Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

Ask Playbill.com: Casting Leads

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: Several Broadway and West End musicals have been picking their lead performers through reality shows, allowing viewers at home to see the casting process up close. But on those shows, of course, the casting process is, in part, designed to create good television, and doesn't always mimic what happens in the real world. What is the normal process for casting the lead roles in a musical?

Answer: For this column, we spoke with Tara Rubin, one of Broadway's top casting directors, who has cast the current musicals Young Frankenstein, Spamalot, Jersey Boys, Mary Poppins, Mamma Mia! and The Little Mermaid.

Let's say a performer wants to play Bert in Mary Poppins. He could come to the Equity Principal Audition (EPA), where he would wait in line with lots of other performers, and eventually perform a song of his choosing, in front of Rubin or one of the associates at her casting agency. "He could sing any song, but if he's wise he'll sing something in the style that Bert sings," she says. (Non-Equity members can also show up to EPAs and sign up to audition, but there's no guarantee the casting directors will have time to see them.)

If the casting people in the room think the performer is good enough, they'll send him a song from the show and sides — bits of scenes from the show — which he has to prepare for another audition. Sometimes that's the ultimate audition, in front of the director and maybe the music director, choreographer, producers and writers.

Other times, it's just an intermediate step, in front of what Rubin calls the "associate team," which may include the associate director, associate choreographer and others. Then, if the performer passes that filter, he goes on to have his final audition. On occasion, before the final audition, the performer will have a work session with the director, associate director or a music director, where he can ask questions and get coaching. Also, if dancing is a big part of the role, a dance audition will be required at some point.

Does a role always get cast this way, where someone works his way up from the EPA? Not at all. But it does happen, Rubin says. She especially remembers it happening for Les Misérables.

There are all sorts of variations on this process. For instance, let's go to the top: Some of the top performers on Broadway, Rubin says, are purely offer only — they will only consider a role if offered it, and won't agree to audition. This is the case certainly with many movie stars, but also some purely Broadway stars as well. Some won't audition but will agree to take a meeting with the creative team so that the team can assess the performer's thoughts on the role, and decide whether to make the offer.

While this may sound high and mighty, note that stars of this stature have been seen onstage in lead roles multiple times by everyone in the theatre community, and so an audition would probably be unnecessary anyway. Plus, these performers might have past working relationships with the musical's director, producers or writers, who know the performer's abilities and process. Sometimes, the performer has even helped shape the role itself by appearing in a developmental reading or workshop of the musical.

In other cases, Rubin says, top Broadway performers will audition. "There would only be one meeting, and we would make it as private and low pressure as possible," Rubin says. "We might sit around the piano and sing through the music. The artist might prepare the music [ahead of time] but still present it in the room in a very casual way." The director will be there, and probably the music director and choreographer (even if there's no dancing to be done), and perhaps a producer and the writers. Since the performer's acting ability is well-known, Rubin says, "the purpose of the audition is to find out what the actor will be like in the world of the play."

Sometimes the process is a legendary, months-long, transcontinental affair, as was the case with the new revival of South Pacific. Sometimes an understudy to the lead gets offered the job when the lead leaves the show.

And, sometimes a particular role calls for a particular process. For instance, the performers who play Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys have to be able to dance, act in a convincing Jersey accent and sing in Valli's unique falsetto style. And, they have to look like the guy. It's tough to find someone with the whole package. After a series of auditions, the casting directors and the associate team narrow down the field to six to eight-or-so performers who get sent to what Rubin calls "Frankie Camp." For a week in New York, performers go through workshops where they can work on any aspect of the performance. After that they have a final audition in front of the director, choreographer, perhaps the writers and producers, and sometimes even the real-life Valli and fellow band member Bob Gaudio.

Since Rubin has been in the business for so long and knows the pool so well, doesn't she spend a lot of time seeing the same people over and over again? "Sometimes you see someone you've seen so many times, but that particular day, they do something that you've never imagined them doing," she says.

Lots O' Graduating, Part One

Both my brothers graduated over the last few weeks. Ezra from Oberlin College over Memorial Day weekend, and Nathaniel from UCLA business school last week.

I've only been to Oberlin four times, once each year my brother was there, for a couple days each time. Oberlin helped me realize what I like and dislike about small towns. I think I would feel lonely living in a place where you could walk across the enormous town square in the middle of the day and not run into anyone. That's probably why, during my stays, I grew attached to all signs of life. Even small places like the campus convenience store, dining halls, and coffee shops. And especially the town's main street area, only three blocks long, which included the college bookstore, an army navy store, a one-screen movie theater, a Ben Franklin convenience store, a restaurant and bar that served amazing hamburgers, a brunch place that was always packed, a burrito place where we went once, a casual Chinese place where we went once, a fancier Chinese place where Ezra never wanted to go, an Asian fusion restaurant that clearly aspired to be Zagat's top-rated restaurant within a 30-minute radius, and a candy store, Gibson's, that looked like it had been there since 1910 and that served chocolate covered fruit that also looked like it had been there since 1910. I enjoyed just walking by these places, like you would with stores in a favorite vacation spot, as they provide liveliness and familiarity in an isolated, unfamiliar place.

But what's amazing about college is that even  in this tiny town, in a school of less than 3000 students, Ezra's life was incredibly rich. Each visit, I loved getting a snapshot of that life, and attempting, over the course of two days, to figure out the lay of the land, the rhythms of his classwork and the many networks of relationships. Whenever I would visit either of my brothers at college, they always seemed to be surrounded by a squadron of women, who were all very sweet and smart and whose names I would always get mixed up.  Our visits would be one dorm room and party after another, in buildings whose names and locations I would also get confused. During Oberlin graduation weekend, I had a lot of misplaced nostalgia. "Oh, was that the place where we saw that band with that girl and ordered cookies?" No, I was told, that was somewhere else and someone else.

Oberlin lived up to its reputation of being open, liberal, and intellectual (especially as compared to my college). It was the kind of place where no one I met was even considering going into investment banking. It was the kind of place where if they showed that Metallica documentary on the tiny TV screen in the common room at midnight, you wouldn't be able to find a seat (this actually happened). It was the kind of place where if the class commencement speaker is introduced as a die-hard John McCain supporter, he's not exactly greeted warmly (this actually happened). It was the kind of place where the big event each year wasn't the homecoming football game but the drag ball, where professional drag queens from Cleveland came in to host the competition and where even unsuspecting brothers who were visiting for the weekend got roped into putting on Catholic schoolgirl outfits (this actually happened). When I visited during Ezra's freshman year, I had actual late-night talk about the meaning of life. During college! Who knew!?!

It was fun to see the ways in which Ezra and his friends embraced this sense of liberal openness in various ways as their college careers evolved. During Ezra's freshman year, I heard that there was one common room on his hall where you were allowed to be naked. Sophomore year they were in a coop, where everyone had to take turns cooking. This year Ezra's girlfriend lived in a house with seven women, six of whom had boyfriends, and they all appeared to be one big happy family.

I was pleased that, like my other visits, graduation weekend was a series of so many random events that the two days felt like a week. My aunt and grandmother and I saw the Frank Lloyd Wright house near campus.Ezra's girlfriend and all her roommates had a barbecue, which was basically a memory test for all the names of all his friends, which I managed to pass, barely. At night the school's world-renowned conservatory had a concert on the town square, where they lit Chinese paper lanterns and served pie.

After the conservatory concert, Oberlin's steel drum band, O Steel, played on the steps of the chapel. Yes, Oberlin is also the kind of place the steel drum band has twenty members and where people start reserving their spot where they're going to stand about an hour ahead of time. The audience eventually started clapping in unison to encourage the band to start playing, and then started dancing up a storm when it began. I was standing near some high school girls who seemed to be veterans of O Steel concerts and who were really into this one band member right near them who was wearing a cowboy hat, and was shirtless. Yes, Oberlin is a place where the guy banging on trash cans is the campus equivalent of Mick Jagger.

But even more that the graduation events themselves, the thing I enjoyed most about the weekend was, once again, seeing the various layers of my brother's college experience. Over the last year, Oberlin had apparently been plagued by a rash of cover bands, and so our first night there we saw two of them, one for an indie band whose name I forget, and the other for Weezer, a band who I know from songs that came out when all the Oberlin seniors were eight years old. How did everyone know all the words to "The Sweater Song

The following night, I arrived back from the O Steel concert, the night before commencement, to see a dozen people splayed out on the couch, trying to figure out what to do, just like it was any other night. People were cleaning up, figuring out what parties were happening, dealing with girlfriend and boyfriend issues, calling and texting around. I'm sure many were thinking about their future jobs and careers and summer road trips, but they were still together, talking, appreciating and embracing the collective energy that they found at college. In the real world, they're sure going to miss it.

As for UCLA business school graduation, I'll address it in a future post...

For this family, one last chance to relate

From the Los Angeles Times

THE LEGEND in playwright Jennifer Maisel’s family is that every year during the Passover Seder, her grandfather used to grab the traditional horseradish root off the table and take a bite. For the weak of tongue, that’s not a pleasant experience.

“It’s my favorite holiday of all the Jewish holidays in that it’s the one that involves your home and your family and isn’t about going somewhere else,” says Maisel. “It becomes so personal to every family.”

The holiday’s quirks and intimacy spurred Maisel to write “The Last Seder,” a play about four grown daughters who come home for the last Passover in their childhood house before their Alzheimer’s-stricken father moves into a nursing home.

The daughters are coping with their father’s disease while handling their own issues: one’s an aimless wanderer, one’s a pregnant lesbian, one’s wondering when her fiance will marry her already, and one has no date so she invites someone she met at Penn Station.

“A lot of it has to do with the daughters’ inability to talk about losing their father, and the hurt that that creates in their lives,” says director Joseph Megel, whose grandmother had dementia. “It’s a very hard thing for someone to not recognize you.”

Then there’s the mom, played by Jenny O'Hara (“Mystic River”), who is, of course, a wreck – and she has to cook everything. “She’s in that really stuck place where you’re filled with grief, and you’re really angry and you’re really defiant and you’re funny and generous and loving at the same time – it’s a real mishmash,” says O’Hara, who, with husband Nick Ullett – also in the play as the next door neighbor – dealt with Ullett’s father’s Alzheimer’s.

Megel says that despite the play’s grim subject matter, it does have humor, and eventually provides a catharsis, especially to audience members who have dealt with a relative who has Alzheimer’s or the death of a parent. “The emotional release it gives people has been pretty extraordinary,” he says, judging from past productions in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Maisel – who has written several other plays in addition to scripts for Lifetime, Disney and other outlets – gave the house in “The Last Seder” the same address as her childhood home: 192 Waverly Ave. in

the Long Island town of East Rockaway. But the play isn’t autobiographical. “People are always asking if this is my family, and often my dad’s standing right here,” she says. “He’s fine! He’s right there!”

Maisel notes that audience members don’t need to be Jewish to understand the play. “We’ve had audiences where people say to me, ‘That’s exactly like Easter or like my Thanksgiving,’ ” she says.

Seder is like mass, she adds, in that it “has a dramatic structure to it – rise and climax and denouement.” So when is the climax of the Seders she’s attended? “Probably when we eat,” she says.

‘THE LAST SEDER’
WHERE: Greenway Court Theatre, 544 N. Fairfax Ave.
WHEN: Opens 8 p.m. Fri.; runs 8 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 4 p.m. Sun.; ends July 27.
PRICE: $24
INFO: (323) 655-7679,  Ext. 100; www.greenwayarts.org

Ask Playbill.com: Crew Hiring

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Robert H. of New York, NY.

Question: We often hear about the typical audition process that actors go through when they want to join a Broadway production. However, what process do potential backstage crew members go through when they want to join a new/current show?

Answer: For this column we'll explain all the different types of stagehands, in addition to how they're hired. A show has two types of stagehands: First, there's the "pink contract" crew, which is hired by the show's producers, typically via a production manager that the producers hire to oversee everything that goes on backstage. The pink contracts start with a musical during its out-of-town tryout, and then travel with the show to Broadway.

Then there's the house crew, which is hired by the theatre owner. Typically, a big Broadway theatre will have a permanent house carpenter, house electrician, house propman and a flyman. When a show is in the theatre, those house heads will be working there; if there's no show, they don't have to be there. For a show, these house heads hire crew members who work under them.

As you might have guessed, this breakdown is a union-related distinction: The house crew is governed by Local One, the stagehands union in New York City. The pink contracts are governed by the national union. (The majority of pink contracts are also Local One members, who work in Local One contracts at other points in time, according to Bruce Cohen, a spokesperson for Local One.)

Hillary Blanken of Juniper Street Productions — the production management company for shows such as Cry-Baby, Xanadu, A Catered Affair and Gypsy —says that on the big musical Cry-Baby, for instance, the house heads and their crew consist of five carpenters, four electricians, three props people and one sound person. In addition, there are seven pink contract crew members: three carpenters, one electrician, one props, two sound. The pink contracts collaborate with the house heads in leading each department. To load in the sets, the show needed even more people: about 30 people, plus the pink contract crew.

The term "carpenters" doesn't mean that they're backstage sawing all the time. They put the sets together, hang parts of the set, raise and lower sets, and prepare the sets to be moved onstage and offstage via the automation system (these days, stagehands don't usually push sets on and off stage with their hands).

Typically, Blanken says, the house electrician runs house lights, while a pink contract electrician runs the light board. Other electricians run follow spots, or work backstage setting up lights that are embedded into set pieces and props.

The props people prepare props and hand off props — and props doesn't just mean things you hold in your hand. In Cry-Baby, for instance, when the prisoners escape from the prison, they jump onto a huge crash mat behind the set that gets carted on and taken off by props people.

Cry-Baby also has a wardrobe supervisor, wardrobe assistant, nine dressers, a hair supervisor and three hairstylists. They're hired by the show's producers (as opposed to the theatre), and are governed by their own union, separate from the stagehands.

Broadway stagehands have to first be members of the stagehands union, and membership has various requirements that we don't have time to get into here (it involves earning a certain amount of money over a certain length of time). Local One also runs an apprentice program, which aspiring stagehands can join by passing a written test. Apprentices get placed into various New York City theatres or scene shops (though typically not Broadway theatres, Cohen says). Eventually, after a certain number of years, they can join Local One and work their way up into Broadway shows.

The Broadway shows run by not-for-profit companies — where the producer and the theatre owner are usually one and the same — work similarly to the for-profit shows. Rebecca Habel, a general manager with the Roundabout Theatre Company, says that the company hires a production supervisor to oversee each show, on a per-show basis (though, by contrast, Manhattan Theatre Club, another not-for-profit with its own Broadway theatre, has a full-time production management team). In addition each of the Roundabout's Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres has a full-time head electrician, master technician and wardrobe supervisor, and occasionally a sound supervisor and a head of props. The house heads collaborate with the production supervisors to hire the other stagehands.

So how do they decide who gets the jobs? "A lot of times [we hire] people who work on our load-ins," Habel says. "Other times it's somebody that one of our heads knows and recommends. What we look for is obviously someone who is experienced, and has the right technical skills that we're looking for, and is in the union, and has — at the Roundabout — what is a significant time period available, often 11 weeks to 14 weeks depending on the theatre."

Tony Awards 2008

Watching the Tony Awards always makes me feel a bit excited and a bit embarrassed. It's as if CBS let all my relatives put on a TV show for three hours, and they decided to perform skits about all our inside jokes. Since these shows that we're honoring haven't been around more than a year (most of them only a few months), and you can only see them in New York (for now, at least), they've only played to a hundred thousand people or so, and many of those people are probably watching the Lakers game anyway.

How many people could possibly be interested in this, other than the few dozen in Manhattan who work between 41st and 51st Street or who live between 59th and 92nd Street? What kind of awards show has a presentation from Barry Bostwick, whoever he is? What kind of awards show has to trot out the network's morning news anchor (Julie Chen), because they can't find other more famous celebrities? Why does CBS let them get away with it?

Adding to my embarrassment is that sometimes the Tonys isn't even displaying the best that theater can be. In each category, instead of picking among hundreds of choices, as you do for the Oscars, you have about a dozen. Half of those dozen are bad on the face of it, maybe three or four are fair, and maybe one or two are good and perhaps one is great. So nominations -- and song presentations on the Tonys -- are given to shows that most people agree were only ok or outright bad, and occasionally awards are too.

You see a little bit of the network's reservations shine through in the number of awards announced before the live broadcast -- the best play revival isn't announced on CBS live? -- but for the most part, they let these theater folk run free.

That being said, this year I was very impressed at how the shows looked on TV, especially "Passing Strange," "In the Heights" and even "South Pacific." Some shows had it tough --  "Xanadu" didn't show off how funny the show really is, and I'm not sure how that particular show could have, in only four minutes. The song from "Gypsy" was fantastic for us musical theater fans but to outsiders I feel like that show comes across as an "in" thing that only musical theater fans can get (maybe that's because before I actually saw and loved the last two Broadway versions, I remember seeing the Bette Middler TV version as a kid and being totally bewildered as to what was going on, and why she was called a stripper but didn't strip).

And if you told me in advance that Lin-Manuel Miranda would rap and Mark Rylance would recite a poem in their their acceptance speeches, I might have made a point to use their categories as bathroom breaks, but they actually came across as very charming.

I guess I should give the audience some credit. Even if some poor schmoes are roped into watching it because their girlfriend made them, or they want to see that cute drug dealer from "Weeds," or their remote control is broken, no one's forcing anyone not to turn off the TV.

Toy Theatre Festival at Disney Hall

From the Los Angeles Times

NINJAS, dinosaurs and dragons will invade Disney Hall this weekend. But not to worry --they're only a few inches high.

The venue is hosting its first-ever Toy Theatre Festival, celebrating a form of puppetry that involves two-dimensional puppets attached to rods (as opposed to, say, marionettes, which are three-dimensional and controlled by strings).

Toy theater was popular in Victorian England, where drama fans could buy kits with paper puppets that had faces sketched to look like the performers in a popular new play. The kits came with miniature sets, a proscenium that looked liked those in the actual venue and an abridged script for creating your own performance. Toy theater's popularity waned in the 20th century, but contemporary puppeteers have revived it.

Barbara Leonard, the festival's artistic director and the Music Center's artistic director for education, is particularly excited by the form's all-encompassing nature. "The artists -- they're the architect of the theater, the playwright, the scenic designer, costume designer, the producer, director and actor," she says.

Leonard researched toy theater by traveling to puppetry festivals in St. Paul, Minn., and Preetz, Germany, and meeting with members of Great Small Works, a company that runs an annual toy theater festival in New York City. Most of what she found, surprisingly, was aimed at adults. So she commissioned five artists to create new works for kids and rounded up six others. (REDCAT, the venue attached to Disney Hall, has its own evening programs of adult toy theater this weekend.)

The tabletop performances will be scattered around Disney Hall's lobby areas, rehearsal rooms and main auditorium, ranging in length from 15 to 70 minutes, and in style from the traditional to the avant-garde. Toy theater versions of classics will include "Alice in Wonderland," the opera "The Peony Pavilion" in both Chinese and English, and a "Macbeth" by Dov Weinstein's Tiny Ninja Theater. Beth Peterson is presenting a pageant inspired by the Maya Angelou poem read at Bill Clinton's first inauguration, "On the Pulse of Morning."

Laura Heit has created "Matchbox Shows," a miniature, circus-themed cabaret with puppets at the ends of matchsticks and the action taking place in a matchbox -- yes, that small. The show is captured on camera and projected live onto a huge screen behind her. "My finger will be 3 feet long in the projection," she says. "People are always very drawn to that change in scale."

Local school groups will perform shows on natural disasters and American history, and a modernized "Romeo and Juliet." Plus, the garden level will have workshops where families can construct their own toy theaters.

"I think when you make things small, they become special," Heit says. "They become almost magical, because you've reinvented the scale of the world."

TOY THEATRE FESTIVAL
WHERE: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.
WHEN: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. and Sun.
PRICE: Free (reservations recommended)
INFO: (213) 972-8500; www.musiccenter.org

Ask Playbill.com: Tony Logistics, Part Two

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Mark Kari of Toronto, Canada.

Question: When shows are performed on the Tony Awards broadcast, do they bring their own sets/props/lighting or do they have an extra set of sets/props/lighting created just for the show?

Answer: Several readers have asked this question in various forms, so let's settle the question: No, sets are not brought from the Broadway theatres to Radio City Music Hall to be used for the songs on the Tony Awards. "It's physically not practical," says Glenn Weiss, the director-producer of the Tonys.

Weiss does say, however, that "all the shows will have a scenic representation of their own set." Typically, a show will build another set specifically for the Tonys — anything from a replica of the actual set to a bare bones version.

That may be costly, but here's why it's impractical to use the original set: Many of the shows have a Sunday matinee the same day as the awards. So dragging all the sets to Radio City in the late afternoon before the Tonys, loading them in, getting them assembled, finding a place for them on the stage — all in a few hours — would require a miracle.

Plus, there are rehearsals with the sets (but without costumes) on the Thursday and Friday before the Tonys, and a dress rehearsal (with costumes) Sunday morning. And the sets could never be transported back and forth for all those rehearsals, unless you simply canceled all those Broadway shows for the week.

Don't worry, those extra sets don't always go to waste. Weiss says that some are dismantled, but others are stored after the Tonys and then later used for the show's touring production.

One fact to note: The Radio City stage is about 100 feet wide — much wider than a Broadway stage. "You can get lost on the stage at Radio City, it's just so huge," Weiss says. So Weiss' team builds a false proscenium that's a more appropriate 44-feet wide. As a result, Weiss says, "The scale is correct, so the number looks like it looks in their own theatre." The 44-foot scale also allows for an appropriately sized set that can later be used in touring productions if need be.

As for the other technical elements, the actual props can sometimes be transported from the Broadway theatre to be used during the awards. The Tonys has its own lighting designer, who works in consultation with the lighting designers for the shows.

The actors use their actual costumes. Sunday morning, all the performers report to their own theatre to get into costume, and then are bused over to Radio City for the dress rehearsal. Then they go back to their theatre for the Sunday matinee, and then the busing process is repeated for the actual awards. If you're one of these performers who's also nominated for an award, you can have a place to change backstage so that you're not in your costume when you go up to receive your statue.

For actors, that Sunday is quite insane, especially if you're someone like, say, Idina Menzel, the year she won a Tony for Wicked. She was her Elphaba character during the dress rehearsal, then she performed in the matinee, then she walked the red carpet as herself, then she got back into Elphaba gear to sing at the awards, then she changed back into her own clothes to receive her award — all the while having to put on and take off a entire face full of green make-up. "She was moving every moment of the day," Weiss says. "It's a true testament to the whole logistical situation that we have going on backstage."

Disneyland

Two Mondays ago I went to Disneyland for the first time since I was six. I’ve been to Disney World, the one in Florida, many times since, most recently in college. But I was very much looking forward to returning to the company’s original park in Anaheim.

The occasion was that a friend and his girlfriend came to town, and the friend knew a Disney Imagineer — a guy who designs the attractions — who got us in for free and knew everything there is to know about every ride, such as when it was built, how many people flow through every hour, and the ways they maximize that flow. Like how on one ride people get into Car A, then it moves forward to allow Car B to pick up passengers as Car A is getting checked by a second set of cast members (that’s what they’re called at Disney) to see that everyone’s belt loops are in place. As opposed to people getting in and having their belt loops checked at the same station, while people wait in line angrily. The Imagineer also clued us in on how to best use the park’s “Fast Passes” — passes you can pick up at machines located near the entrances to the busiest rides, which give you a reservation to come back later at a specified time, skip most of the line, and hop on the ride. They’re fantastic.

Here’s a rundown of what we did:

-Space Mountain. As good as ever. I felt like I did when I got laughing gas before my wisdom teeth were taking out — I had a smile on my face the whole time and there was nothing I could do to erase it.

-The Indiana Jones ride, where you’re in a jeep, was trying to be a thrill ride aimed at teens and older people but I just thought it was bumpy and nothing special. The best part was at the end when you thought you were going to get run over by the big ball from “Raiders.”

-The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland, which I read through at Barnes and Noble beforehand, implied that Peter Pan was a classic ride that would appeal to people my age. But they were wrong. Yes, it looks cool when you fly over London and see all the lights lit up. But it’s not worth the wait.

-Pirates of the Caribbean was very disappointing. I don’t know how they got such an entertaining movie from such a boring ride. Basically, the town gets taken over by pirates, the pirates get jailed, they escape, but Jack Sparrow finds the treasure first — or so I was told afterwards by our Imagineer friend. I wasn’t sure of the perspective of the ride — I thought we were supposed to root for the townspeople, especially since Jack Sparrow — the Johnny Depp character, who has (since the movies) been inserted into the ride — initially appears to be against the pirates and helping the townspeople. But it seems he’s just out for the treasure. And we’re supposed to be rooting for the pirates. It’s all very confusing. And boring.

-Haunted Mansion was also quite boring. The best part was when the cars tilted back slightly, so I could lie down and rest.

-The big drop on Splash Mountain was one of the highlights of the day. We didn’t get that wet, which was fine with me. Here’s my question: this is a relatively new ride and they based it on the film “Song of the South,” with Brer Rabbit popping up in places. Doesn’t Disney want to forget that movie, since they still get flack for Uncle Remus being a racial stereotype? Though I did think that playing “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” after the drop was a fun touch.

-I don’t know why, but I have a soft spot for Big Thunder Mountain. I think when I was a kid I liked underdogs, and, as I envisioned it in my six-year-old head, BTM never got any respect compared to the more popular Space Mountain and the showier Matterhorn, a big, snowy mountain. So Big Thunder was fun.

-We had dinner at the Blue Bayou, a dimly-lit New Orleans-themed restaurant in a great setting, next to the Pirates of the Caribbean river

-Innoventions was a fun attraction in Tomorrowland with a lot of very advanced video games that have do-gooder themes like solar energy

-The Matterhorn was special because, as I still remember, it’s the only roller coaster at Disneyland and not at Disney World. Doing it at night made for some cool glow-in-the-dark effects and fun views of the park.

-In the relatively new Buzz Lightyear ride, as your car moves through  “Toy Story”-themed rooms, each person has a gun and you try to shoot at various shapes and rack up points. I did ok the first time. The second time I think my blaster was broken. You have little idea what you’re shooting at, since your gun creates a little laser-pointer-style dot on what you’re pointing at, but there are two dozen laser pointer dots flying around and you don’t know which one is yours.

-We also took a midday trip to California Adventure, Disney’s park next door to Disneyland, which looks more like a generic Six Flags kind of park and seems to be trying to appease the teenagers who have outgrown Mickey Mouse. The attractions we saw there:

-This generic roller coaster that was ok but mainly gave me a headache.

-An amusing 3-D movie based on “A Bug’s Life.”

-A water ride with the circle-shaped boats. We got a little wet, not much.

-This really great presentation in which the turtle from “Finding Nemo” appears on the screen in computer animation form, and talks to the audience, asking them questions, and then responds. The hundred little kids in the audience didn’t seem to realize what a huge leap forward in technology this is, but to me it was pretty cool. Though the turtle’s surfer dude accent got annoying quickly. I wondered what Sean Penn would say when told that his character Jeff Spicoli was still being emulated two decades later by a computerized talking sea animal.

-Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is the only ride to get five stars from the Unofficial Guide to Disneyland. And it deserves it. It’s one of those towers where you’re strapped in and they take you up really high and then drop you, but with Disney special effects magic to heighten the experience. You start out walking through this spooky hotel, thinking it’s all very corny and no way am I going to be scared by any of these creepy guys in top hats who look like Jefferson Mays from the play “I Am My Own Wife.” Plus, I was skeptical as to whether “Twlight Zone” was the correct branding. While on line, I said, “’Twilight Zone’ is about mystery, and there’s no mystery here. Basically they’re going to pick you up and drop you.” But there is eventually one crucial surprise. They strap you into  a seat in the hotel’s “service elevator” — a room with about 20 other people — and you’re watching this video about going into the Twlight Zone and there’s some outer space imagery, and then you’re suddenly raised up to the top of the tower. And then the genius part happens: they open the doors and you look out on Disneyland. Then they drop you. And it’s amazing. What I realized is, opening those doors made it all the scarier, because it connects this creepy “Twilight Zone” hotel world with the real world, making the creepy world seem all the more real.

Our day was exhausting, as I left my apartment at 7:30 AM and didn’t get back until after midnight. But Disneyland did not disappoint.

Ask Playbill.com: Tony Logistics, Part One

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Peter Mitchell of Chanhassen, MN.

Question: With the Tony Awards coming up, I was wondering how the nominees for Best Musical and Best Revival of a Musical choose which song (or medley of songs) they will perform? Once the songs have been selected, how do the organizers of the Tony Awards ceremony pick the order in which the casts will perform? Is there any kind of technical rehearsal and/or dress rehearsal to incorporate the design elements and work all of the songs and transitions before the ceremony?

Answer: Glenn Weiss, director and producer of the Tony Awards, says that every season, before the nominations even come out, he and his team sit down with the producers of each new musical on Broadway to discuss potential songs for the Tonys telecast.

"We're looking at the shows from the eye of what would make a great three-minute television performance, which is sometimes not what people would perceive as the best number of the show," he says. "It must be something that holds together out of context of the show."

While the Tony Awards producers (Weiss co-produces with Ricky Kirshner) and CBS have the final say, Weiss says, he wants all parties to agree.

"There's a lot of compromise that goes into it and give-and- take," he says. "It's a total collaboration. No one's going in bullying anybody else. We really talk through with their creative people and come to consensus on what we feel represents their show."

Adam Epstein, the producer of one of this year's Best Musical nominees, Cry-Baby, plus past nominees Hairspray (the 2003 Best Musical winner) and The Wedding Singer, says that in deciding what song to suggest, "usually we use two criteria: What is the most energetic and robust number that a TV audience could watch that would make them want to buy tickets? What is the largest number that could include the most people so that you're doing an ensemble number, to show people that you're doing an old-fashioned and heavily populated Broadway musical?" Cry-Baby will perform the song "A Little Upset," which, while not including everyone in the cast, is a group number that "we think is out best foot forward," Epstein says. As for his discussions with the Tony producers, he says, "I've never had a situation where we've disagreed. TV producers and theatre producers arrive at the same idea because clearly there's highlights of every show."

Rob Ahrens, a producer of Xanadu, says that the producers and creative team looked to similar out-of-context presentations for guidance in picking which song would work. They had presented a medley of four songs at a cocktail party during the Broadway League's recent conference for road presenters. "We felt one of the songs played very well there, so we decided to do that song again at the Tonys, and to expand it a little bit," he says.

As for the order of the songs, Weiss says, "Our objective is to keep it interesting, keep it exciting so that viewers have an interest in staying." Does that mean putting more recognizable shows later in the show? Not necessarily, he says, but "that is one of many calculations that could go into the formula."

Another part of it is making sure the songs flow from one to the other. Weiss says the process is "much like in the music business, what song plays first on an album what song plays second an album — trying to create a flow that you're happy with." He implied that that might involve making sure songs that are back to back aren't too similar in terms of tempo, perhaps, but was hesitant to spell out hard-and-fast rules. "There are no guidelines or rulebook," he adds. "It's more just creating something that feels like a natural flow. Like anything else in the art world, that's subjective."

Stage logistics is also a factor. Sometimes the order is determined by when sets have to be moved on an off. At other times, "these nominees are playing in that number so we can't put that award next to that number," he says. "It's an interesting jigsaw puzzle. For every concept on paper that might flow well, you have to look at nuts and bolts."

And yes, there are rehearsals, including a dress rehearsal on Sunday morning (June 15), the day of the Tonys. AskPlaybill.com will address more Tony logistics questions next week.

"A Chorus Line" at the Ahmanson

I saw the touring production of the Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line” two Thursday nights ago at the Ahmanson Theater (I also saw in on Broadway a year and a half ago). I don’t know if it was the opening night audience, or the fact that L.A. audiences haven’t seen the show in a while, or both, but the crowd was incredibly appreciative, with applause and cheers coming unexpectedly, in the middle of songs, especially early on.

“A Chorus Line” was the first Broadway musical I saw as a kid. My grandparents took us when I was about eight or nine or so. I think my parents might have taken us to see it on Broadway at another point too. We also at some point saw a small production in Virginia. We listened to the soundtrack during car trips and I knew every line by heart.

As with “My Fair Lady,” which I wrote about a few weeks ago, seeing the show now made me realize how I’ve changed since I was younger. There were little realizations — like that I took turns of phrase literally. The line “married beneath him” confused me. And in the lyric “I stuffed her shoes with extra socks / ran seven blocks / in nothing flat” — I thought “nothing flat” was a reference to that fact that the bottoms of the shoes weren’t flat. Because of the socks.

I didn’t quite get that whole song about the girls’ messed-up childhoods, when they talked about “dug earrings out of the car,” “I knew that they weren’t hers,” and how that meant that their dad was having an affair, and the Indian chief and why she called him daddy, and young girls waiting to see if they’d turn out pretty. I got that there was something bad going on in these people’s families and that the ballet helped them forget about it, because “everything was beautiful at the ballet.” I didn’t really see how ballet could make you forget your problems. I still don’t. I’ll just take their word for it.

The biggest realization I had while watching the show the other day is how little I knew when I was a kid — as compared to how much I know now — about the desire to strive towards success in a chosen career, which is what the show is all about. When I was little, I related all the love references to love for people, like the girls I had a crush on in elementary school, not realizing that “love” in this show, like in the song “What I Did For Love,” refers to love of a profession, dancing. When I was eight I hadn’t really felt rejection. From what I remember, I enjoyed the beauty of the dances, and didn’t care too much about the desperation that the performers showed in every jump, twist and turn, the need to impress and to avoid rejection for the umpteenth time. I remember enjoying the flash and precision of the song “One,” but I don’t remember recognizing the song’s tongue-in-cheek expression of the show’s central dilemma, our desire to stand out versus the need to fall in line. It's nice to realize that having actually faced such dilemmas, and having faced the highs and lows of professional elation and rejection, has given me a more mature outlook on art, and on life.

Granted, my memory of the past is a little distorted, especially since I have stronger memories of listening to the soundtrack, as compared to my much more vague memories of seeing the actual show. Like when I saw it just now, I got chills at certain points, like the part when they all march forward and then put their headshots over their faces. Sure, one reason for that is that I now know how famous that headshot pose is. But I also don’t remember what I felt at that moment while watching the show when I was eight — I only remember listening to the soundtrack, which tended to happen in the car in the middle of Georgia while we were looking for a Holiday Inn.

But I do know one thing: during the song about “tits and ass,” I didn’t know what tits were. Seriously.