK.” Then he broke the connection.
I felt I had no option but to appear at the trial but I had planned carefully what I would do. I was the worst witness for the prosecution ever. Camargo’s barrister couldn’t believe his luck. In minutes he had convinced the jury that I had a poor memory, poor eyesight, that I wasn’t wearing my glasses at the time of the accident, that I couldn’t tell the difference between a BMW and a Fiat Panda, that I was in shock when I gave my original statement to the police, that the letters ‘EMD’ were the first letters that came into my head and finally that I had rabid racist tendencies. Camargo, who had watched me stonily throughout, walked free, Trudy’s Nan spat at me as I left court.
Two years later I received a press cutting through the post. It was a small item from the Peckham Advertiser. Under the headline ‘Scholarship for local girl’ it said that talented local clarinettist Sophie Mason had been awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. For a moment I thought of the visit that must have been made by two men in balaclavas to a tweed jacketed examining professor of music and I smiled.
Budapest to the Black Sea
Saturday, 13 June 2009
Sunday, 24 May 2009
How to Put on a Musical –Part 13 - Production Meetings
The late eighties and early nineties were the Golden Age of the one-off kamikaze musical. A steady stream of would be producers arrived at Heathrow, each with a suitcase full of money and each announced to the world at large and Theatreland in particular “I have a great idea for a musical”. Many of these poor deluded souls found their way to our offices in Bedford St. Among many others we churned out Carrie, Metropolis, Sherlock Holmes – The Musical, Which Witch, Children of Eden, Winnie, and these are the shows are that actually made it onto the stage, many mercifully did not. In every case there was a preliminary production meeting where the man with the suitcase full of money set out his stall, where possibilities were assessed and flights of fancy shot down. The worst moment at these early encounters was when the budding Ziegfield would pull a cassette from his pocket and play us some of the music. Normally the experience that followed ranged from embarrassing to excruciating but worst of all was the time that we were summoned to a very camp Chelsea apartment to discuss ‘Always’ , the Edward & Wallis-Simpson musical. The producer, who I think was also the author, seated us in comfy armchairs and then proceeded, with the aid of a cassette player and a few deftly arranged props, to perform the entire musical for us at point blank range. Another example of man’s inhumanity to man. Unsurprisingly, since our efforts not to giggle failed, we didn’t get that job.
The next phase in production meetings is much more businesslike, schedules, budgets, staffing etc are discussed but still in a relatively small forum. At this point realistic production and running budgets are set up, which in theory bear some relation to the show’s earning capacity and should predict a recoupment of the courageous investors’ money at some point in the next hundred years. As the production progresses layer upon layer of detail is added and the numbers of attendees at the meetings increase as the number of days before Previews dwindles. By the time rehearsals start the turn out at a production meeting will easily outnumber a matinee house in Scarborough. They come armed with fresh notepads and sharp pencils ready to fight for a few square feet of wing space or a couple of hours of stage time, they come to have the importance of their role in the Grand Plan recognised. Fat chance.
Project Model – Maintenance!
Production Manager Stewart Cowless’s first introduction to Maintenance! comes about as a result of a call from producer Alvin Toxteth. “Stewart I have a project I’d like you to look at. I think you’ll agree that it’s quite remarkable. Can you come and see us?” After checking Toxteth’s provisional production schedule against his commitments Cowless finds that he is only booked on two other shows at the time in question and cheerfully agrees to a meet. As he walks into the offices of Jolly Good Musicals Ltd he is greeted by Kevin Whimper, the General Manager. “Stewie I hope you’ve got your prescription pad with you. They’re all in need of medication in there” he says, gesturing at Toxteth’s inner sanctum.
With a wry smile Cowless goes into Toxteth’s office where he is introduced to an enormous pony-tailed man wearing black jeans and a black leather waistcoat over a white shirt, there is a fair amount of metalwork hanging round his neck. This is composer Gunther Eisenkopf who greets him with a bone crushing handshake before waving over the book and lyric writer Dermot O’Dainty. O’Dainty looks tiny beside Eisenkopf, he is a dapper charming figure familiar from TV panel games and pet food commercials.
“Ah, so you are the man who is going to make it all work” says O’Dainty
“Something like that”
Alvin Toxteth ushers them into chairs around his desk and starts to describe the project .to Cowless, who has had some warning from Kevin Whimper about the wackier aspects of the production and is ready to play a straight bat to whatever may come at him. However the limits of his self control are tested when Eisenkopf hits the button on a CD player and plays some of the songs, explaining as he does the effect that his East German upbringing and the neglect of his Stasi officer father has had on him. At one point he appears to wipe away a tear and Cowless, who judges the music to be dreadful, the up-tempo numbers a cross between Status Quo and the Ramones but less interesting, the ballads sounding like the dirges that Portugal enters for the Eurovision Song Contest, realises that an anodyne “Oh that’s fantastic! I particularly like the one with the tuba intro”. Isn’t going to cut it, but he is an old campaigner and knows how to handle this sort of stuff. He looks Eisenkopf dead in the eye and says earnestly, “It’s like an orange isn’t it. You know what I mean when I say it’s like an orange? I mean that your music has an outer skin that initially is hard to peel and gets under your fingernails but when you have peeled it you have the exhilaration of the juice”. Eisenkopf’s English is not quite good enough to take in what Cowless has said but he senses a compliment and beams happily. O’Dainty nods his head slowly and Alvin Toxteth eyes his production manager suspiciously. The meeting moves on to more practical matters and an hour and a half later Cowless is back on the street convinced that this particular project will die the death sooner rather than later.
Much to his surprise Maintenance! does continue to flourish, a creative team is put in place, budgets finalised, staff employed and Cowless himself signs a contract to steer the show into the Piccadilly Theatre.
During the first week of rehearsals the first full on production meeting is called with all the newly appointed HODs, stage management, and creative team invited. Cowless, who normally chairs these events, is a believer in the theory that you should never call a meeting unless you can be sure of its outcome. During the days preceding the meeting he methodically works his way round the various departments and creatives making sure that there will be no ambushes and that everything should go smoothly. The meeting convenes after rehearsals in the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance, the stage management arrange chairs in a large circle, the attendance will be good, even the marketing team are coming.
Eventually everyone takes a seat, opens their notebooks, and Cowless starts the production meeting.
“Thanks for coming everybody. This shouldn’t take too long if we all crack through it, as some of you will know I am Chairman of the Society for the Prevention of Long Meetings “ There are a couple of polite chuckles at this feeble attempt at humour.
“OK so I suggest that we take a quick look at the schedule then go round the room to pick up on any individual concerns or niggles.”
“Well if it’s the schedule that we are talking about I’m going to jump in first” says director Kevin McHarrowing. “This schedule is totally unworkable. I thought I made it clear at the outset that this is not a crappy formulaic juke box musical that you can just throw on the stage. These rehearsals need to have an emotional core, the cast will need to find their moral space on the stage. These are artists not squaddies who need to be drilled into submission”
Cowless, who has always thought of musical ensembles in exactly the latter terms, is about to reply when choreographer Bobby Brasso breaks in.
“Listen guys I’m the last person to deny anyone their moral space but I need placing time and I just don’t see it in this schedule.”
The floodgates open.
“Stewie dear we can’t do a costume parade in two hours. And we need to do it under the proper lights” chips in Buzz Phelps.
“No chance! We will barely have the rig in the air by the time that’s scheduled. When am I supposed to focus? In the middle of the bloody night I suppose! I need a decent blackout and no chippies banging about.”
As soon as Geoff Osram has finished sound designer Ian Geek plunges in.
“Stewart I don’t know what’s going on here but I can’t EQ the system, set the defaults on the digbys and defib the AJBs in two sessions and I certainly can’t do it until all the masking is in place and we certainly need to have the company in wigs from the Day 1 of the Tech”.
Wig mistress Natalie Tongs is aghast “Sorry but we weren’t expecting to have wigs until the second week of the tech at the earliest”.
Harry Redeye the video designer: “Look old chap we need line-up time and obviously we can’t do it while Geoff’s focussing but I’m sure you can find us a slot.”
Stage Manager Rowena Pettifer diffidently puts her toe into the increasingly stormy waters, “Look I don’t want to be difficult or anything but I don’t think we can start the tech on the Tuesday there will be too many Health & Safety issues to resolve before we can have the company on stage.”
“Bugger Health & Safety” says Alvin Toxteth succinctly. There is a short pause while everyone considers his point, a point that all can agree with.
“Er the photocall doesn’t seem to have made it onto the schedule. We need all the principals for 4 hours on the morning before the first Dress Rehearsal and when are we doing the EPK?” This identifies the smart young man that no one has recognised as one of the PR team.
Set designer Ulla Hoos, “Vhere is the paint call? Zhere is no paint call! The cobble stones vill certainly need touching up.” Her Latvian accent comes across more strongly as she becomes more stressed.
“Cobble stones! What fucking cobble stones?” Bobby Brasso’s camp nasal Bronx cuts across the room like a buzz saw. “How many times do I have to say this people? We can’t fucking dance on cobble stones.”
McHarrowing explodes “Listen they have cobble stones in Bohemia and they never stop fucking dancing! Bohemians are famous for their fucking dancing!”
“OK! OK! Perhaps the cobbles should be the subject of a separate meeting”. Cowless manages to get a word in, then Toxteth stands up, looks around the room before stating firmly “It’s obvious that the schedule needs to be finessed but no one in this room should be in any doubt that we will do our first Preview on the 27th come hell or high water. I hope that’s clear.”
Stewart Cowless sighs and thinks firstly that it is going to be a long evening and secondly that a career as a beachcomber somewhere warm with a relaxed attitude to drugs and prostitution is looking increasingly attractive.
The next phase in production meetings is much more businesslike, schedules, budgets, staffing etc are discussed but still in a relatively small forum. At this point realistic production and running budgets are set up, which in theory bear some relation to the show’s earning capacity and should predict a recoupment of the courageous investors’ money at some point in the next hundred years. As the production progresses layer upon layer of detail is added and the numbers of attendees at the meetings increase as the number of days before Previews dwindles. By the time rehearsals start the turn out at a production meeting will easily outnumber a matinee house in Scarborough. They come armed with fresh notepads and sharp pencils ready to fight for a few square feet of wing space or a couple of hours of stage time, they come to have the importance of their role in the Grand Plan recognised. Fat chance.
Project Model – Maintenance!
Production Manager Stewart Cowless’s first introduction to Maintenance! comes about as a result of a call from producer Alvin Toxteth. “Stewart I have a project I’d like you to look at. I think you’ll agree that it’s quite remarkable. Can you come and see us?” After checking Toxteth’s provisional production schedule against his commitments Cowless finds that he is only booked on two other shows at the time in question and cheerfully agrees to a meet. As he walks into the offices of Jolly Good Musicals Ltd he is greeted by Kevin Whimper, the General Manager. “Stewie I hope you’ve got your prescription pad with you. They’re all in need of medication in there” he says, gesturing at Toxteth’s inner sanctum.
With a wry smile Cowless goes into Toxteth’s office where he is introduced to an enormous pony-tailed man wearing black jeans and a black leather waistcoat over a white shirt, there is a fair amount of metalwork hanging round his neck. This is composer Gunther Eisenkopf who greets him with a bone crushing handshake before waving over the book and lyric writer Dermot O’Dainty. O’Dainty looks tiny beside Eisenkopf, he is a dapper charming figure familiar from TV panel games and pet food commercials.
“Ah, so you are the man who is going to make it all work” says O’Dainty
“Something like that”
Alvin Toxteth ushers them into chairs around his desk and starts to describe the project .to Cowless, who has had some warning from Kevin Whimper about the wackier aspects of the production and is ready to play a straight bat to whatever may come at him. However the limits of his self control are tested when Eisenkopf hits the button on a CD player and plays some of the songs, explaining as he does the effect that his East German upbringing and the neglect of his Stasi officer father has had on him. At one point he appears to wipe away a tear and Cowless, who judges the music to be dreadful, the up-tempo numbers a cross between Status Quo and the Ramones but less interesting, the ballads sounding like the dirges that Portugal enters for the Eurovision Song Contest, realises that an anodyne “Oh that’s fantastic! I particularly like the one with the tuba intro”. Isn’t going to cut it, but he is an old campaigner and knows how to handle this sort of stuff. He looks Eisenkopf dead in the eye and says earnestly, “It’s like an orange isn’t it. You know what I mean when I say it’s like an orange? I mean that your music has an outer skin that initially is hard to peel and gets under your fingernails but when you have peeled it you have the exhilaration of the juice”. Eisenkopf’s English is not quite good enough to take in what Cowless has said but he senses a compliment and beams happily. O’Dainty nods his head slowly and Alvin Toxteth eyes his production manager suspiciously. The meeting moves on to more practical matters and an hour and a half later Cowless is back on the street convinced that this particular project will die the death sooner rather than later.
Much to his surprise Maintenance! does continue to flourish, a creative team is put in place, budgets finalised, staff employed and Cowless himself signs a contract to steer the show into the Piccadilly Theatre.
During the first week of rehearsals the first full on production meeting is called with all the newly appointed HODs, stage management, and creative team invited. Cowless, who normally chairs these events, is a believer in the theory that you should never call a meeting unless you can be sure of its outcome. During the days preceding the meeting he methodically works his way round the various departments and creatives making sure that there will be no ambushes and that everything should go smoothly. The meeting convenes after rehearsals in the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance, the stage management arrange chairs in a large circle, the attendance will be good, even the marketing team are coming.
Eventually everyone takes a seat, opens their notebooks, and Cowless starts the production meeting.
“Thanks for coming everybody. This shouldn’t take too long if we all crack through it, as some of you will know I am Chairman of the Society for the Prevention of Long Meetings “ There are a couple of polite chuckles at this feeble attempt at humour.
“OK so I suggest that we take a quick look at the schedule then go round the room to pick up on any individual concerns or niggles.”
“Well if it’s the schedule that we are talking about I’m going to jump in first” says director Kevin McHarrowing. “This schedule is totally unworkable. I thought I made it clear at the outset that this is not a crappy formulaic juke box musical that you can just throw on the stage. These rehearsals need to have an emotional core, the cast will need to find their moral space on the stage. These are artists not squaddies who need to be drilled into submission”
Cowless, who has always thought of musical ensembles in exactly the latter terms, is about to reply when choreographer Bobby Brasso breaks in.
“Listen guys I’m the last person to deny anyone their moral space but I need placing time and I just don’t see it in this schedule.”
The floodgates open.
“Stewie dear we can’t do a costume parade in two hours. And we need to do it under the proper lights” chips in Buzz Phelps.
“No chance! We will barely have the rig in the air by the time that’s scheduled. When am I supposed to focus? In the middle of the bloody night I suppose! I need a decent blackout and no chippies banging about.”
As soon as Geoff Osram has finished sound designer Ian Geek plunges in.
“Stewart I don’t know what’s going on here but I can’t EQ the system, set the defaults on the digbys and defib the AJBs in two sessions and I certainly can’t do it until all the masking is in place and we certainly need to have the company in wigs from the Day 1 of the Tech”.
Wig mistress Natalie Tongs is aghast “Sorry but we weren’t expecting to have wigs until the second week of the tech at the earliest”.
Harry Redeye the video designer: “Look old chap we need line-up time and obviously we can’t do it while Geoff’s focussing but I’m sure you can find us a slot.”
Stage Manager Rowena Pettifer diffidently puts her toe into the increasingly stormy waters, “Look I don’t want to be difficult or anything but I don’t think we can start the tech on the Tuesday there will be too many Health & Safety issues to resolve before we can have the company on stage.”
“Bugger Health & Safety” says Alvin Toxteth succinctly. There is a short pause while everyone considers his point, a point that all can agree with.
“Er the photocall doesn’t seem to have made it onto the schedule. We need all the principals for 4 hours on the morning before the first Dress Rehearsal and when are we doing the EPK?” This identifies the smart young man that no one has recognised as one of the PR team.
Set designer Ulla Hoos, “Vhere is the paint call? Zhere is no paint call! The cobble stones vill certainly need touching up.” Her Latvian accent comes across more strongly as she becomes more stressed.
“Cobble stones! What fucking cobble stones?” Bobby Brasso’s camp nasal Bronx cuts across the room like a buzz saw. “How many times do I have to say this people? We can’t fucking dance on cobble stones.”
McHarrowing explodes “Listen they have cobble stones in Bohemia and they never stop fucking dancing! Bohemians are famous for their fucking dancing!”
“OK! OK! Perhaps the cobbles should be the subject of a separate meeting”. Cowless manages to get a word in, then Toxteth stands up, looks around the room before stating firmly “It’s obvious that the schedule needs to be finessed but no one in this room should be in any doubt that we will do our first Preview on the 27th come hell or high water. I hope that’s clear.”
Stewart Cowless sighs and thinks firstly that it is going to be a long evening and secondly that a career as a beachcomber somewhere warm with a relaxed attitude to drugs and prostitution is looking increasingly attractive.
Friday, 8 May 2009
On a late August day in 2004 I checked into the Radisson Hotel in Moscow. The receptionist chirpily said “Ah Mr Irwin you are staying with us for 49 nights”. My heart sank, from previous recce visits I knew that this was not a good idea. What follows are the despatches that I sent home as we progressed. Some of my readers will have read them before but there is a whole new generation of We Will Rock You crew who might enjoy them so I make no apologies.
Moscow Diary 1
Well here we are on the 7th day of the load –in and we progress slowly but steadily. We have some lighting hung, we have 80% of the showdeck down, we have ripped out the substage ready for lift installation. Sadly the sound rig has not yet arrived but is promised for today. So our Production Sound Engineer, Chris Vass, and Autograph’s representative, PJ, have had plenty of time to be tourists, unfortunately for them they were both laid low by food poisoning on the second night, proof positive that there is a God.
We are still trying to sort out the generator problem and we are not nailed down on a video playback system. A laser contractor was here today and seemed to know what he was talking about.
The relationship with the theatre is very tiresome. Simple tasks like getting doors unlocked require a great deal of negotiation. Putting the dimmer racks on the fly floor created a fair old rumpus locals being convinced that the fly floor would collapse. No one seemed reassured when I pointed out that we had removed 2 tons of counterweights from the fly floor before we put the racks up there. Almost everything we do is greeted with howls of outrage and much shaking of heads by leathery old gentlemen who probably remember the good old days when Stalin sat in the stalls and a good time was had by all. Security is provided by unsmiling young men in dark suits who prowl the corridors and foyers. We had one particularly joyous moment when one of these thugs refused to let Ian Moulds, our production electrician, open one of his flight cases unless he had written authority from Sergei Baranov.
Sergei also prowls the building dispensing humour and charm in equal measure!
The Radisson Hotel is about 20 mins from the theatre depending on the traffic and is a typical international hotel, biggish rooms, proper bath, excellent breakfast and some of the best looking prostitutes I have seen for a long time hanging round the bar.
Travelling by car in Moscow can be exhilarating, one should recall the old Russian proverb “ In the land of the Russian driver the panel beater is king.” The Metro is highly recommended (Chechen suicide bombers permitting!) each station superbly and individually decorated. I’ve never had to wait more than 30 sec for a train.
Food comes in different shapes and sizes. There are the restaurants in the hotel mall which have menus quaintly priced in ‘conventional units’, a coy way of describing dollars at a ruinous exchange rate. Then there are top of the range Moscow restaurants like the one with a ‘Ukrainian’ village in the middle of it complete with live goats, hens and pretty peasant girls. At the rear of the theatre is Buffet No7 which serves decent Russian food and to the right of FOH is a café which is not only OK but cheap as chips. There is also a small canteen in the basement of the theatre where you could probably live for a hundred years and not spend a week’s per diems.
To sum up we are undoubtedly behind schedule and it’s bloody hard work! Lost in translation! Phooee! We don’t just lose things in translation here, we kidnap them, torture them to death, boil them in oil, chop them up and serve them on toast!
Moscow Diary 2
We have completed the second week of the load-in. The sound rig turned up 8 days late (a little local difficulty in Lithuania) but our sound and light teams have made good progress. They plough on dragging their local crews kicking and screaming along with them. They show great forbearance and tempers have not been lost. Sadly I don’t do quite so well in this respect. I tend to be irritable by 10.00am, angry by midday, homicidal by 5.00pm and completely out of control and in need of restraint by 8.00pm.
The Estrada itself is a major source of frustration, it is locked in a bizarre Stalinist time-warp. The whole building is severely overmanned with elderly people who do nothing. As you enter the stage door there is normally a cheery lady to greet you though sometimes it is a malevolent looking chap who looks disconcertingly like the vampire in Nosferatu. Sat a few feet from the stage door person is another man whose sole responsibility seems to be to sign out dressing room keys. Sat next to him is another man who idly watches a CCTV view of the stage door. Once you have run this gauntlet you may encounter on stage a man wearing a red arm band. I assumed that perhaps he was taking part in Communist Pride Week but no, apparently this armband denotes that he is in overall charge of the stage. A surprise to me as I have never seen him do or say anything.
Unlocking doors! Aargh! Every morning requires a struggle to unlock the doors to the foyers, where we store our equipment, and to the circle where the control room is. I now know how the Russians won the battle of Stalingrad. They simply withdrew very slowly locking all the doors behind them as they went until the Germans went insane.
The hole in the forestage, the muddy hole in the forestage (which is surprising considering the stage is on the 3rd floor) where our lift will go remains the centre of much speculation. Every day a new team of men arrive to stand in the hole for a few minutes, shake their heads then depart. We are promised that the lift will be installed on the 18th!
The scenery is notable for it’s absence. But we do now have a band platform which has been well made and major developments are imminent.
The now notorious 7.00pm meetings have taken on the quality of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. We have them at a long table in a basement room in the theatre. I fully expect people to cry ‘No room! No room!’ as I approach the table. Sergei (known affectionately as Caligula by his staff) takes the chair and explains how the meeting will be run. He will ask all the questions (and he asks me specifically never to interrupt him) and then at the end we can remind him of any questions that he might have forgotten to ask. He then proceeds to browbeat his staff and scenery contractors into making promises that they cannot possibly keep. The other night at the end of the meeting he turned to me and said ‘Everything is OK, all the scenery will be delivered on the 18th’.
I glanced across the table at Oleg, the main scenery contractor, who was sitting with his head in his hands, and I thought ‘I have just been told the biggest lie since Hitler said he had no more territorial demands in Europe’.
All I can say is that my staff (who shamefully tend to giggle at these meetings) and I await the 18th with bated breath.
Away from the theatre news from the costume dept is reassuring and I have seen some good wigs. I haven’t seen any rehearsals, which are taking place on the other side of Moscow.
We have been talking to staff and Sergei has taken on 2 showcallers neither of whom have any experience. At our meeting I explained the task ahead of them, the lovely Julia gazed at me uncomprehending but beautiful while Ashod furiously wrote down every single word that I said. An analogy leaps to mind, picture a packed 747 (crippled child, singing nun etc), the pilot and co-pilot collapse after eating the prawn cocktail, these 2 kids have to land the 747! Tracey we need you!
At present there is no stage manager worthy of the name.
Our best signing is probably Seva, video operator, who came for an interview, watched the Perth video, turned his nose up at the video scheme proposed by a local contractor, went away and designed a system himself which he then sourced and demonstrated in the theatre 2 days later (on our cheap and cheerful Russian screens). He managed to demonstrate every effect required in the show within 15 minutes with the exception of time code synchronisation. He may look as if he’s only twelve years old but the boy’s a genius. Willie Williams and Smasher are providing a non-synch version of Radio Ga Ga and One Vision.
Possibly the biggest triumph of the week is the completion of the re-translation of the script from Russian back into English so that we have a script that lines up word for word, so that we Brits can work out where the hell we are in the Cyrillic script during the Tech. This task was accomplished by Tania, our excellent and vivacious translator, and I. Interesting to note that in Russia Gazza Fizza becomes Goolya Figga and Meat and Britney become Phil & Alla, the Russian Pearl Carr and Teddie Johnson of their generation (younger readers may need to refer to the Encyclopaedia Britannica at this point).
Time for tourism has been limited but I have made it to the Bolshoi twice to see Mussorgski’s mighty operas Khovanschina and Boris Godunov. The glorious 7 tiered auditorium and 160 odd Russian chorus belting out my favourite operas makes the whole trip worthwhile. It may be heretical to say this but who needs Rock & Roll.
Moscow Diary 3
Exactly 3 weeks in and progress is slow and steady. Sadly all the scenery was not delivered on the day directed by our esteemed producer but it has been coming in fits and starts. Some of it is excellent, some of it is OK and some of it is gobsmackinzitpickingfuckinshite. Best is the Heartbreak/Wasteland Truck which, after 2 days attention from some decent painters looks the business. The Wasteland side has looks nothing like the Australian version but has an energy all of it’s own. The Bar and the Ga Ga Statues are also excellent. The booby prizes go to the small van, which looks as though my 5 year old daughter and her class mates have pooled their stocks of Play-Doh and sculpted a psychedelic dodgem car, and the Wasteland Hanging which could be a Forest Glade in Les Sylphides. Both are for the tip!
But does the lift work? Do the Ga Ga Treads and the Killer Queen Throne slip gracefully up and down stage? In your dreams!
Sound and Video are in reasonable shape. Lighting would also be in good shape were it not for the Generator. Don’t mention the war! Don’t mention the generator! This was the instruction given to Ian, our Production Electrician, by Mr Baranov in a rare moment of exasperation. However the generator crisis dribbles on from day to day. We have known for 6 months that we need a generator and here we are days behind schedule and still we can’t turn the rig on. Eventually a generator has been found in Moscow, but not the cable to connect it to the theatre. When the cable did turn up there was a problem with the connection which resulted in a bizarre moment at last night’s 7 o clock meeting when Rubin, the local chief electrician, asked Ian if he had lots of black PVC tape with him. Ian asked why. Rubin said that they were going to make a temporary connection in the Mains room which they were proposing to insulate with PVC tape. A 300 amp connection! Bloody Norah!
There are many mysteries here at the Estrada which remain to be unravelled.
Who cleans the stage is one of them. The crew don’t do it, but there is a lady in a green pinny who pops on stage now and then, surveys the carnage for a few moments, nervously sweeps a few square feet in the US corner and then scuttles away. We have christened this lady Beryl. But even the Beryls of this world have their day in the sun. A few days ago Mr Baranov arrived at the theatre and decreed that, in honour of Jim, Brian and Roger’s visit, we should all stop what we were doing and clear the stage completely so that Beryl could vacuum & mop. There was more than an air of triumphalism in the swing of Beryl’s mop.
Another mystery is the identity and role of three men who arrive fairly early (by Russian standards), build themselves a little lean-to shelter out of old scraps of ply in the scene dock, and then play backgammon until 3.00pm when they leave. None of our contractors or the theatre lay claim to them.
The problem of who our stage manager is to be was confirmed in a curious way the other day. Mr Baranov has nominated a chap called Sergei who has 25 years experience in the theatre. What he spent these 25 years doing remains unclear. I have expressed my doubts about this appointment. I personally wouldn’t book this guy to manage a troupe of performing goldfish. Anyway I was in the SL scene dock discussing the responsibilities of a stage manager with this Sergei via our talented and charming interpreter Tania, (keeping our voices down so as not to disturb the backgammon players) when we were approached by the eldest member of the theatre staff, the one with the red arm band who does bugger all. He told us a curious tale from long ago of a local stage manager of Mongolian descent named Kur-Li, who, on his deathbed, decreed that his clipboard should be concealed within the very fabric of the building until someone sufficiently worthy to carry it should come along. At that very moment I felt the floor beneath my feet begin to vibrate, the fluorescent tubes overhead began to flicker, cracks appeared in the wall in front of us, chunks of masonry fell away to bounce unconvincingly on the floor. And there within the wall, bathed in a golden light was a clipboard, the clipboard of Kur-Li. Sergei stepped forward unhesitatingly and took it in both hands.He is the ‘Chosen One’.He turned to me, his eyes glowing with an inner fire, he looked down at the clipboard and said “What is it? What do I do with it?” I sighed and went back onstage to watch paint dry.
Our tiny theatrical expat community has doubled in size with the arrival of Bruce Ramus, Richard Sharratt, Ben Milton & Smasher. We are all looking forward to the tech rehearsal period with some anticipation. Rarely in the history of musical theatre have so many factors been stacked on the side of chaos and mayhem. We have our stage manager, ‘The Chosen One’, we have our 2 show callers (2??) Ashod, the speed writer, and Julia, beautiful but uncomprehending. We have an entirely green crew, who I gather will not be consistent, anyone may turn up. We will be working with 3 translators, one on the stage ring, one on the lighting ring and one with sound. We have a Russian director and choreographer, neither of whom have done a musical before. And possibly best of all we have a producer who may jump on stage at any moment and organise the scene changes personally. So the stage is set for a humdinger.
The schedule is shot to pieces but no one seems very interested in previews so I guess they get the push.
Traffic habits in Moscow continue to fascinate and terrify. Interestingly there are absolutely no cyclists. We assume that they have all been killed. Moscow is running it’s own experiment in Natural Selection. They are breeding a race of aggressive pot bellied men with big cars and small dicks (sorry, a bit of big car envy crept in there). All the eco friendly caring sharing cycling Nigel Planer look-a-likes have been brutally expunged from the gene pool.
Russian history hangs like grey pall over everything here. The complex of up-market flats of which the Estrada theatre is a part was built in the early 30’s to house high-up Communist party apparatchiks. Locals tell us that not one of the apartments here missed having its inhabitants butchered or exiled at some point in the Terror of the 1930’s and 40’s. Presumably those who survived retired to bungalows on the Black Sea coast with names like ‘Dunmassmurderin’ and ‘Dungulagin’. Mind you after working here for 3 weeks mass murder comes top of my list for things to do on a rainy afternoon.
Moscow Diary 4
We have been here exactly a month and Russia is as exasperating now as the day we got off the plane. We all feel that our responses to normal life have been coarsened by our experiences. This is in part due to the everyday rudeness of your average Russian, they insult each other with regularity and gusto. Waitresses and shop assistants are treated with finger snapping contempt which they are quite capable of returning with interest. Even the most uncontroversial discussions on stage can turn into a shouting match. The worst insult you can hurl is apparently ‘pederast!’ which Mr Baranov frequently uses in his discussions with Yuri Antizersky (Clement Freud look-a-like) on the subject of the late arrival of the scenery. Even Tracey Ransom, who has only been here 3 days coaching our show caller Julia, has started swearing like a trooper.
“……and on the seventh day Sergei Baranov said let there be light!” And on the twelfth day there was light. Gordon Bennett! What a performance getting the generator running. Cables not long enough, wrong size, planning permits etc etc. We’ve known about this for 6 months. The abject failure of Russian technology and planning so far on this project has led us to speculate on how these people managed to put a man in space. We pass a splendid statue of Yuri Gagarin on our way to the theatre and have come to the conclusion that he must either have had a profound death wish or been forced into the space capsule at gunpoint.
But with power to the lighting rig and a couple of days rough programming from Bruce we decided to go straight into a tech with the actors. Finding a crew hasn’t been straightforward. Our stage manager, Sergei, the ‘Chosen One’ was de-selected by Mr Baranov almost immediately and replaced, to our dismay, at one of our knock-about 7.00pm meetings, by Vladimir who is the technical manager for the building. This arrangement lasted for several minutes until after the meeting when Vladimir came to me and said ‘I’ve not agreed this with Baranov. I won’t do it!.’ So we remain consistent, at no point on this production have we had so much as the toenail clippings of a stage management team. What we need is a team of nice, middle class, work ethic driven folks ready to die for the sake of fly Q 22. Sadly we have no one, we have no paperwork from rehearsal, no moves written down, no script revisions, no idea at any given moment who should be playing whom from the innumerable permutations of cast. The crewing has also been a bit bumpy. Four follow spot operators duly presented themselves for a day’s training, three of them took one look at their truss positions and promptly left. They were replaced the next day by more cannon fodder who were bullied into position. The stage crew, who are in part made up of the backgammon players, have also been very flexible in their approach to the job. One of my biggest problems with the running crew has been to convince any of them that being in the building is a necessary part of the rehearsal process. They drift off at any time without so much as a by your leave. Seva, our Golden Boy video operator, has been the worst offender in this respect. Local crew morale has picked up with the arrival of the cast in the theatre, specifically the lady members of the company. The expat WWRY crew here are definitely of the opinion that, from a heterosexual male point of view, this is undoubtedly the best looking Rock You company world-wide. But perhaps we have all been away from her indoorski for too long. As a sage old Master Carpenter once said to me, ‘Ted, once you’ve done a couple of all-nighters they all look like Marilyn Monroe’.
The show is entirely in Russian apart from the last three numbers and it’s fair to say differs in emphasis markedly from the UK version. Sexual politics are somewhere in the Stone Age here so Scaramouche doesn’t get all the good lines and in one of the van scenes sobs uncontrollably and is comforted in manly fashion by Galileo (our no1 Galileo is blessed with what are apparently Georgian good looks, black hair, hook nose and eyebrows that need strimming). All the dialogue scenes seem much longer than normal and are played to the hilt, no gentle ironies or self mockery here, dramatic points are hammered down with all the subtlety of Canadian seal hunters armed with baseball bats. The Van Scene! Our director Dimitri Astrakhan, has boldly taken on the ‘Curse of the Van’ (general readers may want to skip this bit). All of us who have been associated with the production for a while know that the two Van scenes in Act 2 present a scenic challenge in that getting the damn thing on and off stage can be a problem. This difficulty has been solved in Australia & Vegas by having the Van come up on a lift. This was our plan here, but a combination of architectural problems and the bloody minded intransigence of the Estrada management has forced the lift right to the front edge of the stage. Dimitri declared that the scene was unplayable in this position and so we are pushing our Play-Doh dodgem on from DSR. He also worried about the lack of scenic background in Van II and when I said that it was a short scene covering the transition into the Killer Queen Boudoir he replied “No! No! It’s a very complex dramatic scene”. A few minutes later he was at the back of the stalls quoting Brecht at me in broken English, at which point I felt it was probably time for a lie-down.
But for all the problems at last we are under way with a cast on stage, a music dept that is currently missing 50% of it’s cues, the lovely Julia is calling the show in harness with Miss Ransom who doubles as Musical Supervisor on occasion and above all we have a lot of shouting. Russians love to shout and it’s bloody exhausting listening to them all day.
As we progress through the grinding hell of the Tech time for excursions has been limited but a chance conversation with a business Brit in the hotel bar tempted me out after rehearsal one day. He said that he travelled regularly from Kursk Station and that the area around there was distinctly dodgy. Well the opportunity to combine a bit of train spotting with some low life research was catnip to me, so off I went. Sadly the low life bit was about as racy as Dorking though the area is significantly poorer than the affluent area of Moscow where we spend most of our time. There are far fewer vagrants visible here than in London and very little litter and no graffiti. The trains are good though. Russian sleeping cars have a smartly dressed lady attendant standing in every door ready to greet the passengers and there is a smell of coal fires from the stove in each carriage on which a samovar is kept going all day.
Moscow Fashion Note: For those of you planning to make the trip for the Press Night and who want to cut a dash in Moscow Society you should be aware that Mr Baranov is not the only one who wears silly pointy shoes. They all do. One is in serious danger of multiple ankle high stab wounds at any moment this city.
Apart from there being no cyclists here, there are also no sandwiches and no whistling. The notion of beetroot and potato on rye has not caught on, not one of the local kiosks or our beloved local supermarket (apparently the most expensive in Moscow) carry a sandwich of any kind. Whistling is traditionally banned in theatres worldwide, but Smasher was sternly told by a policeman to stop whistling while walking across a bridge near our hotel. Overt displays of happiness are frowned on as being improbable.
And finally I must relate a sorry tale which encapsulates all that has made this project the trial it has been. A few nights ago I spotted Mr Baranov and Yuri Antizersky talking at the back of the stalls. They were arguing over a sheet of paper and as I approached they looked more shifty than usual. I could see that they were holding a Russian copy of the prop list. I asked if there was a problem and they said “No! no!” and wandered off. Later I interrogated Yuri and, yes folks, you guessed it, a sizeable chunk of the prop list (including the Yuppie Canes) had just been ordered, 3 days into the tech.
I get a day off from all this jollity when I fly to Munich in a couple of days to check out the Cologne set which is being built there. Onlookers at Munich airport may be surprised to see an Englishman on his hands and knees kissing the tarmac.
Moscow Diary 5
Phew! Made it!
Yes on the 17th Oct 2004 Lazarus walked, water turned to wine and we had a premier that wasn’t half bad. The final preview was described by Bruce Ramus as the “worst Rock You ever”, so the transformation was miraculous. Everything worked, even the Killer Queen Throne lift and rotate which was still being teched an hour before the show. The company gave their all which is a lot and sometimes you may not want it all but you get it anyway. The Russian version is longer and wordier than the UK model but the audience seem to be engaged by the dialogue scenes. Now and then a ripple of applause runs round the house as if to say ‘Good point, well made!’. The opening captions don’t get a laugh even though I am reliably informed by our lovely and talented translator, Tania, that 2045 reads “Ben Elton burnt at stake by religious zealots in Turkmenistan”.
The previews, indeed all the rehearsals, were a shambles with endless permutations of band and cast driving the sound boys demented. And the shouting! Endless, endless shouting.
What does the future hold? Well with no technical or stage management it’s hard to believe that all will go smoothly. Yuri Antizerski explained the Russian approach, which goes along the lines of letting things get into such an appalling state that you have to do something and in the end you just get through. That’s certainly the case with this production.
The Party was held in a huge low ceiling ballroom within the precincts of the Kremlin. It had less atmosphere than the baggage-claim area at Dusseldorf airport (where I am a regular visitor) but there was plenty to drink and eat, and of course Brian, Roger and the company rocking on stage. Excellent.
And the next day we made our escape back to the free world. Never is a rash word to use but until they sell Cornettos in Hell I will steer well clear of Moscow. On the plus side are the Metro, the Bolshoi and hordes of beautiful women in pointy shoes. On the minus side just about everything else.
Moscow Diary 1
Well here we are on the 7th day of the load –in and we progress slowly but steadily. We have some lighting hung, we have 80% of the showdeck down, we have ripped out the substage ready for lift installation. Sadly the sound rig has not yet arrived but is promised for today. So our Production Sound Engineer, Chris Vass, and Autograph’s representative, PJ, have had plenty of time to be tourists, unfortunately for them they were both laid low by food poisoning on the second night, proof positive that there is a God.
We are still trying to sort out the generator problem and we are not nailed down on a video playback system. A laser contractor was here today and seemed to know what he was talking about.
The relationship with the theatre is very tiresome. Simple tasks like getting doors unlocked require a great deal of negotiation. Putting the dimmer racks on the fly floor created a fair old rumpus locals being convinced that the fly floor would collapse. No one seemed reassured when I pointed out that we had removed 2 tons of counterweights from the fly floor before we put the racks up there. Almost everything we do is greeted with howls of outrage and much shaking of heads by leathery old gentlemen who probably remember the good old days when Stalin sat in the stalls and a good time was had by all. Security is provided by unsmiling young men in dark suits who prowl the corridors and foyers. We had one particularly joyous moment when one of these thugs refused to let Ian Moulds, our production electrician, open one of his flight cases unless he had written authority from Sergei Baranov.
Sergei also prowls the building dispensing humour and charm in equal measure!
The Radisson Hotel is about 20 mins from the theatre depending on the traffic and is a typical international hotel, biggish rooms, proper bath, excellent breakfast and some of the best looking prostitutes I have seen for a long time hanging round the bar.
Travelling by car in Moscow can be exhilarating, one should recall the old Russian proverb “ In the land of the Russian driver the panel beater is king.” The Metro is highly recommended (Chechen suicide bombers permitting!) each station superbly and individually decorated. I’ve never had to wait more than 30 sec for a train.
Food comes in different shapes and sizes. There are the restaurants in the hotel mall which have menus quaintly priced in ‘conventional units’, a coy way of describing dollars at a ruinous exchange rate. Then there are top of the range Moscow restaurants like the one with a ‘Ukrainian’ village in the middle of it complete with live goats, hens and pretty peasant girls. At the rear of the theatre is Buffet No7 which serves decent Russian food and to the right of FOH is a café which is not only OK but cheap as chips. There is also a small canteen in the basement of the theatre where you could probably live for a hundred years and not spend a week’s per diems.
To sum up we are undoubtedly behind schedule and it’s bloody hard work! Lost in translation! Phooee! We don’t just lose things in translation here, we kidnap them, torture them to death, boil them in oil, chop them up and serve them on toast!
Moscow Diary 2
We have completed the second week of the load-in. The sound rig turned up 8 days late (a little local difficulty in Lithuania) but our sound and light teams have made good progress. They plough on dragging their local crews kicking and screaming along with them. They show great forbearance and tempers have not been lost. Sadly I don’t do quite so well in this respect. I tend to be irritable by 10.00am, angry by midday, homicidal by 5.00pm and completely out of control and in need of restraint by 8.00pm.
The Estrada itself is a major source of frustration, it is locked in a bizarre Stalinist time-warp. The whole building is severely overmanned with elderly people who do nothing. As you enter the stage door there is normally a cheery lady to greet you though sometimes it is a malevolent looking chap who looks disconcertingly like the vampire in Nosferatu. Sat a few feet from the stage door person is another man whose sole responsibility seems to be to sign out dressing room keys. Sat next to him is another man who idly watches a CCTV view of the stage door. Once you have run this gauntlet you may encounter on stage a man wearing a red arm band. I assumed that perhaps he was taking part in Communist Pride Week but no, apparently this armband denotes that he is in overall charge of the stage. A surprise to me as I have never seen him do or say anything.
Unlocking doors! Aargh! Every morning requires a struggle to unlock the doors to the foyers, where we store our equipment, and to the circle where the control room is. I now know how the Russians won the battle of Stalingrad. They simply withdrew very slowly locking all the doors behind them as they went until the Germans went insane.
The hole in the forestage, the muddy hole in the forestage (which is surprising considering the stage is on the 3rd floor) where our lift will go remains the centre of much speculation. Every day a new team of men arrive to stand in the hole for a few minutes, shake their heads then depart. We are promised that the lift will be installed on the 18th!
The scenery is notable for it’s absence. But we do now have a band platform which has been well made and major developments are imminent.
The now notorious 7.00pm meetings have taken on the quality of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. We have them at a long table in a basement room in the theatre. I fully expect people to cry ‘No room! No room!’ as I approach the table. Sergei (known affectionately as Caligula by his staff) takes the chair and explains how the meeting will be run. He will ask all the questions (and he asks me specifically never to interrupt him) and then at the end we can remind him of any questions that he might have forgotten to ask. He then proceeds to browbeat his staff and scenery contractors into making promises that they cannot possibly keep. The other night at the end of the meeting he turned to me and said ‘Everything is OK, all the scenery will be delivered on the 18th’.
I glanced across the table at Oleg, the main scenery contractor, who was sitting with his head in his hands, and I thought ‘I have just been told the biggest lie since Hitler said he had no more territorial demands in Europe’.
All I can say is that my staff (who shamefully tend to giggle at these meetings) and I await the 18th with bated breath.
Away from the theatre news from the costume dept is reassuring and I have seen some good wigs. I haven’t seen any rehearsals, which are taking place on the other side of Moscow.
We have been talking to staff and Sergei has taken on 2 showcallers neither of whom have any experience. At our meeting I explained the task ahead of them, the lovely Julia gazed at me uncomprehending but beautiful while Ashod furiously wrote down every single word that I said. An analogy leaps to mind, picture a packed 747 (crippled child, singing nun etc), the pilot and co-pilot collapse after eating the prawn cocktail, these 2 kids have to land the 747! Tracey we need you!
At present there is no stage manager worthy of the name.
Our best signing is probably Seva, video operator, who came for an interview, watched the Perth video, turned his nose up at the video scheme proposed by a local contractor, went away and designed a system himself which he then sourced and demonstrated in the theatre 2 days later (on our cheap and cheerful Russian screens). He managed to demonstrate every effect required in the show within 15 minutes with the exception of time code synchronisation. He may look as if he’s only twelve years old but the boy’s a genius. Willie Williams and Smasher are providing a non-synch version of Radio Ga Ga and One Vision.
Possibly the biggest triumph of the week is the completion of the re-translation of the script from Russian back into English so that we have a script that lines up word for word, so that we Brits can work out where the hell we are in the Cyrillic script during the Tech. This task was accomplished by Tania, our excellent and vivacious translator, and I. Interesting to note that in Russia Gazza Fizza becomes Goolya Figga and Meat and Britney become Phil & Alla, the Russian Pearl Carr and Teddie Johnson of their generation (younger readers may need to refer to the Encyclopaedia Britannica at this point).
Time for tourism has been limited but I have made it to the Bolshoi twice to see Mussorgski’s mighty operas Khovanschina and Boris Godunov. The glorious 7 tiered auditorium and 160 odd Russian chorus belting out my favourite operas makes the whole trip worthwhile. It may be heretical to say this but who needs Rock & Roll.
Moscow Diary 3
Exactly 3 weeks in and progress is slow and steady. Sadly all the scenery was not delivered on the day directed by our esteemed producer but it has been coming in fits and starts. Some of it is excellent, some of it is OK and some of it is gobsmackinzitpickingfuckinshite. Best is the Heartbreak/Wasteland Truck which, after 2 days attention from some decent painters looks the business. The Wasteland side has looks nothing like the Australian version but has an energy all of it’s own. The Bar and the Ga Ga Statues are also excellent. The booby prizes go to the small van, which looks as though my 5 year old daughter and her class mates have pooled their stocks of Play-Doh and sculpted a psychedelic dodgem car, and the Wasteland Hanging which could be a Forest Glade in Les Sylphides. Both are for the tip!
But does the lift work? Do the Ga Ga Treads and the Killer Queen Throne slip gracefully up and down stage? In your dreams!
Sound and Video are in reasonable shape. Lighting would also be in good shape were it not for the Generator. Don’t mention the war! Don’t mention the generator! This was the instruction given to Ian, our Production Electrician, by Mr Baranov in a rare moment of exasperation. However the generator crisis dribbles on from day to day. We have known for 6 months that we need a generator and here we are days behind schedule and still we can’t turn the rig on. Eventually a generator has been found in Moscow, but not the cable to connect it to the theatre. When the cable did turn up there was a problem with the connection which resulted in a bizarre moment at last night’s 7 o clock meeting when Rubin, the local chief electrician, asked Ian if he had lots of black PVC tape with him. Ian asked why. Rubin said that they were going to make a temporary connection in the Mains room which they were proposing to insulate with PVC tape. A 300 amp connection! Bloody Norah!
There are many mysteries here at the Estrada which remain to be unravelled.
Who cleans the stage is one of them. The crew don’t do it, but there is a lady in a green pinny who pops on stage now and then, surveys the carnage for a few moments, nervously sweeps a few square feet in the US corner and then scuttles away. We have christened this lady Beryl. But even the Beryls of this world have their day in the sun. A few days ago Mr Baranov arrived at the theatre and decreed that, in honour of Jim, Brian and Roger’s visit, we should all stop what we were doing and clear the stage completely so that Beryl could vacuum & mop. There was more than an air of triumphalism in the swing of Beryl’s mop.
Another mystery is the identity and role of three men who arrive fairly early (by Russian standards), build themselves a little lean-to shelter out of old scraps of ply in the scene dock, and then play backgammon until 3.00pm when they leave. None of our contractors or the theatre lay claim to them.
The problem of who our stage manager is to be was confirmed in a curious way the other day. Mr Baranov has nominated a chap called Sergei who has 25 years experience in the theatre. What he spent these 25 years doing remains unclear. I have expressed my doubts about this appointment. I personally wouldn’t book this guy to manage a troupe of performing goldfish. Anyway I was in the SL scene dock discussing the responsibilities of a stage manager with this Sergei via our talented and charming interpreter Tania, (keeping our voices down so as not to disturb the backgammon players) when we were approached by the eldest member of the theatre staff, the one with the red arm band who does bugger all. He told us a curious tale from long ago of a local stage manager of Mongolian descent named Kur-Li, who, on his deathbed, decreed that his clipboard should be concealed within the very fabric of the building until someone sufficiently worthy to carry it should come along. At that very moment I felt the floor beneath my feet begin to vibrate, the fluorescent tubes overhead began to flicker, cracks appeared in the wall in front of us, chunks of masonry fell away to bounce unconvincingly on the floor. And there within the wall, bathed in a golden light was a clipboard, the clipboard of Kur-Li. Sergei stepped forward unhesitatingly and took it in both hands.He is the ‘Chosen One’.He turned to me, his eyes glowing with an inner fire, he looked down at the clipboard and said “What is it? What do I do with it?” I sighed and went back onstage to watch paint dry.
Our tiny theatrical expat community has doubled in size with the arrival of Bruce Ramus, Richard Sharratt, Ben Milton & Smasher. We are all looking forward to the tech rehearsal period with some anticipation. Rarely in the history of musical theatre have so many factors been stacked on the side of chaos and mayhem. We have our stage manager, ‘The Chosen One’, we have our 2 show callers (2??) Ashod, the speed writer, and Julia, beautiful but uncomprehending. We have an entirely green crew, who I gather will not be consistent, anyone may turn up. We will be working with 3 translators, one on the stage ring, one on the lighting ring and one with sound. We have a Russian director and choreographer, neither of whom have done a musical before. And possibly best of all we have a producer who may jump on stage at any moment and organise the scene changes personally. So the stage is set for a humdinger.
The schedule is shot to pieces but no one seems very interested in previews so I guess they get the push.
Traffic habits in Moscow continue to fascinate and terrify. Interestingly there are absolutely no cyclists. We assume that they have all been killed. Moscow is running it’s own experiment in Natural Selection. They are breeding a race of aggressive pot bellied men with big cars and small dicks (sorry, a bit of big car envy crept in there). All the eco friendly caring sharing cycling Nigel Planer look-a-likes have been brutally expunged from the gene pool.
Russian history hangs like grey pall over everything here. The complex of up-market flats of which the Estrada theatre is a part was built in the early 30’s to house high-up Communist party apparatchiks. Locals tell us that not one of the apartments here missed having its inhabitants butchered or exiled at some point in the Terror of the 1930’s and 40’s. Presumably those who survived retired to bungalows on the Black Sea coast with names like ‘Dunmassmurderin’ and ‘Dungulagin’. Mind you after working here for 3 weeks mass murder comes top of my list for things to do on a rainy afternoon.
Moscow Diary 4
We have been here exactly a month and Russia is as exasperating now as the day we got off the plane. We all feel that our responses to normal life have been coarsened by our experiences. This is in part due to the everyday rudeness of your average Russian, they insult each other with regularity and gusto. Waitresses and shop assistants are treated with finger snapping contempt which they are quite capable of returning with interest. Even the most uncontroversial discussions on stage can turn into a shouting match. The worst insult you can hurl is apparently ‘pederast!’ which Mr Baranov frequently uses in his discussions with Yuri Antizersky (Clement Freud look-a-like) on the subject of the late arrival of the scenery. Even Tracey Ransom, who has only been here 3 days coaching our show caller Julia, has started swearing like a trooper.
“……and on the seventh day Sergei Baranov said let there be light!” And on the twelfth day there was light. Gordon Bennett! What a performance getting the generator running. Cables not long enough, wrong size, planning permits etc etc. We’ve known about this for 6 months. The abject failure of Russian technology and planning so far on this project has led us to speculate on how these people managed to put a man in space. We pass a splendid statue of Yuri Gagarin on our way to the theatre and have come to the conclusion that he must either have had a profound death wish or been forced into the space capsule at gunpoint.
But with power to the lighting rig and a couple of days rough programming from Bruce we decided to go straight into a tech with the actors. Finding a crew hasn’t been straightforward. Our stage manager, Sergei, the ‘Chosen One’ was de-selected by Mr Baranov almost immediately and replaced, to our dismay, at one of our knock-about 7.00pm meetings, by Vladimir who is the technical manager for the building. This arrangement lasted for several minutes until after the meeting when Vladimir came to me and said ‘I’ve not agreed this with Baranov. I won’t do it!.’ So we remain consistent, at no point on this production have we had so much as the toenail clippings of a stage management team. What we need is a team of nice, middle class, work ethic driven folks ready to die for the sake of fly Q 22. Sadly we have no one, we have no paperwork from rehearsal, no moves written down, no script revisions, no idea at any given moment who should be playing whom from the innumerable permutations of cast. The crewing has also been a bit bumpy. Four follow spot operators duly presented themselves for a day’s training, three of them took one look at their truss positions and promptly left. They were replaced the next day by more cannon fodder who were bullied into position. The stage crew, who are in part made up of the backgammon players, have also been very flexible in their approach to the job. One of my biggest problems with the running crew has been to convince any of them that being in the building is a necessary part of the rehearsal process. They drift off at any time without so much as a by your leave. Seva, our Golden Boy video operator, has been the worst offender in this respect. Local crew morale has picked up with the arrival of the cast in the theatre, specifically the lady members of the company. The expat WWRY crew here are definitely of the opinion that, from a heterosexual male point of view, this is undoubtedly the best looking Rock You company world-wide. But perhaps we have all been away from her indoorski for too long. As a sage old Master Carpenter once said to me, ‘Ted, once you’ve done a couple of all-nighters they all look like Marilyn Monroe’.
The show is entirely in Russian apart from the last three numbers and it’s fair to say differs in emphasis markedly from the UK version. Sexual politics are somewhere in the Stone Age here so Scaramouche doesn’t get all the good lines and in one of the van scenes sobs uncontrollably and is comforted in manly fashion by Galileo (our no1 Galileo is blessed with what are apparently Georgian good looks, black hair, hook nose and eyebrows that need strimming). All the dialogue scenes seem much longer than normal and are played to the hilt, no gentle ironies or self mockery here, dramatic points are hammered down with all the subtlety of Canadian seal hunters armed with baseball bats. The Van Scene! Our director Dimitri Astrakhan, has boldly taken on the ‘Curse of the Van’ (general readers may want to skip this bit). All of us who have been associated with the production for a while know that the two Van scenes in Act 2 present a scenic challenge in that getting the damn thing on and off stage can be a problem. This difficulty has been solved in Australia & Vegas by having the Van come up on a lift. This was our plan here, but a combination of architectural problems and the bloody minded intransigence of the Estrada management has forced the lift right to the front edge of the stage. Dimitri declared that the scene was unplayable in this position and so we are pushing our Play-Doh dodgem on from DSR. He also worried about the lack of scenic background in Van II and when I said that it was a short scene covering the transition into the Killer Queen Boudoir he replied “No! No! It’s a very complex dramatic scene”. A few minutes later he was at the back of the stalls quoting Brecht at me in broken English, at which point I felt it was probably time for a lie-down.
But for all the problems at last we are under way with a cast on stage, a music dept that is currently missing 50% of it’s cues, the lovely Julia is calling the show in harness with Miss Ransom who doubles as Musical Supervisor on occasion and above all we have a lot of shouting. Russians love to shout and it’s bloody exhausting listening to them all day.
As we progress through the grinding hell of the Tech time for excursions has been limited but a chance conversation with a business Brit in the hotel bar tempted me out after rehearsal one day. He said that he travelled regularly from Kursk Station and that the area around there was distinctly dodgy. Well the opportunity to combine a bit of train spotting with some low life research was catnip to me, so off I went. Sadly the low life bit was about as racy as Dorking though the area is significantly poorer than the affluent area of Moscow where we spend most of our time. There are far fewer vagrants visible here than in London and very little litter and no graffiti. The trains are good though. Russian sleeping cars have a smartly dressed lady attendant standing in every door ready to greet the passengers and there is a smell of coal fires from the stove in each carriage on which a samovar is kept going all day.
Moscow Fashion Note: For those of you planning to make the trip for the Press Night and who want to cut a dash in Moscow Society you should be aware that Mr Baranov is not the only one who wears silly pointy shoes. They all do. One is in serious danger of multiple ankle high stab wounds at any moment this city.
Apart from there being no cyclists here, there are also no sandwiches and no whistling. The notion of beetroot and potato on rye has not caught on, not one of the local kiosks or our beloved local supermarket (apparently the most expensive in Moscow) carry a sandwich of any kind. Whistling is traditionally banned in theatres worldwide, but Smasher was sternly told by a policeman to stop whistling while walking across a bridge near our hotel. Overt displays of happiness are frowned on as being improbable.
And finally I must relate a sorry tale which encapsulates all that has made this project the trial it has been. A few nights ago I spotted Mr Baranov and Yuri Antizersky talking at the back of the stalls. They were arguing over a sheet of paper and as I approached they looked more shifty than usual. I could see that they were holding a Russian copy of the prop list. I asked if there was a problem and they said “No! no!” and wandered off. Later I interrogated Yuri and, yes folks, you guessed it, a sizeable chunk of the prop list (including the Yuppie Canes) had just been ordered, 3 days into the tech.
I get a day off from all this jollity when I fly to Munich in a couple of days to check out the Cologne set which is being built there. Onlookers at Munich airport may be surprised to see an Englishman on his hands and knees kissing the tarmac.
Moscow Diary 5
Phew! Made it!
Yes on the 17th Oct 2004 Lazarus walked, water turned to wine and we had a premier that wasn’t half bad. The final preview was described by Bruce Ramus as the “worst Rock You ever”, so the transformation was miraculous. Everything worked, even the Killer Queen Throne lift and rotate which was still being teched an hour before the show. The company gave their all which is a lot and sometimes you may not want it all but you get it anyway. The Russian version is longer and wordier than the UK model but the audience seem to be engaged by the dialogue scenes. Now and then a ripple of applause runs round the house as if to say ‘Good point, well made!’. The opening captions don’t get a laugh even though I am reliably informed by our lovely and talented translator, Tania, that 2045 reads “Ben Elton burnt at stake by religious zealots in Turkmenistan”.
The previews, indeed all the rehearsals, were a shambles with endless permutations of band and cast driving the sound boys demented. And the shouting! Endless, endless shouting.
What does the future hold? Well with no technical or stage management it’s hard to believe that all will go smoothly. Yuri Antizerski explained the Russian approach, which goes along the lines of letting things get into such an appalling state that you have to do something and in the end you just get through. That’s certainly the case with this production.
The Party was held in a huge low ceiling ballroom within the precincts of the Kremlin. It had less atmosphere than the baggage-claim area at Dusseldorf airport (where I am a regular visitor) but there was plenty to drink and eat, and of course Brian, Roger and the company rocking on stage. Excellent.
And the next day we made our escape back to the free world. Never is a rash word to use but until they sell Cornettos in Hell I will steer well clear of Moscow. On the plus side are the Metro, the Bolshoi and hordes of beautiful women in pointy shoes. On the minus side just about everything else.
Monday, 20 April 2009
The Old Rex
This is not a story about a beloved but ageing GoldenLabrador nor about a raffish clubbable chap going to seed, this is a story about the Rex Cinema in a prosperous town halfway between London and the South Coast.
Charlie Hepple sheltered from the rain under the only section of the cinema’s canopy that remained intact and watched the neatly dressed woman with a red umbrella approach.
“Carol Timperley from Biggin-Newbold.” She proffered the hand not holding the umbrella. “You must be Mr Hepple. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“No. Just a couple of minutes” said Charlie.
“Shall we go in?” Ms Timperley burrowed in her handbag and produced a bunch of keys and after peering at the dog eared labels selected the largest and thrust it into the lock of the foyer doors. The Rex had been built in the 1930s and for a long time had been an outpost of the Gaumont chain, third in the cinematic pecking order behind the Odeons and ABCs. At some point in the 1970s the Rex had descended from showing exotically titled Horror double-bills to soft porn and finally closed as a cinema only to reopen briefly as a Punk Rock venue. At about this time the Rex was bought by a local businessman who tried more porn (insufficient dirty old men), Indian movies (the local restaurateurs and their families preferred to go up to London for their Bollywood dreams) and Bingo (the Rex’s Jackpots were no match for the Top Rank Suite’s at the bottom of the town). It was this businessman, now in his 80s, who was selling the Rex, freehold and all.
Charlie Hepple and Carol Timperley stood side by side in the gloom of the foyer.
“I haven’t been in here myself before” said Miss Timperley. “Mr Baildon at the office said there was a light switch on the right. Ah! There it is.” She flicked the switch and a fluorescent tube sputtered into life. The foyer was small, the ticket window boarded up and the sweet stall ceiled had collapsed, the walls were painted a nasty blue. There was a framed photo of a chubby bespectacled man in a dinner jacket that was captioned “Ron Pickles – Our Manager at Your Service”.
Ms Timperley gazed around at the dismal scene. “It’s been closed a very long time you know” she said rather failing in her estate agent’s duty to accentuate the positive.
“Yes” said Charlie “shall we go inside?” On the left of the foyer was a staircase that led to the circle and to the right three steps that led up to the stalls. He led the way to the right and Ms Timperley , who had brought a torch out of her handbag, followed. The double doors at the top of the steps opened into utter darkness and the light from the torch seemed to peter out after a few feet. Ms Timperley turned to her right and shone the torch along the back wall of the stalls until she located the switch that she was looking for. A single bulb dangling from the front of the circle gave out baleful yellow light. They heard rustling from around the room.and Ms Timperley stepped a little closer to Charlie. “I’m OK with mice” she said “but I’m not very good with rats. I can smell something. Do you think there are rats?” she asked.
“Probably” said Charlie cheerfully. But Charlie Hepple wasn’t smelling rats he was smelling profit and Charlie had come out of the womb smelling profit. At school he never paid much attention in class but on the playground he was the king of the free market and profitably wheeled and dealed his way through dozens of schoolboy crazes. He wangled a place on a business course at his local Poly (now the University of North Surrey) and found his niche as Student Union Entertainment Secretary. This meant that he got to book the bands, he got to meet the bands, he got to load the bands’ vans and he got to sleep with the girls who failed to sleep with the band. His wife Sandy had failed to get off with the bass player of a band called Sputum Test and their relationship had started in a moment of post-gig triste in the Union building car park. Twenty years on they were still together, Sandy is Finance Director of Charlie’s business. After college Charlie became the booker for a circuit of pub venues in the south-east and when a distant relative left him a lump of money he bought a bankrupt restaurant just outside Guildford which he converted (despite strenuous protests from local residents) into his first Rock venue. The Rex, should he go ahead and buy it, would be his fifth venue. The other four were all doing well with a mixture of cheap eats, expensive drinks and good music.
Charlie walked down to the front of the auditorium. By modern Multiplex standards it was big, 500 seats in the stalls with another couple of hundred in the circle. The walls had once been red but were now pockmarked with crumbling patches of crumbling plaster, there was some nasty 1950s fretwork around the proscenium framing some once gold drapes that in turn framed the screen which had a three foot gash near its bottom edge. The seats had been partially covered with dust sheets, Charlie peeled back the nearest to reveal moth eaten red plush.
Ms Timperley followed him down to the front. “Mr Baildon said that there was a mains switchboard or something backstage. I could go and try and switch some more lights on if you like”. She looked as enthusiastic about this expedition as she would if presented with a free holiday in Somalia.
“Great” said Charlie. Ms Timperley pluckily headed for a small door to the right of the screen and vanished through it.
Left to himself Charlie’s thoughts returned to profits. The Rex was certainly big enough, the auditorium could be levelled, he could put a bar at the back of the stalls and another up in the circle. As always where to put the kitchen was a problem. Perhaps Ms Timperley would reveal something, but at that moment the light went out leaving Charlie in complete darkness.
“Shit!” he said, she had the only torch, he could only wait in the dark for her return. He heard a faint clattering noise and beam of light from the projection room window flicked on. Ms Timperley had obviously found the switch room. Scratchy images of countdown numbers appeared on the screen accompanied by a hissing crackling soundtrack, a barely legible title came up I’m Here. Then the film seemed to break, the rattling projector momentarily sounded louder, the screen showed pure white for a couple of seconds before everything went dark and silent once more. The single bulb hanging from the circle came back on and Carol Timperley emerged through the little door at some speed looking somewhat less elegant than when they had first met under the canopy.
“You found the switchroom then” said Charlie
“No I didn’t. Sorry it’s all locked up back there. What a bugger! There must be more keys somewhere”.
“But this light went out and the projector came on”
“Really?” said Ms Timperley, “well not from anything I did. To tell the truth I didn’t look too hard for the switchroom, there are a lot of scuttling things back there. “She looked into the gloom above the circle, “I don’t think that there are any projectors up there. Are you sure?”
“Yes” said Charlie, but as he said it he felt less confident. “Perhaps we could look upstairs”
“Certainly” They both went back through the foyer and up the stairs. The circle was in worse condition than the stalls, most of the seats were broken and the wreckage piled up against the rear wall.
“How do we get up to the projection box?” asked Charlie.
“I don’t know” said Ms Timperley. There appeared to be no access from the circle until Charlie pushed open the fire doors at the far end of the upper foyer and found a fire escape that led up onto the roof and to the projection box. The door was firmly locked.
“Sorry” said Biggin-Newbold’s finest. “I’ll have a rummage around for the other keys when I get back to the office.”
Charlie took pity on her. “I tell you what, leave me the Foyer key and the torch. I’ll have a look around for a while and I can drop them off at your office later.”
After Ms Timperley had left he spent a few more moments in the circle and then went slowly back down the stairs inspecting two foul smelling toilets on the way. Back in the stalls he took out his digital camera and took a dozen shots of the auditorium before going backstage where Ms Timperley had feared to tread. With only the fading beam of the torch to guide him he stumbled on to the tiny stage behind the screen, which housed the remains of a bingo-caller’s rostrum and a few chairs. On the side of the stage was a staircase leading below where he discovered the locked boiler and switch rooms. There was an exit door down there which Charlie presumed opened onto the small car park at the back.
A few minutes later he was standing on the other side of the street studying the Rex’s battered façade. One half of his brain was thinking that there were possibilities here. The location was perfect, the top end of the town had been going steadily upmarket over the past few years, the surrounding streets buzzed with life in the evenings. He could probably buy the Rex for a song and he didn’t expect any licensing problems from the local authority. The other half of his brain reran those few frames of scratchy film that he had seen or thought he had seen. The projection room had been securely locked, he and Ms Timperley would have met anyone coming down the stairs. It made no sense and Charlie Hepple didn’t go in for magic. He walked own the hill to Biggins-Newbold, returned the torch and keys, and told them he would come back the following week with his surveyor and builder.
After supper that evening he downloaded the photos that he had taken on to his laptop and showed them to Sandy. She clicked through them casually but then asked “Who’s that bloke?”
“What bloke?” said Charlie
“Him. In the doorway” she said pointing to the screen. Sure enough, standing in the doorway that led from the auditorium to the foyer was a man rather formally dressed in a dark suit with a raincoat over his arm. Charlie zoomed in as far as he could before the image became impossibly pixilated. The man appeared to be in his thirties with short hair, he looked unfashionably dapper, he had an almost black and white movie look about him.
“He must have turned the projector on” said Charlie.
“What do you mean?” asked Sandy. Charlie explained his ‘hallucination’.
“It’s still a bit weird isn’t it? Why didn’t he say something?”
“I don’t know” said Charlie uneasily “he must be some sort of caretaker I suppose”.
Charlie shut the computer down and went to watch football on television.
A week later Charlie was in the Biggins-Newbold office, Carol Timperley cheerfully brandished a bunch of keys that she had produced from desk drawer. “Here you go Mr Hepple. I’ve found the right bunch this time with the boiler room, switch room and everything”. Charlie took the keys and paused at her desk. “You didn’t see a man in the Rex last week did you?” he asked.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Well when I got back and downloaded the photos that I took, in one of them there was a man standing in the auditorium doorway”
Ms Timperley frowned. “Really? Do you know what. I don’t think I locked the street door when we went in. He probably just walked in off the street. Just a curious passer-by.”
Charlie mentally kicked himself for not thinking of the obvious solution and set off for the Rex to meet his surveyor Keith Wallace and his builder Harry Dunphy.
“Welcome to the Rex gents” said Charlie as he ushered them into the foyer “soon to be Rock Dreams V “
“Good site Charlie” said Keith. He took out a laser measurer and started to map out the dimensions of the foyer. Charlie led Harry into the auditorium where he turned on the baleful yellow light.
“The boiler room and the switch room are through there Harry” said Charlie gesturing to the door to the side of the proscenium “do you want to check them out?” The builder nodded, took the keys and disappeared backstage. Immediately the single bulb clicked off and immediately a projector beam stabbed through the darkness.
“Oh shit!” said Charlie but this “Oh shit!” was not said just out of fear but also from expectation. Somehow Charlie had known that this would happen and indeed, by sending Harry off, leaving him on his own, had engineered it. This was the “Oh shit!” that you might say as you strap yourself into a white-knuckle ride. Just like the week before the scratchy image of the countdown numbers appeared on the screen and then the title ‘I’m Here’, but this time Charlie had a powerful torch with him. He swept the room with it focussing particularly on the auditorium door but there was no sign of the man with the raincoat. He looked back to the screen, he could hear a crackling hissing soundtrack. Had there been sound the week before? He couldn’t remember. The title faded into a snowstorm of scratches before the figure of a woman appeared. She was walking along a street towards the camera, she was smiling, a pretty woman with tight blonde curls, wearing a jacket over a full skirt. Charlie had no claims to be a student of the history of fashion but even he could tell that this was definitely pre-miniskirt. 1950s perhaps. He shouted out “Keith! Keith could you come in here please. Harry!” There was no reply, no sound except the relentless hiss and crackle as the woman neared the camera, her face nearly filling the screen. Charlie studied the smiling eyes, while the woman was pretty she was no film star and the quality of the film was that of a home movie. Why was he being shown this? He shone the torch up at the projection room windows but as he did so the film cut out and the single bulb hanging from the circle came back on. He strode out to the foyer where Keith was poking about in the box office.
“Didn’t you here me calling?” said Charlie.
“No” said the surveyor. “You OK Charlie?” He could see that his client was agitated.
“Yeah. Yeah I’m fine. Let’s check out the roof”. Keith sighed, stopped what he was doing and followed Charlie up the stairs, through the circle foyer and out onto the fire escape, Harry followed a few moments later.
“Let’s check in here” said Charlie as he unlocked the projection room. Keith and Harry exchanged glances, of all the aspects of the Rex the projection room was easily the least relevant to the job in hand.
“Shit!” said Charlie as he stepped inside. The room was empty apart from some rickety Dexion shelving in one corner.
“What were you expecting Charlie?” asked Keith
“Er nothing… I suppose” muttered Charlie. The curved steel runners embedded in the concrete floor on which the original projectors would have been rolled back for maintenance were the only trace of the room’s former use. There was a thick steel plate door at one end of the room. Charlie tried all the keys on the bunch but none fitted.
“That would have been the film store originally” said Keith “when this place was built film stock was still incredibly flammable and they had to keep it in fireproof rooms”.
Charlie shrugged, went out and leaned on the rail of the fire escape gazing distractedly across the rooftops of the town, gazing as it happens at the rooftop of Biggins-Newbold where Carol Timperley was keeping her fingers and her legs crossed in the hope that Charlie Hepple would make an offer for the Rex. It would be a feather in her cap to shift a property that had been on the books for so long.
At lunchtime the three men met in the pub across the road and compared notes. The builder and surveyor were relieved to see that their client had recovered his composure and was ready to do business. All the news was good news, the fabric of the Rex was sound and, for a building that had been unoccupied for most of the three previous decades, was in surprisingly good nick. Even the boilers which probably should be replaced eventually were good for another couple of years.
Charlie was decisive. “Ok guys I want to go for this. Let’s do some preliminary costings and let’s meet in Keith’s office next Monday morning. I want to make an offer next week. OK?”
As they left the pub Charlie said “Bollocks! I’ve left my torch in the Rex. I’ll have to go back for it. I’ll see you on Monday” As Keith and Harry wandered off to the NCP Charlie went back into the cinema and sat in the stalls. “Come on then. Show me the rest” he said out loud. There was silence. He sat there for nearly half an hour. At one point he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. A mouse trotted boldly along the floor by the skirting board and glanced casually at him as it vanished under a dust sheet. Charlie got up to leave and as he did so there was a familiar clattering noise and the single bulb went out. He sat down in the dark watched the screen intently. There were no clues in the in the initial numbers or title and the street background to the approaching woman sequence was so blurred that it could have been anywhere. The film cut to another close-up of the same woman. This time the camera was pulling away revealing more of the woman as it did so. She was smiling but not in the same open cheerful way as in the street, there was something sly in this smile. The scene was an interior, she cast a clear shadow on the white brick wall behind her, her bare arms were raised above her head. The camera drew back further, her wrists were manacled together and chained to a ring in the wall, she was wearing black bra and pants. “Bloody hell” thought Charlie “I’m watching a 1950s home-made S&M porn movie which is being projected by magic. What the fuck is going on here”. By now the screen was filled with a full length image of the woman chained to the end wall of a narrow room, from behind the camera a man emerged. He was stripped to the waist, showing a fair amount of paunch and he wore a black hood. He looked absurd, a Pythonesque member of the Surbiton Sadomasochists Society but then Charlie saw the whip in his hand and he said “No!” to the empty auditorium. The man started to lash the woman and through the incessant crackle of the soundtrack Charlie could hear her gasps of pain which soon turned into screams. In his career on the fringes of Rock & Roll Charlie had been to some wild parties and seen some weird stuff, but this was different, there was nothing mechanical about the scene on the screen, there was an emotional intensity about it which made it hard to watch. He wanted it to end. The whipping did eventually stop and the camera moved in to a close-up of the woman’s face, her eyes were full of tears but her expression was exultant. The film snapped off and the light came back on. Charlie sat stunned for a moment or two then something made him look back over his shoulder to the doors to the foyer. The man with the raincoat over his arm stood there watching him.
“What did that mean?” asked Charlie gesturing at the screen. “Who are they?” The man didn’t reply but stared steadily back at Charlie, who got up and started to move up the aisle towards him. The man stepped back into the foyer and the doors swung to behind him. By the time Charlie burst through those doors the man had vanished. Charlie had locked the street door and so knew that the man was no passer-by and that the only way he could have gone was up. He raced up the stairs to the circle and then through the circle foyer and onto the fire escape. There was no trace of the man but Charlie had not really expected any, he realised that something very strange was going on. He stood on the roof in the early summer sun for a few minutes before unlocking the projection room door. He went in and stared down at the auditorium through the projection windows for a long time, then he relocked the room and went downstairs and out onto the street. Across the road a traffic warden was enjoying writing tickets in the early summer sun, Charlie went over and asked for directions to the Public Library.
Mrs Pardew had been a librarian for many years, in fact she had officially retired some time ago but she still came in to man the Information desk. When she saw the flashily dressed young man stride into the library that afternoon she recognised a fish out of water. Charlie for his part was no scholar, no reader, he could just about manage a John Grisham on holiday. In his entire life up to that point he had probably not been inside a library of any description for more than a total of 7 ½ minutes.
“Can I help you young man?” asked Mrs Pardew who on closer inspection had decided that flashily dressed or not this was a rather good looking young man.
“Yes. Maybe. Do you keep copies of old newspapers here?” asked Charlie
“We do. On micro-fiche”
“Microfish?”
“Yes. I’ll show you. We only keep the local paper here, for the nationals you’ll have to go to London. What year?”
“Erm 1950s I think” said Charlie haltingly. Suddenly he had no idea what to look for.
“We probably need to be more specific” said Mrs Pardew kindly “what exactly are you trying to find out?”
“I’m interested in the Rex. The old cinema. Do you know it?”
“The old Rex. Yes I certainly do” she chuckled,” my second husband and I did some of our courting in the back row there. But it’s been closed for some time now hasn’t it?”
Charlie had his elderly helper down as an archetypal spinster and was surprised to discover that there had been at least two Mr Pardews.
“I’m looking for an event in the 1950s, something out of the ordinary. I’m not sure what.”
“Well apart from the Etherington murder there’s nothing that comes to mind”.
“The Etherington murder?”
“Yes. Mary Etherington was a usherette at the Rex. Her husband killed her but it didn’t have anything to do with the Rex as far as I can remember.”
“When was this?”
“I’m not sure but I think I can find out”. She went away and returned a few moments later thumbing through the appendices of Capital Punishment in the UK by J M Sturges. “This is a list of all the executions that took place in the UK. There were only a dozen or so per year in the 50s so we should be able to find it”
“The husband was executed?”
“Oh yes” said Mrs Pardew “They hung him. They did in those days. Ah here we are. Stanley Etherington executed at Wandsworth Prison on the 26th June 1954. it’s notable as one of the few cases where a murderer was executed when the victim’s body has not been found.”
“Is there a picture of him in there?” asked Charlie
“No” said Mrs Pardew “it’s not that sort of book, but I’ll get you the Evening Argus micro-fiche scrolls for 1953 and 54. there will be plenty of pictures, this was a big story locally.” She fetched the scrolls and showed Charlie how to use the viewing machine. Left alone he went immediately to the 25th June 1954 and below a banner headline reading Etherington to Hang Tomorrow – Final Appeal Fails was a picture of the man that Charlie had seen only an hour before. It is one thing to have the feeling that something strange is going on but it is altogether different when you are confronted with incontrovertible proof that you have been talking to a man that was hung for murder more than 50 years before. He felt a chill dread steal over him. What was he supposed to do now? Numbly he scrolled back through reports of the appeals and the original trial. Apparently the alarm was raised by Mary Etherington’s mother when her daughter had not turned up for a planned weekend visit. When she confronted Stanley Etherington he claimed that Mary had run off with another man and that he didn’t know where she was and didn’t care. For a while the affair was seen only as a ‘missing persons’ case by the local police but eventually at Mary’s mother’s insistence they started to dig deeper. A veritable army of family members, neighbours and local publicans presented themselves to the police to testify that Stanley Etherington, a local printer, was an evil tempered bastard and that they had heard him threaten his wife on many occasions. Eventually the police discovered traces of Mary’s blood in the boot of Etherington’s car (which he claimed were the result of an accident with a broken beer bottle on a picnic outing) and more traces of the same blood on a spade in his shed. The evidence was all circumstantial but overwhelming, the prosecution case being that he had done away with Mary in a fit of jealous rage by means unknown and then buried her body somewhere up on the Downs. Charlie scrolled further back past the reports of Etherington’s arrest back to the time of the alleged crime. There was no mention of the Rex but finally he noticed a tiny item in the bottom right hand corner of the front page of the June 2nd 1953 edition. ‘Local Projectionist Dies’. The report continued ‘Mr Percy Howland, projectionist at the Rex Cinema tragically died yesterday. Mr Howland was crossing the High St when he suffered a heart attack. First Aid was administered at the scene by a passing midwife but he was found to be dead on arrival at St James Hospital. Mr Howland was a respected and popular local character, he lived alone and leaves no family’.
Charlie sat quietly for a few minutes then pulled out his mobile phone and punched in Harry Dunphy’s number. Mrs Pardew scuttled across and said “Give me that. You can’t use it in here!”
Charlie ignored her.
“Harry I’m sorry and I know it’s late in the day but could you come back to the Rex and bring Sean or one of your other boys with a gas axe?”
“What?” said Harry
“You know. Oxy-acetylene cutter”.
“Yes I know what it is but what’s it for?” demanded Harry
“Humour me “. said Charlie and cut the connection. He turned to the outraged Mrs Pardew, “Sorry and thanks but I’ve got to go now”
45 minutes later Harry Dunphy pulled up outside the Rex in a Toyota pick-up with his son Sean.
“We need to get the gear up to the projection room” said Charlie.
Harry started to swear but Charlie raised a hand and Sean started to lug his equipment up the stairs. A few moments later Keith Wallace arrived having been alerted by Harry that something was up.
“Cut round the lock” said Charlie.
The three men and Sean were looking at the plate steel door of the store in the projection room.
“At the very least it’s criminal damage Charlie” said Keith.
“Someone’s going to notice eventually” said Harry
“Just do it “ said Charlie “it’s important”.
“Don’t I need a Hot Works Permit?” asked Sean nervously.
Harry caught Charlie’s grim expression. “Not today son. Just do it”.
As the room filled with smoke and the smell of scorched metal, the three men went out onto the roof while Sean worked. Nothing was said.
After a few minutes there was a clang as the lock fell out of the door, Charlie was about to shove Sean aside and open the door when Harry grabbed him.
“Wait Charlie! It’s red hot, let it cool”
Charlie looked round the room, picked up a piece of wood and levered the door open.
As the smoke cleared a different smell, a smell of dead things caught at the back of Charlie’s throat and he gagged. Mary Etherington sat on a mattress staring sightlessly past him. Mary’s neck was still ringed by a steel collar attached to a bolt in the wall, her underwear hung loosely over her mummified flesh, a few scraps of blonde hair clung to her withered skull. The room was the room that Charlie had been shown on the screen the only difference being that Mary had written, in her own blood, the words ‘I love you’ on the wall beside her.
Mary had run off with another man, run to Percy Howland’s S&M dungeon on the roof of the Rex. Percy must have left her chained there while he popped out for some cigarettes and dropped dead in the High Street with the only key to the store in his trouser pocket. Poor Mary must have died of thirst. Stanley Etherington had been hung for being an evil tempered bastard and nothing more.
“Christ! What a balls up” said Charlie. He pushed the door shut with his foot and took out his mobile to call the police.
Charlie Hepple sheltered from the rain under the only section of the cinema’s canopy that remained intact and watched the neatly dressed woman with a red umbrella approach.
“Carol Timperley from Biggin-Newbold.” She proffered the hand not holding the umbrella. “You must be Mr Hepple. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“No. Just a couple of minutes” said Charlie.
“Shall we go in?” Ms Timperley burrowed in her handbag and produced a bunch of keys and after peering at the dog eared labels selected the largest and thrust it into the lock of the foyer doors. The Rex had been built in the 1930s and for a long time had been an outpost of the Gaumont chain, third in the cinematic pecking order behind the Odeons and ABCs. At some point in the 1970s the Rex had descended from showing exotically titled Horror double-bills to soft porn and finally closed as a cinema only to reopen briefly as a Punk Rock venue. At about this time the Rex was bought by a local businessman who tried more porn (insufficient dirty old men), Indian movies (the local restaurateurs and their families preferred to go up to London for their Bollywood dreams) and Bingo (the Rex’s Jackpots were no match for the Top Rank Suite’s at the bottom of the town). It was this businessman, now in his 80s, who was selling the Rex, freehold and all.
Charlie Hepple and Carol Timperley stood side by side in the gloom of the foyer.
“I haven’t been in here myself before” said Miss Timperley. “Mr Baildon at the office said there was a light switch on the right. Ah! There it is.” She flicked the switch and a fluorescent tube sputtered into life. The foyer was small, the ticket window boarded up and the sweet stall ceiled had collapsed, the walls were painted a nasty blue. There was a framed photo of a chubby bespectacled man in a dinner jacket that was captioned “Ron Pickles – Our Manager at Your Service”.
Ms Timperley gazed around at the dismal scene. “It’s been closed a very long time you know” she said rather failing in her estate agent’s duty to accentuate the positive.
“Yes” said Charlie “shall we go inside?” On the left of the foyer was a staircase that led to the circle and to the right three steps that led up to the stalls. He led the way to the right and Ms Timperley , who had brought a torch out of her handbag, followed. The double doors at the top of the steps opened into utter darkness and the light from the torch seemed to peter out after a few feet. Ms Timperley turned to her right and shone the torch along the back wall of the stalls until she located the switch that she was looking for. A single bulb dangling from the front of the circle gave out baleful yellow light. They heard rustling from around the room.and Ms Timperley stepped a little closer to Charlie. “I’m OK with mice” she said “but I’m not very good with rats. I can smell something. Do you think there are rats?” she asked.
“Probably” said Charlie cheerfully. But Charlie Hepple wasn’t smelling rats he was smelling profit and Charlie had come out of the womb smelling profit. At school he never paid much attention in class but on the playground he was the king of the free market and profitably wheeled and dealed his way through dozens of schoolboy crazes. He wangled a place on a business course at his local Poly (now the University of North Surrey) and found his niche as Student Union Entertainment Secretary. This meant that he got to book the bands, he got to meet the bands, he got to load the bands’ vans and he got to sleep with the girls who failed to sleep with the band. His wife Sandy had failed to get off with the bass player of a band called Sputum Test and their relationship had started in a moment of post-gig triste in the Union building car park. Twenty years on they were still together, Sandy is Finance Director of Charlie’s business. After college Charlie became the booker for a circuit of pub venues in the south-east and when a distant relative left him a lump of money he bought a bankrupt restaurant just outside Guildford which he converted (despite strenuous protests from local residents) into his first Rock venue. The Rex, should he go ahead and buy it, would be his fifth venue. The other four were all doing well with a mixture of cheap eats, expensive drinks and good music.
Charlie walked down to the front of the auditorium. By modern Multiplex standards it was big, 500 seats in the stalls with another couple of hundred in the circle. The walls had once been red but were now pockmarked with crumbling patches of crumbling plaster, there was some nasty 1950s fretwork around the proscenium framing some once gold drapes that in turn framed the screen which had a three foot gash near its bottom edge. The seats had been partially covered with dust sheets, Charlie peeled back the nearest to reveal moth eaten red plush.
Ms Timperley followed him down to the front. “Mr Baildon said that there was a mains switchboard or something backstage. I could go and try and switch some more lights on if you like”. She looked as enthusiastic about this expedition as she would if presented with a free holiday in Somalia.
“Great” said Charlie. Ms Timperley pluckily headed for a small door to the right of the screen and vanished through it.
Left to himself Charlie’s thoughts returned to profits. The Rex was certainly big enough, the auditorium could be levelled, he could put a bar at the back of the stalls and another up in the circle. As always where to put the kitchen was a problem. Perhaps Ms Timperley would reveal something, but at that moment the light went out leaving Charlie in complete darkness.
“Shit!” he said, she had the only torch, he could only wait in the dark for her return. He heard a faint clattering noise and beam of light from the projection room window flicked on. Ms Timperley had obviously found the switch room. Scratchy images of countdown numbers appeared on the screen accompanied by a hissing crackling soundtrack, a barely legible title came up I’m Here. Then the film seemed to break, the rattling projector momentarily sounded louder, the screen showed pure white for a couple of seconds before everything went dark and silent once more. The single bulb hanging from the circle came back on and Carol Timperley emerged through the little door at some speed looking somewhat less elegant than when they had first met under the canopy.
“You found the switchroom then” said Charlie
“No I didn’t. Sorry it’s all locked up back there. What a bugger! There must be more keys somewhere”.
“But this light went out and the projector came on”
“Really?” said Ms Timperley, “well not from anything I did. To tell the truth I didn’t look too hard for the switchroom, there are a lot of scuttling things back there. “She looked into the gloom above the circle, “I don’t think that there are any projectors up there. Are you sure?”
“Yes” said Charlie, but as he said it he felt less confident. “Perhaps we could look upstairs”
“Certainly” They both went back through the foyer and up the stairs. The circle was in worse condition than the stalls, most of the seats were broken and the wreckage piled up against the rear wall.
“How do we get up to the projection box?” asked Charlie.
“I don’t know” said Ms Timperley. There appeared to be no access from the circle until Charlie pushed open the fire doors at the far end of the upper foyer and found a fire escape that led up onto the roof and to the projection box. The door was firmly locked.
“Sorry” said Biggin-Newbold’s finest. “I’ll have a rummage around for the other keys when I get back to the office.”
Charlie took pity on her. “I tell you what, leave me the Foyer key and the torch. I’ll have a look around for a while and I can drop them off at your office later.”
After Ms Timperley had left he spent a few more moments in the circle and then went slowly back down the stairs inspecting two foul smelling toilets on the way. Back in the stalls he took out his digital camera and took a dozen shots of the auditorium before going backstage where Ms Timperley had feared to tread. With only the fading beam of the torch to guide him he stumbled on to the tiny stage behind the screen, which housed the remains of a bingo-caller’s rostrum and a few chairs. On the side of the stage was a staircase leading below where he discovered the locked boiler and switch rooms. There was an exit door down there which Charlie presumed opened onto the small car park at the back.
A few minutes later he was standing on the other side of the street studying the Rex’s battered façade. One half of his brain was thinking that there were possibilities here. The location was perfect, the top end of the town had been going steadily upmarket over the past few years, the surrounding streets buzzed with life in the evenings. He could probably buy the Rex for a song and he didn’t expect any licensing problems from the local authority. The other half of his brain reran those few frames of scratchy film that he had seen or thought he had seen. The projection room had been securely locked, he and Ms Timperley would have met anyone coming down the stairs. It made no sense and Charlie Hepple didn’t go in for magic. He walked own the hill to Biggins-Newbold, returned the torch and keys, and told them he would come back the following week with his surveyor and builder.
After supper that evening he downloaded the photos that he had taken on to his laptop and showed them to Sandy. She clicked through them casually but then asked “Who’s that bloke?”
“What bloke?” said Charlie
“Him. In the doorway” she said pointing to the screen. Sure enough, standing in the doorway that led from the auditorium to the foyer was a man rather formally dressed in a dark suit with a raincoat over his arm. Charlie zoomed in as far as he could before the image became impossibly pixilated. The man appeared to be in his thirties with short hair, he looked unfashionably dapper, he had an almost black and white movie look about him.
“He must have turned the projector on” said Charlie.
“What do you mean?” asked Sandy. Charlie explained his ‘hallucination’.
“It’s still a bit weird isn’t it? Why didn’t he say something?”
“I don’t know” said Charlie uneasily “he must be some sort of caretaker I suppose”.
Charlie shut the computer down and went to watch football on television.
A week later Charlie was in the Biggins-Newbold office, Carol Timperley cheerfully brandished a bunch of keys that she had produced from desk drawer. “Here you go Mr Hepple. I’ve found the right bunch this time with the boiler room, switch room and everything”. Charlie took the keys and paused at her desk. “You didn’t see a man in the Rex last week did you?” he asked.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Well when I got back and downloaded the photos that I took, in one of them there was a man standing in the auditorium doorway”
Ms Timperley frowned. “Really? Do you know what. I don’t think I locked the street door when we went in. He probably just walked in off the street. Just a curious passer-by.”
Charlie mentally kicked himself for not thinking of the obvious solution and set off for the Rex to meet his surveyor Keith Wallace and his builder Harry Dunphy.
“Welcome to the Rex gents” said Charlie as he ushered them into the foyer “soon to be Rock Dreams V “
“Good site Charlie” said Keith. He took out a laser measurer and started to map out the dimensions of the foyer. Charlie led Harry into the auditorium where he turned on the baleful yellow light.
“The boiler room and the switch room are through there Harry” said Charlie gesturing to the door to the side of the proscenium “do you want to check them out?” The builder nodded, took the keys and disappeared backstage. Immediately the single bulb clicked off and immediately a projector beam stabbed through the darkness.
“Oh shit!” said Charlie but this “Oh shit!” was not said just out of fear but also from expectation. Somehow Charlie had known that this would happen and indeed, by sending Harry off, leaving him on his own, had engineered it. This was the “Oh shit!” that you might say as you strap yourself into a white-knuckle ride. Just like the week before the scratchy image of the countdown numbers appeared on the screen and then the title ‘I’m Here’, but this time Charlie had a powerful torch with him. He swept the room with it focussing particularly on the auditorium door but there was no sign of the man with the raincoat. He looked back to the screen, he could hear a crackling hissing soundtrack. Had there been sound the week before? He couldn’t remember. The title faded into a snowstorm of scratches before the figure of a woman appeared. She was walking along a street towards the camera, she was smiling, a pretty woman with tight blonde curls, wearing a jacket over a full skirt. Charlie had no claims to be a student of the history of fashion but even he could tell that this was definitely pre-miniskirt. 1950s perhaps. He shouted out “Keith! Keith could you come in here please. Harry!” There was no reply, no sound except the relentless hiss and crackle as the woman neared the camera, her face nearly filling the screen. Charlie studied the smiling eyes, while the woman was pretty she was no film star and the quality of the film was that of a home movie. Why was he being shown this? He shone the torch up at the projection room windows but as he did so the film cut out and the single bulb hanging from the circle came back on. He strode out to the foyer where Keith was poking about in the box office.
“Didn’t you here me calling?” said Charlie.
“No” said the surveyor. “You OK Charlie?” He could see that his client was agitated.
“Yeah. Yeah I’m fine. Let’s check out the roof”. Keith sighed, stopped what he was doing and followed Charlie up the stairs, through the circle foyer and out onto the fire escape, Harry followed a few moments later.
“Let’s check in here” said Charlie as he unlocked the projection room. Keith and Harry exchanged glances, of all the aspects of the Rex the projection room was easily the least relevant to the job in hand.
“Shit!” said Charlie as he stepped inside. The room was empty apart from some rickety Dexion shelving in one corner.
“What were you expecting Charlie?” asked Keith
“Er nothing… I suppose” muttered Charlie. The curved steel runners embedded in the concrete floor on which the original projectors would have been rolled back for maintenance were the only trace of the room’s former use. There was a thick steel plate door at one end of the room. Charlie tried all the keys on the bunch but none fitted.
“That would have been the film store originally” said Keith “when this place was built film stock was still incredibly flammable and they had to keep it in fireproof rooms”.
Charlie shrugged, went out and leaned on the rail of the fire escape gazing distractedly across the rooftops of the town, gazing as it happens at the rooftop of Biggins-Newbold where Carol Timperley was keeping her fingers and her legs crossed in the hope that Charlie Hepple would make an offer for the Rex. It would be a feather in her cap to shift a property that had been on the books for so long.
At lunchtime the three men met in the pub across the road and compared notes. The builder and surveyor were relieved to see that their client had recovered his composure and was ready to do business. All the news was good news, the fabric of the Rex was sound and, for a building that had been unoccupied for most of the three previous decades, was in surprisingly good nick. Even the boilers which probably should be replaced eventually were good for another couple of years.
Charlie was decisive. “Ok guys I want to go for this. Let’s do some preliminary costings and let’s meet in Keith’s office next Monday morning. I want to make an offer next week. OK?”
As they left the pub Charlie said “Bollocks! I’ve left my torch in the Rex. I’ll have to go back for it. I’ll see you on Monday” As Keith and Harry wandered off to the NCP Charlie went back into the cinema and sat in the stalls. “Come on then. Show me the rest” he said out loud. There was silence. He sat there for nearly half an hour. At one point he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. A mouse trotted boldly along the floor by the skirting board and glanced casually at him as it vanished under a dust sheet. Charlie got up to leave and as he did so there was a familiar clattering noise and the single bulb went out. He sat down in the dark watched the screen intently. There were no clues in the in the initial numbers or title and the street background to the approaching woman sequence was so blurred that it could have been anywhere. The film cut to another close-up of the same woman. This time the camera was pulling away revealing more of the woman as it did so. She was smiling but not in the same open cheerful way as in the street, there was something sly in this smile. The scene was an interior, she cast a clear shadow on the white brick wall behind her, her bare arms were raised above her head. The camera drew back further, her wrists were manacled together and chained to a ring in the wall, she was wearing black bra and pants. “Bloody hell” thought Charlie “I’m watching a 1950s home-made S&M porn movie which is being projected by magic. What the fuck is going on here”. By now the screen was filled with a full length image of the woman chained to the end wall of a narrow room, from behind the camera a man emerged. He was stripped to the waist, showing a fair amount of paunch and he wore a black hood. He looked absurd, a Pythonesque member of the Surbiton Sadomasochists Society but then Charlie saw the whip in his hand and he said “No!” to the empty auditorium. The man started to lash the woman and through the incessant crackle of the soundtrack Charlie could hear her gasps of pain which soon turned into screams. In his career on the fringes of Rock & Roll Charlie had been to some wild parties and seen some weird stuff, but this was different, there was nothing mechanical about the scene on the screen, there was an emotional intensity about it which made it hard to watch. He wanted it to end. The whipping did eventually stop and the camera moved in to a close-up of the woman’s face, her eyes were full of tears but her expression was exultant. The film snapped off and the light came back on. Charlie sat stunned for a moment or two then something made him look back over his shoulder to the doors to the foyer. The man with the raincoat over his arm stood there watching him.
“What did that mean?” asked Charlie gesturing at the screen. “Who are they?” The man didn’t reply but stared steadily back at Charlie, who got up and started to move up the aisle towards him. The man stepped back into the foyer and the doors swung to behind him. By the time Charlie burst through those doors the man had vanished. Charlie had locked the street door and so knew that the man was no passer-by and that the only way he could have gone was up. He raced up the stairs to the circle and then through the circle foyer and onto the fire escape. There was no trace of the man but Charlie had not really expected any, he realised that something very strange was going on. He stood on the roof in the early summer sun for a few minutes before unlocking the projection room door. He went in and stared down at the auditorium through the projection windows for a long time, then he relocked the room and went downstairs and out onto the street. Across the road a traffic warden was enjoying writing tickets in the early summer sun, Charlie went over and asked for directions to the Public Library.
Mrs Pardew had been a librarian for many years, in fact she had officially retired some time ago but she still came in to man the Information desk. When she saw the flashily dressed young man stride into the library that afternoon she recognised a fish out of water. Charlie for his part was no scholar, no reader, he could just about manage a John Grisham on holiday. In his entire life up to that point he had probably not been inside a library of any description for more than a total of 7 ½ minutes.
“Can I help you young man?” asked Mrs Pardew who on closer inspection had decided that flashily dressed or not this was a rather good looking young man.
“Yes. Maybe. Do you keep copies of old newspapers here?” asked Charlie
“We do. On micro-fiche”
“Microfish?”
“Yes. I’ll show you. We only keep the local paper here, for the nationals you’ll have to go to London. What year?”
“Erm 1950s I think” said Charlie haltingly. Suddenly he had no idea what to look for.
“We probably need to be more specific” said Mrs Pardew kindly “what exactly are you trying to find out?”
“I’m interested in the Rex. The old cinema. Do you know it?”
“The old Rex. Yes I certainly do” she chuckled,” my second husband and I did some of our courting in the back row there. But it’s been closed for some time now hasn’t it?”
Charlie had his elderly helper down as an archetypal spinster and was surprised to discover that there had been at least two Mr Pardews.
“I’m looking for an event in the 1950s, something out of the ordinary. I’m not sure what.”
“Well apart from the Etherington murder there’s nothing that comes to mind”.
“The Etherington murder?”
“Yes. Mary Etherington was a usherette at the Rex. Her husband killed her but it didn’t have anything to do with the Rex as far as I can remember.”
“When was this?”
“I’m not sure but I think I can find out”. She went away and returned a few moments later thumbing through the appendices of Capital Punishment in the UK by J M Sturges. “This is a list of all the executions that took place in the UK. There were only a dozen or so per year in the 50s so we should be able to find it”
“The husband was executed?”
“Oh yes” said Mrs Pardew “They hung him. They did in those days. Ah here we are. Stanley Etherington executed at Wandsworth Prison on the 26th June 1954. it’s notable as one of the few cases where a murderer was executed when the victim’s body has not been found.”
“Is there a picture of him in there?” asked Charlie
“No” said Mrs Pardew “it’s not that sort of book, but I’ll get you the Evening Argus micro-fiche scrolls for 1953 and 54. there will be plenty of pictures, this was a big story locally.” She fetched the scrolls and showed Charlie how to use the viewing machine. Left alone he went immediately to the 25th June 1954 and below a banner headline reading Etherington to Hang Tomorrow – Final Appeal Fails was a picture of the man that Charlie had seen only an hour before. It is one thing to have the feeling that something strange is going on but it is altogether different when you are confronted with incontrovertible proof that you have been talking to a man that was hung for murder more than 50 years before. He felt a chill dread steal over him. What was he supposed to do now? Numbly he scrolled back through reports of the appeals and the original trial. Apparently the alarm was raised by Mary Etherington’s mother when her daughter had not turned up for a planned weekend visit. When she confronted Stanley Etherington he claimed that Mary had run off with another man and that he didn’t know where she was and didn’t care. For a while the affair was seen only as a ‘missing persons’ case by the local police but eventually at Mary’s mother’s insistence they started to dig deeper. A veritable army of family members, neighbours and local publicans presented themselves to the police to testify that Stanley Etherington, a local printer, was an evil tempered bastard and that they had heard him threaten his wife on many occasions. Eventually the police discovered traces of Mary’s blood in the boot of Etherington’s car (which he claimed were the result of an accident with a broken beer bottle on a picnic outing) and more traces of the same blood on a spade in his shed. The evidence was all circumstantial but overwhelming, the prosecution case being that he had done away with Mary in a fit of jealous rage by means unknown and then buried her body somewhere up on the Downs. Charlie scrolled further back past the reports of Etherington’s arrest back to the time of the alleged crime. There was no mention of the Rex but finally he noticed a tiny item in the bottom right hand corner of the front page of the June 2nd 1953 edition. ‘Local Projectionist Dies’. The report continued ‘Mr Percy Howland, projectionist at the Rex Cinema tragically died yesterday. Mr Howland was crossing the High St when he suffered a heart attack. First Aid was administered at the scene by a passing midwife but he was found to be dead on arrival at St James Hospital. Mr Howland was a respected and popular local character, he lived alone and leaves no family’.
Charlie sat quietly for a few minutes then pulled out his mobile phone and punched in Harry Dunphy’s number. Mrs Pardew scuttled across and said “Give me that. You can’t use it in here!”
Charlie ignored her.
“Harry I’m sorry and I know it’s late in the day but could you come back to the Rex and bring Sean or one of your other boys with a gas axe?”
“What?” said Harry
“You know. Oxy-acetylene cutter”.
“Yes I know what it is but what’s it for?” demanded Harry
“Humour me “. said Charlie and cut the connection. He turned to the outraged Mrs Pardew, “Sorry and thanks but I’ve got to go now”
45 minutes later Harry Dunphy pulled up outside the Rex in a Toyota pick-up with his son Sean.
“We need to get the gear up to the projection room” said Charlie.
Harry started to swear but Charlie raised a hand and Sean started to lug his equipment up the stairs. A few moments later Keith Wallace arrived having been alerted by Harry that something was up.
“Cut round the lock” said Charlie.
The three men and Sean were looking at the plate steel door of the store in the projection room.
“At the very least it’s criminal damage Charlie” said Keith.
“Someone’s going to notice eventually” said Harry
“Just do it “ said Charlie “it’s important”.
“Don’t I need a Hot Works Permit?” asked Sean nervously.
Harry caught Charlie’s grim expression. “Not today son. Just do it”.
As the room filled with smoke and the smell of scorched metal, the three men went out onto the roof while Sean worked. Nothing was said.
After a few minutes there was a clang as the lock fell out of the door, Charlie was about to shove Sean aside and open the door when Harry grabbed him.
“Wait Charlie! It’s red hot, let it cool”
Charlie looked round the room, picked up a piece of wood and levered the door open.
As the smoke cleared a different smell, a smell of dead things caught at the back of Charlie’s throat and he gagged. Mary Etherington sat on a mattress staring sightlessly past him. Mary’s neck was still ringed by a steel collar attached to a bolt in the wall, her underwear hung loosely over her mummified flesh, a few scraps of blonde hair clung to her withered skull. The room was the room that Charlie had been shown on the screen the only difference being that Mary had written, in her own blood, the words ‘I love you’ on the wall beside her.
Mary had run off with another man, run to Percy Howland’s S&M dungeon on the roof of the Rex. Percy must have left her chained there while he popped out for some cigarettes and dropped dead in the High Street with the only key to the store in his trouser pocket. Poor Mary must have died of thirst. Stanley Etherington had been hung for being an evil tempered bastard and nothing more.
“Christ! What a balls up” said Charlie. He pushed the door shut with his foot and took out his mobile to call the police.
Saturday, 11 April 2009
How to Put on a Musical – Part 12 – The Design
No one can deny that set design is important. Would Les Mis have been the success it is without its barricades and its cast endlessly tramping around the revolve? Would Phantom still be running without its chandelier, drapes and subterranean candles? Would We Will Rock You prosper without the theatrical coup that is the Guitar Reveal? I firmly believe that the original Martin Guerre would have been a hit if only they had had a set more interesting than those dreary radio controlled trucks that trundled aimlessly around the stage (mind you at the preview I saw the finale consisted of the ensemble miming hoeing in semi darkness so perhaps the direction missed the mark as well). On the other hand a great set can’t buy you success as audiences who dozed through Lord of the Rings will testify.
Producers hate designers almost as much as they hate production managers. The reason is simple, as a basic principle producers hate anything or anyone that costs them money and designers are responsible for spending a substantial portion of the budget. Producers often get the designer foisted on them by the director and feel they have no control and definitely no understanding of these maverick creatures, who can be difficult, spendthrift, drunk, unavailable, irritatingly camp, abroad, vegetarian, Trotskyite, foreign, sleeping with the director, unfathomably intellectual, computer illiterate, patronising, impractical, late, and over budget (delete as applicable). Producers find themselves sitting with their head in their hands listening to a designer earnestly explaining why the floor texture has to be made from individually carved tiles as opposed to a simple paint job (a floor incidentally that no one in the stalls can see) or why the finale costumes have to be made from a handmade silk dyed in Milan rather than being bought in Southall. We production managers (and I must be careful not to grind too many axes here) are often caught in the middle, the producer will gush enthusiastically at the design presentation but the moment the designer is out of earshot will turn to me and say “Tell him the floor’s got to be a paint job and tell him he can shove the handmade silk up his arse”.
Project Model – Maintenance!
It’s late in the afternoon at the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance when director Kevin McHarrowing completes his introductory remarks and turns to designer Ulla Hoos to present her model of the set design to the assembled company. Ulla is an intelligent, determined woman who has never lacked ‘front’ but today’s presentation is bigger than anything she has done before and she is aware that there are some aspects of her model that may not find favour with other members of the creative team, who due to the lateness of the design have not had a chance of a preview.
So it is with some trepidation that unveils her model and starts to speak. “When Kevin and I first started to talk about this musical we both agreed that it was vital to set it in its correct 20th century context. You will notice I say 20th century not 21st and we feel that both the Skoda and Barry’s maintenance predicaments are very much products of their time and place in late 1990s Kettering.. We have drawn on cultural references from all over Europe and I’m sure that some of you will notice the influence of the Viennese Secessionist Movement in general and of the Absurdist poet-gardener Janos Handspring in particular. The original chief of design at Skoda was…” She drones on and has cleverly lost everyone in the room in no more than 30 seconds, she can ramble on without fear of interruption. As she pulls the white sheet off the model box there are polite ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ particularly from the acting company though production manager Stewart Cowless does hear someone mutter “Why is it all grey?” and as he dose so he sees the other members of the creative team making a beeline for him.
The model that Ulla has revealed consists of a cobbled stage with a criss-cross of tramlines surrounded by solid walls, which extend out into the auditorium, painted with a grim industrial wasteland and shadowy figures that might just suggest haggard children. There is a solid ‘faux’ concrete ceiling and the front edge of the stage appears to be decorated with broken glass. Ulla demonstrates how the various trucks and lifts work and how the ‘Pet Shop’ ingeniously transforms into Morag the Mechanic’s narrow boat..
Bobby Brasso is the first to arrive at Stewart’s side and whispers urgently in his ear “What’s with the fucking cobbles? Nobody said a damn thing about cobbles. We can’t fucking dance on cobbles.” Stewart makes reassuring noises as the choreographer rants on but then the normally mild mannered lighting designer Jeff Osram arrives at his other ear.
“Solid walls! Solid ceiling! Pros booms covered! How the fuck am I supposed to light this thing with no overheads or side light. This is supposed to be a bloody musical”.
Stewart manages to extricate himself only to be confronted by Ian Geek, Maintenance! s sound designer. “She’s covered the pros wall and the advance bar position! Where am I supposed to hang the PA?”, company manager Anthony Fawning is next “won’t the broken glass be a health and safety issue?” and finally costume designer Buzz Phelps sidles up to him “Stewie darling what about my shoes? Ooh those awful cobbles. Promise me you’ll get rid of the cobbles”.
Ulla is getting close to the end of her presentation “ …and finally the cobbles which are absolutely central to our design concept in that they make the link between Bohemia and Kettering abundantly clear.”
“I don’t think they ever had cobbles in Kettering” says Jeff Osram quietly at the back
“How do you know?” says Cowless “Have you ever been to Kettering?”
“Well no but…”
“They certainly never had trams in Kettering” says Geek.
“Why is the show set in Kettering? Does anyone know?” asks Osram
“Oh for Christ’s sake you two! Maybe it’s to do with ley lines or maybe Dermot O’Dainty lost his virginity there.”
“Really? “
“Gordon Bennett!” Cowless stalks off to listen to Buzz Phelps’s presentation of her costume drawings.
Buzz is the ultimate pro and has never delivered a design late in her life, there are those who might unkindly suggest that this is because all her designs are essentially the same and that she can knock them out in her sleep. She smoothly displays beautiful sketches complete with fabric samples neatly pinned to them. If she can’t sell these original designs to members of the cast she will sell them at ‘Showbizz Showbizz’ in the Fulham Rd after the show opens. The ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ from the cast are unforced and heartfelt and the producers beam at this welcome antidote to Ulla’s dour and unsettling set presentation. In a rare moment of competence they have insisted that Ulla should not do both set and costumes on the grounds of workload and the only discontented faces in the room at this moment are Ulla’s and McHarrowing’s who both feel that the costumes will only trivialise the vital story that they have to tell, a story of ordinary working people facing the challenge of life in post-industrial Kettering. They are unwarrantedly colourful, they are sexy in a way that undermines the themes of sexual exploitation that they want to bring forward and both resent the complete lack of agonising that has gone into their design. On a personal level Ulla feels a twinge of envy as she studies the design for Morag the Mechanic’s overalls which are a triumph of subtle eroticism over utilitarianism. She has never had the flair for this kind of thing and her costumes often appear no more user friendly than her sets. Company Manager Anthony Fawning brings Maintenance!s first day of rehearsal to a close announcing as he does that there will be a production meeting after rehearsal the following day. As the company, the management, and the creative team drift away, the stage management hastily stack chairs and clear the hall in preparation for the evening’s Tai-Kwon-Do session. Dermot O’Dainty pauses on the steps of the Parish Hall for a moment and smiles to himself as he remembers the far off day when he lost his virginity in Kettering.
Producers hate designers almost as much as they hate production managers. The reason is simple, as a basic principle producers hate anything or anyone that costs them money and designers are responsible for spending a substantial portion of the budget. Producers often get the designer foisted on them by the director and feel they have no control and definitely no understanding of these maverick creatures, who can be difficult, spendthrift, drunk, unavailable, irritatingly camp, abroad, vegetarian, Trotskyite, foreign, sleeping with the director, unfathomably intellectual, computer illiterate, patronising, impractical, late, and over budget (delete as applicable). Producers find themselves sitting with their head in their hands listening to a designer earnestly explaining why the floor texture has to be made from individually carved tiles as opposed to a simple paint job (a floor incidentally that no one in the stalls can see) or why the finale costumes have to be made from a handmade silk dyed in Milan rather than being bought in Southall. We production managers (and I must be careful not to grind too many axes here) are often caught in the middle, the producer will gush enthusiastically at the design presentation but the moment the designer is out of earshot will turn to me and say “Tell him the floor’s got to be a paint job and tell him he can shove the handmade silk up his arse”.
Project Model – Maintenance!
It’s late in the afternoon at the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance when director Kevin McHarrowing completes his introductory remarks and turns to designer Ulla Hoos to present her model of the set design to the assembled company. Ulla is an intelligent, determined woman who has never lacked ‘front’ but today’s presentation is bigger than anything she has done before and she is aware that there are some aspects of her model that may not find favour with other members of the creative team, who due to the lateness of the design have not had a chance of a preview.
So it is with some trepidation that unveils her model and starts to speak. “When Kevin and I first started to talk about this musical we both agreed that it was vital to set it in its correct 20th century context. You will notice I say 20th century not 21st and we feel that both the Skoda and Barry’s maintenance predicaments are very much products of their time and place in late 1990s Kettering.. We have drawn on cultural references from all over Europe and I’m sure that some of you will notice the influence of the Viennese Secessionist Movement in general and of the Absurdist poet-gardener Janos Handspring in particular. The original chief of design at Skoda was…” She drones on and has cleverly lost everyone in the room in no more than 30 seconds, she can ramble on without fear of interruption. As she pulls the white sheet off the model box there are polite ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ particularly from the acting company though production manager Stewart Cowless does hear someone mutter “Why is it all grey?” and as he dose so he sees the other members of the creative team making a beeline for him.
The model that Ulla has revealed consists of a cobbled stage with a criss-cross of tramlines surrounded by solid walls, which extend out into the auditorium, painted with a grim industrial wasteland and shadowy figures that might just suggest haggard children. There is a solid ‘faux’ concrete ceiling and the front edge of the stage appears to be decorated with broken glass. Ulla demonstrates how the various trucks and lifts work and how the ‘Pet Shop’ ingeniously transforms into Morag the Mechanic’s narrow boat..
Bobby Brasso is the first to arrive at Stewart’s side and whispers urgently in his ear “What’s with the fucking cobbles? Nobody said a damn thing about cobbles. We can’t fucking dance on cobbles.” Stewart makes reassuring noises as the choreographer rants on but then the normally mild mannered lighting designer Jeff Osram arrives at his other ear.
“Solid walls! Solid ceiling! Pros booms covered! How the fuck am I supposed to light this thing with no overheads or side light. This is supposed to be a bloody musical”.
Stewart manages to extricate himself only to be confronted by Ian Geek, Maintenance! s sound designer. “She’s covered the pros wall and the advance bar position! Where am I supposed to hang the PA?”, company manager Anthony Fawning is next “won’t the broken glass be a health and safety issue?” and finally costume designer Buzz Phelps sidles up to him “Stewie darling what about my shoes? Ooh those awful cobbles. Promise me you’ll get rid of the cobbles”.
Ulla is getting close to the end of her presentation “ …and finally the cobbles which are absolutely central to our design concept in that they make the link between Bohemia and Kettering abundantly clear.”
“I don’t think they ever had cobbles in Kettering” says Jeff Osram quietly at the back
“How do you know?” says Cowless “Have you ever been to Kettering?”
“Well no but…”
“They certainly never had trams in Kettering” says Geek.
“Why is the show set in Kettering? Does anyone know?” asks Osram
“Oh for Christ’s sake you two! Maybe it’s to do with ley lines or maybe Dermot O’Dainty lost his virginity there.”
“Really? “
“Gordon Bennett!” Cowless stalks off to listen to Buzz Phelps’s presentation of her costume drawings.
Buzz is the ultimate pro and has never delivered a design late in her life, there are those who might unkindly suggest that this is because all her designs are essentially the same and that she can knock them out in her sleep. She smoothly displays beautiful sketches complete with fabric samples neatly pinned to them. If she can’t sell these original designs to members of the cast she will sell them at ‘Showbizz Showbizz’ in the Fulham Rd after the show opens. The ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ from the cast are unforced and heartfelt and the producers beam at this welcome antidote to Ulla’s dour and unsettling set presentation. In a rare moment of competence they have insisted that Ulla should not do both set and costumes on the grounds of workload and the only discontented faces in the room at this moment are Ulla’s and McHarrowing’s who both feel that the costumes will only trivialise the vital story that they have to tell, a story of ordinary working people facing the challenge of life in post-industrial Kettering. They are unwarrantedly colourful, they are sexy in a way that undermines the themes of sexual exploitation that they want to bring forward and both resent the complete lack of agonising that has gone into their design. On a personal level Ulla feels a twinge of envy as she studies the design for Morag the Mechanic’s overalls which are a triumph of subtle eroticism over utilitarianism. She has never had the flair for this kind of thing and her costumes often appear no more user friendly than her sets. Company Manager Anthony Fawning brings Maintenance!s first day of rehearsal to a close announcing as he does that there will be a production meeting after rehearsal the following day. As the company, the management, and the creative team drift away, the stage management hastily stack chairs and clear the hall in preparation for the evening’s Tai-Kwon-Do session. Dermot O’Dainty pauses on the steps of the Parish Hall for a moment and smiles to himself as he remembers the far off day when he lost his virginity in Kettering.
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
How to Put on a Musical – Part 11 – Rehearsals 2
Rehearsals. What do they do all day? Well the actors don’t normally learn their lines in the rehearsal room, they do that offsite while in the bath or walking the dog. In musical rehearsals there are normally 2 rooms one for the director and one for the choreographer. The latter lays out the big routines and the former does the motivation and the ‘don’t bump into the furniture bit’. It sounds simple doesn’t it, six weeks later a fully formed musical steps into the spotlight. However as always with Musical Theatre there is plenty to go wrong.
From my personal point of view, a production manager’s point of view, the first day of rehearsal can be both dreary beyond belief and fraught with peril. On the one hand one has to sit through endless introductory speeches and meet dozens of people whose names melt away quicker than snow in the desert and on the other one is likely to be confronted by aggrieved staff members who have discovered that their contracts are not exactly what they expected and one can also be ambushed by the creative team who may have added something to the design concept not previously discussed or costed. So we production managers have to either be on our mettle or find some reasonable excuse for not being there at all.
Project Model – Maintenance!
Kevin McHarrowing slowly rises to his feet, he gazes round at the assembled company, he almost seems to be counting them to check that all were present, that no one would miss his First Day of Rehearsal Director’s Speech.
“Welcome. All of us in this room have something in common, we have all shared at least one experience and that is the feeling of pure bewilderment when we heard that these two guys” here he indicated the show’s producers sitting either side of him, “were going to put on a musical based on the Haynes Owners Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit.. It’s crazy, it’s off the wall, it’s almost surreal” Glaswegian McHarrowing lovingly rolls the ‘r’s in surreal, “which incidentally is a word we will be coming back to later. But now let’s think about the 1989 Skoda Favorit. It was the last crap car that Skoda made, after this Favorit model Volkswagen bought the company and starting making ‘good’ German cars. All well and good but did we not lose something at that moment. Leave your bourgeois ‘What Car Magazine’ prejudices at the door. The Skoda was the people’s car, the Czech people’s car built at a plant deep in the Bohemian forests. Ah Bohemian there’s another word that we will be coming back to in these rehearsals. These are the forests where the Brothers Grimm roamed in search of their fairy tales, where Hitler went on camping trips from school, they are soaked in romance, blood and history and in order to put the Skoda in its true 20th century context we will be doing the opening ‘Production Line’ routine entirely in Czech. At this point I would like to introduce Katarina Masaryk who is our Czech language coach.” All turn to look at the pretty blonde girl at the back of the room.
“And then we have the ‘’Book’”, McHarrowing raises a copy of the Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit above his head. It is a mauve A4 size hardback with an artist’s impression of a Skoda Favorit and a photo of something that might be a gear box on the cover. It has been out of print for sometime and is hard to come by. “All down the ages from the Gospels themselves, through A Pilgrim’s Progress , Das Kapital, down to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets there have been books that show us the way, that show us our place in the universe. This book in its humble way does the same. It guides our hero Barry on his perilous journey from adolescence to manhood on what Sigmund Freud described as ‘Das autobahn von der leben’. We can take this book as a paradigm for……”
At the mention of the word paradigm, the meaning of which is known to only four people in the room, the company’s attention starts to wander. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust starts to feel distinctly uneasy, partly because he doesn’t know what paradigm means and partly because he thought that he was putting on a simple ‘Boy Buys Car to Get Girl – Boy gets Girl – Car Breaks Down – Boy Loses Girl – Boy Fixes Car – Boy gets girl Back’ sort of a musical and from what McHarrowing is saying, (he is now deep into the relationship between contemporary socio-political mores and motor maintenance), he is not going to get it.
Stage manager Rowena Pettifer takes a moment to open the box next to her chair which should contain scripts of Maintenance! but to her dismay, due to a cock-up at the printers, contains copies of a 50 page pamphlet produced by the London Borough of Newham entitled Performing Arts for the Elderly – A Users Guide. An ASM is despatched to the printers in a cab.
Choreographer Bobby Brasso sighs inwardly as he listens to McHarrowing. He has sat through many such speeches but this one has the makings of an all time low. Why was it that Brits took the direction thing so seriously, on Broadway there was a lot more pzazz than paradigm. Brasso, who despite his age (58) has been voted ‘Boy with the Pertest Bottom on Broadway’ for the last three years running, comforts himself with the thought that only he can turn things round, only he, using a lifetime’s experience on ‘the Great White Way’ can turn this dreary tuneless English suburban piece of hackwork into a dazzling choreographic extravaganza with routines remembered long after the Skoda Favorit has been forgotten.
Designer Ulla Hoos, clad in her normal khaki dungarees and beret, listens to McHarrowing attentively. She is probably the only person in the room who shares his world view and as his loyal and long term collaborator she desperately hopes that Maintenance! could be their passport out of a cultural ghetto of their own making onto a sunlit upland plain of mainstream work that might pay the rent and buy some new dungarees.
Composer Gunther Eisenkopf sits entranced. All this is new to him, in all his years with the East German heavy metal band Kursk Salient his music (and most critics didn’t describe it as such) was universally reviled by all but a devoted and drug crazed band of fans. His English isn’t good enough to quite follow what McHarrowing is saying but phrases like ‘musically a definitive statement of intent’ and ‘beats the shit out of Rodgers & Hammerstein’ sit well with him.
Book and lyric writer Dermot O’Dainty does know what paradigm means but also realises that McHarrowing is talking absolute bollocks. However he is savvy enough to know that to have any credibility a director has to talk absolute bollocks some or all of the time. He lets his imagination roam to a world where he and Katarina Masaryk make sweet sweet music together.
Production Manager Stewart Cowless sits in his chair trying not to writhe with anxiety. His mobile phone vibrates silently but relentlessly in his pocket as desperate scenery contractors try to contact him to nail down orders for a set that Cowless knows is already over budget and highly impractical. Eventually he can stand it no longer and making apologetic gestures to McHarrowing in particular and to the room in general he heads for the corridor to get on with business.
‘……and that’s enough quotes from dead Germans for one day’ says McHarrowing mercifully concluding his opening remarks. ‘Now I’d like to introduce our design team Ulla Hoos who has come up with a sensational set and Buzz Phelps our costume designer……’
To be continued
Here is a brief reminder of who's who on Maintenance!
Producers: Alvin Toxteth & Samuel J Bloodlust
General Manager: Kevin Whimper
Producers PA: Charlotte Gore Wincanton
Music: Gunther Eisenkopf
Book: Dermot O’Dainty
Choreographer: Bobby Brasso
Director Kevin: McHarrowing
Designer: Ulla Hoos
Costume Designer: Buzz Phelps
Lighting Designer: Geoff Osram
Sound Designer: Ian Geek
Production Manager: Stewart Cowless
Company Manager: Anthony Fawning
Stage Manager: Rowena Pettifer
Deputy stage Manager: Sazz Muldoon
ASM Book Cover: Maggie Truelove
ASM: Justin Philpotts
Wardrobe Mistress: Angie Overlocker
Wig Mistress: Natalie Tongs
And here is a reminder of the location of past episodes in the archive
No 1 Feb 1 2008
No 2 Mar 3 2008
No 3 Mar 31 2008
No 4 Apr 21 2008
No 5 Apr 31 2008
No 6 May 25 2008
No 7 June 1 2008
No 8 June 29 2008
No 9 Oct 9 2008
No 10 Nov 17 2008
From my personal point of view, a production manager’s point of view, the first day of rehearsal can be both dreary beyond belief and fraught with peril. On the one hand one has to sit through endless introductory speeches and meet dozens of people whose names melt away quicker than snow in the desert and on the other one is likely to be confronted by aggrieved staff members who have discovered that their contracts are not exactly what they expected and one can also be ambushed by the creative team who may have added something to the design concept not previously discussed or costed. So we production managers have to either be on our mettle or find some reasonable excuse for not being there at all.
Project Model – Maintenance!
Kevin McHarrowing slowly rises to his feet, he gazes round at the assembled company, he almost seems to be counting them to check that all were present, that no one would miss his First Day of Rehearsal Director’s Speech.
“Welcome. All of us in this room have something in common, we have all shared at least one experience and that is the feeling of pure bewilderment when we heard that these two guys” here he indicated the show’s producers sitting either side of him, “were going to put on a musical based on the Haynes Owners Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit.. It’s crazy, it’s off the wall, it’s almost surreal” Glaswegian McHarrowing lovingly rolls the ‘r’s in surreal, “which incidentally is a word we will be coming back to later. But now let’s think about the 1989 Skoda Favorit. It was the last crap car that Skoda made, after this Favorit model Volkswagen bought the company and starting making ‘good’ German cars. All well and good but did we not lose something at that moment. Leave your bourgeois ‘What Car Magazine’ prejudices at the door. The Skoda was the people’s car, the Czech people’s car built at a plant deep in the Bohemian forests. Ah Bohemian there’s another word that we will be coming back to in these rehearsals. These are the forests where the Brothers Grimm roamed in search of their fairy tales, where Hitler went on camping trips from school, they are soaked in romance, blood and history and in order to put the Skoda in its true 20th century context we will be doing the opening ‘Production Line’ routine entirely in Czech. At this point I would like to introduce Katarina Masaryk who is our Czech language coach.” All turn to look at the pretty blonde girl at the back of the room.
“And then we have the ‘’Book’”, McHarrowing raises a copy of the Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit above his head. It is a mauve A4 size hardback with an artist’s impression of a Skoda Favorit and a photo of something that might be a gear box on the cover. It has been out of print for sometime and is hard to come by. “All down the ages from the Gospels themselves, through A Pilgrim’s Progress , Das Kapital, down to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets there have been books that show us the way, that show us our place in the universe. This book in its humble way does the same. It guides our hero Barry on his perilous journey from adolescence to manhood on what Sigmund Freud described as ‘Das autobahn von der leben’. We can take this book as a paradigm for……”
At the mention of the word paradigm, the meaning of which is known to only four people in the room, the company’s attention starts to wander. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust starts to feel distinctly uneasy, partly because he doesn’t know what paradigm means and partly because he thought that he was putting on a simple ‘Boy Buys Car to Get Girl – Boy gets Girl – Car Breaks Down – Boy Loses Girl – Boy Fixes Car – Boy gets girl Back’ sort of a musical and from what McHarrowing is saying, (he is now deep into the relationship between contemporary socio-political mores and motor maintenance), he is not going to get it.
Stage manager Rowena Pettifer takes a moment to open the box next to her chair which should contain scripts of Maintenance! but to her dismay, due to a cock-up at the printers, contains copies of a 50 page pamphlet produced by the London Borough of Newham entitled Performing Arts for the Elderly – A Users Guide. An ASM is despatched to the printers in a cab.
Choreographer Bobby Brasso sighs inwardly as he listens to McHarrowing. He has sat through many such speeches but this one has the makings of an all time low. Why was it that Brits took the direction thing so seriously, on Broadway there was a lot more pzazz than paradigm. Brasso, who despite his age (58) has been voted ‘Boy with the Pertest Bottom on Broadway’ for the last three years running, comforts himself with the thought that only he can turn things round, only he, using a lifetime’s experience on ‘the Great White Way’ can turn this dreary tuneless English suburban piece of hackwork into a dazzling choreographic extravaganza with routines remembered long after the Skoda Favorit has been forgotten.
Designer Ulla Hoos, clad in her normal khaki dungarees and beret, listens to McHarrowing attentively. She is probably the only person in the room who shares his world view and as his loyal and long term collaborator she desperately hopes that Maintenance! could be their passport out of a cultural ghetto of their own making onto a sunlit upland plain of mainstream work that might pay the rent and buy some new dungarees.
Composer Gunther Eisenkopf sits entranced. All this is new to him, in all his years with the East German heavy metal band Kursk Salient his music (and most critics didn’t describe it as such) was universally reviled by all but a devoted and drug crazed band of fans. His English isn’t good enough to quite follow what McHarrowing is saying but phrases like ‘musically a definitive statement of intent’ and ‘beats the shit out of Rodgers & Hammerstein’ sit well with him.
Book and lyric writer Dermot O’Dainty does know what paradigm means but also realises that McHarrowing is talking absolute bollocks. However he is savvy enough to know that to have any credibility a director has to talk absolute bollocks some or all of the time. He lets his imagination roam to a world where he and Katarina Masaryk make sweet sweet music together.
Production Manager Stewart Cowless sits in his chair trying not to writhe with anxiety. His mobile phone vibrates silently but relentlessly in his pocket as desperate scenery contractors try to contact him to nail down orders for a set that Cowless knows is already over budget and highly impractical. Eventually he can stand it no longer and making apologetic gestures to McHarrowing in particular and to the room in general he heads for the corridor to get on with business.
‘……and that’s enough quotes from dead Germans for one day’ says McHarrowing mercifully concluding his opening remarks. ‘Now I’d like to introduce our design team Ulla Hoos who has come up with a sensational set and Buzz Phelps our costume designer……’
To be continued
Here is a brief reminder of who's who on Maintenance!
Producers: Alvin Toxteth & Samuel J Bloodlust
General Manager: Kevin Whimper
Producers PA: Charlotte Gore Wincanton
Music: Gunther Eisenkopf
Book: Dermot O’Dainty
Choreographer: Bobby Brasso
Director Kevin: McHarrowing
Designer: Ulla Hoos
Costume Designer: Buzz Phelps
Lighting Designer: Geoff Osram
Sound Designer: Ian Geek
Production Manager: Stewart Cowless
Company Manager: Anthony Fawning
Stage Manager: Rowena Pettifer
Deputy stage Manager: Sazz Muldoon
ASM Book Cover: Maggie Truelove
ASM: Justin Philpotts
Wardrobe Mistress: Angie Overlocker
Wig Mistress: Natalie Tongs
And here is a reminder of the location of past episodes in the archive
No 1 Feb 1 2008
No 2 Mar 3 2008
No 3 Mar 31 2008
No 4 Apr 21 2008
No 5 Apr 31 2008
No 6 May 25 2008
No 7 June 1 2008
No 8 June 29 2008
No 9 Oct 9 2008
No 10 Nov 17 2008
Monday, 17 November 2008
How to Put on a Musical – Part 10 - Rehearsals
The first thing you need for rehearsals is a rehearsal room and for a musical the ideal rehearsal space should fill the following criteria:
Be within 400 yards of Leicester Square tube station
Comprise: 1 large space for the main production calls
1 smaller space for dance calls etc
1 room with mirror & piano for costume fittings and music calls
1 room with phone/internet as a company office
3. Be available 9.00am – 10.00pm
4. Have a sprung timber floor
5. Be well heated so that dancers don’t injure themselves
6. Be in a nice middle-class area with access to cappuccinos, ciabatta sandwiches, noodle bar, and a pub for the stage management to brood in at the end of the day.
How many rehearsal rooms fit these criteria? None. Most rehearsal rooms are in socially challenged areas where the local kids can strip the wheels off a BMW and leave it on bricks in less than 3 minutes. Most are inconveniently placed in quadrants of London not served by the underground and most are draughty and dank, too small to mark up the set plan on the floor, have limited access and provide a wide variety of cultural and sporting activities for the local community in the evenings requiring a complete clear up of the space at the end of rehearsals every day. The latter drawback is often viewed as a plus by some wily producers who realise that a full programme of table tennis, Brownies and Tae-Kwon-Do in the evenings will prevent the director from rehearsing after 6.00pm and thus save thousands of pounds of stage management overtime.
Project Model – Maintenance!
Due to the short notice of the deal with the Piccadilly Theatre the Maintenance! management have had to book rehearsal space at the last minute and have ended up with the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance in East Ham. This is a sub-standard space by any reckoning. It is not big enough, it is badly lit and heated, it is a nightmare to access from central London and worst of all, the local priest is a musical theatre enthusiast who likes to pop in and discuss how things are going with the director.
The first day of rehearsals gets off to an inauspicious start when stage manager Rowena Pettifer and her team turn up at 9.30 to set up for the morning’s ‘Meet ‘n Greet’ session only to find the hall securely locked. After half an hours detective work they find caretaker Sid Stickler a few doors away. Sid, who, unlike his parish priest, believes that all musicals, with the possible exception of Bernadette, are the work of the devil and that the unhappy group of stage management on his doorstep are only one step removed from being Satanists, is not helpful. He declares that there was only a pencil booking, that nothing has been confirmed and that no advance payment has been made, furthermore he has no intention of opening the hall until he has a call from Doris Quill the parish secretary telling him that a cheque has been received. With that he departs for his allotment. Rowena hastily calls Kevin Whimper, who is already half way to East Ham and now has to turn round and return to the office to pick up a cheque for Mrs Quill. It is a miserable, drizzling February morning in East London and slowly the group of disgruntled actors, management and creative team huddled together by the locked doors of the hall grows larger. The Church of our Lady of Cheerful Countenance is marooned in an ocean of derelict industrial sites interspersed with the occasional decaying tower block or vandalised playground, there is not a Starbucks for miles and the only catering nearby is a petrol station where the pork pies have sell-by dates from the previous year. Director Kevin McHarrowing eventually cancels the morning call and tells everyone to return at 2.00pm. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust curses everyone within earshot including the Lady of Cheerful Countenance and sets off in his chauffeur driven BMW with his leading man and leading lady to buy doughnuts for everybody.
By lunchtime the cheque has finally reached Mrs Quill and the stage management retrieve Mr Stickler from his allotment (he is discovered in his shed reading a periodical entitled ‘Zips ‘n Buckles’). He grudgingly opens the hall and even more grudgingly turns on the heating. At 2.00 the company are finally assembled, seated in a semicircle in front of a table where the producers, Samuel J Bloodlust and Alvin Toxteth sit with director McHarrowing. Bloodlust gets up to speak.
“Welcome everyone. I am Samuel J Bloodlust and I and my partner Alvin, are the producers of Maintenance! Today is a proud day both for us and for the creative team on this project, today is not the beginning but is a vital staging post on a journey that began one night two years ago in the departure lounge of Berlin’s Tegel Airport. On that night these two guys”, he pauses to indicate composer Gunther Eisenkopf and book writer Dermot O’Dainty, “met at the bar and in an evening of creative inspiration wrote the basis of the show that we are about to put on”.
Eisenkopf and O’Dainty nod sagely knowing full well that they were both so drunk on that fateful evening that they had no idea that they had written a musical until the following morning when the airport police released them and with the personal possessions returned to them was a bundle of paper napkins on which they had laid down the basis of Maintenance!
“Dermot brought the project to us soon afterwards and I’m happy to say that we are now fully funded”, at this point his partner Alvin Toxteth looks distinctly shifty, “and as you all know we are scheduled to start previewing at the Piccadilly Theatre in 7 weeks time. We are very excited to have secured the Piccadilly with its superb location and long history of successful runs”. This last laughable assertion sets some of the company sniggering. “However I’m not going to take up any more time, I’m going to pass you over to Anthony your company manager who has some business stuff to get out of the way and then to Kevin who will lead us on the journey that is Maintenance!"
Anthony Fawning gets up. “OK everyone. Welcome and many apologies for this morning’s problems. Now if you haven’t been seen by our wardrobe department and been measured then you need to have done so before you leave the building. You also need to have handed me your starter forms before you leave. And finally I know some of you had trouble finding your way here today and I know that two of you ended up at Stanstead Airport, so can I recommend that you go to Stratford East by overland then get the 429 bus heading towards Barking and get off at Asda and get a 365 heading towards Woolwich which will drop you off at the top of the road. Any questions? No? OK it’s over to you Kevin”.
Director Kevin McHarrowing gets slowly to his feet and surveys the clay from which he hopes to mould a hit musical. He has never staged a West End musical before but he has absolute not to say psychotic confidence in his own abilities and has no doubt that given sufficient intellectual rigour he can transform the sentimental pap that is the current book into a socialist parable for our times, a parable that will bring hope and meaning to ordinary working people and not just the contemptible pleasure seekers who come to the theatre solely to have ‘a good night out’.
“Good afternoon everyone. Before I tell you something about Maintenance! I think we should all introduce ourselves and tell the room what we do. So Gavin would you like to start”.
“Gavin Shoestrap playing Barry”.
“Erica Fortinbras playing Sharon”
One by one the cast and staff announce their names and the part that they are playing or the job that they will be doing.
“Miranda Williams ensemble”
“Harry Hopkins playing Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”
“Diane Wilkins ensemble & dance captain”
“Peter De Vriess ensemble.”
“David Casper, Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”.
“Ah” says McHarrowing staring at David Casper who he fails to recognise. Alvin Toxteth quickly intercedes, realising that somewhere in his office something has gone horribly wrong and that somehow they have contracted two actors to play the same parts.
“David you and I need to get together on this”
“Do you mean I’m not playing the Foreman, Pet Shop owner and Registrar?” says the aggrieved actor.
“No, no, no. We just need to have a chat”. says a flustered Toxteth and gestures for the next actor to introduce themself. Finally all are done and the company look around with mixed feelings. The Company manager and stage management study the sea of faces trying to work out who will be the company nutter, the rest look around and compile a mental list of whom they would most like to sleep with and David Casper leaves the room to ring his agent.
McHarrowing starts his introductory address.
To be continued
Be within 400 yards of Leicester Square tube station
Comprise: 1 large space for the main production calls
1 smaller space for dance calls etc
1 room with mirror & piano for costume fittings and music calls
1 room with phone/internet as a company office
3. Be available 9.00am – 10.00pm
4. Have a sprung timber floor
5. Be well heated so that dancers don’t injure themselves
6. Be in a nice middle-class area with access to cappuccinos, ciabatta sandwiches, noodle bar, and a pub for the stage management to brood in at the end of the day.
How many rehearsal rooms fit these criteria? None. Most rehearsal rooms are in socially challenged areas where the local kids can strip the wheels off a BMW and leave it on bricks in less than 3 minutes. Most are inconveniently placed in quadrants of London not served by the underground and most are draughty and dank, too small to mark up the set plan on the floor, have limited access and provide a wide variety of cultural and sporting activities for the local community in the evenings requiring a complete clear up of the space at the end of rehearsals every day. The latter drawback is often viewed as a plus by some wily producers who realise that a full programme of table tennis, Brownies and Tae-Kwon-Do in the evenings will prevent the director from rehearsing after 6.00pm and thus save thousands of pounds of stage management overtime.
Project Model – Maintenance!
Due to the short notice of the deal with the Piccadilly Theatre the Maintenance! management have had to book rehearsal space at the last minute and have ended up with the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance in East Ham. This is a sub-standard space by any reckoning. It is not big enough, it is badly lit and heated, it is a nightmare to access from central London and worst of all, the local priest is a musical theatre enthusiast who likes to pop in and discuss how things are going with the director.
The first day of rehearsals gets off to an inauspicious start when stage manager Rowena Pettifer and her team turn up at 9.30 to set up for the morning’s ‘Meet ‘n Greet’ session only to find the hall securely locked. After half an hours detective work they find caretaker Sid Stickler a few doors away. Sid, who, unlike his parish priest, believes that all musicals, with the possible exception of Bernadette, are the work of the devil and that the unhappy group of stage management on his doorstep are only one step removed from being Satanists, is not helpful. He declares that there was only a pencil booking, that nothing has been confirmed and that no advance payment has been made, furthermore he has no intention of opening the hall until he has a call from Doris Quill the parish secretary telling him that a cheque has been received. With that he departs for his allotment. Rowena hastily calls Kevin Whimper, who is already half way to East Ham and now has to turn round and return to the office to pick up a cheque for Mrs Quill. It is a miserable, drizzling February morning in East London and slowly the group of disgruntled actors, management and creative team huddled together by the locked doors of the hall grows larger. The Church of our Lady of Cheerful Countenance is marooned in an ocean of derelict industrial sites interspersed with the occasional decaying tower block or vandalised playground, there is not a Starbucks for miles and the only catering nearby is a petrol station where the pork pies have sell-by dates from the previous year. Director Kevin McHarrowing eventually cancels the morning call and tells everyone to return at 2.00pm. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust curses everyone within earshot including the Lady of Cheerful Countenance and sets off in his chauffeur driven BMW with his leading man and leading lady to buy doughnuts for everybody.
By lunchtime the cheque has finally reached Mrs Quill and the stage management retrieve Mr Stickler from his allotment (he is discovered in his shed reading a periodical entitled ‘Zips ‘n Buckles’). He grudgingly opens the hall and even more grudgingly turns on the heating. At 2.00 the company are finally assembled, seated in a semicircle in front of a table where the producers, Samuel J Bloodlust and Alvin Toxteth sit with director McHarrowing. Bloodlust gets up to speak.
“Welcome everyone. I am Samuel J Bloodlust and I and my partner Alvin, are the producers of Maintenance! Today is a proud day both for us and for the creative team on this project, today is not the beginning but is a vital staging post on a journey that began one night two years ago in the departure lounge of Berlin’s Tegel Airport. On that night these two guys”, he pauses to indicate composer Gunther Eisenkopf and book writer Dermot O’Dainty, “met at the bar and in an evening of creative inspiration wrote the basis of the show that we are about to put on”.
Eisenkopf and O’Dainty nod sagely knowing full well that they were both so drunk on that fateful evening that they had no idea that they had written a musical until the following morning when the airport police released them and with the personal possessions returned to them was a bundle of paper napkins on which they had laid down the basis of Maintenance!
“Dermot brought the project to us soon afterwards and I’m happy to say that we are now fully funded”, at this point his partner Alvin Toxteth looks distinctly shifty, “and as you all know we are scheduled to start previewing at the Piccadilly Theatre in 7 weeks time. We are very excited to have secured the Piccadilly with its superb location and long history of successful runs”. This last laughable assertion sets some of the company sniggering. “However I’m not going to take up any more time, I’m going to pass you over to Anthony your company manager who has some business stuff to get out of the way and then to Kevin who will lead us on the journey that is Maintenance!"
Anthony Fawning gets up. “OK everyone. Welcome and many apologies for this morning’s problems. Now if you haven’t been seen by our wardrobe department and been measured then you need to have done so before you leave the building. You also need to have handed me your starter forms before you leave. And finally I know some of you had trouble finding your way here today and I know that two of you ended up at Stanstead Airport, so can I recommend that you go to Stratford East by overland then get the 429 bus heading towards Barking and get off at Asda and get a 365 heading towards Woolwich which will drop you off at the top of the road. Any questions? No? OK it’s over to you Kevin”.
Director Kevin McHarrowing gets slowly to his feet and surveys the clay from which he hopes to mould a hit musical. He has never staged a West End musical before but he has absolute not to say psychotic confidence in his own abilities and has no doubt that given sufficient intellectual rigour he can transform the sentimental pap that is the current book into a socialist parable for our times, a parable that will bring hope and meaning to ordinary working people and not just the contemptible pleasure seekers who come to the theatre solely to have ‘a good night out’.
“Good afternoon everyone. Before I tell you something about Maintenance! I think we should all introduce ourselves and tell the room what we do. So Gavin would you like to start”.
“Gavin Shoestrap playing Barry”.
“Erica Fortinbras playing Sharon”
One by one the cast and staff announce their names and the part that they are playing or the job that they will be doing.
“Miranda Williams ensemble”
“Harry Hopkins playing Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”
“Diane Wilkins ensemble & dance captain”
“Peter De Vriess ensemble.”
“David Casper, Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”.
“Ah” says McHarrowing staring at David Casper who he fails to recognise. Alvin Toxteth quickly intercedes, realising that somewhere in his office something has gone horribly wrong and that somehow they have contracted two actors to play the same parts.
“David you and I need to get together on this”
“Do you mean I’m not playing the Foreman, Pet Shop owner and Registrar?” says the aggrieved actor.
“No, no, no. We just need to have a chat”. says a flustered Toxteth and gestures for the next actor to introduce themself. Finally all are done and the company look around with mixed feelings. The Company manager and stage management study the sea of faces trying to work out who will be the company nutter, the rest look around and compile a mental list of whom they would most like to sleep with and David Casper leaves the room to ring his agent.
McHarrowing starts his introductory address.
To be continued
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