The director: 'Big River' succeeds in sign and song
Jeff Calhoun says one of his main challenges in staging Deaf West Theatre's musical is to choreograph singing and signing.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published March 27, 2005
It sounded like a crazy idea when Jeff Calhoun got a call to direct a show.
Calling Calhoun made sense: The veteran director and choreographer was fresh off choreographing Broadway revivals of Annie Get Your Gun and Bells Are Ringing.
The crazy part was that he was being asked to direct a musical in which half the cast would be deaf. For a small company far from Broadway.
"You can imagine my reaction," says Calhoun, who had never met a deaf person. But Deaf West Theatre, a Los Angeles company, persuaded him to give it a try.
"It appeared to be a sort of demotion, to go to a little theater in Studio City," Calhoun says. "That's how naive and arrogant I was at the time. I'm ashamed to think that ever entered my mind, because it has been the greatest artistic experience I've ever had."
Calhoun's first show with Deaf West was Oliver!, and the production combining spoken English and American Sign Language was so successful that the company asked him to do another one.
"I was very reticent," he says. "I actually said no. I really felt like we had fooled people and gotten away with something with Oliver!. I wasn't sure we were able to re-create that. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle, so I took a deep breath and said, all right, let's do it again."
The rest is theater history. Calhoun's second Deaf West production, Big River, a revival of Roger Miller's 1985 musical version of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was such a hit that it eventually landed on Broadway, where it won a special Tony Award. The tour arrives at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center this week.
Calhoun realizes that people who haven't seen Big River have a hard time conceiving how it is performed. "There is really no way to educate you prior to seeing it. It's one of those things you need to experience," he says.
The cast has eight deaf actors, who communicate with sign language, and 14 hearing actors, who provide the show's speaking and singing voices.
"Every moment of the play is voiced as well as signed," Calhoun says. "So you're getting every line and every note of music. For the theatergoer, it's an enhanced experience."
With all the signing, Calhoun says, "the whole thing seems to dance. It takes about five minutes for the audience to get acclimated, but by the end, they forget who's deaf and who's hearing."
Calhoun came up with an ingenious solution for the roles of Huck Finn and Mark Twain, played by Garrett Matthew Zuercher and Adam Monley, respectively.
"Mark Twain, of course, is the voice of all of his characters, but it just made sense to me that he should be the voice of Huck Finn," Calhoun says. "Although a deaf actor plays the role of Huck Finn, Mark Twain, from the peripheral - or sometimes not so peripheral - voices for Huck."
Big River demands a lot of the cast. "The hearing actors have to learn to sign, and most of the time spent with deaf actors in a musical is figuring out ways to keep them with the music," Calhoun says. "It's done through visual cues. But we don't want the audience to see the visual cues. That's what makes the magic. You just marvel at how they can be staying with the music."
Calhoun, under the tutelage of Deaf West founder and artistic director Ed Waterstreet, took pains not to patronize deaf culture.
"When I first started working with Deaf West, it forced me to deal with my own prejudices," Calhoun says. "You do think of people signing, not talking or hearing, as different than yourself. Unfairly, but that's just instinct, human nature. I found I was prejudiced without knowing it. It became clear to me that part of this experience was going to be, for me, educating the public about the sameness of all of us. Just because someone speaks and someone doesn't speak doesn't make us different."
Leah Hager Cohen, author of Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World, lauded Big River's evenhanded approach in the New York Times, saying that it "celebrates the artistic possibilities of sign language without glorifying it, without ever making it seem too-too precious or maudlin. One never has the feeling that sign language was layered on gratuitously as a gimmick; it really works within the story."
Calhoun says the "unsung heroes" were the interpreters who translated the dialogue and lyrics of Big River into ASL.
"It's a challenge to have the voice match the signing. Sometimes you can have a sentence with 10 words in it but there are only four signs. You want the voice to start when the signing starts and you want the voice to end when the signing ends. But there's not always an equal amount of signs to words. It's really tricky."
Then there are the practical issues of working with the deaf. "It's labor intensive," Calhoun says. "You have to have special monitors in everyone's dressing room because they can't hear the speakers; they have to see. How do you tell a deaf actor on the second floor that he has a guest at the stage door? It's a very time-consuming, expensive process."
Calhoun runs rehearsal differently with deaf actors. "Every time you want to stop something, you can't yell cut. You have to stand up, walk over and tap everybody on the shoulder who's deaf. You have to have a sense of humor."
Casting Big River was a challenge, because deaf actors don't have much chance to gain the training and experience required by a Broadway musical. But some aspects of theater are universal.
"Deaf actors are no different than hearing actors looking for a gig, and the jobs were very scarce," Calhoun says. "More than anything, there was a joy in having the job opportunity, and with that joy came gratitude. I've not had one bad experience with a deaf actor, and I can't say the same for the hearing culture."
The show has opened up opportunities. Tyrone Giordano, who created the role of Huck, plays Diane Keaton's deaf brother in a forthcoming movie, The Family Stone. A second Big River company recently opened at Ford's Theatre in Washington.
Calhoun, who directed the musical Brooklyn, now playing on Broadway, knows the Tampa Bay area well, as a frequent teacher in Ann Reinking's summertime Broadway Theatre Project. He was the director of the ill-fated Busker Alley, which had its last stand at TBPAC when the star (and Calhoun's mentor), Tommy Tune, broke his foot.
Big River almost didn't make it to TBPAC. Wonderful Town was scheduled for Clear Channel Entertainment's Broadway series around the country, but that musical didn't mount a major tour and was replaced by the Deaf West production.
"Clear Channel markets didn't initially want us," Calhoun says. "The misfortune of Wonderful Town has been our great fortune and, hopefully, the audience's good fortune. The one thing I can promise them is they won't soon forget this evening in the theater."
PREVIEW: Big River opens Tuesday and runs through April 3 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. $30.50-$66.50, plus service charges. 813 229-7837 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045; www.tbpac.org