Tohu Bohu

Sunday was the matinee. I hate matinees.

I should point out that I think it’s a very good idea to have matinees, and that in fact I think we should probably do more than one. There are people who (for one reason or another) can’t get to the evening shows, and part of the point of community theater is for the community. You know? And then there’s the part of the community that lives in a different state and doesn’t want to drive three hours home in the middle of the night. OK, not so much the community, but still.

The problem is that the matinee throws off our entire rhythm. First there’s the call, which is, let’s say, an hour before curtain. Curtain is usually at eight, so call is for seven, and people start arriving around six-thirty or so. It’s how we set up our day. We finish our afternoon stuff (on Friday, that’s generally our day jobs), those of us who eat before the show eat our dinners and those of us who don’t eat whatever we do to sustain ourselves, and we head for the playhouse. For the matinee, though, curtain is at two, call is for one, and we’re all messed up. There’s too much time in the morning to not do anything, but there’s not enough time to make a day of anything. We arrive at the playhouse just after noon, and wander like lost souls. There’s too much light. We can’t really believe there’s a show in the middle of the day, and can’t settle into it. We left this place only twelve or fourteen hours ago, and it looks different somehow, and worse.

We walk in out of the bright sunshine to put on our layers of woolen clothes, our hats and overcoats. In Pyggie, particularly, the opening scene is at eleven at night, in a cold rain; outside it’s eighty and sunny, and kids are throwing Frisbees. There’s an extra layer of unreality to it. We close the stage door to keep the sunshine out, and also because the matinee crowd, like the actors, have arrived early and are wandering around, their rhythm off as well.

Once the show starts, there’s an odd quality to the light, even though there logically shouldn’t be; there aren’t any windows to let in the sun. Still, we can feel it. And the audience is more restless in the middle of the day, less able to settle into their seats and be absorbed. Our rhythms up on stage are just a bit off, which sets them further off. We don’t lose our lines, but they come out a bit different, the words in a different order, the emphasis on a different word, the gesture at a different spot. Costumes, somehow, pick the matinee to open their seams or stick their zippers. Offstage, we are noisier. There’s more whispering in the wings, more chattering and cursing in the greenroom.

When the show is over (and for all my kvetching, it was a good show), we emerge into the daylight, blinking, and realize that there’s a good two hours before dinnertime, and then the evening after that. The combination of adrenaline and exhaustion that usually sustains us after a show—final curtain around ten-fifteen, washing and changing, chattering and drinking, people coming back behind and saying “Marvelous! Marvelous!” more chattering and drinking perhaps, and eating (with this group, much eating: fruit plates, veggie dip, cupcakes, brownies, doughnuts, pasta salad, cheese and crackers… someone brought an entire roasted chicken to Opening Night and we did a pretty good job of finishing it) and then off to our various homes to tumble into bed and sleep the sleep of the just for however many hours remain until morning—is now working against us as we contemplate the rest of the day.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Mobile phone! Mobile phone! Mobile phone!

That is the first time that’s ever happened to me. I stopped doing theater from around 1995 to around 2005, during which time cell phones became ubiquitous. Before that, having a phone ring during the show would have been very surprising, and the actor could probably assume that the owner of the phone was a doctor, and really needed to be reachable. Or a drug dealer, and the disruption of a play was far from the worst aspect of the call, I suppose. Now, we just assume that someone idiotically forgot to put the thing on silent, curse them.

It was during Rich Alfie; I believe it started ringing during Eliza’s line that is my cue to stealthily make my way behind her and tap her on the shoulder. Eliza turns, sees Alfie in his wedding suit, and shouts awohwahwah!, Higgins repeats the cry mockingly, and then I stand staring at Eliza thinking nothing at all but Mobile phone! Mobile phone! Mobile phone!

I eventually remembered my line, but dang.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger hasn’t written here about the reviews of Pyggie, three of which have come out and been positive. I suspect we are going to get one more, possibly two, but it’s also possible that there won’t be any more. Still, three positive reviews is three positive reviews, and one is in a newspaper with a circulation of thirty thousand, and one is in a newspaper with a circulation of more than fifty thousand (wow! that surprises me), so, you know, not bad. I won’t link to them here, as that for some reason busts my pseudonymyty sense, but I suspect Gentle Readers in the area have sufficient Google Skillz to find them should they be interested.
The thing about the reviews from my point of view is that they haven’t been effusive about me personally. Two of them don’t mention me at all, in fact, and the third says I am “lively” and that I am not old enough to be Eliza’s father, and suggests that Rich Alfie should be “eliminated altogether”. The reviewer also uses the word “hilarious” to describe the part, although that seems to me aimed more at Shaw than at me, but still, the word is connected to my performance, so that’s all right.
Now, I’m in a supporting part here. There isn’t any particular reason for a reviewer to say anything about me, and given the limitations of newspapers, there is a reason to leave out anything you can. And you may think that as long as nobody says anything nasty about me, I should be happy—after all, as a supporting actor, it is my job to support the story, not to draw attention away from it. Still, I am enough of an egotist to want to see a reviewer say “A highlight of the show was…”
I oughtn’t sulk, and in fact I am not sulking as much as it sounds like I am. The important thing about reviews is not the personal affirmation, but the butts in seats. These reviews should help with butts in seats. So that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Well, and last night’s brush-up rehearsal went just about like brush-up rehearsals usually go. I arrive late, just in time to make my entrance as Poor Alfie. We made it through the scene without disaster, but without putting in a whole lot of effort. When I got to the point in my monologue where I skipped on Saturday, I thought to myself Oh, that’s where I skipped! Better not skip this time. Now, where am I? but made it through all right. Jenny was conserving energy and pampering what I think was a muscle pull, so she didn’t waltz during the ball, and she didn’t fully wail her aw-oh-wah-oh-aws. Steve completely corpsed at one point, I’ve no idea why. And we all got home early.

Brush-up rehearsals are an odd thing. It’s useful to have them, so we don’t go into Friday’s performance cold. Many of us (ahem) don’t run lines during the week, because we are luxuriating in not having to go to rehearsals for a few days, so it’s a good idea to have some sort of compulsory line-through. Some groups just do a line-through (that’s done with the cast just sitting around saying their lines, often at double-speed to get home faster), and some do something closer to a full dress rehearsal, and some just do a travesty, screwing around and inserting dirty jokes. I think what we did is just about right, going through it at the right speed, with the blocking, with no wigs or beards or makeup or costumes (except hats, we must have our hats) reminding ourselves of the lines and of the broad contours of the play, and getting ready to do it properly tonight.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Gentle Readers will recall that YHB asked for help in mixing a CD for Opening Night presents, and just possibly have been waiting to find out the final score. Herewith the opening of the liner notes:

Notes on some recordings of popular music from the Higgins Archive

By W.G. Neppomuck

While it is well-known among scholars of historical linguistics that the Higgins Archive of recordings on wax cylinders includes many fine examples of early-twentieth-century dialects, a complete index of the Archive has only recently been completed. Even many researchers who have used the recordings by courtesy of the Royal Archive are unaware that in addition to the hundreds of recordings of London dialects and scores of recordings of dialects from elsewhere in England, Europe and Asia, there are a handful of cylinders of popular music. Whether Henry Higgins instructed the vocalists in phonetics, recorded them for study, or simply kept them for his own amusement, it is not now possible to know¹.

The purpose of this note is to sketch out the variety of styles, accents and dialects and other matters of phonological interest found in these recordings. The accompanying CD provides scholars an opportunity for close study. It is, perhaps, worth mentioning that some of the recordings lack a modern sense of cultural sensitivity. Higgins himself was, as was typical for his time, profoundly chauvinistic and insensitive²; however, the modern scholar might also keep in mind that he collected many recordings of which he did not approve. We must reserve judgement. However, for the modern listener, this author apologizes in advance for any offense, but persists in hopes that doing so will advance the cause of phonetic science.

¹ The notes kept with the cylinders are in Higgins’ own hand, and are incomplete, illegible and incoherent. Fortunately, the labels are in another hand, meticulous and feminine. The identity of this assistant is another mystery of the Higgins Archive, however, we are grateful to her for the names of the songs and of the vocalists.

² see Higgins 1908, Higgins 1909a, Higgins 1909b, Higgins and Pickering 1913, Higgins and Pickering 1914, Higgins 1915 and Higgins 1919.

The song list is below. There were some good things I had to leave off, and a few lousy things I had to leave off, and there were a few things I couldn’t track down in time. After the fact, a cast member suggested Lonnie Donegan’s My Old Man’s a Dustman, which would have been perfect and probably would have opened the CD, but I had never heard of it before, and although I’m sure I had heard of Lonnie Donegan (as he is a Big Deal influence on a bunch of musicians I like so much that I’ve bothered to read articles about them and their musical influences) I can’t say as I could have pulled his name out of my memory. With that sort of thing in mind, Gentle Reader, please chip in with other stuff that seems missing, as it may be a Learning Experience for YHB, and I can always use one of those.

“Mother’s Lament”, performed by Cream
“ I’m Henery The Eighth”, performed by Harry Champion
“ It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”, performed by Albert Farrington
“ Yes, We Have No Bananas”, performed by Billy Jones
“ I Love Louisa”, performed by Fred Astaire
“ Slow Down Krishna”, performed by The Bobs
“ In the Desert”, performed by Flanders & Swann
“ Rum And Coca Cola”, performed by Andrews Sisters
“ Me Pants Fall Down”, performed by Da Vinci’s Notebook
“ Run Joe”, performed by Louis Jordan
“ Road Man”, performed by Smash Mouth
“ Flat Foot Floogie”, performed by Mills Brothers
“ Angelina - Zooma Zooma (Medley)”, performed by Louis Prima
“ Mambo Italiano”, performed by Rosemary Clooney
“ Thou Swell”, performed by Count Basie & Joe Williams
“ Burlington Bertie”, performed by Julie Andrews
“ Bruces’ Philosophers Song”, performed by Monty Python
“ It’s You I Love”, performed by Beausoleil
“ Dos Geshrey Fun Der Vilder Katshke (The Cry Of The Wild Duck)”, performed by Klezmer Conservatory Band
“ What I Want Is A Proper Cup Of Coffee”, performed by Trout Fishing In America
“ Another Irish Drinking Song”, performed by Da Vinci’s Notebook
“ Autumn Leaves”, performed by Mel Torme

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Gentle Reader Matt Hulan sent me a link to The Shakespeared Brain, an article for The Literary Review by Philip Davis, in which he describes the research he and his colleagues are doing on how the brain reacts to Shakespeare’s language. In particular, he is focused on (essentially) scanning people’s brains whilst they chew on functional shifts in words, that is, words being used as parts of speech we don’t expect. Verbing, as every stoolboy knows, weirds language, and nounification is the strangosity of languageness, but does it actually fry our brains? Mr. Davis did some experiments, bless his curly head, and found that in fact, there is something different and unusual going on in our brains when we read something that has sense but is grammatically left-field-from-coming.

This was, unsurprisingly, serendipitous. I had just been listening to Shakespeare. As I was driving back and forth to Western CT and Pyggie rehearsals, I found that the recordings of Arkangel Shakespeare were an excellent diversion, making the time fly without interfering unduly with my driving skills, never much to begin with. These are full audio productions with marvelous casts, mostly RSC folk, with unabridged text. I began with The Winter’s Tale, because it had been on my mind ever since reading The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare, and discovered that the cast was lead by the magnificent Eileen Atkins and also included Ceiran Hinds, Sinead Cusack, Alex Jennings (of whom I had not heard, but who was wonderful) and a cameo by John Gielgud. I have also listened to an only moderately good Love’s Labours Lost (despite Alex Jennings as a quite good Berowne), a very funny Comedy of Errors (with David Tennant, who some Gentle Readers may know from his Hamlet which is currently at the RSC; he is doing Berowne later this year as well) and a Henry IV, Part One with Richard Griffiths as a funny but not a revelatory Falstaff.

Now, the thing that I found myself ruminating about as I was listening was the way that Shakespeare so often uses words that have more than one meaning. I don’t just mean metaphor, the replacement of a thing with some other thing to see the replaced thing better by its displacement. Not just puns, either, although of course Shakespeare is very fond of puns. I mean wit, the saying of two things simultaneously. In H4i, f’r’ex, an exchange depicting thieves as acolytes of the moon:

Falstaff: Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty: let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.

Hal: Thou sayest well, and it holds well too; for the fortune of us that are the moon’s men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is, by the moon. As, for proof, now: a purse of gold most resolutely snatched on Monday night and most dissolutely spent on Tuesday morning; got with swearing ‘Lay by’ and spent with crying ‘Bring in;’ now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladder and by and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.

Here there are puns metaphors and similies and straightforward wordplay together with the double meaning I’m talking about. Hal picks up Falstaff’s use of the word govern, but of course as the heir apparent, when he talks about governing, it holds a second meaning, particularly when going on to talk of hanging. And in small talk, too: the money is dissolutely spent, but there is also the image of Falstaff, spent and sleeping (as earlier Hal describes him “sleeping on benches after noon”) and the image of the empty and slack purse reinforces the image of the hanged thief. And of course what is laid by is not what is brought in, and neither of them are boats.

It’s not that it’s a particularly wonderful passage, although of course I like it, but it’s an example of that particular style of writing that I think of as Shakespearean, far more than the verbing and nounification that Mr. Davis is scanning, and which takes a listener a certain amount of pleasurable work to unknot. And this kind of writing often requires (or at least makes use of) repetition of a word several times in different contexts, and often in different parts of speech. Government and governed, but also the sea and the moon and spent as well.

In the writing and reading of our century, when we are pressed to omit needless words and to avoid repetition, a style like Shakespeare’s may require us to use our brains in a very different way. I don’t think that Mr. Davis, who I admit knows much more about Shakespeare than I do, has hit upon the way of it. The functional shift is something that most of us only find in Shakespeare (it was a feature of the dialogue in Friends), but the double-meaning and the repetition with shifted emphasis are something that we have stamped out of our modern style, other than in puns and jokes.

Which is fine. Stylistic trends, like people, are different one to another, and that’s presumably what makes comparative literature interesting and fun. And what makes people think that Shakespeare’s language is difficult and inaccessible. It’s not the thees and thous and dosts and cansts. It’s the style. The long sentences, sure, that often pay more attention to what is important than to where a person might actually place a subject and a verb, and that are happy to repeat an idea in a different way, or in three different ways, to heap emphasis on it. We’ve been stylistically strunked out of Shakespeare.

Except that, once you get a taste for it, it’s there for you. Even whilst driving through western Connecticut.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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The opening weekend went rather well. We seem to have sold a lot of tickets; I didn't get the final numbers, but the houses were reasonably full. The Opening Night audience was ready to laugh, and the Saturday audience was not, but they were paying attention. There were some moments that required quick thinking by one of us, but the thinking was done quickly, and the audience (mostly) never noticed a thing.

On Saturday, I cut about a third out of my big monologue. Steve had cut about half a line early in the scene, nothing big but just enough for me to rattle myself. When I went into my big monologue—here it is:

Dont say that, Governor. Dont look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that hes up agen middle class morality all the time. If theres anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "Youre undeserving; so you cant have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I dont need less than a deserving man: I need more. I dont eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I'm playing straight with you. I aint pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and thats the truth. Will you take advantage of a man's nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what hes brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until shes growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.

Here's what actually happened. I went along just fine until “I drink a lot more.” At that point, I turned to Higgins and said “Will you take advantage, er, of …” Oh, crap, I've skipped ahead. How can I get back to where I left off? Where did I leave off? Ah, hell with it “… er, a man's own nature…”

Nobody noticed. Well, except Mrs. Pearce.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Sorry to have left this abandoned for so long. We’ve been a bit busy. Opening Night was last night (we had a semi-open dress rehearsal/Senior Night on Thursday, which went reasonably well, I thought), and we’ve been working very hard. So I’ve missed writing about how every time I dirty up my hands and arms for Poor Alfie, my pasty pink skin shines through, and I’ve missed writing about the strangeness of practicing the curtain calls halfway through the second act so that some folks can go home early, and I’ve missed writing about the difficulties of keeping a large cast quiet backstage. Ah, well. Too late now.

It is not, however, too late for photos! The playhouse now has a whole gallery of Pyggie Photos, and there’s a picasa page with about a million more, and lovely ones, too. Boy, this show looks good.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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So. Your Humble Blogger had the opportunity to watch the musical of The Full Monty a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been vaguely wanting to write a note about gay jokes. Well, about a few particular kinds of gay jokes that seem to me thematically connected. Before I begin, though, I want to be clear: I’m not making pronouncements on what is funny and what ain’t funny. I am pontificating on what I find disturbing and uncomfortable, personally. I’m curious whether Gentle Readers share my discomfort, but not as some sort of moral test, just as a shared stimulus/reaction thing.

The jokes in question are about straight men being uncomfortable with gayness. I’ll break it down into categories, because that’s my nineteenth-century-positivist way of taking the humor out of the funny:

Observed: Two straight men are interacting, and a third person observes them. The interaction is misunderstood as indicating a sexual relationship between them. Sometimes this is just misunderstood referents in conversation, but often there’s an elaborate set-up where the men are embracing or one has his pants down or some other physical embodiment. This appears to be very funny indeed; audiences howl with glee. I cringe. The humor here comes from the misunderstanding, that is, it is very important to the gag that the men not be gay. Either the men are confronted with the observer’s misapprehension (usually, I should add, positive) or we are left to imagine them appalled at being so confronted.

The joke is connected, of course, to the idea that the worst thing that a straight man could imagine is being thought to be homosexual. That’s assuming that the straight man could not imagine being homosexual, being, you know, straight. So the joke here is twofold: there’s the mistaken impression of the observer (possibly a series of misapprehensions, possibly very clever writing or slapstick to get the fellows to the point of confusion) which is a sort of Humour of Ambiguity, and there’s the idea that people think they are gay, which is a sort of Humour of Humiliation. Which, again, rests entirely on the idea that it is humiliating for people to think you are gay.

I should, however, admit that the joke is occasionally attempted when the couple being observed are a man and a woman. I have only rarely seen it done that way, and in those cases, the couple (a) appear to be engaged in completely bizarre acts of congress, such as would be humiliating to be discovered, or (2) are a potential couple, such that the point is not the humor but the romance, or (3) most amusing of all, the couple is old, and therefore it is the observer who is humiliated by the thought of older, unattractive people having sex. Despite these overlaps (and the whole thing is a variation on crosstalk), I think the joke of Straight Men Observed to be Gay is enough of a distinct category to talk about, and to view its relation to other joke categories such as…

Pretending: Two straight men jocularly pretend to be lovers, or to be attracted to each other. They amuse themselves with this banter, and therefore us. This is a surefire amusement, although not one of the Big Yuks. It must be clear, however, that this is not flirtation. The men may assume lisps, or mince, or otherwise imitate stereotypical gay men, or they may express themselves in their normal tone, but either way it cannot be humorously sustained for more than a minute or two.

I actually find this funny on occasion, if it is done well (and by well, I mean, to my taste). It is (for me) Humor of Transgression, and allows men to say and do things they wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed to. I don’t find it intrinsically funny, though. In my actual life, however, I flirt with men quite a lot, when I can, and find that amusing and entertaining. Of course, I also flirt with women and find it amusing and entertaining, when I can do so without consequence. Because I am so very straight, I flirt with straight men without consequence (at least when I am correct about their straightness). Because I am so very married, I flirt with married women without consequence (at least when I am correct about their, er, monogomosity). Connected with this proclivity of mine for my own self-amusement is my amusement at other people engaging in this sort of faux flirtation.

Unwelcome Advance: A homosexual man indicates he finds a straight man attractive, reducing the fellow to a gibbering idiot. The advance can range from an approving up-and-down to a full-bore come-on; the response can range from a quick shudder to jumping out the nearest window. This is, oddly enough, nearly identical to the Unwanted Advance joke where a sexually aggressive woman makes a pass at a straight man. I don’t find either even remotely funny.

I could imagine a version where the come-on reduces the fellow to an idiot because it is welcome, rather than unwelcome; it would be the surprise that would un-man the target, not being wrong-footed. Or, rather, it would come as a surprise to the man that the advance was welcome, as he had neither been expecting it nor wanting it, and is at one moment shocked and aroused, and of course reduced to gibbering and so misses his chance. I think I have seen this done with a woman’s advance; I am pretty sure I’ve never seen it carried off between two men.

Naked Hottie: A straight man is forced to observe a scantily-clad or entirely naked gay hunk. The humor here is that the naked hunk is entirely repulsive to the straight man. The hunk should not be engaged in any sexual act, nor should there be any question of potential sexual activity at all. The joke is that the straight fellow must see something that a gay man presumably would want to see, but his reaction (being, you know, straight) is repulsion, or nausea, or jumping out a nearby window. It must also be clear that the hunk is gay, because for reasons that passeth understanding, it is not funny for a straight man to be bothered by the sight of a naked or nearly naked straight man, in a shower, locker room or beach or (f’r’ex) coming out of a dormitory bathroom. It is also important for the humor that the naked gay man be hot, and, oddly enough, that the straight man recognize that the naked gay man is hot, although of course not responding to the hotness with anything other than revulsion.

The Full Monty musical opens with a male stripper actually stripping to a g-string; there is much hilarity in the audience, although much of the laughter is nervous. Over the course of the play, I think all the above tropes are put into play. Terrence McNally wrote the book (that is, the dialogue of the play and its scene outline); he is a gay man who often uses what seem to me to be homophobic tropes for his own purposes. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. And by works, I mean… I don’t actually know what I mean by works. I suppose I mean that sometimes people in the audience are comforted in their discomfort with homosexuality, if you know what I mean, rather than discomfited. Throughout the show (which I enjoyed, by the way, very much), I was discomfited, if you will, by the audience’s lack of discomfort with their discomfort, that is, by how completely they participated in the type of gags I’m talking about.

I wasn’t comfortable with this because all of those gags depend for their humor on it being perfectly natural for straight men to be wildly uncomfortable, to the point of panic, at the thought of their sexuality coming into question. I don’t think that the joke is on the straight man (pardon the expression), with the audience feeling superior to him because he is so bigoted and closed-minded. I think the joke is ultimately on of recognition, that he reacts the way he is supposed to react, the way people should react.

I am a straight man, myself. I would describe myself as attracted to most women and to almost no men. I am not grossed out by gay men. I don’t find the idea of a gay man being attracted to me repulsive or even particularly unpleasant. As it happens, no man has ever made a pass at me, at least not that I noticed. I am reasonably capable of finding and expressing preferences among men, as for instance, finding Jude Law cuter than Matt Damon. I am not some sort of paragon of tolerance. I am just a straight guy who isn’t grossed out by gay guys. And I find straight guys who are creeped out by gay guys to be a little bit creepy and a little bit pathetic, rather than being funny.

Now, I’ve said all that in a way that makes it clear that, however I started this interminable note, I am indeed pontificating on what should be funny and what shouldn’t, what all right-thinking people should find unfunny, and how superior YHB is to the guffawing yahoos circumjacent. And yet, seriously, am I wrong?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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In the last week before the show, we’ve switched to just running the damned thing through. No going through a tricky scene twice, no skipping nights while they work on somebody else’s scenes, just curtain at seven-thirty and we’re done when we’re done. It’s very important to get some practice at this. The technical is technically not until tomorrow, but we’ve been doing all-but-tech for a few days, practicing set changes and some of the costume changes and other aspects of doing the show.

One of the things I find myself working on during this week is the important question of timing my journey from the green room to the wings. In the Sherman Playhouse, there are two dressing rooms (one for men, the other tidy and well-lit) and a Green Room downstairs, with a stairway up to either wing. It’s very convenient; most of my theater experience has been in places much less well-suited to doing theater. Barns, in fact, or near as dammit. Anyway, once dressed, the actor can sit in relative comfort on a moldering sofa, sipping tea and playing Scrabble or doing crosswords or otherwise quietly whiling away the minutes between exit and entrance. At the right moment, up you get, quietly up the stair, check the mirror in the wing, pick up your hand prop if you are unlucky enough to need one, and on you go.

But what is the right moment? I don’t like to be in the wings for very long. The requirement for silence is of course complete (in the Green Room whispering is customary during a performance), and Gentle Readers will know how difficult it is for me to remain silent for very long. More than that, though, the tension of being in the small dark space, silent, while keeping the energy level high is very frustrating for me. And, of course, the wings being a small space (tho’ larger than many I’ve stood in), it’s generally wise to stay out of people’s way as they make their exits and entrances or costume changes or prepare the set changes. So the idea is to stay downstairs in the Green Room as long as possible.

On the other hand, while being early to the wings is not great, being late to the wings is disastrous. Even without contemplating missing my actual entrance (and I hope the S.M. would notice my absence and send someone down to beat me before the moment), I don’t want to be flying up the stairs and running onstage without a chance to catch my breath, check the mirror, settle my hat and do the twist (don’t ask). The right moment is not the last possible moment. In fact, I am happier if I am up in the wings in time to notice that I’ve left my hat downstairs, go back down and get it, and then come back up and make my entrance without being out of breath. Not that I do leave my hat downstairs. I’m just saying if.

So this week I am trying to figure out when to climb those stairs. I’m not in the first scene at all. I will probably not even begin making up until places, when almost everyone is onstage and I can hog the lighted mirror. I certainly won’t put on the boots until we’re done with Covent Garden and into Wimpole Street. The gloves and hat and coat will be placed near me until time. I think maybe I should go up at three pages before my entrance, say just as Eliza is making her exit. Only of course I shouldn’t come upstairs just as Eliza is making her exit, because she has to come off and get totally changed (and possible made up again? I can’t tell) in the wings, without time to go downstairs to the dressing room. Hm. Practice, practice, practice.

Rich Alfie is easier. When the curtain rumbles open on the scene, I can put my hat on. I have two or three minutes yet, and it’s just slightly better if I ease upstairs after Pickering’s entrance rather than before, so I don’t need to put my hat on before the scene begins, but the curtain is my signal, and I can’t really miss that if I’m listening at all, right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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When I arrived at the Sherman Playhouse last night, they set fire to my overcoat.

Well, not my overcoat. I mean, seriously, it was, like eighty-crap degrees and four hundred percent humidity. Even I wasn’t wearing an overcoat. But it’s winter in Lisson Grove, and Alfie needs an overcoat. Poor Alfie. And the selection of overcoats went from lovely to a acceptable. Acceptable is a good deal too nice for Poor Alfie. So they took an acceptable overcoat, threw it in the parking lot, trampled it, tore it, dragged it through the dirt, and (just as I was arriving) stubbed out their cigarettes on it.

Digression: Kids, don’t smoke. Disgusting habit. Hard to kick. But if you are going to take up smoking, smoke cigars, which at least are made with decent tobacco, and aren’t just the sweepings-up from the factory floor soaked in cyanide and piss. And if you are going to take up smoking, for the sake of all that’s good and holy, don’t smoke Swisher Sweets. This has been a public service announcement. End Digression.

Anyway, the overcoat seems to have made a big difference to the way Alfie looks, and the (disgusting) boots (which appear to have been actually painted with pig muck) have made a difference to the way Alfie walks. But the big difference for me to the way Alfie feels are the gloves. We have a lovely pair of old torn-up leather work gloves with the tips of the fingers cut out, and wearing those gloves changes not only the way I use my hands, but the way I feel. Er, no pun intended. I found my voice went lower in pitch. I remembered to walk with shorter steps (although that may have been the boots). I stood with my feet further apart.

And, er, I forgot a big chunk of my lines. But that won’t happen again.

It’s not that I though Poor Alfie was going badly; I didn’t. It was going pretty well. But the gloves—and the coat, and the boots, and the bandana around my neck—boost it into going very well indeed. At least from my point of view.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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OK, I probably shouldn’t tell tales out of school, but… the conversation, you understand, started with Mrs. Pearce wondering why Higgins brought back kimonos from his trip abroad. I mean, what use did Higgins have for kimonos? I wondered if they had been gifts from some diplomat that Higgins had taught English pronunciation, but then why would you give a bachelor a kimono? Not a very diplomatic gift. It seemed likelier that the gift had been a geisha, wearing a kimono, and that Mrs. Pearce had done her in.

Also, the scores of American millionaresses? Dead.

Pickering? Once they get him to sign power of attorney over to them, he’ll be next for the chop.

We were thinking that instead of the second act being all about the tedious human relationships of person to person (and class to class) that Shaw was on about, wouldn’t a madcap thriller be more fun? Doesn’t Freddy really need an axe? We’re thinking two parts Arsenic and Old Lace, one part Sweeney Todd, two parts Little Shop of Horrors with just a dash of Deathtrap. Doesn’t that sound great?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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One of the amusing things about this bit of the rehearsal process is that we use those bits of the costume or hand props that make us feel comfortable in the scene, and leave off the rest. So Pickering wears a lovely black jacket over a polo shirt and shorts, I put my top hat on over whatever I happen to be wearing, and Mrs. Pearce attaches her housekeys to her belt. Actually, it’s trickier for women in period plays, who usually need to change from jeans or skirts into dresses to get the movements right; guy’s clothes of the last two hundred years or so don’t necessitate changes in walk or gesture. Although I’m still needing Poor Alfie’s boots, which I think may make a difference in his walk.

While I mention it, I’m having some difficulty with Alfie’s walk. I want to make it a distinctive walk (oh, all right, a funny walk), with short steps and a rolling gait. But I keep forgetting to actually do it! I find myself crossing the stage with my usual long paces, and then stomp back. Maybe my boots will remind me. Ah, well, we’ll get there.

We have eight more rehearsals before an audience sees the thing. Eight!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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One of the annoying things about doing community theater, and there are lots of wonderful things, is when people who do not do theater ask how we remember all those lines. We work like hell at it, that’s how.

(The other annoying aspect to the question is that it assumes that memorizing lines is the hard part. Well, in some ways it is, but it’s like seeing a beautifully hand-carved wooden stair rail, all vines and leaves and curlicues and whatnot, and asking the carver how he manages to make it support the weight of the person coming downstairs. It takes training and hard work, and it’s important, but he was kinda hoping you would notice that bunch of grapes on the sixth newel post.)

Anyway, here’s a little moment in the line-learning process. I had been having trouble remembering Rich Alfie’s line “What is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old age?” I could get it more or less right, but I couldn’t make the clauses come out in order. What is there for me in my old age if I chuck it but the workhouse? What is there but the workhouse for me in my old age if I chuck it? What is there for me in my old age if I chuck it but the workhouse?

You may notice that none of the wrong sentences sound right at all. I certainly noticed, as I was saying them, and be unable to finish them or the speech. So I would stumble and stammer, and ask for the line.

Today, while running the lines, I wound up saying it a different way, and I’m hoping that it will help. I had been saying (and you’ll have to pardon the notation; I’ll try to record it for listening, but I haven’t a mic with me) something like “What is there for me, if I chuck it, but the workhouse in my old age?” Today I tried “What is there for ME, if I chuck it, but the workhouse in my old age?”

The change of inflections is sensible, I think, as it (a) leads eventually in to a consideration of what the deserving people would have if they chucked a bequest, and (2) plays in to Alfred Doolittle’s moral philosophy, which determines the ethical nature of questions by what he gets out of them. The other way, I think, conveys the, um, pathos? The emphasis on there being nothing for him, rather than on there being nothing for him, if you see. So for meaning, either could work.

But for some reason, What is there for ME… leads more naturally and rhythmically into if I chuck it and less into but the workhouse or in my old age. Is it the repeated pronoun? I know I’m saying the rhythm has something to do with it, but aren’t all three phrases two weaks a strong and a weak? No, I don’t really know why it works, but with luck, I now know my line.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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So, it’s like this: right at the beginning of two,three, that is, of the final scene where everybody converges on Mrs. Higgins, Pickering and Higgins go to sit down. The way it has been blocked, Pickering sits in the far chair, and Higgins and the center one. There is also a sofa that seats two; at the time of this sitting-down there are three characters on the set, but Rich Alfie is about to come on and make four.

We have changed the blocking every single time we’ve run this scene. Every time. It’s not a particularly complicated scene (although there are a fair number of entrances and exits), but we haven’t managed to get everybody in the same room for it very often, and for some reason, even when we do, something doesn’t work right.

This time, it was that move to the chairs. It was awkward. And it was awkward, no question about that. Jane solved that awkwardness by simply switching chairs. Now Higgins is in the far chair, Pickering up center. All solved. But wait…

Rich Alfie comes in, takes up the last remaining seat, on the sofa with Mrs. Higgins. Then Higgins, frustrated and impatient, gets up, and I chase him, flinging my top hat in the center chair that he vacated. Only he hasn’t vacated it. He has vacated the other chair. So I have to fling it all the way into the far chair. And then I go and sit in that chair (but not on the hat), only it’s the far chair. And then Mrs. Higgins gets up and I lead her back to the center chair, only Pickering has to get up and get out of that chair, because otherwise she’d be sitting on his lap. So. Now he’s up, and over by the sofa, so instead of pushing Higgins over on the sofa, I go and sit in the vacant chair. Now Mrs. Higgins is up, Pick and Higgins are over by the sofa, which is good, but I’m across the stage, which isn’t as good. And when she finishes and sits down, she wants to sit in the far chair, but now I’m in the far chair, so she sits in the center chair. So when I get up to go, instead of crossing from the sofa (remember the sofa?) I’m crossing from the far chair, which means I’m going all the way to center before turning around and exiting on the same side I just came from.

I have a feeling that we’ll be changing the blocking again, next time we do the scene.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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The first off-book rehearsal was a fiasco. Well, more of a debacle, really. It went exactly as everybody expected it to: very, very badly.

People who know their speeches cold, and were in fact running them backstage before their entrances without any errors, got into the scenes and blanked. I only asked for a line once, plus of course the time I screwed up without asking for a line. Our Pickering, bless him, came in several times with great confidence and mellifluousness with a line from later in the scene. That will throw a person off. Our Liza and our Higgins blundered through, blanking and swearing and stamping their feet. It was, in short, a disaster. Just exactly as it is supposed to be. So that’s all right, Best Beloved, d’y’see? If tonight is a disaster, too, then that will be fine. If Wednesday night is a disaster, then it will start to be a problem…

The good news (other than the disaster proceeding according to plan, which isn’t so much good news as expected news) is that we have nearly all the costume bits and hand props, and a good deal of the set dressing as well. Miraculous, actually, when you think that there are two and a half weeks left before opening. Fifteen rehearsals? Something like that. Our first Dress rehearsal is two weeks from yesterday. Except that we’re doing an early Dress for the photographer, but that doesn’t count.

Most important is that we have The Hat. Eliza’s hat, that is. Somehow, it’s not Pygmalion without Eliza’s hat. Eliza isn’t Eliza without it. And it’s such a wonderful hat, really magnificently shabby, or do I mean shabbily magnificent? Shabbily magnificent. You can see why Higgins wants to try it on, and why Mrs. Pearce won’t let him. It’s a whale of a hat. If I were worried about the off-book disaster (and in case it isn’t clear, I’m not worried in the slightest), I would be reassured by The Hat. Any show with a hat like this is bound to be good.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Tonight we are off-book. We’ll see how that goes. We are easing into it with Act One tonight and Act Two tomorrow; I suspect there will be some starting and stopping. Well, a lot of starting and stopping. A tremendous amount.

Jane, our Dear Director, is very keen on running through as much as possible in order. That is sometimes an annoyance for those of us who aren’t in very many scenes, as we don’t get so many nights off. On the other hand, she’s very good about letting us go early if we aren’t needed until the end. Some directors are very big on Giving Notes: at the end of rehearsal everybody gathers and the Director goes down a whole list, something for everybody, you were a little late on your entrance, you need to pick up the pace in the early scene, can you emphasize how tired you are in that last scene, on and on. Jane doesn’t go in for that: a word in your ear in private is her way. And a very good way, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger, as there is no particular reason for Gentle Readers to know, is a man with a moustache.

—Darling, there’s a man at the door with a moustache.
—Tell him I’ve already got one.
Boom Boom

I started growing a moustache as soon as I could, or in truth a few months sooner. I never looked forward to shaving; I looked forward to not shaving. Sadly, the beard thing never happened. In addition to coming in patchy, a moustache suits my face, a beard does not. I did grow a goatee—an echt goatee, not one of those imperials that are called goatees these days (although as a descriptivist, I am obliged to concede that since nobody other than YHB has worn what I would call a goatee in decades, and since the word is actually used by actual English speakers to refer to any beard (with or without a moustache) that doesn’t connect to the sidewhiskers, communication requires that the things called goatees are goatees, curse them all)—where was I? Oh, yes, I grew a goatee for a few months, for comic effect, but as it neither looked particularly good nor improved my morning ablutions, I gave up and shaved it off. My beard comes in dark and impressive down my throat, which is exactly where it should not be.

But the purpose of this note is not to gripe about my facial-hair situation, except to the extent that its purpose is to gripe about my facial-hair situation, as will be seen. You see, I am a man with a moustache. I like having a moustache, I think of myself as having a moustache, and for twenty years or so, the only times I have shaved my upper lip have been for the stage. As I shaved my upper lip on Friday morning.

The first set of publicity photos are set for Wednesday, so there was a terminus for the moustache, and my experience is that it is wise to give the raw skin a few days sunlight and air before starting with the greasepaint. Well, pancake. Nobody actually uses greasepaint anymore. And spirit gum; my mad Hrungarian has whiskers, as Shaw requires. Not the fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers I think would be perfect for him, but I really don’t have time to deal with fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers as I make the eight-minute change to Rich Alfie. Particularly as our Dear Director is trying to pick up the pace everywhere, so I may have only a seven-minute change…

It’s Whiskers that’s the problem. Alfie could have a moustache, but Whiskers must have a moustache, and therefore Alfie must not have a moustache, for the purposes of differentiating the two. And as it’s difficult for an actor with a moustache to play a character without a moustache (at least on stage), YHB must shave the lip for six weeks or so. Which is all right. Of all the inconveniences I have inflicted on myself to be in this show, the shaving ranks very low. Even counting washing out the washbasin.

However, it has been dispiriting how few people have noticed the change. My Best Reader noticed, of course, as did (eventually) a G.R. who was houseguest at the time. My Perfect Non-Reader when prodded, felt sure that I had shaved it off the previous day or even earlier. Co-workers failed to notice, or at least to comment, although many of my co-workers won’t see me until Monday. I had lengthy conversations with four of my Perfect Non-Reader’s friends’ parents, and short ones with two more, and none of them seemed to notice. Of the couple next door, the fellow gave me the business about it but his wife did not (although that doesn’t mean he noticed first). It seems in the mirror to be a radical change in appearance. If it isn’t, if it’s not something that people notice is missing, then maybe YHB is not, after all, a man with a moustache, just a man who happens to have a moustache?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Nothing new to report about the Pygmalion process today, since Friday night’s rehearsal was cancelled. Thank goodness for that! It was my Perfect Non-Reader’s birthday, and the idea of getting into the car to go rehearse after the day we had… well, it was a Good Thing that I didn’t have to.

So without any new amusing anecdotes from the rehearsal process, I’ll just ramble about the plot of the play, and the problems with it. Which aren’t actually problems, although they do look like problems from most angles.

Look: Pickering is a rich, well-connected bachelor who can wangle invitations to Society not only for himself but for a young woman he has befriended but who nobody else knows. First of all, I don’t think so. The King could get his girlfriends invited to certain kinds of events, but not into Society. But fine. Here’s this Pickering fellow, away for many years, comes back and dives back into Society. Remember: rich, well-connected bachelor. He is going to be the center of gossip. Everyone will know where he is living (with that impossible Higgins fellow!) and who he has been seen with (they were at the Shakespeare exhibition at Earls Court with a nobody of a girl, and Clara Eynsford-Hill says…). Everybody presumably knows Henry Higgins and his profession—his mother is clearly well-connected enough, and he gets an invitation in his own right to a Society gathering, despite being not quite entirely a gentleman, that is, in that he takes money for a service like a merchant or a dancing-master. Fine. I don’t quite understand how Professor Higgins got an invitation, but he did, and clearly everybody knows some American heiress or other who he schooled in received-pronunciation English. And now Pickering arrives with this girl, certainly a beautiful girl, but wouldn’t everyone just assume that she is some tart Pickering picked up in India (or Lord knows where, all those colonial places being the same, really) and Higgins has taught how to speak? Isn’t that the obvious conclusion—far more likely than that Pickering has come across some Hungarian royal by-blow?

But here’s the point: the play isn’t about whether Higgins can pass Eliza off as a duchess. That question is answered halfway through the play, is not a matter of any great suspense and is never questioned afterward. You could imagine a play where that is the main question: either the play would end with the triumph at the ball or the scenes after the ball would be driven by somebody blackmailing Eliza or some loose end of the imposture coming unraveled. This play is nothing like that. This play is about whether Eliza and Higgins can be friends (or lovers, I suppose). And they can’t.

There’s a moment in The History Boys that has become famous, when Hector has been caught fondling the testicles of his students. He tells the Headmaster, “The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.” Hector, as is unsurprising, has confused the eroticism of the body for that of the soul. But call it a romantic act, and it’s terribly accurate, or accurately terrible. The play is about that kind of romance, and its consequences. Most of the play is Eliza’s extrication from that transmission of knowledge, now that Higgins has nothing more to teach her. Now she is no longer a student, no longer a flower-seller, no longer a false princess, she has to be something else. But what?

As G.B. Shaw writes in a magnificent and lengthy essay that follows the play, despite everybody claiming she is disqualified from working in a flower shop, she in fact could do so very reasonably. If Henry Higgins had any sort of connections with retail places, he could get her a job and an apartment, and there she is. Pickering could get her a job in a bank or even in the military as a secretary, keeping the appointment book and so on—make her Vivie Warren, in fact, despite not having a proper education. Or Mrs. Pearce, bless her, could find her a position with one of the commercial establishments the house comes in contact with, or with an employment agency, where she could be a magnificent asset, impressing both the workers and the toffs. And, of course, Rich Alfie with his three thousand a year (call a pound in 1900 a hundred dollars now, for an income of $300,000) makes even that prospect unnecessary. Like her imposture, her unemployability is a red herring, or rather a platform for Shaw’s magnificent and vicious social commentary, but not a real problem for the characters.

No, the real problem is that the two have, will-they or nill-they, a relationship based on the erotically-charged transmission of knowledge, and that transmission has ended. Higgins can’t quite see it, and probably never will. Of course, he probably will never realize that he has come to the end of what he has to teach her, that he really doesn’t know anything about “Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art” that she couldn’t learn better from someone else. She does know that. And she knows that as long as she stays in that relationship she will always be smaller than he is, and will never transmit her own knowledge to someone else.

I think, and this is just me, that the scene after the ball (when Eliza’s beauty becomes murderous, perhaps the best stage direction in the history of theater) is when Eliza realizes that she has nothing more to learn from him, and that he has no intention of letting her grow. He’s incapable of conceiving of it, in fact. She can’t really imagine getting out from under his shadow. Both there and at Mrs. Higgins, she responds by cutting him down to her size, but eventually she lands on the idea of teaching, of being the bigger one in a new relationship. “You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me,” she says.

Now, Mr. Shaw, in that what-really-happened essay, makes it clear that she does not carry through on her threat to teach, but instead learns (alongside Freddie) how to operate a flower shop, and eventually makes a success at it. She remains close to Higgins, in a way (there is a wonderful and revealing bit in that sequel—wait, I’ll quote:

But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton’s verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton’s words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it made the margins all wrong.

Or, in Alan Bennett’s more economical dialogue, the transmission of knowledge is still and always an erotic act.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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The costumes are coming together. I love costumes. It’s what I like best about acting, dressing up in somebody else’s clothes. Alfie, of course, has Poor Alfie and Rich Alfie. We’re pretty much set for both, now, I believe. Poor Alfie is in trousers, a striped shirt, a leather waistcoat, and a ridiculous dustman’s hat—a brimless black bowl with a long flap behind to keep the crud out of the collar. Rich Alfie, of course, is in his wedding suit: spongebag trousers and black tails. We don’t have anything around my neck at present; we’ll either have to come up with a cravat or a necktie with a nice pin, either of which are easy enough.

The rest of the menfolk were also easy, really. There are the cockneys and the toffs, and each have a look, but really, it’s not all that different from our own kind of clothes. No tights, no breeches, no tunics. Trousers, shirts, jackets. There are cummerbunds, I suppose, which most of us have only worn at weddings, but other than that the differences are the shapes of the things.

Women have a much harder time, of course, because they are women, and women’s clothing has always given them a harder time. The stage isn’t much different from real life like that. Stage dresses are usually easier to take on and off than real dresses, as much of the hook-and-eye crap is fake and backed with Velcro. But it’s got to be the right length, and the right width, and the right color, and have appropriate shoes… audiences notice it when it’s done badly. And they like it when it’s done well.

Pickering, actually, seems to have the toughest changes. Very quick, with layers of things. Eliza, oddly enough, doesn’t seem to have that much of a problem, as she has the intermission to get into her ball gown, and then the next scene she’s still wearing it, and then she has a nice long stretch offstage while we all blather on. Pickering, though, if he’s not going to look like a total slob, has to have a new outfit in every scene (except the after-the-ball one), and he’s in practically every scene, often on at the beginning of the scene and the end. Higgins, too, I suppose, although it matters less if he looks like a slob. I wonder if the addition of the Eliza-and-Freddie bit between the after-the-ball scene at Wimpole Street and the final scene is to allow Higgins to change clothes. Although the addition of the training scene just makes a gratuitous change at the end of the first act. Ah, well.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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So. As Gentle Readers will be aware, this production of Pygmalion will have the Pyggie Ball. I was originally against it. My version of the play (that is, I think, the version published before the first production (which was, if I am not mistaken, in German translation) rather than the script that was used in the first London productions) has only five scenes: Covent Garden, Wimpole Street, Mrs. Higgins’ses at-home, Wimpole Street after the ball, Mrs. Higgin’ses’sses the next morning. The version we are playing, which is based on the London playscript I believe, adds three short scenes: before the at-home there’s a short scene of Higgins training Eliza, after the after-the-ball scene there’s a short scene of Eliza and Freddie (during which Eliza does not sing “show me”), and plumb spang in the middle is the Pyggie Ball.

As I say, I was against including those scenes, but now I think that the Pyggie Ball is a Good Thing, on the whole. It’s visually attractive, you can slip in the Eynsford-Hills, which is nice, and it underlines the imbecility of the entire class thing. “Silly people don’t know their own silly business” Higgins says later, and he is utterly right. For all that they place such emphasis on the markers of class, they don’t speak properly themselves, nor do they recognize those markers correctly for themselves. They have to rely on Nepommuck—and Nepommuck is dishonest, playing the game for his own purposes, and is, besides, a fool. Insofar as the play is an attack on the class system (and it is), the Ball shows the inconsistency, incoherence and instability of that system. So that’s all right, d’y’see?

Well, and the thing about the Ball is that we waltz. Dear Jane, our director, has chosen the Liebeslieder, Strauss Op. 114, a lovely piece of music if a trifle difficult to dance to. And most of us are not dancers. Your Humble Blogger is not a dancer, although I can waltz a little, so I am well up on most of the crowd. We will have (unless there are changes…) five couples; of those ten persons, I believe three of us have waltzed on a dance floor. I count myself in that, knowing that there are some Gentle Readers who are right now snorting through their noses at the thought that what I do could properly be called waltzing, but think of this: seven of us have less experience than I have.

And our Dear Director—let me make this clear, I adore her, and yield to no-one in my adoration, but a dance teacher, she ain’t. Ah, well. It’ll all work out. In fact, I suspect it will be gorgeous. But it will take some doing.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Well, and the news from Thursday night’s rehearsal is that I need to rethink Rich Alfie. There are two problems—well, no, I tell a lie, there are three problems. Problem the first is that Rich Alfie is too different from Poor Alfie. The audience need to recognize Rich Alfie as just Poor Alfie in a different outfit, or a different set of circumstances. Problem the second is that I’m coming in far too hostile, which puts the audience off. The audience has to like Alfie; they like Poor Alfie, and need to like Rich Alfie just as much. Problem the third is that it has to be funnier.

The good thing about having a director that I adore (and, perhaps more to the point, trust) is that I don’t really have to worry about it. I tried one thing, it didn’t work, now I’ll try something else. It’s much better than sticking to the thing that doesn’t work until the audience comes in. If I had a director that I didn’t trust, well, I’d be sitting here today coming up with all the reasons that my original stuff was better, and sulking about having to do her stinky way that nobody was going to like. Then I would do it badly, no doubt, because I wouldn’t really believe it would work, and it wouldn’t work because I was doing it badly, and the show would suck, and everything would be lousy. This way is much better.

Why do I trust our director so much? Well, I’ve bought tickets to three or four shows that she has directed, now, and enjoyed them all. That counts for quite a lot. I’ve also been in two shows that she has directed, and several times in those shows she made decisions that I would never have made, and they worked. That counts for even more. Sometimes those decisions have been about my characters, and sometimes they have been about other people’s, and sometimes they’ve just been about the set or the sound. Heck, sometimes they’ve been about the choice of the show in the first place. The point is that she has good judgment, and knowing that makes everything easier on me.

Of course, knowing that my own judgment is not particularly good also makes it easier.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Well, and we’re going through the scenes we blocked last week, right? This is the second time through. I have my own blocking scrawled on my sides, but of course I don’t have anybody else’s written down. That’s their business, and Jane’s, and Laura’s.

So. I make my entrance as Rich Alfie, and I come in and look around, and I think to myself Alfie, my boy, I think, wasn’t Higgins on the other side last time? I’m all back-to-front. I am still going DL when it says DL and DR when it says DR, and it all works, but I have Higgins on one side and Mrs. Higgins on the other, and it’s the wrong side. Or is it? Am I remembering it wrong? Which one was in the sofa? Which one was in the chair? Nobody else seems to think there’s anything different.

I still, stubbornly, think that they’ve switched it. And it works this way just fine. Maybe better. I couldn’t tell, because I was so thrown by it.

This is, by the way, utterly different from the blocking being off during a performance. During a performance, I can’t let myself be thrown by a little thing like two people switching chairs. There’s too much else to be thrown by. And by that point, I hope to hell I’ll know if we’ve screwed up the blocking, and I’ll roll with it. Lord knows I’ve done it before. But at this point, when we’re still working it all out, and I’m trying to decide what lines to pitch to which people, and when to stretch and when to stamp my little feet, and I could just swear he was on my right when I came in.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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We went through Poor Alfie again last night. It’s going very well, I think. The blocking is great, the interaction is coming, the rhythm is starting to happen. The only thing holding us back, now, is these damn books in our hands.

Actors, like people, are different one to another. This makes being in shows interesting and fun. And, as with people generally, frustrating and annoying.

This is an awkward part of rehearsals, in between getting the blocking and getting off-book. For anyone reading this that doesn’t know the term, off-book means doing the scenes without holding on to the playscript. There is a rehearsal designated in the schedule as off-book, and anyone who still needs to hold onto the script after that is subject to scorn and derision. Before that, though, there are two very different approaches. One school has the actor focusing intently on the script, writing down any blocking, directorial note or dialect cue in detail, giving a bit of shape to the line deliveries and only the tiniest hint of the physical business. Actors with this habit tend to develop characters and scenes slowly, but when they are at last forced off-book, they know their lines and their blocking comprehensively, and are ready to devote full attention to the scene.

The other school has its adherents nearly off-book as soon as they can possibly manage it, glancing at the script only when they go blank. These actors spend this set of rehearsals trying out line readings, trying out bits of business, playing with as much energy as they can. Actors with this habit tend to develop their characters and scenes quickly but change their minds a lot as they try out this and that. When they set down their books and play with empty hands (or their hand-props), these actors tend to wander all over the place, getting their lines and their blocking only mostly right.

Both are perfectly good, and both are roads to good performances, or even great ones. Or lousy ones, I suppose. Neither is a guarantee of success or failure, although if somebody inclined to the one suppresses that inclination, it is as likely to result in failure as any path I can think of. The problem, and it’s not so much a problem as an annoyance, comes when a scene is between two actors of different schools. Then, during this (briefish) period between blocking and off-book, the one will be trying out this and that and hollering random words all over the stage, and the other will be standing stock still in exactly the correct place reading exactly the correct words off the page. This is perfectly normal, and excruciating.

Fortunately, Higgins, Pickering and I are all of the second school. This is probably the more irritating group in a general way, but for our Poor Alfie scene together, we’re more or less evenly matched.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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I had a chance to work with our dialect coach at last night’s rehearsal. Yes, we have a coach to make sure everybody’s accent comes from the right class—not the specifics within a mile or two, but in a show where everybody is talking about accents, they had better not suck. Alfie is brought up in Hounslow, in the west of London, and his mother is Welsh, and Higgins can hear all of that in the way he says Morning, Governor, I’ve come about a very serious matter. But the audience just needs to believe that he’s working class, that is accent, like his clothes and his gestures, are appropriate to one of the deserving poor.

Now, I have a good ear for accents, if I say so myself. My feeling is that the mimetic gift is something people have or don’t have. Some people have to learn the words individually, which takes a lot of work. I can usually mimic an accent without breaking it down into its constituent sounds. Which is lovely, but the problem is that it means I get very lazy. I just imitate in my head somebody, or a combination of somebodies. My Alfie is a bit of Stanley Holloway (of course), a bit of Ken Shabby, and a bit of Lauren Cooper. And a bit of making it up as I go along. Which get me most of the way there. But to get the rest of the way, there’s the dialect coach.

The little stuff (which is still very important) is just somebody to listen to each word and correct the stuff that sounds wrong. I have trouble with I ask you, which should be something like oyawskye, and with arrangement with its broad long a, and with clothes and clothing, neither of which have anything like a th (pardon me for not using the IPA; I never learned it; remember about me being very lazy?) and so on. Try, for instance, doing a cockney accent with glottal stopps instead of ts on Betty bought a bit of butter; “Bah!” she said, “This butter’s bitter! If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter.” So she bought a bit of butter, better than the bitter butter, put the butter in her batter, made the bitter batter better, better batter bitter butter, baiter, booter, oh, the hell with it.

The big thing is not the individual words, though. The big thing is the tone. The cockney tone is very nasal, much more nasal, actually, than I do it by instinct. I learned, over the years of being in shows and so on, to speak from my chest. To speak correctly, I would say. But then, so much of speaking cockney is speaking incorrectly. As our dialect coach put it, when I’m getting the words right, and even the melodies right, but the tone is wrong, I sound like an educated person putting on a cockney accent. Which isn’t quite sounding like Dick Van Dyke, but it’s not much better.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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YHB was thinking, today, about the differences between Rich Alfie and Poor Alfie. Poor Alfie comes in with the potential of causing real trouble. It’s a plot point: before we can really settle down to Eliza’s education, we have to know that the Old Life won’t be rearing it’s head. As you might expect it to, if you didn’t know the show. In fact, that would be the more usual sort of thing, with the battle between her Old Life and her New Life, reconciling the two, blah blah blah, we’ve seen that movie before. No, Shaw isn’t interested in that as a character study. He wants Eliza thrown into the new life with a clean break. Poor Alfie’s scene, where he is bought off with a five pound note, makes that clear.

Rich Alfie, on the other hand, is closer to comic relief. It’s pointed comic relief—everything Shaw does is pointed, even when it’s dull—but it isn’t necessary from the plot point of view. Oh, I suppose it clears up whether Eliza will be forced to stay with Higgins, but there are so many options available to her that I doubt any theatergoer, even if unfamiliar with the play in any of its forms, would get to Rich Alfie’s scene with any question about that.

So he serves different purposes in the two scenes. And he has also changed quite a bit. He’s had a harrowing experience, and although Shaw’s interminable who-does-what-afterwards essay indicates that he recovers from his sudden prosperity, I am not playing it that way, and I don’t think you need to. I think Alfie really is broken by middle-class morality, and he spends the rest of his years, probably not many of them, straightjacketed and morose. “Happier men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their tip; and I’ll look on helpless, and envy them.” That’s one of the lines that’s been cut from our playing script, but that’s my image of his life after the play.

During the play, however, he’s still kicking against the pricks, which is what makes the scene funny. Or, rather, he’s caught between his rage and his helplessness, and he’s wearing respectability like a choking necktie. My favorite bits are where he tries, pathetically, to adopt the middle-class mannerisms that are now incumbent on him. I’m itching to get my hands on the hat. That’ll be the real focus. What do you do with a top hat? He won’t have worn one in his life (not whilst sober, anyway, although he may have pinched one from a pre-dawn staggering Algie or Rupert at some point), and he’ll vague know about taking it off indoors and tipping it to ladies, and all, but it’ll all be new. And besides, he’s got to keep it clean and tidy for the wedding. If I can manage it, that hat will be his cage and handcuffs and his red rubber nose, all in one.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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