| SzczerbiakManiac |
11-13-2006 04:45 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, November 12, 2006
ONE SHARP NEW MUSICAL
by Rachel Howard
Sam Archer and Richard Winsor didn't take long to get in touch with the disabilities of their character in the musical "Edward Scissorhands." On their first day of trying on the foot-long blades that substitute for Edward's hands, the two dancers, who alternate in the lead role, were left alone in a closed studio.
"Richard's pants came undone and we couldn't do anything about it," Archer said recently from Paris, remembering the shocking practicalities of his transformed appendages. "And then we couldn't leave the studio because we couldn't turn the door handle."
The daily difficulty of dancing with cutlery for fingers was just one of the many challenges in adapting Tim Burton's 1990 movie for the stage. But surprisingly, Caroline Thompson, who conceived "Edward Scissorhands" with Burton and wrote the original screenplay, trusted British director and choreographer Matthew Bourne immediately.
When she first met Bourne in 1997, through their mutual friend actor Alan Cumming, she'd already seen Bourne's eye-opening all-male "Swan Lake."
"I thought it was the most beautiful piece of theater I'd ever seen," Thompson said by phone from her ranch in Ojai (Ventura County). "A year later Matt asked whether I'd consider letting him adapt 'Edward Scissorhands,' and I said, 'Oh, that's wonderful. What a great idea.' I was enthusiastic straight off."
It took seven more years to bring Burton and composer Danny Elfman on board, and to secure all the rights and funding. But Thompson's faith never wavered, which is all the more remarkable given the liberties Bourne was to take with a story so close to her heart. From early on, Bourne and his longtime associate artist and visual designer, Lez Brotherston, knew they could not simply stage a live-action version of the film.
"We decided to take the story down to its fairy-tale aspect and flesh it out the way we would any show, from 'Car Man' to 'Highland Fling,' " Brotherston said from London, speaking of Bourne's nontraditional takes on "Carmen" and the romantic ballet "La Sylphide." "This is a reinvention rather than an adaptation."
The story's whole look was reconsidered, and Brotherston and Bourne decided to set the stage "Scissorhands" in the 1950s, rather than the late 1980s as in the movie.
"The '50s seemed to symbolize the American dream more than the '80s," he said. "In the 1980s, why would Edward be so odd? There were punks and Goths in the '80s anyway."
So Brotherston created a spectacular fantasia of American suburbia, taking his cue from old cookbooks and movies like "Back to the Future" and "Peggy Sue Got Married."
Then there were practical special-effects questions: How would Edward unleash his sculpting skills, so comical in the movie, upon the town's poodles and shrubs? As always, Bourne looked for a dance solution, and Edward's styling sessions became a high-stepping extravaganza for an unlikely ensemble: a dozen topiaries, spindly legs poking out from people-size manicured bushes.
Concocting reasons for Edward to dance became a source of inspiration for Bourne and Thompson, who co-wrote the stage show's early scenario. Scenes from the film were dropped and others, like a wild Christmas party, added. But the team didn't stop there. Brotherston and Bourne went on to answer unresolved questions from the film, like why Edward's lonely inventor would create a boy with scissors for hands in the first place. And to figure out what kind of costume Edward would wear for the stage -- a muscle-defining brown leather bodysuit rather than Johnny Depp's riveted black Goth getup from the film -- Brotherston and Bourne dreamed up a thorough explanation: The inventor sews Edward from an old brown couch.
"We thought, 'What is Edward made out of?' " Brotherston said. "What would the inventor have at his disposal? The sofa is brown, so he's brown. It's about finding a truth to the character."
That complicated, heavily elasticized costume used to take the actors 45 minutes to put on (today, with four helpers, they've got the dressing routine down to 15 minutes). And the fiberglass blades and thick leather forearm brace are "like dancing with two cans of baked beans in your hands," said Winsor, who with his cherubic face seems an unlikely choice to play Edward until you see him in pale makeup (which takes 1 1/2 hours to apply).
The two actor-dancers quickly discovered that the restrictive costume actually helped them realize their Edward by forcing them to reinvent how he would move.
"You put that leather suit on and suddenly you feel you are this character, trapped in this body, isolated from the group," Archer said.
To help the actor-dancers get in touch with other aspects of the character, Bourne had co-adapter Thompson sit in on early rehearsals, including one in which he asked the performers to play dogs and masters.
"Edward does what he's told," Archer explained. "He's an innocent character. A dog has that loyalty and truth."
Getting in touch with that viscerally helped the actors avoid a major pitfall: copying Johnny Depp.
"I think for the first month of the show I played the character of Edward Scissorhands rather than the real Edward, trying to copy the film persona," Winsor said. "But that was a different guy. I had to find my own vulnerability and lostness."
A wildly successful opening run in London -- and Thompson's patient notes on an original screenplay she still considers her favorite work--helped the actors find their own truth for the stage.
"Even if we wanted to be Johnny, we couldn't," Archer said. "Caroline gave us a different perspective. In the end, Edward is the outsider. But he's also the more human."
|
Complete article with photos is on-line at the aforementioned link. |
