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The Messiah - Director's Diary - Jon Halpin
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Sunday October 22
Well tomorrow is day one of rehearsals for The Messiah by Patrick Barlow. This is a play I directed four years ago for the Queensland Theatre Company with Jean-Marc Russ and Hayden Spencer in the show back then. Unfortunately, Christine Johnstone is unable to join us again this time, but fortunately Carita Farrer has taken on the role of Mrs Bird.
The play tells the story of two men, Leslie Barrymore Lockett and Owen Blunt, who attempt to perform the nativity but constantly fall short of their ambition due to lack of resources, experience and talent. It’s hilarious and brilliant. It can be utterly lowbrow; the coarsest, broadest, stupidest humour imaginable one moment and then be very sophisticated, witty and damn clever the next. Although the two main characters are incompetent, their intentions are honourable and the play has a big heart.
Jean-Marc plays Leslie, an insipid but damaged man whose idea it was to put on the show, and Hayden plays Owen. There’s also a singer (Carita’s role), who we are now calling Barbara Redmond Bird who sings occasional interludes from Handel’s Messiah and is a further source of antagonism for Leslie. I’m thrilled to be able to tackle this one again, as it’s certainly an absolute favourite of mine.
The rehearsal process is a little unusual due to unavoidable circumstances. Jean-Marc is currently performing in Private Lives here in Brisbane before it heads to Adelaide for a four week season there. This means we have eight days rehearsal in Brisbane (two weeks, but we can’t rehearse Wednesdays or Saturdays due to Private Lives matinees), and then we have four weeks off before we all meet up again in Wodonga were we have three days to tech and dress before opening. This is hardly an ideal process, but as I said, completely unavoidable if we want to go ahead with the show. I really have to tip my hat to Charlie Parkinson and all the team at HotHouse for not dumping this project in the too hard basket when it became apparent what challenges lay ahead in the planning to mount this production.
Wednesday October 25
Days 1 & 2
A couple of hiccups along the way, but generally the first two days of rehearsals have gone pretty well. Hayden arrived on day one with a bit of a flu but seemed to shake it off after lunch. It’s a brand new feeling for all of us to be revisiting an old work, but we’re all thrilled to be doing it. We had a read through on the first morning which had us all laughing again. When we did it in 2002 the writer, Patrick Barlow, had given the go ahead to Australianise the script – in it’s published form it’s very English. We had gone a step further and Brisbanised it to some extent, so we talked a bit about how we can make it more suitable to Albury Wodonga audiences and then the rest of the country as it goes on the road next year.
After lunch we started putting the start of it up on the floor. I’d done up a rehearsal schedule that I felt was a little ambitious, but by the end of day one, we had actually gotten a lot further through the show than I had originally hoped. And it’s funny!
On day two Jean-Marc woke up with a pretty scratchy throat. This is something we need to be really careful of as the role of Elyot in Private Lives is not a small one, and he has fourteen performances to get through before we finish rehearsing. The upshot was that JM whispered his role in the rehearsal room which made his character very weird, but these two weeks are about getting the shape of the show back together, not hitting a vocal performance.
By the end of the day we had blocked and were able to run the entire first act. It seems the play has been sitting in the back of all our minds just waiting to pop back out. Most promisingly, the lines are coming back to Hayden and JM and they are managing to do a great deal of the show off the book already.
Saturday October 28
Days 3 & 4
A pretty productive first week I reckon. There was very sad news on Thursday morning though when Carita’s father passed away. She was obviously unavailable all of that day, and I offered (and advised) for her to have Friday off as well, but she was having none of it.
By the end of the week we had gotten all but the last six pages of the script blocked and found a couple of points where we could tighten the whole piece. JM’s voice is back and Hayden’s nearly got the whole script down.
The only scene we really still need to cover is the dreaded hat scene. This is a scene where JM plays Joseph and Hayden plays a number of salesmen, Mary and a couple of Roman Centurion. The idea is that he has a different hat for each character and as the scene goes on, he gets more and more confused, ending in disaster. When we did this last time, we spent ages finding a way to make it work, and I think we tried to overcomplicate the whole thing, eventually though we got it too work. The key to the scene is the quick changing of the salesmen fez hats, but only one from the last production is still in existence. The only replacement we could find is too small and the scene simply can’t find it’s rhythm without the correct props. Over the weekend it’s my job to either find a new hat for the scene or find a way to adjust the replacement one to do the trick for us.
Saturday November 4
Days 5, 6, 7 & 8
We started this week by finishing off the shape for Act II and were then able to run the whole act. It’s rough, but it can certainly work. In the afternoon we ran the whole play, so we could revisit act I after almost a week away from it. We were all pretty happy with how it’s going and seemed to be in agreement as to what areas need the most attention.
Tuesday morning we worked on a lot of little bits and pieces, particularly the songs Carita sings and what Hayden and JM do in those parts. We were able to extend the comedy of the tableaux they find themselves in during these scenes. In the afternoon we payed attention to the stuff we felt was a bit clunky during the run on Monday afternoon. My hat experiment was only a partial success. It’s the right size for the prop to work, but I had to add so much stuff to it, that it’s really far too heavy. Our costume maker Wiggy Brennan will hopefully be able to make a second hat that matches the one we have in existence for when we get to Wodonga.
I bought a harmonica for Carita to play during the scene where Joseph is looking for an inn for Mary to have her baby. We settled on a version of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s You Gotta Move as the perfect appropriate/inappropriate song for her to play through the scene which has a great blues riff, and can also be played with just four notes on the harp. She’s unfamiliar with how to play the instrument, but as Carita’s an excellent singer and has fantastic musical instincts, I don’t think she’ll have any trouble picking it up.
On Wednesday, Rob Scott came to Brisbane to show me the design model box of the design. Rob and I had met in July and talked about the aesthetic of the show and what absolutely needed to be there, and then talked via email and the phone a number of times since then. The model looked great. There was one aspect I was a little unsure about, but wanted to see a run of the show with it in mind. Come Thursday afternoon, after running and working bits in the morning, including the hat scene, we had that run which Rob was able to watch. I became apparent to me that Rob’s idea would work, in fact it will enhance the production, we just need a couple of minor adjustments to the performances, so we’re all happy.
Friday consisted of running over bits from the previous afternoon’s run in the morning and then a final run in the afternoon with notes. It’s in pretty good shape, and still very funny. There’s still a couple of bits we need to fix when we get down to Wodonga, and we can’t properly do the end until we’re in the space, so we have to suck it and see. I’ve got a bit of work to do with Brett Collery the composer/sound designer for the show in the meantime, Carita’s got some singing practice to cover and the boys need to keep the script in their minds so we can hit the ground running on December 6. I can’t wait.
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THE MESSIAH performance times:
Dec. 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 at 8.15pm
Dec. 15 at 4.00pm
Dec. 17 at 2.00pm & 6.00pm
Jon Halpin
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