English
Nederlands
2004-10-01
Madam
For the second time in a week I was invited for a kind of entertainment I wouldn't have chosen myself. I don't like musicals, because the story progresses at such a slow speed. Every time after a little action a song has to sung and a dance has to be made, while I am mainly curious how the story will develop. The story of a musical like 'The West Side Story' can be told in five minutes, but in the theatre you have to wait for the end of it for over two hours. It just isn't efficient.
On October 1st, Mutua Amicitia staged the première of the musical Madam by Annie M.G. Schmidt and Harry Bannink. And I was in the audience. I think it a as a very brave choice for a theatre group to do a musical. That requires a lot more than a normal stage play. So then there is the question whether you have all the skills you need to make this happen.
Mutua Amicitia (Muut for friends) didn't have those, but they hired professionals to compensate that. For instance they hired a professional choreographer an a singing instructor. But still it had to be their own members who were to put it all on stage.
Fortunately Muut had chosen excellent material in the musical Madam. Annie's texts are snappy and hilarious, Harry's music is beautiful and the story has a strong plot. So what could go wrong?
A lot of things. Muut is an amateur theatre group. It is not a choir, nor a dance-group. Singing and dancing are disciplines the members simply don't have, except for some positive exceptions. Stefanie Heijnraets did very well as Madam, both in acting and in singing. The same goes for Marian Roomer as Anita. Hans Verhoef played Mr. Valentijn excellently and sang quite well.
But the rest of the group... Most players only had small parts in the musical, so there was very little they could do with their experience in acting. But they often had to sing and dance, at the same time! For such parts you shouldn't hire actors, but singers and dancers! That is the way it is done in professional musicals as well. Parts like these are filled in by people who cannot say more than three lines of text or even actively listen to another player saying a few lines of text. But as soon as they can start dancing and singing again, the enthusiasm returns and everything goes well as if it isn't difficult at all.
But Muut doesn't have people like that! Fortunately there are a few more good singing voices in the group apart from the main characters, but that just isn't enough to make the whole thing work.
If you really have to make a musical, you should go to the sound recording studio with these ladies and record each voice of each song separately until it works. Then add a few strong voices to the choirs (like Daniëlle Blok for instance, Muut's best singing voice) and mix the result with the orchestra tape. You won't get a 100 % live musical this way, but would it matter?
Where was Daniëlle anyway? How can Muut stage a musical and leave her best singer at home? A pity.
Something many people overlook in the theatre is the work of the technicians. Apart from a lot of acting I have also done light and sound engineering in the theatre myself and that makes you look at any stage performance in a different way: I often look 'The wrong way' in a theatre. With every change in scène goes a change in 'light setting'. For the audience this is very straightforward: If the lights go up on the right side of the stage, that is probably where the next action will take place, so everybody looks to the right.
But I glance upward as well. Which spots have come on and which have been switched off? By the way, there were about one hundred spots to light all this. I think few people will have noticed that. But the result looked very well indeed.
As is usually the case nowadays, there were several places on the stage that represented locations that can be many miles apart in reality. Using this technique makes a great difference in the speed of your performance because you don't need to change the decor so many times. The technicians take care of the rest by lighting the right place on the right moment. This looked very well too: The lighting was very filling for the atmosphere of the scènes and the soloists got an extra light.
No you don't notice the technical aspects until something goes wrong. And things did go wrong, in spite of the dedicated work of the technician. He is at the back of the hall behind a large control panel full of knobs and buttons. It was him who put up all those lamps, made them point in the right direction and put the right color filters in them. I noticed the soloists often didn't stand on the spot where they should have been. That way they cannot be reached by the spot that has been put up there especially for them! Nico Vellinga, the technician, solved that by secretly switching on extra spotlights if something like that happened. I think few people have noticed that, but I look for things like that...
And then suddenly someone rested his behind against the switches of the working light in the hall! Bang! All the fluorescent light tubes came on at once! Gone was the atmosphere! This didn't happen once, but several times in a row. This is something the technician cannot help! The working light is not connected to his control panel. I think the fire brigade wouldn't even allow it to be any other way.
Nico Vellinga (Nivell Theatre Productions): "I felt so powerless at these moments!" I can imagine that very well. There you are with your state-of-the-art equipment and then something happens you cannot influence.
I have uttered a lot of criticism. Does that mean I disapprove of the performance as a whole? No, I don't. In spite of the problems mentioned, Muut has show a great performance here. The 200 people in the audience have had a wonderful time. And even I, not being fond of musicals at all, did like the show.
By the way, if the musical has been played a few more times, many things will go much more fluently than they did on this first evening. So I can recommend people to go and see it. Especially on Saturday, October 9th. I expect that will be the best performance of this musical.
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On October 1st, Mutua Amicitia staged the première of the musical Madam by Annie M.G. Schmidt and Harry Bannink. And I was in the audience. I think it a as a very brave choice for a theatre group to do a musical. That requires a lot more than a normal stage play. So then there is the question whether you have all the skills you need to make this happen.
Mutua Amicitia (Muut for friends) didn't have those, but they hired professionals to compensate that. For instance they hired a professional choreographer an a singing instructor. But still it had to be their own members who were to put it all on stage.
Fortunately Muut had chosen excellent material in the musical Madam. Annie's texts are snappy and hilarious, Harry's music is beautiful and the story has a strong plot. So what could go wrong?
A lot of things. Muut is an amateur theatre group. It is not a choir, nor a dance-group. Singing and dancing are disciplines the members simply don't have, except for some positive exceptions. Stefanie Heijnraets did very well as Madam, both in acting and in singing. The same goes for Marian Roomer as Anita. Hans Verhoef played Mr. Valentijn excellently and sang quite well.
But the rest of the group... Most players only had small parts in the musical, so there was very little they could do with their experience in acting. But they often had to sing and dance, at the same time! For such parts you shouldn't hire actors, but singers and dancers! That is the way it is done in professional musicals as well. Parts like these are filled in by people who cannot say more than three lines of text or even actively listen to another player saying a few lines of text. But as soon as they can start dancing and singing again, the enthusiasm returns and everything goes well as if it isn't difficult at all.
But Muut doesn't have people like that! Fortunately there are a few more good singing voices in the group apart from the main characters, but that just isn't enough to make the whole thing work.
If you really have to make a musical, you should go to the sound recording studio with these ladies and record each voice of each song separately until it works. Then add a few strong voices to the choirs (like Daniëlle Blok for instance, Muut's best singing voice) and mix the result with the orchestra tape. You won't get a 100 % live musical this way, but would it matter?
Where was Daniëlle anyway? How can Muut stage a musical and leave her best singer at home? A pity.
Something many people overlook in the theatre is the work of the technicians. Apart from a lot of acting I have also done light and sound engineering in the theatre myself and that makes you look at any stage performance in a different way: I often look 'The wrong way' in a theatre. With every change in scène goes a change in 'light setting'. For the audience this is very straightforward: If the lights go up on the right side of the stage, that is probably where the next action will take place, so everybody looks to the right.
But I glance upward as well. Which spots have come on and which have been switched off? By the way, there were about one hundred spots to light all this. I think few people will have noticed that. But the result looked very well indeed.
As is usually the case nowadays, there were several places on the stage that represented locations that can be many miles apart in reality. Using this technique makes a great difference in the speed of your performance because you don't need to change the decor so many times. The technicians take care of the rest by lighting the right place on the right moment. This looked very well too: The lighting was very filling for the atmosphere of the scènes and the soloists got an extra light.
No you don't notice the technical aspects until something goes wrong. And things did go wrong, in spite of the dedicated work of the technician. He is at the back of the hall behind a large control panel full of knobs and buttons. It was him who put up all those lamps, made them point in the right direction and put the right color filters in them. I noticed the soloists often didn't stand on the spot where they should have been. That way they cannot be reached by the spot that has been put up there especially for them! Nico Vellinga, the technician, solved that by secretly switching on extra spotlights if something like that happened. I think few people have noticed that, but I look for things like that...
And then suddenly someone rested his behind against the switches of the working light in the hall! Bang! All the fluorescent light tubes came on at once! Gone was the atmosphere! This didn't happen once, but several times in a row. This is something the technician cannot help! The working light is not connected to his control panel. I think the fire brigade wouldn't even allow it to be any other way.
Nico Vellinga (Nivell Theatre Productions): "I felt so powerless at these moments!" I can imagine that very well. There you are with your state-of-the-art equipment and then something happens you cannot influence.
I have uttered a lot of criticism. Does that mean I disapprove of the performance as a whole? No, I don't. In spite of the problems mentioned, Muut has show a great performance here. The 200 people in the audience have had a wonderful time. And even I, not being fond of musicals at all, did like the show.
By the way, if the musical has been played a few more times, many things will go much more fluently than they did on this first evening. So I can recommend people to go and see it. Especially on Saturday, October 9th. I expect that will be the best performance of this musical.
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