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The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage went down last night with an incredible performance where the actors just owned the piece from start to finish, everything went pretty smoothly with the pace (some transitions were still making me wince, though), and the audience was terrific and seemed on the same page as us the whole time - laughing, chucking, gasping, and falling deathly silent right when they were supposed to. Lot of friends out there, and a lot of strangers out there (we were sold out and over and had people sitting on the riser edges and on mats on the floor in front), and they were all pretty effusive about it, although I again got comments asking why I turned the AC off during the show - no one believes me, but there are very few shows where the sound of the AC going during it is not a problem - it's worse for comedies, where punchlines are blunted even when fully audible -- people laugh more when they're cool, but even less when there's white noise going on in the room -- but it throws a wet blanket over everything when it's on.
I saw one performance of Robert Honeywell's Every Play Ever Written, which I saw four times, DESTROYED by the AC, which Robert rode off and on during all the shows, but mostly on for this one, and I could feel the gags (wonderfully performed by the company as always) trapped inside wet felt.
We kept it on during all the NECROPOLIS shows last August, as the entire sound for all those is pre-recorded and can be easily pumped over the AC tone, but the revivals didn't go over nearly as well with audiences, reactionwise, as the originals had. I just felt that AC sound lying across the shows, muffling them.
So we were all hot - not as bad as Tuesday, marrone!, but sweaty enough.
Oh, someone on the Wellesnet forums, someone who KNOWS his Welles, as I can tell from his postings, saw the show last night, and loved it, and said nice things about it, and I wrote a response just now, which is here, with the nice quote that made me respond:
I feel like I now know how Welles' uncut Ambersons would have played.
Wow, thanks so very very much for the complement - that's about the best I could hope for, really. The more I worked on it, the more I got that feeling myself - I had originally no "illusions" about this being any kind of true reconstruction, because of the basic differences in media between film and theatre, but I did eventually feel like I knew how especially the last act of the film would have felt, and while I don't excuse the butchers one frame of their work, I grew to have even more of an understanding of why they were so unnerved by the film - I couldn't just sneer at them simply and say, "Oh, they were scared by how DARK it was, whoa!" - I don't think it's because it was "dark," as we normally think of that, it's because of the feeling of . . . a "pained mournfulness" is about as close as I can come (an entire film that feels like Aggie Moorehead's face looks at the end of Wilbur's funeral).
There were times when we would be running scenes that were ultimately reshot, butchered, or dropped, and I would think to myself, "Dear God, Orson actually thought this would get onscreen in 1942?" There's something that changes in the whole piece when Major Amberson's monologue tips over into the metaphysical (mostly gone in the release print) that turns the whole story into something Other, and hangs over the rest of it - my favorite piece to perform as narrator of the show is the uncut intro to that speech (in a close race with the cut section of the "walk home" narration about "If space has memory . . ."). When the show worked (which, being theatre, it did at varied levels from performance to performance, last night being all around the best), everything CHANGED from that moment, and you could feel it change in the audience (being in an interesting position, seated between the actors and the audience - an uncomfortably open and vulnerable spot for me - I could really feel the interplay between the two).
In any case, thanks, and yes, I hope to do it again sometime, when I can afford to rent the costumes again, and once I'm able to under Actors Equity codes (because of the code I had to produce this under, I can't do it again at the same level for at least 13 months, but several of the actors are already pushing me to jump right back into it when that time is up).
Okay, enough Ambersons for now - I have to get this all together to post and get back to The Brick to supervise a tech.
Meanwhile, as I write this, back in the iPod:
1. "Sans Raison (I Love You For Sentimental Reasons)" - Les Chats Sauvages - Foreign Language Fun, vol. 4
2. "August Mademoiselle" - Children of the Mushroom - Pebbles Volume 9 - Southern California 2
3. "Hot Promotions" - Johnson & Johnson - Sundown
4. "Gotta Hear The Beat" - Animal Jack - Ear-Piercing Punk
5. "Beautiful Dream" - World Party - Egyptology
6. "Hold Me Baby" - Albert Washington - MOJO: Raw Soul
7. "Crazy Things" - The Quid - Pebbles volume 4
8. "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War" - Paul Simon - Hearts and Bones
9. "Love You 'Till The Day I Die" - The Heartbreakers - Dangerous Doo-Wop 3
10. "A Fine, Fine Boy" - Darlene Love - Phil Spector - Back to Mono (1958-1969)
So, a couple of recent cat photos . . . what's Hooker looking at with that silly look?
Oh, it's the whip prop Berit's making for Ambersons, dangling here at top of frame (with Hooker on the painting tarp that has been a favorite nap spot recently):
And so as to not overload this too much with images, behind the cut are 12 favorites from last night's photo call after the show - there are other good ones, but these were the ones that caught my eye immediately this morning . . .
The opening of The Ball scene:
The Major (Bill Weeden) and Isabel (Sarah Malinda Engelke):
Eugene Morgan (Timothy McCown Reynolds), George Amberson Minifer (Stephen Heskett) and Isabel Amberson Minifer meet at The Ball:
Eggnog at The Ball, with The Major, Jack Amberson (Walter Brandes), Wilbur Minifer (Vince Phillip), Isabel, Fanny Minifer (Ivanna Cullinan) and Eugene:
A butler (Roger Nasser) serves olives at The Ball, a previously unseen delicacy viewed with skepticism by the midwestern locals here at the turn of the 20th Century (David Arthur Bachrach, Josh Hartung, Maire-Rose Pike, Aaron Baker, Natalie Wilder):
Gene gets a warning from Jack about George at The Ball:
Lucy Morgan (Shelley Ray) and George dance at The Ball:
At the other end of the play, George talks to his nearly hysterical Aunt Fanny as she leans against the boiler in the kitchen of the cleaned-out Amberson mansion:
"My money? My money?" - Fanny reveals to George that she's broke:
Fanny breaks down as George tries to calm her:
Some time later, Eugene visits Fanny in her shabby boarding house to tell her that he and George have met and are at peace:
Gene tells Fanny of his feelings for his dead true love, Isabel, as Fanny despairs in her love for Gene:
But I will include some final shots from Berit's and my cleanup after the show last night, which took us a couple of hours . . .
It was obvious that there was no point in us trying to keep the breakaway bass prop Berit made for the show . . .
It's just too big to store - and maybe we'll do the show again, but it'd be over a year and a half away, and what would we do with this in the meantime? Berit shows off the pre-broken back for just a moment . . .
And then, a moment later, shows just how we'll fit in in a trash bag to go out with The Brick's garbage:
A pretty sad end for the prop, seen here with Berit's feet in midair coming down for one more smash . . .
Damn, we should have considered we'd be doing this before the show, and let Timothy go full out on it during this last performance . . . shoot. Oh, well.
Okay, time to let this lie and run off to The Brick again
