Next week The Old Globe Theatre will open the world premiere musical “Huzzah!” I got a chance to check out an early rehearsal because I heard there was swordplay.
A not-so-typical musical
I have to confess, I tend to be a little wary of contemporary musicals, but the Tony-nominated husband-and-wife team of Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe immediately won me over.
“We didn't grow up with Golden Age musicals,” Benjamin said. “We grew up with action movies. I love action movies. So we write accordingly.”
“We get a little impatient, and we want the story to keep changing even while people are singing,” O’Keefe added. “And so that's what makes us restless, but that's also what makes us children of action movies — car chases, kung fu fights, Jackie Chan, Hong Kong movies.”
Wait — they're speaking my language, but they are talking about a musical!
“We think of musicals as being like action films because the story doesn't stop for an action sequence, but you put action on top of it,” Benjamin said. “And likewise, with a musical, you don't want the story to stop for your musical number. You want it to continue through while this incredible stuff is happening.”
I got to see some of the incredible stuff at an early rehearsal of “Huzzah!”
Huzzah is a term used to express delight or approval, and the musical is set against the backdrop of a family-run Renaissance Faire. And that’s another attractive aspect of the show. The Ren Faire setting means not only will there be fabulous costumes, but also plenty of room for exciting action.
Why Ren Faires?
A visit to a Ren Faire years ago first sparked the idea for “Huzzah!,” percolating in the minds of Benjamin and O’Keefe.
“We were in our 20s,” O’Keefe recalled. “We had just moved out to LA, and some of our Hollywood friends who thought they were super cool and smart said, ‘You have to go to this thing called a Renaissance Faire in San Bernardino, and you're going to love it. It's so stupid.’ And we thought, ‘Oh, that's great, maybe this might make a sitcom where we can be like “The Office” and make fun of people who hate their jobs.’ But everybody loved their jobs. We went there and everybody was good at something. They made things. They made swords with their blacksmith practices. They knew how to actually joust on real horses.”
Benjamin agreed: “We thought, 'no, this is not something to make fun of. This is some place we want to be every day.'”
And while they don’t maintain a residence at a Ren Faire, they did fall in love with the environment enough to keep returning — often in appropriate garb.
“The particular fun you have at a Ren Faire is you make part of it yourself,” O’Keefe said. “Even if you're not dressed in Renaissance garb, you go there to play in a different way. It's a wonderful respite from the rest of the world, but it's also the best of us. I like to say that it's the most American thing we make because you go to a place — it's like a field or a pasture or a little forest glade — and you build booths and tents and sometimes castles, and you bring live horses, and you make things with your hands and you sell them.”
The idea of a musical set in a Ren Faire appealed to the Globe’s artistic director Barry Edelstein who wrote in the program notes, “I live just east of Balboa Park, and my daily commute takes me through the winding back roads that traverse San Diego’s crown jewel … But about twice a week I see something that always takes me by surprise: jousting. At a corner of Morley Field, Renaissance Faire enthusiasts turn up in full regalia to pound each other with broadswords, throw axes and spears, and play Nine Men’s Morris. I often stop to watch, delighting in the joy and commitment of the participants and the striking visuals of the medieval pursuits on display.”
A safe and sexy place
The first Renaissance Pleasure Faire was held in Agoura Hills, California, in 1963, and was founded by a husband and wife. The event quickly gained popularity and has since inspired hundreds of Ren Faires around the country.
“A lot of people think that a Ren Faire is like Disneyland for Lord of the Rings geeks,” O’Keefe added. “But it's really a place where nerds are safe and sexy, and we felt very safe and sexy there. And so we, for years, have been thinking we want to make a show that celebrates these people, that does not make fun of them but actually puts them alongside the audience. And blurs the distinction between show and audience. And that's very helpful because, of course, if you love Ren Faires, you will dress up yourself and go. They're called playtrons because they play, but they're patrons. The playtrons dress up as ninjas or pirates or Gandalf or Darth Vader in a kilt. They pay admission. They don't work there, but they make part of the magic there.”
But as with O’Keefe’s “super cool” Hollywood friends, there are people who snicker at the idea of Ren Faires, and look condescendingly on people who attend them. Director Annie Tippe insists that is not the tone of this play.
“I think with any culture that is viewed as niche, a nerd culture, a comic culture, Ren Faire culture, there's definitely an outside eye that can glance down upon it and say, ‘Oh, you've chosen to live your life in make-believe. You've chosen some alternative reality to living in this world.’ And if you spend time in one of these places, I think what you find is people who are really engaged in creating the world they want to live in, a world that is welcoming, that is empathetic, that is wild and free, and welcoming to people,” Tippe said. “That's the beauty. Once you go in, you might actually find that a Ren Faire can be even more welcoming than the real world sometimes is.”
A Ren Faire is a place that embrace a wide range of nerdiness.
“For instance, somebody's doing purely historical stuff; somebody's a fairy; someone's doing Lord of the Rings; someone's doing a Darth Vader,” Benjamin said. “And then they all come to one place with radically different interests and agendas, and they make a day of fun work together.”
Family, fantasy and drama
That family aspect of early Ren Faires is partly of what influenced the story of “Huzzah!,” in which a father passes on the family business to his daughters who have very different feelings about Ren Faires.
“I play Gwen,” said actress Liisi LaFontaine. “One of the two daughters who are gifted with running this Ren Faire. Our dad is saying that he wants to step down as king. And one sister, Princess Kate, loves the fair. She models her life around it. She believes in it. And the other daughter, Gwen, runs payroll and lives upstate and has not come back for many years. So the day that the show is beginning, Gwen is coming back to try to fix some issues with the fair when they find out that the fair is now theirs, and drama ensues.”
Cailen Fu plays Kate.
“Essentially, I have stayed at the fair running it with my father while Gwen has been running off being an accountant in the real world,” Fu said. “I'm essentially the fair's princess. I get to wear all the fun fairy crowns and all the big dresses. Essentially, I'm just the positivity fairy running around.”
Enter Sir Roland
Another key character is Sir Roland Prowd, a knight new to the fair and about to stir things up.
“We meet this star, Sir Roland Prowd,” O’Keefe explained. “He's arrived at the fair for the battle royale. He's taking on all comers, cracking some skulls and doing a great job. But he's also impressing people, and certain major characters are falling deeply in love with him in different ways, including the daughters, who find this guy very compelling.”
Leo Roberts plays Sir Roland, who even has a song named after him.
“Sir Roland is the perfect knight,” Benjamin said. “He lives every day as a knight of the Tudor Court, and consequently, he fights. He is unbeatable, and his introductory song is the 'Song of Roland.'”
Here’s where the musical got fun for me: a dialogue scene transitions to a song, then a fight sequence where Sir Roland shows off his prowess to an excited crowd. To pull this off, the show uses both a dance choreographer and a fight choreographer, who have to work in tandem. Plus, an actor who can fight with broadswords — not those flimsy rapiers — while singing and dancing.
“The challenges of this musical are the utter delights of this musical,” Tippe stated. “I think because the piece takes place at a Ren Faire, things seamlessly move between spoken word and dance and fighting, because that is what you would find at a Ren Faire. So I look at the challenges actually as the perfect cohesion of what being at one of those fairs feels like. It's very all-encompassing. It's very intoxicating. And at any point, a swordsman could be thrown at your feet, which is delicious.”
Indeed! But it is a very meticulous process to make it all look so easy on stage.
"We talk through the story, we talk through the story beats," Tippe explained. “And then it's a very slow, calculated process of layering in the fight choreography so that, yes, it's impressive. Yes, it's exciting. But at the very end of the day, each move and each sword hit is a storytelling gesture that gets us from A to B. So it's very collaborative.”
It also has to be safe. Although from the audience’s point of view, it can look thrilling. But Ren Faires, where you can find knights jousting on horses, are all about blurring lines and creating an amazing space for imagination to thrive.
“We're playing characters on top of characters on top of characters,” La Fontaine enthused. “It's very easy to give yourself to it. Our director, Annie, always says that the more you commit to the silliness, the funnier it is, the more you believe in what you're saying, the more you commit to your character, your accent or whatever you're given.”
Themes that resonate
But there are also serious themes at play in “Huzzah!”
“I think the core is about coming back together as family,” La Fontaine said. “It's about finding a safe space. It's about protecting those safe spaces. It's about how easy it is to be seduced by a powerful man. It's about how easy it is to follow a powerful man and how quickly that can fall apart. And ultimately, it's about how if we band together, we can overcome anything, and we can overpower these forces that are on us. It has a lot of surprisingly deep meanings, and it's very timely for what's happening right now.”
“Huzzah!” strives to be as immersive, inviting audiences to participate, much like a real Ren Faire.
“A huge part of it is the people who are coming and visiting, who have paid to see these different acts who are going through the different shops and who are really investing themselves in the world of these Ren Faires,” Fu said. “I really am going to be encouraging the audience to lean forward when they see the show rather than sit back and see a movie.”
Benjamin and O’Keefe even encourages attendees to come in costume — and maybe earn a seat closer to the stage. And you're inspired to attend a real Ren Faire after the show, the program lists local options: the Escondido Renaissance Faire in fall and spring; the Vista Viking Festival in September for Nordic flair; and Lakeside’s Yuletide event.
Huzzah!
