Rehabilitation Through the Arts: Performing THE WIZ (Part 2)
This past January, the women of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility put on a production of The Wiz, managed and produced by Rehabilitation Through the Arts. In the first article of this series, Anne Lloyd and Michael Minard, the co-faciliators of RTA, chatted their process of choosing The Wiz. Below, they continue their discussion about the rehearsal process.
Anne: Finally, it was time to begin rehearsals leading to what would be two performances of The Wiz at the end of January. For the first time in BHCF (Bedford Hills Correctional Facility) history, families and outside friends of the cast would be allowed to attend an RTA production. The night we announced the administration’s approval our cast was glowing, anticipating who they would invite. Their families and friends would see them shining on stage, dancing, singing, and celebrating their own spirit and that of The Wiz. They would be more than just inmates, more than women incarcerated for the worst moments of their lives.
We started with auditions in several rounds: practice auditions — after which we gave notes — middle round (more notes!), and finals. We used a theatre game that included wild, enthusiastic applause after each woman’s audition piece — a strategy that provided support and an even playing field for both brave and less brave actors. It started us off with a good dose of unifying warmth and appreciation. The actors encouraged each other and saw how everyone improved as we moved through the rounds.
Michael: Even though you might not expect it, the women were very supportive of each other during the audition process. Inmates, given so little, can be covetous of their hopes and dreams. Who can blame them? And while we didn’t have a large group to draw from, at first 16 or 17, many of them said they wanted to play Dorothy. When they didn’t get that role, or even another major character, they were still excited for the women who did. Rather than expressing disappointment, they almost always said, “She’ll be perfect.” That was humbling.
Anne: Michael and I used the truth of what we knew about our actors in life as we cast the show. We sensed that a woman who was known for her selfless service to her peers would have a fantastic time playing a meanie like Evillene. With other actors, we knew we could count on their inner beings to deliver what they knew best. We intuited that some women had the capacity to discover within themselves the qualities they would be called on to play. One woman told me after several weeks that she finally ‘got’ why she had been cast in her role. That moment was a marker of understanding her character as well as the start of a great conversation.
Michael: As music director, I was looking for some specific qualities during auditions. I was listening for the strength of the instrument — the voice — but also for the ability to act a song. I had my antennae out for any potential “Rex Harrisons” who could sell a song without necessarily delivering a captivating melody. Our first Dorothy was a terrific actor — sassy, great timing with dialogue — but musically she was no Stephanie Mills. I rearranged the solo “Soon As I Get Home,” redistributing lines to give it a kind of call and response with the chorus to take the vocal pressure off Dorothy.
Anne: We had two actual hours of rehearsal at each session. We gradually moved from two nights a week, to three nights, and then every afternoon and evening of the last week leading to performance. This was quite an extraordinary accommodation by the administration, but doing a musical in a maximum security prison is never without suspense. If ‘the count’ was off (all inmates accounted for at a given time), inmates in the entire facility were held up, and rehearsals could be late or canceled. We scheduled rehearsals by the week, and since we are not allowed to contact any inmate outside of rehearsal, we just had to hope that our actors would be able to attend and ready for what we planned.
We always maintained several nimble backup plans — sometimes attendance was affected by an actor being in a college program inside BHCF, illness, or an actor was detained for trailer visits, medication times, scheduled phone calls to family, difficulties with callout sheets, and so on. One of our women in a major role was in lockup for several weeks, with her release uncertain and rehearsals of her scenes were challenging, to put it mildly. We lost several cast members who were ‘drafted’ — transferred to another facility with no warning.
We got used to all that pretty quickly. We pressed on, working with who we had in the room on any given night. Our original Lion was released from prison on a mistrial, and we recast from within. We adjusted as needed, moving people around from one role to another, rejigging the Tornado Ballet, the Monkey Dancers, and the Yellow Brick Road ensemble.
Our cast was, for the most part, composed of unfinished actors. I say unfinished because by the time we got to production, many of them were anything but! Some of our women had performed in community or school settings before they were incarcerated. We had some incredible voices and a few talented dancers. A couple of our women took acting in their college studies inside, but everybody needed fresh skills to pull off this production.
Rehearsals began each night with warmups — vocal, articulation, physical and group work. We rehearsed with the method I’ve preferred over many years as an actor: a classic table read. Then we’d start putting the scene on its feet. I’d bring in blocking for actors to try out. In scene work, we’d focus in on really talking to each other, trying to get everyone out of their own heads and into relationships with each other. Some were able to begin boldly; some had to be coaxed to come out and play. Our cast had plenty of personality if not technique! I realized if we just were able to meld the characters with the personal style of each woman, along with a strong awareness of being an ensemble member, that we’d have a truly authentic show. We had a lot of actors capable of throwing themselves into being funny, too. These were very entertaining rehearsals!
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Photo: Dorothy, Cowardly Lion, Tinman and Scarecrow perform in the prison gym. Credit: RTA[/caption]
Michael: From the beginning, we knew that we would be presenting the music of The Wiz in a kind of rock concert format. Without changing the dramatic purpose or the focus of the numbers, each principal singer was to use a hand-held cordless microphone, while the chorus, in three-part harmony, supported her with vocals picked up by choir microphones positioned above the stage. Rehearsing in this format was tricky, because we only had access to amplification a few days before the performance. For months, I had to encourage the chorus to effectively “drown out” the lead singer, reassuring the cast (and myself) that everything would magically come into balance when the sound equipment was brought into the prison.
Anne: We began with everyone being in the same room through each nightly rehearsal — a bit later, we expanded into two rooms, so there was always a built-in audience. It was sometimes hard having the whole cast in the room together, especially if some actors didn’t have much to do that night. We stressed how much you can learn from watching other actors rehearse. To maintain the creative freedom to take risks with this difficult material, we talked about the necessity of not judging each other. We also had to figure out the performance style of the play, and then interpret that for each woman, through her own filter.
I’ve come to see that women in prison hold so much inside. I watched our actors struggling to express the emotions and desires of their characters. We worked a lot on vocal production, so everyone could be heard and understood, as well as super silly exercises that exaggerated whole body expressiveness. We used sense memory exercises.
We explored how posture, movement, and focus are perceived onstage. We divided the class in half. Some women watched while others ‘performed’ theatre exercises and games. By being the ‘audience,’ our actors learned that they needed to account for every second they were onstage — everything was going to be seen. We switched back and forth being audience and performers. Everyone had a chance to try things out, to lose face, to be witnessed and to laugh together.
Michael: Despite the tight security of BHCF, we were eventually given two rooms for rehearsing The Wiz. This was fortunate, because if Anne was doing detailed scene work in the main room, choreographer Andrea DelGaudio and I could focus on movement and singing with smaller ensembles and individuals in the room across the hall. Our Addaperle — a full-throated gospel singer — could run her song “He’s The Wizard” as many times as she pleased, while Andrea shaped the movement of the Munchkins with each repetition. It was in this second, smaller, room that Andrea worked out the details of the Yellow Brick Road sequences and the Crow Motown Backup Singers for Scarecrow’s “Born On the Day Before Yesterday.”
Also in this second room, our first Lion had a genuine “Cowardly Lion” moment — a true rehearsal meltdown. After trying several times to get her song “Mean Ol’ Lion” on its feet, she declared that it wasn’t possible, that she simply couldn’t do it. When she dissolved in frustration, Andrea gently “modeled” a performance of the song for her. Neither an actress nor a singer herself, Andrea’s effort inspired our cowardly lion to cry out, “I get it now!” and she threw herself into the role.
Anne: Eventually, the work started clicking and confidence built. The moment an actor got her first laugh from the room — or the room went very quiet during a tender scene — she became aware of that, and was inspired to keep searching for ways to find more of those moments. We used a lot of specific coaching. It took many months of rehearsal to find the flow, since rehearsals were so fragmented. And we sang together every night, no matter what. The feelings of power and beauty that came from our singing, and Michael’s gorgeous harmonies, were a huge help in believing that we had the capability to put on a show that would work. As my actors sardonically noted, I cried every single time I heard the songs “If You Believe” and “Home.”
Because we worked on a typical shallow gymnasium stage with no wing space, we did the show story theatre style — multiple casting, all actors onstage for the whole show, with costume changes and movement of set pieces, props and microphones all seen as part of the show.
Hilary Rosenfeld, our production designer, designed several platforms to provide levels onstage for different scenes, but Bedford Hills has no woodworking shop. Katherine Vockins, RTA’s Executive Director, reached out to Sing Sing and their vocational shop agreed to build the platforms. Hilary created the scheme for our fantasy-based costumes as well. We bought and borrowed the basic costume elements, but the specialty pieces were loaned from The TDF Costume Collections in Astoria. These were layered on and off over a simple base costume, enabling the cast to play multiple characters without leaving the stage for a costume change. The TDF costume pieces gave the show a sparkle that would have been impossible on such a limited budget. RTA arranged to have the backdrops painted in the prison with the help of some very talented women who volunteered for the assignment. When Hilary showed up the first night with 1/2” scale renderings of the backdrops, the women were skeptical about how this process would work. But once they started, they could see that it was coming together and the backdrops transporting us to Kansas and Oz ended up being phenomenally beautiful. The paint crew became so involved in the production that they ended up becoming the back stage crew for the show and took care of the props, ran the spotlight and helped with the costumes.
The process of arranging costumes and props to go into a maximum security prison is daunting, but the administration was cooperative and helped us to get all the clothes in and out of BHCF twice — once for fittings, and again for the entire week of dress rehearsal and performances. Every single element worn by our actors — and remember, they were wearing multiple costumes, was accounted for on a ten-page master list. That’s every dress, hat, cape, belt and pair of socks being checked in by security. Of course each piece had to pass muster as to color (no gang colors, for instance) and inspected for contraband — including Toto, our specially made marionette. Substitutions were made for certain items — thick cardboard tubes, for instance, were used in place of tall wooden dowels.
Once the costumes were admitted into BHCF, each piece was counted every time it was used and then locked in a secure room. This went for every prop, too, and The Wiz is a heavily propped show. We worked hard to develop our counting system and got efficient supervision from the prison staff. But this always ate into rehearsal time, and if something wasn’t found (everything was, every time, miraculously) it was heart attack time. We all knew it was possible our production could be shut down. I didn’t relax until the show was over and each piece was counted out for the last time.
And then, just days before performance, a local tornado hit BHCF — we lost our Dorothy to another facility! We recast Dorothy with the actor who had been playing Evillene and she heroically learned the role in just a few days. Moving yet another cast member at that point would have been too disruptive, so an RTA writing facilitator, who already had BHCF clearance, stepped in to play Evillene. We called on our choreographer, Andrea, to fill in a spot in the Yellow Brick Road. The resilience, hard work, and crazy courage of our ever-changing ensemble was awesome.
Our dress rehearsals onstage happened just in time. We were ready for clothes, and the stage, and all our props. We needed to stretch out from the rehearsal room to feel what filling a theatre with emotion, music and laughter would be like. An old shower room in the gym was used as our dressing room. With the help of our back stage crew, who kept things organized for us in the tiny spaces to the left and right of the stage, we started making sense of just how to run this show. Having an amazing stage manager was a godsend.
But somehow, our rehearsal journey, as wacky as it was, led us to a remarkable place. We were ready to show our audiences what we had.
