I’ve always loved a good musical number, but I don’t think I could put my finger on what made a really good piece, as opposed to a just-okay one. Since working on Hairspray, I’ve become even more perplexed by this phenomenon. I know what I like to see, but I don’t necessarily have the tools (yet) to recreate or vocalize what I can picture so clearly in my mind.
Hairspray has such a special place in my heart — I remember downloading the movie soundtrack on my iPod Nano during elementary school, playing it on my iHome at full blast, and making up huge musical numbers in front of my bedroom mirror every day after school. It was truly the start of my love for theatre. I was prolific and had a boundless imagination. I probably staged 100 versions of Rent, Chicago, and The Last 5 Years during that time. It’s a surreal feeling directing my cast of 37 now, months before my college graduation. Who would have thought my favorite pastime as a child would become something so much greater?
Now that I’m in the rehearsal room, working with actual actors on Hairspray and not just my imagination, I realize how much more difficult the process of staging a musical number is than I could have ever predicted. How do you translate the stage images to different people with different dance backgrounds and experience and abilities and talents? How do you create, maintain, and speak the same language of movement, tempo, and style throughout the process? How do you delineate between pure choreography, pedestrian movement, and the mix between the two? Who draws those lines? And, equally as important, who teaches what, between director and choreographer? There is so much beautiful, blurry, complicated collaboration in musical theatre. It is a whirlwind to keep up, but I’m loving every minute of it.
The current number that I am trying to tackle is “I Can Hear the Bells.” I want to believe that it shouldn’t be that hard. The story is simple: Link bumps into Tracy. Tracy enters a dream world. Tracy reveals the ways that she and Link will fall in love. Everyone on stage is enveloped in the fantasy. They sing with her, surround her, celebrate with her, and then all return by the end of the number, with no knowledge of what the audience just watched unravel. It’s a perfect mix of sweet and campy, elaborate and simple.
Every time I have tried staging it, I have frozen up. I think in my mind this number would be fantastic, surreal, actors would be building the world as they moved, and we would watch a full-on wedding scene occur. I can think of the elements—bow ties and veils, a wedding runner, ladders with garlands—but the part I’m having the most trouble with is mapping out how we get there and most importantly, what the actors onstage are doing in the moments where they aren’t building or traveling to a new formation. It sounds silly, but the layers upon layers of detail-work that I want to put into the number is both overwhelming and exciting.
Now when I watch a good musical number, I can’t help but think about all of the mechanics that went into its creation. I spent so much of my academic career, up to this point, thinking that my love for the subjective was somehow lesser than that of those I know who study math and science and engineering, but this work is a science of its own. There is something so satisfying about calculus to me, knowing when I have found the right answer and moving forward to the next problem. I used to think that my art couldn’t feel the same way — to some degree, I am always hungry to edit or revisit or detail, detail, detail. I think, in my process, there is not objectively right, objectively wrong answers. But there is objectively good, efficient, elegant. I am certain that there is a better, smarter, trickier way to stage this number and see my internal stage pictures come to life, and I’m determined to uncover it with my actors.
Here’s to hoping at tonight’s rehearsal we can finalize the number once and for all!
P.S. Muir Musical just launched our annual fundraiser to support this year’s production and future musicals at UC San Diego. With a show of this scale, every penny helps! You can donate here!