“I wanted to make this a working person’s theater,” says Julianne Boyd, artistic director of Barrington Stage Company. She’s showing me around the company’s mainstage theater on Union Street in Pittsfield. The company’s move here five years ago, after a decade in temporary digs south of Great Barrington, has given added vigor to this depressed city’s fledgling and largely arts-led renaissance.
The new venue is just off North Street, Pittsfield’s main drag, but on the west side of that artery, which, as Boyd explains, “is considered the seedy side of town.” BSC refurbished the former vaudeville house—a rough-and-ready renovation “without any frills or gold gilt”—and set up their administrative offices in the classic 19th-century octagon building next door, which had become a burned-out crack den.
“When we moved here,” Boyd continues, “everybody thought we were crazy. ‘Nobody’s going to go there,’ they said. We’d go into stores and people would say, ‘When are you leaving?’ But I believe theater has to be part of the community in which it resides.”
The rest of the company’s operations rub elbows with two longtime Pittsfield institutions. The smaller Stage 2, a couple of blocks farther into the West Side, occupies half of VFW Post 448 on Linden Street. The company’s rehearsal studios are classrooms in St. Joseph Central High School, and the annual Youth Theatre production holds forth in the school’s gymnasium.
This largely working-class community contrasts sharply with the fancy addresses of the Berkshires’ other three major theaters, Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge. Now in its 16th season, BSC is also considerably younger than its long-established sister organizations.
This morning, Boyd’s bustling energy takes her to St. Joseph’s for a check-in with the cast of Into the Woods, now halfway through its four-week run. Tucked into a corner of the gym, the Youth Theatre’s pocket-size stage is crowded with the trees and vines that populate Stephen Sondheim’s bittersweet fairy-tale musical and, right now, with the show’s 19 young performers.
Begun 10 years ago as a way to bring kids—and through them, their families—into the theater, the program has grown into a semi-professional operation in which area teenagers formally audition for the show, rehearse with New York-based directors, are paid for their work, and sign “a mini-Equity contract” detailing professional-level expectations and responsibilities.
Today, Boyd wants to work with the cast members on their diction. “You’re fighting this echo-y space,” she tells them. “I want the audience to grab hold of what you’re saying from the very beginning.” She runs them through the opening number, stopping when the words aren’t clear. “I know this sounds like Bad Acting 101, but when you’re moving around the stage, you have to make sure your voice is still aiming out.”
More than any other Berkshire stage, Barrington loves musical theatre. Six of the 10 productions in this summer’s lineup are musicals, beginning with a month-long run of Sondheim’s sinewy guignol opera, Sweeney Todd. A new musical, Pool Boy, is playing to sold-out houses in Stage 2, and upstairs in one of the school’s classrooms, another world-premiere musical is rehearsing.
It’s The Memory Show, a two-character piece about a mother and daughter dealing with their fractious past and difficult present as the elder slips into Alzheimer’s. The schoolroom desks have been pushed to the wall and long tables stretch between the blackboards. The two performers, Catherine Cox and Leslie Kritzer, are seated facing each other, holding their scripts—it’s only the second day of rehearsal—with music director Vadim Feichtner at an electric keyboard and director Joe Calarco giving comments and suggestions as they work through the first scene.
In one corner, looking on benevolently, is William Finn. He’s the director of BSC’s Musical Theatre Lab, which has been a staple of the company’s program ever since his musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was developed here and went on to be a Broadway hit in 2005. During a break in rehearsal, Finn, a large, ebullient man with a Santa beard and belly, tells me that the Lab fills an unmet need in the American musical theater.
“There are so many writers who are really talented and can’t get their shows on. Theaters are always interested in you after you’ve had your first few productions, but getting those up is getting harder and harder. I thought we could be the sort of theater that helped establish these writers.”
Many of the shows developed and produced at BSC—either in workshop form or in full productions—are the work of former students of Finn’s at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The Memory Show began as a thesis project by two of his proteges, Sara Cooper and Zach Redler. An annual feature of the summer season, Songs by Ridiculously Talented Composers and Lyricists You Probably Don’t Know But Should, is a showcase of choice numbers from his NYU class.
Finn credits Julie Boyd for her vision in creating the program, and for her input in the shows’ development process. “Julie’s very tough. She can be bad cop to my good cop. She likes to think of herself as the mother figure in this process, but I said, ‘Which mother, Medea?’ “
Pool Boy was co-written by Janet Allard and Nikos Tsakalakos, the latter also a former student of Finn’s who, after college, became his assistant. “His job was to drive me places and keep me amused,” Finn twinkles. The idea for the show came when Finn encouraged him to plumb his own experiences as a pool boy at the Hotel Bel Air in Beverly Hills.
Finn says the two shows make a nice contrast in styles. “I love both pieces. They’re as different as night and day, and I just love it that I chose both of them.” He calls The Memory Show “an exquisite gem, very beautifully written, and carefully written.” Pool Boy, he says, “was a little more… exuberantly written.” He says the show was created in a rush of energy and adds that three days before opening, the first act was extensively revised. Nevertheless, it’s turned out to be the sold-out hit of the season at Stage 2, with, as Finn gleefully claims, “fist fights at the box office.”
There are no fisticuffs at the ticket window tonight when I arrive for the Pool Boy performance, but sure enough, the 110-seat theater is jammed. And sure enough, the show is infectiously exuberant, though the first act still needs work. Its lively, contemporary pop score supports a surprisingly old-fashioned, thoroughly predictable, but good-humored boy-meets-girl show-biz storyline.
The title character, an ambitious but naive young musician manning the cabana while awaiting his big break, is played by an extremely likable newcomer, Jay Armstrong Johnson. He’s supported by a strong cast of stock characters, including the hero’s love interest, an equally ambitious and naive young actress; his wisecracking sidekick, an Asian-American who acts the squinty-eyed Oriental because that’s what the boss expects; a narcissistic record producer and his cougar wife; the stuffy hotel manager; and the hotel’s new owner, a wannabe-hip oil sheik.
A three-piece band, including the composer, Tsakalakos, providing percussion on a cajon, occupies an alcove cut into the stuccoed back wall of the poolside set. The designer, Brian Prather, is one of many young artists who have come up “through the ranks” at Barrington Stage, starting as a backstage props master. He is a good example of Julie Boyd’s conviction that “part of my job is to get the next generation of artists ready, keep them moving.”
She’s fond of citing “my favorite saying, one of Joe Papp’s: ‘If things don’t change, they don’t stay the same, they go backwards.’ I’m constantly trying to think of what to do next. What do people want? What does the community want? I think this is one of the towns where culture leads the economy. We’re contributing a lot to the quality of life in Pittsfield, and that’s what’s going to bring businesses back to the city.”
Barrington Stage Company: Performances through Aug. 29, (413) 236-8888, barringtonstageco.org.
