Inside A.C.T.

By Shannon Stockwell The longer you work in theater, the more you gather tales of dramatic disasters, and the more you realize the resilience of theater makers who rally under the old adage: “The Show Must Go On.” Some problems can be anticipated, however, and that’s where understudies come in. For A.C.T.’s production of The Last Five Years , a two-person musical by Jason Robert Brown, we had two amazing understudies, but no one expected them to have to go on because the run was so short—only three weeks long. But illness struck, and both understudies ended up having to perform at different times. And, if you were at the performance on Saturday, May 28, you would have gotten to witness a special moment in theatrical problem solving when Margo Seibert, who was recovering from illness, was struck by a coughing fit in her first song and an unscheduled fifteen-minute intermission was called while her understudy, Kelsey Venter, prepared to go onstage as Cathy. To get the scoop on the ...

By Shannon Stockwell Composer Jason Robert Brown. Photo by Maia Rosenfeld. After writing the music and lyrics for Parade , a musical about the 1913 trial of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank, Jason Robert Brown was burnt out. “I had been working on [it] for five years and [it] ran for three months,” Brown says. “It was too exhausting and too hard and the therapy cost more than the royalties.” His first instinct was to get out of show business, but as he was planning where to go, Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) called him and said they wanted to commission a piece. He began to explain an idea he had been working on: an intimate song cycle about the relationship between a man and a woman (the polar opposite of Parade ’s 30-odd cast members). And as Brown was explaining, he came up with the idea of the two timelines crossing and meeting in the middle. LCT approved his idea. But Brown found that he couldn’t create something that belonged only on a concert stage, like Songs for a N...

By Shannon Stockwell  The Last Five Years runs until June 5. Get your tickets  here ! In The Last Five Years , Cathy regales us with horrid stories of her time at a theater in the Midwest with the song “Summer in Ohio.” She spends the warm months of the year at what is known in the business as summer stock theater. The practice of staging summer theater in rural areas, sometimes referred to as the “straw-hat circuit,” stems back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when urbanites would escape the stifling heat of the city by traveling to the countryside. Some theater companies fulfilled the city dwellers’ need for entertainment by setting up stages in barns and tents. The tradition of summer stock theater is still going strong, although most summer theaters today have actual performance spaces. Berkshire Theatre Festival, a summer stock theater in western Massachusetts. Photo by John Phelan, 2010. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Cathy’s summer is clearly ...

An Interview with Director Michael Berresse By Cecilia Padilla Michael Berresse came to A.C.T. in 2012 while performing in the national tour of The Normal Heart , and he is delighted to return to the Bay Area—this time as an accomplished director. “Looking back at my directorial career,” says Berresse, “I see that a number of shows I’ve worked on have had complicated or nonlinear structures. There’s something about the puzzle of them and the way my own mind works that draws me to that kind of material.” With its unique structure in which one character’s story is told from ending to beginning, and the other’s from beginning to end, The Last Five Years has been another puzzle for the director to solve. We sat down with Berresse to talk about the challenges and the joys of directing. Director Michael Berresse in rehearsal for A.C.T.’s 2016 production of The Last Five Years . Photo by Shannon Stockwell. What’s it like being both an actor and a director? I love them both for very...

By Shannon Stockwell For musical theater actors, there’s something magnetic about the music of Jason Robert Brown. “If you studied musical theater any time after 2000, chances are you memorized the original cast recording of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years ,” says Huffington Post journalist Suzy Evans. The composer’s work has such a gravitational pull on this peer group of musical theater enthusiasts that Evans refers to it as the “Jason Robert Brown generation.” Just what is it about Brown’s music that has defined a generation? “Jason is a master of making pop-song forms work in a musical theater context,” says Matt Castle, music director for A.C.T.’s 2016 production of The Last Five Years ,   now running until June 5 . “To me, pop music feels like a suspended, single feeling. But a theater song can’t be that, because there has to be something at risk in a scene, something that changes over the course of the song.” Brown’s music, Castle explains, has all of the ...

By Simon Hodgson Today, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop revolution Hamilton broke a Tony Award record with 16 nominations. Jason Robert Brown, composer of The Last Five Years , is encouraged by Hamilton ’s success. “[American musical theater] feels like it’s branching off in (at least) two different directions,” says Brown. “There is the very corporate ‘entertainment’—musicals painted in broad strokes and designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, such as Aladdin and Finding Neverland . Then there is the very personal and cheerfully idiosyncratic approach, which brings us work like Fun Home and Hamilton . I don’t care a whole lot about the first branch, but that second branch is very exciting and that’s the kind of work I’ve been trying to do all along.” This intention is apparent in The Last Five Years , which has its roots in Brown’s personal experiences of love and heartbreak. The result is a unique musical with an exuberant score that has remained in the hearts a...