There was no doubt in my mind about signing the Rainbow contract Ken offered me toward the end of the year to direct “The Sound Of Music” the following summer (’07). The contract included a fee “deposit”, so the commitment was sealed. I even began casting with Ken’s approval, pinning down at least one lead I wanted – Darcy Fehr as ‘Captain Von Trapp’. I had suggested Samantha Hill for ‘Maria’ and had even approached Tracy (Dahl), with my heart in my hands, to play ‘Reverend Mother’ for us. That was going to be a long shot. But all these possibilities would bubble enticingly beneath the surface as the Fall months moved along. I was feeling optimistic.
Dalnavert and the “Christmas Carol” readings reached the 18th year, this time with a split schedule – six performances with two nights off in the middle – and the run was sold out well before we opened mid-December. Realizing that I had become a cash cow for the Museum, Linda, the General Manager, asked me if I would be interested in doing a reading for their Halloween Nights the following year. She suggested “The Picture of Dorian Grey” and I thought of a truncated version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. That booking was way down the road and I said I’d think about it.
Before the New Year, we’d secured Don Horsburgh as our Musical Director for “Sound”, Georgette Nairn, a great Stage Manager, and a few more locals fell into place for the cast including the glamorous Jennifer Lyon as ‘Elsa’. I was also concerned about finding the right look for the sets and costumes, so we began a far-ranging search of existing rental packages. There are a lot of smaller Theater Companies in the US (mostly) which, after having mounted a production of their own of a particular show, put their sets and costumes up for rent with a hope to re-coop some costs. Some were good, some not so much. We even looked at some Asian companies, but they would be pricey. A few had good costumes and others had good sets, but finding a combination of both in one cost-effective package was the trick. With my MSI connection to Troika Entertainment, one of our Contracting partners, I managed to introduce Ken to their crackerjack Production Department and left it for him to investigate. As these details seemed to be falling into place, one major hope was fading away. Tracy had commitments to sing in Prague which would take her out of our first rehearsal week and there was another engagement in Banff that might be tricky to re-schedule, but I harboured hope as I headed to Hawaii for another rest.
It really wasn’t a rest. Manilow payrolls pursued me no matter where I went and, although we had sub-contractors for some sites, there were still major concerts that fell to me to coordinate. We were contracting a touring production of “Rocky” at the same time, still prepping “The Pirate Queen”, and a bunch of one-offs and some regionals that needed attention. I think I had more paper work than clothes in my luggage! My tiny escape served me well and I returned to Winnipeg, somewhat rested but with a boatload of new things to deal with including a crazy tour of a show called “Rock Star Supernova” created out of a TV reality series. I’d never heard of the show, but Sam had shoe-horned us into this project while I’d been away. It was a 28-city schedule of the music I like least in the world and our involvement was very simple – provide a String Quartet that played with the rock groups for two songs! The fact that we were being paid $500.00 U.S. Dollars per site for basically no work made it teetering-on-the-edge-of-acceptable, but this genre was wa-a-ay outside our lane, and I let Sam know it. He said he couldn’t resist the offer and I just rolled my eyes … something he didn’t like me doing to him – but accepted in this case. Work place dynamics!
The “Sound Of Music” auditions, like all auditions for Rainbow productions, were draining. Aside from a medium-size ensemble which doesn’t have a huge amount to do, there weren’t a lot of parts I had to cast. But we had to see almost 200 people (and these were only the adults) and there were a few pleasant surprises. Sadly, Tracy had finally opted out, reluctantly and with profuse apologies, so I was biting my nails that a ‘Reverend Mother’ might turn up out of the blue. The Theatre Gods must have been smiling on us. Colleen Skull, a magnificent mezzo, appeared out of that mystical “blue” and blew all of us away with an astonishing voice and look for ‘Reverend Mother’. We hired her right away. I found Melanie Whyte to double up in a few key roles, a ‘Rolf’ and a ‘Liesl’ and two of the other older Von Trapp kids – ‘Friedrich’ and ‘Louisa’. That last detail meant that the pressure would be lessened (but no less painful) in a couple of weeks at the kid auditions. We were getting there.
Then, out of the blue (this time, not the mystical one), MSI got tagged for an audit by Revenue Canada! Ambush! The blood runs cold, and the heart sputters as the fear runs up the back of your neck. For no real reason, a sense of guilt seems to invade and colour every consideration you make about everything in your life, and the world is thrown into an unfightable chaos. This was a G.S.T. audit. If you run a business in Canada, GST (Goods and Services Tax) is a 7% surcharge added to the fees you charge a client. Essentially, you become a tax collector for the government. As the listed CFO, I had been contacted by a nice-sounding lady named Amber and we had set up an appointment. Not knowing what the face-to-face meeting was going to be like, I had stressed myself out, but I needn’t have worried. She was most pleasant. At the outset, we did a lot of talking about dogs (Morgan had greeted her enthusiastically at the front door) and family and trips before settling into what she needed for the audit. She had put me at ease – something I’m sure she had been trained to do – and I ended up feeling confident that this was going to be a breeze.
A while back, the bookkeeper at our Accountant’s office had pointed out to me that I had not been including our U.S. Income in our G.S.T. reports. This had been gnawing at me as the possible reason a red flag had gone up on MSI. I mentioned this to Amber, but she didn’t seemed concerned, telling me that so many people did that. Since the conversation with the bookkeeper, I had started tracking the US amounts on the GST spreadsheets and would now include that number in our next return. It will probably send RevCan into another tailspin. She looked at my GST returns, and I explained how I did the calculations. She asked for four of our returns to be backed up with documentation as to how I arrived at the figures and gave me a week to generate the information. I took the rest of the day to calm myself down – I wasn’t about to be carted off to prison after all! – and in the days that followed, produced a substantial pile of paper for her to go through. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the whole megillah and I waited with bated breath for the next shoe to drop. Then Sam got a call from Revenue Canada asking why we weren’t doing G.S.T. reports for Lutent Holdings, one of our accounts that held US funds that had already been processed but on which, we discovered, we still had to pay GST. My head was spinning from all these switchbacks and hairpin turns, but I dutifully wrote cheques as they requested knowing that it could all be claimed as expenses, and concluded that this was all just paper generation and a waste of time … at least as far as I was concerned. Mercy! My breathing started to return to normal.
By now, “The Pirate Queen” was well into previews in New York. Sam had been back there keeping things calm and organized. All this while, I had been creating and explaining the weekly payrolls for the Pit Contractor (Dave Roth) so he would technically know how to do the formatting and create the complicated cell formulae once he took over the job full time when the show opened. Our exchanges were always touch-and-go if only because these mathematical calculations confounded us both at times. With so many little rehearsals being called at a moment’s notice, and constant additional hours and overtime being added on almost hourly, we took some solace in the fact that during rehearsals, which we were still in, the production was paying the musicians a week in arrears. Still, it was incredibly frustrating at times when Sam would forget to tell me about a tiny fee detail and I’d be at my computer into the wee hours making the changes on the spreadsheets and Invoices to send off the following morning. But Dave and I got along extremely well, and I was looking forward to meeting him in person in a couple of weeks at the Opening.
With everything in order in New York, Sam took off for ten days in China to drum up business and check in on some touring productions that we had a minimal hand in organizing. Naturally, while he was basically incommunicado on the other side of the world, all hell broke loose at home with only my shoulders on which it all could fall! I made the mistake of accepting the contracting for a Tour of “Chicago” coming into Vancouver. It was ten days down the road – short notice, to be sure – but I knew Sam would have had a fit had I turned down the work. In turmoil about my decision, I spent days trying to put a good band together. Fortunately, we’d had a “Chicago” go through Vancouver eighteen months earlier, so I knew who to hire. It took me until the day before the opening performance to pin down the final player. All through this, John Monaco, the supervising Contractor, and the Live Nation Producers kept calling to whine and kvetch about how high the Vancouver Musician rates were, why we (MSI) were getting as much money as we were for contracting the Orchestra, why there were Principal premiums, why were the doubling rates so high and on and on. It drove me to distraction, and it was all I could do to keep myself from screaming at the office jerks on the other end of the line and at John who went on and on about how the rates are higher in Canada than they are in New York (they’re not). But this was always the case when “Chicago” came across the line (U.S. to Canada). It all got taken care of and in the end, Vinnie, the Musical Director, had a great band, and that’s really all that mattered!
Since there are no production numbers in “Sound of Music”, I decided to take on what “choreography” was needed myself. The only dance was The Laendler, an Austrian Folk Dance that is demonstrated for the kids by ‘Maria’ and ‘Von Trapp’ during the Ball Scene. I wanted to be as authentic as possible, so Georgette, my SM, arranged for me and her to visit “The Edelweiss Shoe Plattler Dance Troupe” in St. Boniface to learn the real dance. They were very enthusiastic and happy to have us in their cozy little hall, decorated with Austrian flags and pictures and cuckoo clocks. We discovered very quickly that the real Laendler they were about to teach us was not at all like the slow, elegant waltz-time Richard Rodgers tune in the show. As the music began, the couples in front of us started whooping and stomping about and clapping to the very quick polka-like music now blasting from the speakers! George and I looked at each other in confusion and surprise but we joined in and laughed and stumbled about, looking like we were learning something. We left after a breathless forty-five minutes of dancing, some refreshments and some small talk. I had no intention of using what we’d just seen, and when I got home, put the “SofM” video on and started writing down the film choreography that went with the music from the show. Thank heavens there was only one dance in the show!
The GST audit was giving me sleepless nights and constant heartburn. But we were on the verge of being done. Amber found what is called a “systemic error”, a mistake that had been made years back, and embedded in a teeny, tiny spreadsheet cell calculation formula I’d created for our tax breakdowns for the Accountant, a small typo that I’d never noticed but which had compounded over time. We ended up paying a whopping bill for the tax not paid over the past three year, but, again, a lot of it could be credited back to us through expenses over the same period. I updated my ancient spreadsheet formula which now incorporated the correction going forward. I knew this audit was small potatoes in the great scheme of things, but the mental stress over those months was pretty major and I hoped I’d never have to go through this again. The self-inflicted fear, for it was self-inflicted, was what surprised me the most, that I had allowed myself to feel that threatened and powerless, at least in my head. It still haunts me.
Then it was off to the Opening Night of “The Pirate Queen” in New York. I had reserved a small suite at the Hyatt in case there were festivities I needed to host at any point and was relieved to settle in by mid-afternoon, allowing payrolls and audits to drain out of me before heading out to dinner with my niece Samantha at Tony’s di Napoli, my traditional first-night-in-NYC meal. I had tried to get her and husband Eric opening tickets but there was nothing I could even buy for the performance. Apparently, half of Ireland was to be in attendance and tickets had long ago been swept up. At least I got to spend a bit of time with her.
To tell the truth, I thought the Opening would be more “star-studded” than it was. Gabriel Byrne was the only person I recognized, and he was there only because he’d narrated a documentary about the show. I’d been keeping my eye on the BroadwayWorld.com postings and was not seeing positive responses from run-of-the-mill folk who had been to previews … no great details, just a disturbing ambivalence. Uh-oh! I found Sam easily behind the roped off area in front of the theatre. I’d not seen him in quite a while. He’d been in Asia for a time and had then flown to New York for some weeks during previews. Surprisingly, he looked great, rested and was in good spirits. We chattered about all kinds of things non-MSI and non-show related, which we rarely did anymore, and took our seats. There was a tumultuous babble in the house, everyone anticipating the “brand new Boublil and Schonberg Musical”, but I could also sense an apprehension. Maybe those internet postings had something to do with my perception, but it just wasn’t what I thought I would feel.
The production was spectacular, no doubt about it! The sets and costumes, the Celtic choreo-graphy and swashbuckling, the lights and smoke, all the visual elements let me know I was sitting in front of a lot of money having been spent. The voices were wonderful, the music and most of the lyrics compelling and rousing. But I couldn’t settle into it. For one thing, the many timelines and locales required me to work much too hard to understand ‘where’ and ‘when’ we were at any particular moment. I couldn’t connect. When it settled for a bit during the ballad moments between Stephanie J. Block (‘Grace O’Malley’) and Hadley Fraser (‘Tiernan’, her love interest) I kind of got it. But I kept thinking of those same kind of moments in ‘Saigon’ which served as welcome catch-your-breath lulls in the ever-present chaos of the War. In this case, they didn’t serve the same purpose and felt like interruptions more than anything else.
When it was over and the audience was going crazy during the bows, I just sat there … until it was de rigeur to stand up. Sam leaned over toward my ear and very quietly asked me what I thought. How was I going to be appropriately enthusiastic and supportive but let him know my honest opinion … which I knew he wanted. “It was spectacular in every way” I said. “Glorious to watch!” And then I stopped for a moment. “But ya know what, Boss? I couldn’t find its heart.” I said it simply, no adornments. I could tell from the look on his face that my words were a confirmation of his own feelings. By then, people were streaming up the aisle and folks were pushing to get out of our row, so we had to join in the flow.
We stood in the departing crowds in front of the Theatre for a bit, then headed down to Cipriani’s at 25th and Broadway for the Opening Night Party. Cipriani’s is a huge, high-end event center, with an immense main banquet room and smaller satellite rooms. Sam’s Assistant had made all the seating arrangements weeks earlier. It was a very rare sit-down affair, but the Producers had very deep pockets. She had given us our tickets before the performance in case we got separated at some point. We cabbed down together with Mark Cumberland, the copyist for the orchestra music and a good friend of Sam’s. Through some kind of “error”, Sam and I found ourselves seated in one of the small outer rooms with the show’s Dressers and Wardrobe folks, and Sam’s Assistant and Mark had disappeared. I was somewhat pissed off about this. I didn’t care all that much about where I was sitting, but Sam was the show’s Music Coordinator and Contractor and really should have been at a mucky-muck table in the main hall! I walked about for a bit, found some musicians I knew in the main room, and stood chatting with them for a bit. As I scanned the crowd, I spotted Sam’s Assistant and Mark sitting at one of those mucky-muck tables in front of the stage, laughing away and drinking champagne, and my blood boiled. I went back to our table in the outer room and told Sam where his Assistant and Mark were and that I was leaving. He said he was going to stay and find the folks he should have been sitting with. The whole evening was just a little sad and not what I wanted it to be … for Sam. To this day, I don’t understand what happened with regard to the seating. As far as I was concerned, it was an obvious and blatant affront. But to what end? What goes through someone’s head to knowingly create that kind of dynamic, particularly with one’s boss? I never challenged her or mentioned it. And I’ve always regretted not doing so.
The rest of the week in New York was spent seeing some more shows – “The Color Purple”, “Legally Blonde”, the John Doyle “Company”, “Talk Radio” and, weirdly enough, the reduced version of “Les Miz”, a huge contrast to the bombast of “PQ” just a few nights earlier. By comparison, “Les Miz” is a well-considered, emotionally secure and affecting piece of theatre, and one can only guess how the same creators (and millions of dollars) could miss the mark so fundamentally with another show. Why does it work when it does, and doesn’t when it doesn’t? And if someone could solve that age-old riddle, they would make a lot of money!
Over the past few years, I’ve been blessed with directing shows that have had a lot of children in them. Well, “blessed” is not actually the right word. “Cursed” would be closer to Truth, but much less “politically correct”. Fortunately, “Sound of Music” required only seven kids and I’d already cast three of them. There were only four to go. So the weekend after returning from the excitement of Broadway, I settled in for two and a half days and a total of 163 youngsters to look at … for only four roles. I decided that I was going to video the auditions this time round. With so many to get through, remembering the details of their performances had always been hard, and this time I was looking for particular “family traits” that would read as “brother and sister” resemblances. I narrowed it down to 24 kids covering all the ages and, the following Saturday, we held “The Von Trapp Kids Boot Camp”, a chance for them to do “stuff”, dancing, singing, readings, generally giving me an idea of how they responded to each other (and me) in a less stressful setting. Yikes!