Here is Curio Theater’s 2010 production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
At this point, the only thing I had to work with was a Sony TRV700, a standard-def video camera. I’d gotten good results out of it for my little personal video Clark Park, June 2007, and I guess that impressed Kyle Cassidy enough to suggest to Curio that, maybe, they could have me come in and get a good video record of the play’s performances, staging, and intriguing Steampunk-influenced costume design. The play was nearing the end of its run, and when I went to the theater to look over the sets, there were only three performances left.
I explained that, since I hadn’t seen the play yet, I might have trouble following all the action: I might miss an entrance or two. And half the time, we’d be showcasing the backs of the actors’ heads. So, I suggested the following: I shoot that night’s performance from the right side of the stage. The next day, the matinee, I shoot it from the left side of the stage. On the final night… well, I’d wanted to shoot it from the audience, but the seats were sold out, so on that night I shot it from a slightly different place on the right. The idea, I explained, was to edit the three performances into one, as though we’d shot all three simultaneously, like a classic three-camera sitcom. If the staging was more or less identical from night to night, I said, it would probably work.
And that’s pretty much what happened. In the end, I had three copies of the play. I then spent about two months, on and off, editing it into a final video that one could watch like a movie.
You’ll see that this is far from a perfect piece of coverage. Remember, I hadn’t seen the play at all, so often I found myself aiming the camera at something other than the Best Possible Thing. (For example, in the opening, when the Count Orsino would utter a line, my camera was usually on Viola down on the floor.) The footage is a bit overexposed much of the time.
But boy, was this a learning experience. It was profoundly difficult to edit, at times. Things didn’t always match from night to night: that smoke that pours out may have filled the stage on Friday, but it kept to the upper platform on Saturday. In the scene where Olivia and Feste talk, the actor playing Feste (Eric Scotolati) would walk in different paths: one night he’d cross in front of Olivia, the next, in back. Sometimes I’d have to match a line reading to a different piece of video, and I’d have to match the actors’ mouths to lines they’d spoken on another night. And there are several instances where I simply didn’t have a great angle, so we wind up watching the back of an actor’s head as he or she uttered lines.
One of the toughest moments came in Act II, where the gang of Toby Belch, Feste and Aguecheek (Ryan Walter, Eric Scotolati and C.J. Keller) sneak around as Mavolio reads their forged note. Remember, we have four people moving about on stage, and they may not always be at the same places when a particular bit of dialogue is spoken. The way they crawl over each other on the upper platform was difficult to time, too.
I had fun with this project because it gave me a few opportunities to impose a few creative choices of my own. Take editing physical comedy. The scene in Act I where Maria (Aetna Gallagher) snaps Feste’s suspenders… well, where can the cuts go for maximum laugh? The joke swordfight between Viola (Chelsea Blulack) and Aguecheek in Act II? Same thing: it’d be really easy to make bad cuts and dissolve the action into gibberish. And the real fight between Toby Belch and John Schultz’s Antonio? Well, stage swordfighting doesn’t register as as dynamic as a filmed swordfight, but cutting on when the blades skimmed each other seemed to work best to make it dynamic enough for film.
Take the scene where Malvolio enters, wearing his yellow stockings, to impress and seduce Olivia. That’s one of the big laugh-moments of the play, and the humor comes from Liam Castellan’s nerdy Malvolio trying to present as a peacock, and Jennifer Summerfield, as Olivia, stunned by the spectacle. The cool thing about film and video is that one can stretch the moment, and give the audience a chance to see more details: give Liam his big entrance, in all its glory, and give Jennifer a chance to let her astonishment and wary “How now, Malvolio?” milk the laugh. I created a short video illustrating how this worked.
Oh, one last thing. I wish the end titles weren’t silent. I liked them a lot: you pick shots that really flatter the actors, and throw some cool music on, and everybody feels great. I’d created a version that used the song “C’mon, Yeah” by the Sunshine, which ain’t exactly Elizabethan in style.
Well, music licensing laws make David Wark Griffiths of us all, I guess.
Addendum: A belated rave review!
Thanks to the magic of video, Wayne Myers, author of The Book of Twelfth Night, or What You Will: Musings on Shakespeare’s Most Wonderful Play, was able to watch Curio’s production six months after it had closed. Have a read at http://www.examiner.com/article/on-video-curio-theatre-company-s-rich-and-strange-steampunk-twelfth-night.