Annie Liebovitz

            This is the email that started this whole project. I was emailing my friend Gretchen McArthur, who is a photographer, about a friend of ours whom she was to do her headshots. I mentioned that I worked with Annie on February 24, 26 & 27, 2006 on a cover shoot for Vanity Fair as a stand-in for Al Gore. She asked for details. The following is the original email as I sent it to her:

Dear Gretchen,

So what’s it like to work with Annie Liebovitz?

      Pretty damn memorable.

      My antennae were up from the minute that I got the call. You said it yourself; she’s a household name, and a brilliant one at that. That, plus the fact that she was the last photographer to snap John & Yoko before he was shot... well, I wasn’t going to miss this one! I mean, how many times do you get to work with an icon? Gail & I packed my bags and I drove to my Mom’s on Long Island. That made it affordable for me to do the shoot & I got to see Mom for the first time since Christmas.

      I got to the studio on Jane St. early that Friday. That would turn out to be a good thing, as they were sticklers for being on time, something I found out later. The studio had the set for the cover already set up, a brick wall covered in ivy, moss and leaves covering the ground. Another part of the studio was just plain white walls. Since this was Vanity Fair’s Green Issue, they had three or four “green” vehicles around, including George Clooney’s battery powered Tango. Also set up at various places were computer screens. Turns out that this was to be Annie’s first digital session. There were also tables and vertical metal racks with pictures on them, including the cover shots for the Rolling Stones Black and Blue.

      The first thing you notice about Annie is that she’s tall. My height kind of tall, around 6 feet. Her assistant Katherine is also tall. So is her sister Barbara, who was filming a documentary about Annie for American Masters, which will be shown Sept 6^th. The three of them standing together looked like the starting backcourt of a WNBA team. It’s always a bit odd at first, seeing a person you’ve only seen on TV or in a magazine acting like a living breathing human being right before your eyes, but once I got used to it, it was pretty much a day at the office. “Good morning everyone!” ”Good morning Mike!”

      The first day was spent filling out forms (including wavers for the documentary), chatting with my fellow stand ins and people from Cadillac (they had a green SUV on the set, so I asked them about it and, since they were the people that brought that vehicle to the Super Bowl, I asked them about seeing the game and the Stones), getting fitted for clothes and doing some test pictures, both on the set and in the white area.  There were a lot of clothing changes, searching for just the right look. We males had quite a few of those. Our “Julia Roberts” had this dress from Bill Blass that matched the set and the theme, so she stayed consistent. I took the train home to my Mom’s, while “Julia” & “Bobby Kennedy” went off for drinks & making out, according to “Bobby”.

      Monday was more of the same. “Julia”, who was coming in from Jersey, was late due to traffic. Annie couldn’t wait, so her assistant/set dresser Mary Howard stood in for the stand in. It was kind of strange to see Mary in Julia’s dress, holding the cover pose, directing how things should be placed on the set. They sent our first Julia home and got a girl from Ford Modeling Agency named Stacy for the afternoon. Lovely person. Speaks fluent French and is an environmental activist. She made some calls to her activist friends after talking to the inventors of the Tango, who were on set that day. Nice guys with a great product. Check it out at http://www.commutercars.com. She’s also one of the shyest people I’ve met. Case In point: we all shared a dressing room in the back where Joe Z had racks of clothes ready for the shoot. Stacy, Joe Z, myself and a couple of dressers are in the back. Now I’m used to having coed dressing rooms, and I know the etiquette pretty well. Stacy wasn’t, and was quite surprised when I nonchalantly passed behind my back her bra, which was on the table in front of me.  Anyway, when we went back on the set, a new element was added: a baby for “Julia”. I supposed that they were trying for a Mother Nature kind of vibe. It didn’t work and wasn’t used, but the baby was cute and a nice distraction. To get the child to smile his Mom stood in the back, jingled keys and called his name: “Hi, Thor!” Yes, that was the child’s name, like the god of Thunder in Norse mythology. Very strange.

      It was really on Monday that I really got to watch how Annie did things. It reminded me of how I heard Frank Zappa worked, in that she knows what she wants, but allows for happy accidents to occur and incorporates them into the work. If something doesn’t quite happen she doesn’t throw a hissy fit, but she moves on. For instance, she asked the builder of the Tango if one of the back windows could be taken out of it so the four of us could all hang out of the window. Unfortunately, those windows are glued in and cost $10K to replace, being that it isn’t a production car. So the inventor told her “no”. She did ask a couple of times if it could be done, but in the end, she let it go. She also wasn’t afraid to do whatever was needed to get the shot she wanted. I spent some time in a pedal car that had the seat removed while she straddled it, standing on stacks of boxes, snapping away. I must have had to change clothes about 15 times and went through lots of Dippity Doo to give my hair that Al Gore look. She was polite, professional and nice to everyone. We worked up until George & Julia showed up, around 4ish. George is as nice as they say, Julia was shyer than Stacy. No intros were made; in fact, we were supposed to have been out of there already but George & Julia showed up early. We very discretely made our way out of the building.

      Tuesday was the last day, but still full of surprises. We started the day on a tugboat in New York Harbor. It was cold, clear and windy. The tug had no back on it, so when we went into reverse a lot of water came up on the deck. I laughed as the water came up into the knee-high boots I was wearing. Annie’s assistants were struggling to keep all of the electrical items off the deck, to keep them from shorting out. Barbara’s film crew had less trouble, but they kept bumping into Annie’s assistants. My worst fears were realized when the side of my face that had Bell’s palsy literally froze up. I couldn’t move it at all. I was really worried that Annie wasn’t going to get what she wanted. She told me that it was OK; that she got what she wanted. Whew! What a relief! Funnily enough, I had Paul Simon’s American Tune going through my head that entire time. Seemed appropriate
with the Statue of Liberty in my line of sight.

      Back at the studio, we did a final series of shots on the set. Stacy climbed back into Julia’s dress, which for some reason was being held together on one side of her bodice by a row of safety pins. Sort of like “Bill Blass as done by The Sex Pistols”. They weren’t there the day before. Odd.  I had a nicer surprise waiting for me on the computer monitors. Seems that they took the previous night’s shots of George & Julia, put a Vanity Fair logo on it and photo shopped me into it, just to see what it would like. Boy, I wished that I had a copy of that! I did walk away with Annie’s compliments and an autograph on my copy of Rolling Stone (the one with John & Yoko on the cover). She dug me, Vanity Fair was happy with me and Sylvia Fay was happy. I’m surprised that I didn’t fly home, being that I was on Cloud Nine already.

      So that’s my Annie Liebovitz stories. I hope that this answered all of your questions. Maybe someday I’ve have my “what was it like to work with Gretchen McArthur” stories to tell. Later.

Peace and Love,

Mike Russo.

So how does this work?

                After the casting process is complete, all of the casts, playwrights, directors and technical staff are gathered together for a table read. Since we don’t have scripts during the audition process, this is the first time we get to see what we’ll be playing. This is also the first time that we get to meet the rest of the casts and hear what they’ll be working on, meet the playwrights and the support staff at the Playhouse. For me, this being my third time in the NVF, a lot of that night felt a bit like Homecoming. There were about 6 of us that have been doing the Festival each of its three editions, and it was great to see some familiar faces in this crowd of strangers. It was also nice to see an entire room well-stocked with tables full of goodies for us to nosh on while we’re listening to the other plays.

                Once plates and cups are filled, new people are met and old relationships are rekindled, we go to our seats and open up the binder that holds all of the scripts.  Some are comedies, some are fairly Avant garde, some serious. The play I worked on was called “Stalling” by Katherine Prybish. It’s a two character play about a brother and sister who are trying to decide whether or not to take their mother off of life support. It was probably the most serious work performed in the Festival. Katherine is in her 20’s, and it was ironic that we had works by older playwrights about millennials who never get their heads out of their phones, and she comes up with this very deep piece of work that sounds like it could’ve come from someone much older. I settled into my seat, next to my scene mate Sue Murphy and across from the playwright and our director, Jean Brenner, who I’d worked with in my very first show in the first NVF (I was playing an angry Latino, and Jean said to me “I want them to hate you.” Well, whatever I did worked, because they sure hated my ass by the end of the night!).

                Now, my attitude towards table reads is to give as much of a performance as I can when we’re reading, even if I’ve never seen the script before, and so it was that night (I’d also heard stories about how Jack Nicholson scared the cast of “A Few Good Men” by really bringing  his character to life at their table read, and I like the idea of bringing the cat amongst the pigeons, almost daring the other casts to top what we’re bringing to ours). I also find that my performance in a first read tends to be the least guarded and most honest, occasionally surprising me with a “Where did THAT come from?” moment. I didn’t have any surprises, but I thought we gave a good read. Jean taped our part of the read, which was a nice template for what we were to build on through rehearsals.

                The rehearsal schedule was fairly brief: only five rehearsals over a few weeks to get ten pages under our belts. In previous years I wouldn’t worry about it, as we were doing staged readings, i.e. with scripts in our hands. This year, everyone was to memorize their parts, no paper crutches to lean on. Because I’ve got two jobs, I had to wedge in time to memorize this stuff, so I wound up working on the script during lunch breaks, before bed, over my breakfast, etc. Sue Murphy got a lot more done than I did, or so it seemed to me, so I pushed myself harder.

                All that being said, rehearsals went pretty well. All four of us worked very well together. Jean directed us as needed, allowing us fairly free reign as far as blocking was concerned. Katherine liked what Sue & I were doing, tweaking the script only in a couple of spots (the characters were originally conceived as being in their late 20’s, and Sue and I could generously be considered as being in our EXTREMELY late 20’s!). Sue came in with such good stuff to play off of, and it was a lot of fun to work on the brother/sister shorthand way of communicating with her. As for me, I went from having the script in my hand to seeing it on the table if I’d needed it, to keeping it in my bag in fairly short order. All in all, a fairly fuss free creative process.

                OK, OK, there was one Sunday rehearsal that I wasn’t quite up to snuff. It was a long week for me at my Hideous Survival Job, and Sundays are usually when I repay my sleep debt. I didn’t get a chance to do that, so my performance was a bit on the flat side. So much so that our director, in an attempt to get more life out of me, had me at one point sing my lines, using a different note for each word. Consequently, I sounded like I was doing an overlong melisma that had no real tonal center. I did, however, have a bit of fun with that process, using Elvis Costello’s “Allison” every time I had to say my sister’s name, but I did resent having to do it at the time. Once I’d gotten home and gotten a nap, I’d felt a lot better, but that was the only real rough patch.

                One of the best compliments we’d gotten as a cast happened during the first rehearsal. Jean, as I’d said earlier, had taped the table read, and we spent part of the first rehearsal listening to what we’d done. John Augustine happened to drift through our rehearsal room at that moment, and he thought that Jean was playing for us some other cast doing our show, hinting that we should be doing it their way. He seemed a bit put out for us, until he’d realized that it was US we were listening to. Made me smile when I figured out what was going on.

               All that's left to talk about now is Tech Week, which I'll do next time.

In praise of the New Voices Festival, Part 1

             

Branch Rickey, the man who successfully integrated major league baseball by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, also has another, earlier innovation to his credit. When he was president of the Saint Louis Cardinals, he discovered that the club didn’t have the funds to compete for talent against richer ball clubs like the New York Yankees. Rather than trying to vie for talent with money that they didn’t have, he decided to grow his own talent, and thus was born the farm system, which every single major league team uses to this day. How appropriate is it then, especially in a county that has a viable farming community, that the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA has, in effect, developed its own farm system for nurturing talent? The revitalized theatre has made it part of his mission to feature new works during its season, and has also, through its Education programs, given exposure to playwrights through their New Voices Festival.

                This year (2016) was the third one for the NVF, my third year participating in it, and I’ve loved dong it each time. Why? Well, they actually hired me for one, which earns them some Brownie points right off the bat, but I can tell you that every year has been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had on stage, certainly the most varied. In three years I’ve played an angry Latino, a frustrated, silent waiter, a surgeon operating on a cat’s paw in the middle of the night, a theatre maintenance man, a college professor, one of a pair of siblings deciding on the fate of their mother, and done the background bit in a couple of plays that needed bodies. What’s more, there are no egos on display when we’re putting this on. The spirit of cooperation and fun permeates even the most serious work, and the audiences, which have grown from a hardy bunch of theatre fans to near sellout crowds, are finding the NVF to be a night of rich and varied stage experiences.

                So what accounts for the success, camaraderie and good times that the NVF has given me? It all starts and ends with the two people primarily responsible for bringing the festival to life: Hester Kamin and John Augustine.

                Hester and John. John and Hester. I can’t imagine, after this many years, one without the other, as both are essential to the equation that is New Voices. I met them both at that first casting call in 2014, braving a dark, rainy night on my way to NY to stop off in Lambertville to show them what I had. Together they find the right actors for the right roles and the right mix of plays that will work together for that night, with results that have been pitch perfect each season.

                While they work together very well, separately each brings a distinct set of skills to the project that complement and enhance one another. John, who is listed in the program as Playwriting Mentor and Instructor, takes the ten scripts that wind up getting chosen for the Fest and, with the authors, works them into shape so that when the actors sit down at the table read to give voice to these works for the first time, they are as close to complete as possible. He knows that a good show starts with a good script, and he makes sure that what we have in front of us is as good as it can be.

                Hester is New Voices’ Mother Superior. It’s Hester who coordinates the schedules of ten small productions, with some nights seeing six shows drift through the three rehearsal rooms in Lambertville. She’s the one who deals with each of the show’s technical issues (props, lighting, sound effects, costumes, etc.), getting the program together, having food in the green room, planning the cast party…there’s nothing that escapes her attention, and all of the shows are better for it. She, John and our stage manager Ellen Gallos also drift in and out of rehearsals to see how the plays are shaping up, ready to offer encouragement and advice when necessary and needed.