His voice raised to a booming and dramatic flourish fitting the occasion, Mayor Anthony A. Williams proclaimed "May 12, 2005, as Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Day" to celebrate the troupe's spanking-new home at 641 D St. NW.
After the speeches, the public was invited to check out the building and the 265-seat courtyard-style auditorium, in which some rows and boxes wrap around the side walls toward the stage.
High above said stage hung a charred-looking car chassis (a Ford from Rent-a-Wreck, we were told), a key prop for "Big Death and Little Death," which opened last week. The unfinished look of the space -- cinder-block walls, splashes of color -- is geared to Woolly's unvarnished, slightly subversive aesthetic.
Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz said proudly Thursday, "Nowhere else in America has a theater company that's so edgy gotten so far," referring partly to the new home that cost nearly $7 million. (Woolly raised more than $8.5 million in its capital campaign -- $2 million from the city, the rest from foundations and private donors.)
Shalwitz concluded: "This new theater will be a beacon for every weird, oddball theater company" that starts up anywhere in the nation.
Not-So-Simply Sondheim
Costume designer Anne Kennedy's pooch Newly wanders among the actors onstage during pauses in the rehearsal of "Pacific Overtures" and sits out in the house while they sing. Newly occasionally barks. Everybody's a critic.
The Signature Theatre cast, in white Kabuki makeup, black wigs, brightly colored robes and bare feet, sing "Someone in a Tree" -- about ordinary people recalling a historic occasion witnessed long ago. Stephen Sondheim has said he loves the song best of all he's written.
Ten actors will play upwards of 40 characters in Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer's intimate rendering of the show, which starts previews tonight. (Quick costume changes are causing a "rat race" backstage, he admits.) Though he has staged many a Sondheim musical, Schaeffer says that for this one (with a book by John Weidman) he waited until he "felt like I could tackle it, because it probably is one of his hardest shows."
"Pacific Overtures" tries to imagine, from the Japanese point of view, the cultural earthquake of 1853 in Japan, when American Commodore Matthew Perry, followed by the European powers, sailed into the long-isolated nation and insisted it trade with them or else. The aftershocks are both comic and tragic.
Schaeffer studied photos of the original production -- it had an epic-size Broadway debut in 1976 -- and knew he had to reinvent it for Signature's small space. He's using the recently revised script and new orchestrations (by Jonathan Tunick) from last winter's revival at New York's Roundabout Theatre. "We made our own Kabuki style up," says Schaeffer, who also designed the sets. It has been an effort to "make our own language to tell the show" differently than it has ever been done.
Music director Jon Kalbfleisch will lead a seven-piece orchestra with two percussionists (occasionally using Japanese instruments). He says Sondheim wrote Western music but with tonalities that evoke Japanese music. He likens Sondheim's songs to the richness of Shakespeare's texts.
"All the information the actors need is in the score," Kalbfleisch says. "If they get the notes and the words right, the characterization is there."
