Re-Casting and a Cancelation

Saturday night Henry IV closed. It was a pretty decent run. We didn’t sell out the run, nor break even at the box office. The show lost $37. Which is pretty damn good for a difficult text with mixed reviews. Tomorrow, we begin tech rehearsals for the Alcyone Festival. I’m so excited about the festival, I can’t wait.

The last week has been tough on that end though. Adam had to let an actor go from his show. He never made it to rehearsals. When the person on-book reading the lines, for the rest of the cast to rehearse, was then off-book from doing it so often we knew something had to change. Luckily for Adam, he’s found someone to fill the role.

I lost an actor over the weekend as well, she was accepted into the School at Steppenwolf and had to withdraw to attend the school. I think I may have found a replacement, she’s reading the script today and we’re going to meet tomorrow. My show is only ten minutes long, so there’s time to get the cast in great shape in the next two weeks.

It’s never easy to cast a festival of this size. There are almost one-hundred actors involved. But, losing actors from shows happens from time to time and with eleven shows it’s almost to be expected.

Some times events happen that we don’t expect or see coming. I’ve done hundreds of shows in one capacity or another. As a designer you don’t have to go to every rehearsal or stay for all of the performances, so when I was primarily designing, I ‘d do a lot more shows than a reasonable person would attempt. Only once have I had a show I was involved with not open.

Make that twice. We had to make a tough decision and pull La Hija de las Flores from this years festival. It is saddening, as this was one of the shows I was most excited about. And I loved the opportunity/challenge of producing a work in Spanish with projected supertitles.

The cast had gotten together the week before and told Juan, the director that they didn’t think the show should be done without cutting parts of it. He was blindsided by this, and as he and I talked about it, we came to the conclusion that the mission of this year’s festival is to expose audiences to work by female playwrights they haven’t seen before. Women who’ve been largely forgotten. I was very clear with the directors about keeping the scripts intact.

There were changes in two of them that I had okayed, one has two published versions of it, and our production will be a halfway point between those two. The other has the gender changed for some of the chorus but the main focus of the play is unchanged.

Juan went back to the cast and said the show needed to go up uncut, but they did work to modernize some of the language, from the 19th century castellano. Most of the cast was on-board. However, the actor leading the charge for the cuts was not easily swayed, and instead asked if she could carry her script for the third act. That would not work when the rest of the cast was off book, so she quit. That was a tough pill for us to swallow, but we were able to pretty quickly find a great actor to replace her.

Casting Hija was difficult, as the cast needed to not only perform in Spanish, but in classical language which is doubly difficult. Also, many latin actors are at the Goodman for their Latino fest. Some even told us that they knew the Goodman was doing the Latino fest so they were keeping their summers open until they got that call.

Everything was back on track, though it would be a tough two weeks. Another actor decided it was too much of a challenge and with the shortened schedule he would not have enough of his process to go on, and he left. At that point over the weekend the tough choice we had to make became clear and we pulled the plug on the show. So for the festival, there will be ten works by great writers, instead of the planned eleven.

I have no doubt the festival will be great, and that everyone will have a good time. But it is a bittersweet thinking of the festival sans Avellaneda.

this is crossposted at the Halcyon Theatre Blog.