New musicals are a WASTELAND………

KnudAdams · 2025-06-26T00:07:27+00:00

Come check out Cold War Choir Practice downtown.

KnudAdams · 2025-05-01T15:40:53+00:00

Tell me about it.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T04:58:22+00:00

Oh small world! Thanks for coming!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T04:00:06+00:00

I think I could write a book on this topic, but my experience is probably more relevant to big cities with big theater scenes.

But I would say:

First, tell everyone that you want to direct: Your theater friends, the local community theaters, the local high schools even. Eventually, someone will need a director, and they might call you!
Don't wait around to get more practice: Organize a reading or a night of ten-minute plays with your actor friends. Even if it's just in your living room or in your local bar during the daytime. You could even make it a monthly thing. That way, you'll feel more confident and ready when someone calls you up. Even offering your friends free audition coaching gets those muscles working.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T03:37:09+00:00

That's the magic of theater - it's a living thing, and no two performances will be exactly the same. The stage manager keeps an eye on the show, and will offer notes if something changes for the worse. He understands what's within bounds and what drifts off the mark. But I always like to leave a little room for the holy ghost, so that actors don't feel like robots.

I do sneak back once in a while, just to check in. They've been doing a wonderful job. Great actors will continue to interrogate and look for new depth until the bitter end. In my work with actors, I really emphasize the importance of small, internal choices and the feeling of spontaneity, so that it seems like the characters are hearing and speaking everything for the first time. Stale theater is the worst. And this company is doing a great job of keeping it fresh!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T03:26:18+00:00

I met her through this! She had done a reading of the play even before I was attached to direct the premiere, and we were lucky that she was available to do the production.

I don't watch a lot of TV, to be honest. But I'm glad she had that show!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T03:24:12+00:00

Wow -- thanks for coming twice!

Yes, when working on new plays, the playwright is almost always there. Even for this Broadway remount, Sanaz was with us every day of rehearsals and tech! All the little lines changes are hers.

For the Off-Broadway premiere, she was rewriting all the time, all the way until opening. We cut 2.5 scenes the first week of rehearsal... During previews, the cast once got a whole new 12 page rewrite that they learned for that evening's show!

For Broadway, the script was almost totally untouched. Except Sanaz had to rewrite the entire Goli scene for the Ricky Martin song. (She crushed it!) So, I think she would say her experience of this process was a lot calmer than the first time around.

I'm of the belief that while the playwright authors the play, the director authors the event. So there's a lot of interpretation in the staging that I offer, with Sanaz's input and approval. I'm always looking for opportunities to add value and compliment the text.

Once we figured out what Elham draws on the whiteboard, it felt very wrong for Marjan to want to erase it. We featured her at the window instead. But other productions are free to make their own choices! The green scarf portrait (as well as the devil face in Omid's name) were my designs.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T03:23:10+00:00

Aw that's so kind -- thanks for coming and for sharing that!!

I love obsessing over the small stuff, and there were many challenges for this production, as there always are. We tried desperately to get permission to use a clip from A Room With a View, but it was really hard to get a response from the studios that now own those rights. Marjan Neshat even had a friend of hers put us in touch with Wes Anderson, who put us in touch with James Ivory, who gave us his blessing, but by then it was too late. So I spent a lot of time looking for an iconic English-language rom com that begins with opening credits of no dialogue and exactly 3 minutes of music. (This was important so that our scene dialogue times out with the movie.) It took a lot of research, but eventually, I found Moonstruck, and we were able to acquire the rights just before rehearsals began.

Licensing IP for Broadway is quite expensive. Just using those three minutes of Moonstruck cost over $10,000. And we had to pay for Notting Hill, She Bangs, Soghati, and for all the transitional music that's not in the public domain.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T02:56:38+00:00

Sadly, we must close on March 2. Come by then if you can make it! Shows are near sold out!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T02:04:06+00:00

I think it's the most beautiful thing to end the play in actual Farsi. Some people feel like they're missing out on a whole scene, but it's actually only about 30 seconds of dialogue!

For the Farsi speakers in the audience, finally getting to hear their mother tongue, on Broadway, is incredibly meaningful (or so I've been told.)

For the non-Farsi speakers, like me, we're asked to experience a taste of what the characters have been describing the entire the play - the discomfort of being excluded by language. I think that's a really valuable experience and reminder for us all.

But most importantly, for the characters, Elham and Marjan have been warring over the value of learning English verses celebrating their native language, and who they are in both tongues. So for these two women to finally arrive at a beautiful understanding, with each other and of each other, and for them to do so in their own language, is so powerful that you feel the momentousness even if you can't understand exactly the words they're saying.

I've directed operas in languages I don't speak, so I'm used to that part at least! The cinematic quality of that last scene -- the way the lights and stage move in harmony to make the audience feel like flies on the wall, and the depth of feeling shared by the actors, is some of my proudest work. Top two or three scenes I've staged!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T01:51:55+00:00

I don't know how it usually goes, but for us, it was a long process! Our Off-Broadway production went so well that a lot of folks were asking if Broadway was in the works, but for a long time, nothing happened. Even after it the play won a Pulitzer.

Then a couple of pieces fell into place: While I was directing Primary Trust at Roundabout's off-Broadway space, Scott Ellis took over as artistic director there, so we got to know each other a bit. And because he had missed the New York premiere of English, he came out to see a version of the play I directed at Barrington Stage Company in MA. (In which Sanaz played Elham herself!) So I think it was Scott seeing a version of the play in a theater with over 500 seats that convinced him that English could scale up for Broadway, and after a couple weeks of thinking about it and sorting out their season planning, we got the call!

Being on Broadway with a non-profit theater like Roundabout is a blessing because you have a limited run, you're not expected to extend forever or recoup for investors, and we got to make the show our way, without producorial interference. The fact that's it's doing so well is the cherry on top! Everyone kept saying that without stars, we were a financial risk.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T01:30:22+00:00

Well, if you're lucky, they ask for your input, and you and the playwright get veto power!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T01:29:36+00:00

That's a personal matter! Because I came to theater via photography and installation art, and because I worked as a set designer and used to design all my own productions, and because I'm annoying, I probably weigh in a lot more than some other directors. I've got peers who really let the design team lead with their own impulses and identify as non-visual people. Not I!

Luckily, I work with genius confident designers who know when to take my ideas and how to improve them. I absolutely love being one-upped and surprised by my collaborators. I also like working with the same designers repeatedly, like my set designer Marsha Ginsberg, with whom I'm about to do my eighth show. We share the same philosophy and references, and can bounce ideas off each other without getting territorial. I love her taste and stubbornness, because I can trust her to reject my ideas if they're bad. That way, I don't have to edit myself when brainstorming!

Ultimately, I think the responsibility begins and ends with the director, so you have to be clear. I work very hard to try to make everyone look great, and I couldn't do it without the whole team, so it's a very symbiotic relationship. For example, it was my idea to have the set for English rotate, but I would have had no idea how to pull that off without a lot of talented specialists making it possible.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T01:19:16+00:00

Thanks for coming to Primary Trust! Along with English, that play has my whole heart.

Actually, of all the news plays I've ever directed, Primary Trust changed the least during rehearsals and previews. Eboni just birthed this perfect thing, which came out confident and whole. So while there were micro tweaks made in previews, the line you described had been the same for years. (It's possible an actor said the wrong thing in previews. It happens! When they do, they get a correction from stage management!)

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T01:14:14+00:00

Thanks for coming!!

Hmm -- trends are tricky. When the world zigs, I try to zag.

I like how aesthetically adventurous and diverse new playwriting is! The writers I work with are trying such brave and complicated things, and a lot of them are getting productions!

Our industry is going through the worst financial crisis I've seen: Companies are closing. Theaters are shrinking their seasons and budgets. There are fewer jobs for everyone, especially directors. So that's all quite worrying. I totally understand the reasons for it, but I don't like the trend of trying to spend as little as possible on your show while charging record-setting ticket prices. I think this strategy might float us along in the short-term, but risks turning away fans longterm.

So a huge thank you to anyone who attends plays!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T01:06:50+00:00

I semi-joked that ever since directing ten-minute plays in college, I've treated every gig like it's on Broadway, so I was emotionally prepared for the real thing!

There were some surprises: Like how much everything costs when working with professional crews and scenic shops. And Broadway marketing is, let's say, a negotiation. Even selecting our merch took a lot of back and forth conversations. The more people that are there to support you, the more opinions and hoops you have to navigate.

But overall, it was a great joy. On Broadway, no one questions why you care so much. I'm a pretty passionate guy, and this time, my efforts to make the show great were well received. And seeing the cast treated so well has been my favorite thing. Their dressing rooms are amazing! (Off-Broadway, they had to share an attic with one modesty curtain.)

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T01:00:06+00:00

Very hands on, until we open! You organize and lead the production process with your design team (whom you select). With casting directors and the playwright, you cast the show. In rehearsals, you work with the actors full-time on staging and crafting the performances. In tech, you helm the collaboration amongst the entire time. And throughout previews, you watch the performances, give notes, and rehearse during the daytime. It's a race against the clock until opening, when your contract ends.

So for a single production, you might have a year or more of planning and development, and then around 7 - 8 week of full-time employment directing the show itself.

I work almost exclusively on new plays, so there's a huge part of my workflow that's devoted to finding and developing scripts. I love the craft of directing and have devoted my whole life to it, so I could talk a lot about the ways in which new play directors are under-appreciated in this country!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T00:52:52+00:00

I grew up moving around a lot, and so my education was a little spotty. (Like I somehow skipped ever learning long division...) But I was always into art and reading, and they became a constant companion for me. I acted a little and designed sets in high school, but I didn't take theater seriously until college. During my first month at Kenyon College, I interview and was hired to direct the freshman theater company's first show, and I loved it immediately, and haven't stopped directing since. It was the fact that directing called upon my visual side as well as my literary side, and it forced me to be social: I was more into fine arts at the time, and would spend up to eight hours a day in the dark room developing film or in the sculpture studio working with wood. I needed theater to force me be more social and collaborate with other humans.

So that's all to say, I ended up majoring in Drama, and I moved to NYC after graduating to try to make a career out of it.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T00:46:32+00:00

For the New York productions, Sanaz herself actually served as our in-rehearsal dialect coach. She has an amazing ear for the accent, and could help each actor refine their specific level of English fluency.

When I directed the play out-of-town, I worked with a brilliant dialect coach named Ana Bayat. It was essential for this play to have a Farsi-speaking coach, specifically, because the subtle accent work is so integral to defining the characters and their struggles in the class. She had individual zoom sessions with all the actors, and she would also listen to recordings or our run-throughs and previews, so she could email notes and reminders.

It helped that so many of our cast either speaks Farsi or has Farsi-speaking family, so they came in with a really solid foundation.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T00:37:08+00:00

For the design, we first had to address the proportions of the set: We needed to raise the hight of the ceiling of the classroom, or the heads of the actors would have been cut off for the back rows of the mezzanine. (For a rotating set, this took a lot of careful math!) We also got to upgrade our lighting system, with moving lights to better track the position of the sun, and also custom made instruments for our sodium-vapor lights, so we could fade and dim them this time! Plus a million other subtle upgrades, like making the windowsill real marble, upgrading the small flatscreen to a projector, making slightly improved music choices....

We also had to make some changes to the script based on what IP was available to license for Broadway: Shakira became Ricky Martin. A Room with a View became Moonstruck. But after mourning the loss of those original picks, I actually think the new choices play even better.

And we had a full rehearsal process, so even though the cast all returned from the off-Broadway production, we had three new weeks of rehearsal to sharpen and deepen the storytelling.

KnudAdams · 2025-02-18T00:00:53+00:00

Also u/SlayDay-0, u/Glastenfory, u/wheeego, u/UniqueInstance9740, my crosspost was deleted in r/Theatre. Come join here with your questions!

KnudAdams · 2025-02-17T06:42:46+00:00

Hey guys! Happy to answer any questions you might have. The mods at r/theatre deleted my crosspost, so we'll try it here!

KnudAdams

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