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The artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, Wayne Harrison, celebrated his 40th birthday on Sunday, quietly, after the longest working week of his life.
The week ended with the cancellation of the preview on Saturday night of the STC's biggest undertaking since The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby in 1984 - a $1.3 million production of the Stephen Sondheim musical, Into the Woods.
The preview was aborted because of technical problems. By Monday night all four previews had been cancelled and the official opening night transferred from tomorrow to March 19.
"Doing a production of this size in a theatre that small (the 544-seat Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera House) with limited resources stretches your ingenuity," Harrison said during a lunchtime interview last week. "For the first time, we have a sound desk in the auditorium, which means that we've had to take out a few seats.
"We can't use the pit, and that's the killer for us. To get the orchestra off stage we would lose nearly 50 seats and then the economics of the season would become impossible."
Even if he should find himself with a sell-out season, Harrison admits that the STC will lose money on Into the Woods. So why go into the woods?
"Our budgeting is done over the 10 plays in a subscription season, and our programming is one of variety, adding big shows to the medium-sized and smaller shows that we mount at The Wharf and in the Drama Theatre. I believe that big companies such as the STC are often seen at their best when they are doing big work. And if we don't do the big work, there is no other theatre company in Sydney which can."
So Into the Woods and Angels in America are being subsidised by the profits from Death and the Maiden and the touring Abbey Theatre production of Dancing at Lughnasa.
Harrison was offered High Society, which the other State theatre companies have combined to mount this year, but decided to go it alone with Into the Woods.
"If we are going to do musicals, then we should produce the shows that commercial producers are reluctant to pick up, either because they're too difficult or they are daunted by the challenge of a cross-over hit. We also should do these works because of the challenges they offer to our musical-theatre performers. Most of them could do High Society on their heads, whereas Into the Woods stretches them to the limit of their abilities."
And that of the production crew, one might add.
In the annals of music theatre, Sondheim stands apart from other mainstream composers for his uncompromisingly cerebral approach.
Despite writing the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy, and the lyrics and music for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and A Little Night Music, which yielded the oftcovered ballad, 'Send in the Clowns', he remains a cult figure.
Theatregoers are polarised: they either love or loathe his quirky rhythms, his internal rhymes, his left-field subject matter (Sondheim's last musical, Assassins, was a Gulf War offering which shocked almost as many people as it thrilled. His next is based on Craig Fussell's best-selling book about body building, Muscle ).
In its intricacy, the plot of Into the Woods resembles a French farce without the revolving bedroom doors. It was inspired by psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment, in which Freud and Jung meet the Brothers Grimm.
Bettelheim wrote that fairytales are splendid "agents of socialisation". The figures and events personify and illustrate inner conflicts, he suggested, and they suggest, "ever so subtly, how these conflicts may be solved, and what the next steps in the development towards a higher humanity might be".
The list of characters includes Little Red Ridinghood, the Wolf whose voracious appetite is matched only by hers, Jack of Beanstalk fame, Cinderella, her Ugly Sisters and Stepmother, Rapunzel, two princes who were"raised to be charming, not sincere", and a childless couple, the Baker and his wife.
As one might expect from Sondheim, the inter-relationships are convoluted: the Witch reveals that her garden was once raided by the Baker's father and that she had consequently cast a spell which caused the infertility of the Baker's Wife. At the same time, she claimed the Baker's sister, Rapunzel, whom she keeps locked in a tower. Rapunzel in turn is loved by the brother of Cinderella's Prince.
Into the Woods opened on Broadway in 1988 with a record advance for an American musical and ran for two years. However, the West End version, which was a cross between farce and panto, closed after just five months.
As a rule, musical theatre is about escapism. Sondheim is the exception: he offers us instead a journey into the heart of darkness.
The first act of Into the Woods is fast and funny; the second half is increasingly dark as the characters face a communal threat in the form of the wife of the giant killed by Jack who returns to seek revenge. This communal threat has been variously interpreted to represent forces of evil as diverse as nuclear proliferation, AIDS and Reaganomics.
Into the Woods won Sondheim three Tony Awards in 1989, to match the three he got for Sunday in the Park with George.
The London production of the latter starred Australia's Philip Quast, who was himself honoured with a 1990 Olivier Award.
Quast was offered the dual role of the Wolf and Cinderella's Prince on the West End but declined because he did not want to tackle another Sondheim so soon after Sunday in the Park.
He now joins three other Sondheim specialists - Geraldine Turner (Company and A Little Night Music, both for the STC, and Sweeney Todd), Judi Connelli (Side by Side by Sondheim) and Tony Sheldon (Forum).
The enormousness of the challenge facing Harrison, his creative team and cast became evident on Thursday when rehearsals shifted from The Wharf to the Drama Theatre.
After five weeks of rehearsing with just a piano as musical accompaniment, and in a room with its floor marked with tape to indicate the approximate dimensions of the stage and the position of props, the cast were eager for the real thing.
Thursday afternoon's dress rehearsal brought together all the elements of the production, bar musical director Brian Stacey and his 16 musicians: Harrison and his assistant director, Tony Bartuccio, the 18 actors, wearing for the first time the inspired costumes of Angus Strathie, seeing the lighting designs of Roger Barrett and a deceptively simple set by John Senczuk which consists of two concentric revolves and a central lift.
The curtain goes up on act one to reveal a man (Simon Chilvers) sitting at a piano, from which a young girl (Pippa Grandison) will emerge. We soon identify them as the Narrator and Cinderella, respectively. On steps behind a scrim stand the rest of the company. Turner is the Baker's Wife, Sheldon the Baker, Connelli the Witch and Philip Quast, Cinderella's Prince.
They are surrounded by the actors playing Little Red Ridinghood, Rapunzel, Jack, Jack's Cow (complete with an udder in the form of a large handbag), Jack's Mother, Rapunzel's Prince, Cinderella's Father, Mother, Stepmother and the Ugly Sisters.
As the scrim fragments, the tableau comes to life. The revolves whirr into action, gathering speed; the characters began to disperse and a hitherto hidden indoor set comes into view. Soon we are flitting between scenes involving Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters, the Baker, the Baker's Wife and Little Red Ridinghood, and Jack and his mother.
Logistically, it's a nightmare. On Thursday afternoon it took 90 minutes for Harrison and his cast to move beyond the prologue. Feeding the performers onto the revolves took on the air of an army manoeuvre.
One suddenly understood why Harrison's is a full head of grey hair. At times he looked like the ringmaster in a three-ringed circus. But he seemed unflappable, and the cast were patient and good-humoured. Remarkably, they remained so until 11.30 pm, when required to call it quits for the night.
The mind-numbingly slow, stop-start "teching" continued on Friday, when the clutch mechanism of one revolve failed.
History is on Wayne Harrison's side. Richard Wherrett's Company was a huge success for the STC, with 106 performances in 1986. A Little Night Music, directed by Harrison, played to 90 per cent capacity in 1990.
"The popular opinion around the world is that there's an aficionado audience which will flock to see Sondheim's work, giving you a burst of box office activity in the first 10 to 12 weeks of a run," Harrison said. "Beyond that, it's a question of whether the work crosses over into the GP market. With A Little Night Music, it did.
"We pitched that production on a popular level and that's what we're trying to do with Into the Woods."
