Godspell
Book by John Michael Tebelak, based on The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Lyrics and Music by Stephen Schwartz
Town & Gown Players, 2007-8 Mainstage season
OK, disclosure first: I do not like Godspell. I didn't like it when Town & Gown put it up in the 1994-95 season, and I still don't like it.
Allowing for what you might call my bias, I think director Derek and a fine cast gave as good a production as I'll ever see. Well-formed stage pictures, first-rate voices, good costumes, choreography that mostly added and hardly ever detracted, and once again Jonathan's sensitive ear to balance the onstage band and the vocalists.
My only quibble is with everything else about the show. The music was tired when it was new, the book (from The Book) sounds like one of those late-60s efforts to make Christianity relevant, and the lyrics are just icky. Still, the performers largely got past the bad material.
What you see at right is more or less what we built toward. Jonathan did a rendering and Tom, Derek and I worked out mechanical details. At your right are curved risers with access from back, front and one end. The circular platforms at your left accommodated the band (keyboard, lead, bass, drum machine). By opening night, the ends of the mural were concealed by curtains. Not just any curtains, our No. 1 rag, dead-hung on some steel members. (Dead-hung means they did not travel back and forth or up and down but simply, um, hung there decoratively.)
Please take special note of the cornice and the lily-shaped lights. Jonathan was aiming for the look of a theater (not, yawn, a circus ring) that had been pretty well used. Tom remembered the movie houses of his youth, which had these sort of Walter Dorwin Teague fixtures (no relation) lining the walls, and he and I recreated them as three-dimensional figures made of styrofoam. Then we reused the "ropelights" from Play It Again, Sam to cast a glow on the sky part of the mural.
Nathan's floorboards received praise from our audience, something that's happened maybe once before in my experience.
At right you see Zack at work on the mural that adorned the upstage wall. The fingers belong to either Nathan or Jonathan. The first of these photos shows the mural not yet completed—some figures are still in outline. That dates the image to two weeks before opening. Tracing day, when Jamie brought the overhead projector, was a week earlier.
Derek and Jonathan decided to mix up the theater look: Part was simulated backstage, part was onstage looking down toward the audience, and part was onstage looking up. Logically it was confusing, but everything contributed to the way Derek had the show visually organized, so it worked.
The show had a pretty good run. Personally, I was relieved, on opening night, to be able to deliver sincere compliments to the director and the performers. Because I do not like Godspell.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Godspell (2007-8)