Another Cinderella Story Full Movie Online Download
Darci Carlton
Ruth Candler 00:14
Welcome to W&L After Class, the lifelong learning podcast. I'm your host, Ruth Candler. In every episode we'll have engaging conversations with W&L's expert faculty, bringing you again to the Colonnade even if you're hundreds of miles away, just like the conversations that happen every day after class here at W&L. You'll hear from your favorite faculty on fascinating topics and meet professors who can introduce you to new worlds and continue your journey of lifelong learning.
Our guest today is Rob Mish, director of the Lenfest Center of the Arts since 2005 and adjunct instructor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Film Studies, where he has taught Introduction to Theater, Acting and Musical Theater and more. Rob has acted in and directed a host of plays and musicals, including university productions of "Mrs. Warren's Profession," "The Night of the Iguana" and the musicals "Kiss Me Kate," "Assassins" and "Legally Blonde." Before becoming director of the Lenfest Center, he spent 15 years working with alumni as W&L's associate director and then director of alumni programs. Rob, it is great to see you, even if it's through a computer screen. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Ruth Candler 01:33
It's gonna be a fun conversation. Anyone who talks with you about theater will quickly discover that musical theater is your passion. It's good to know that your passion has found a focus right here at Washington and Lee. As the director of the Lenfest Center, you're responsible for directing musicals regularly at W&L. These performances have been very popular over the years, and I'm sure that many of our listeners have either attended a W&L musical or participated in one. Before you take us down memory lane with a few of your favorites, I'd like to ask you a couple basic questions. What are the key components of a musical, and what must a director consider before selecting and staging one?
Rob Mish 04:51
I have said that, and it's not perfect. It's not perfect because one of the things about it, and one of the criticisms of it, has been that there's really not much opportunity for dance. It is a great... It's... The music is unbelievable. The story is fantastic. The book is, because it comes straight from Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," but there's not much choreography in it. I still love it, and in fact, I hadn't seen a full production of it until about five or six years ago. I had this image of it that had been in my mind since a little kid.
Ruth Candler 05:44
So "My Fair Lady" first appeared on Broadway 65 years ago, and the story behind it, George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," was written well over 100 years ago. I've heard you say that, "The change in times changes theater." And I suppose that applies to any new production of "My Fair Lady," for it's still being staged. It's fascinating to think of classic musicals being reinvented in light of what modern directors and actors see as their flaws.
Would you walk us through what might happen today in telling the story of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins?
Ruth Candler 10:58
This kind of reinvention or modernization is something we're used to seeing done with Shakespeare, for instance. But many of the shows being reimagined for today's stage are much more recent, only decades old. How do you think our rapidly changing world affects the lifespan of a musical?
Rob Mish 11:20
That's... It's an interesting question, because when you talk about reinventing a classic, and if you think about it, in America, classic means, you know, could mean something as... going back only to the '40s, right?
Rob Mish 11:40
Yeah. Because the musical is really, you know, didn't really come about until... The book musical didn't really come about until the late '20s, with "Showboat," and then you have to go all the way to 1943 to get "Oklahoma!". And then it starts... then we start to evolve.
Now, I'll use "My Fair Lady" as an example of how something changed without changing any of the music, any of the dialogue. So in a recent production, a revival of "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center, Higgins is sitting there... he actually is standing there in his lab, which looks mainly more like a drawing room, actually, and Eliza comes back in. And he does... She says the "I washed my face and hands, I did," and he says, "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?" She has a little valise with her. And this Eliza picks up the valise and walks straight downstage down a set of stairs and up through the center of the house through the audience, leaving him onstage alone, where he belongs.
Rob Mish 13:05
Well, and it also has become Eliza's play from the beginning. If you think about it, Eliza is the one who goes to him to better herself, rather than he finding her and saying, "Eliza come with me to my house and we'll do this." So it's... This one made it her play all the way through, and Higgins, you know... It's Eliza Doolittle who is at the top of the bill and Henry Higgins is underneath it. Rex Harrison wouldn't have had that, of course. You know, it was going to be Rex Harrison over a 19-year-old Julie Andrews, so...
Rob Mish 14:06
Right, because she's accomplished... One of her goals is to do that. And, you know, he has... Later, you know, he takes her, because he thinks that she may have mastered this, and he takes her to the derby and she has picked a horse that she really likes and once the race starts, she loses the ladylike image and goes right back to the Cockney: "Dover, Dover, get your bloomin' arse a-rolling."
Rob Mish 15:03
And they pay him, you know, a certain amount, you know that... He says I need this much, and they give him more than that, because they really like what they're doing. And when you look at it, again, in today's terms, and you, and all it takes is somebody to kind of point that out: "Watch this."
Rob Mish 15:42
Yeah. Yeah. Here's her father doing that. And he's a scoundrel, anyway, but that's pretty big. Now, I will say that Shaw was very interested in and passionate about the social climate. He was concerned about women who had to sell themselves in order to make it in the world. He's, he... Several of the themes in his plays dealt with that. And he was very aware of the class structure.
So all of those things, many of those things, come together in "Pygmalion" and then into "My Fair Lady," if you think about it. I don't know for sure that Allen J. Lerner and the people that, and Frederick Lowe, in putting that together even thought about that. But it is interesting.
Ruth Candler 16:35
Yeah, it is. Worth looking into.
You've said that while growing up, you listened to your records of musicals so often that you wore them out. When I heard that, I was reminded of Lin Manuel Maranda's statement that vastly more people had listened to the "Hamilton" soundtrack online than could ever attend the show in person, and that until a videotaped recording of the show became available, the soundtrack in effect was the show for most of the show's fans. Do you think modern distribution channels have changed the way people respond to musicals?
Rob Mish 17:11
Well, yes, but again, that's nothing new. In the '50s, in fact, before Elvis Presley and the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones came along, the Top 40 were songs from musicals that would play on radio and be presented. The Ed Sullivan Show had scenes from musicals on it often. And then, once things like what we would call the British Invasion came along and pushed those things off of the charts, and they became the bestsellers, if you will, people would not listen to musicals much anymore.
Plays, musicals, New York, Broadway, those things have always been in the elite echelon. How many people can actually afford, even then, to go to the theater? Particularly now in New York, it's, you know, you're thinking the cost of a ticket, a regular ticket, can be $250, not to mention what the basic scalping idea for "Hamilton" and other shows up there. It makes it unavailable for many, many people.
Ruth Candler 20:07
Well, and I've heard, too, that that's how some people got to... Some people understood the play, was by memorizing the words first, because it was very hard to be in the moment and listen to the words and understand what they were saying.
Rob Mish 20:24
That's right. If they paid attention to the lyrics. So often, when you're hearing it, you're hearing... in your head, you're hearing the music first. And then you have to change that perspective to listening to the lyrics, which, in my mind, the lyrics are the heart.
But if you think about songs that were covered, say from "Pal Joey," for instance. Frank Sinatra made a fortune covering songs from that musical. "If I Could Write a Book," "Bewitched," "The Lady is a Tramp," which appeared in the film, people knew those songs because they were played on the radio, not necessarily because they... Most of them didn't have a clue that they were from a musical.
Ruth Candler 21:15
Let's focus now a little more on theater at W&L. Your Total Theater Spring Term course is a very popular one with students. I love the idea that students get the entire theater experience during this time. Would you share with our listeners what happens in this course? And what being an active participant in every aspect of a production teaches our students?
Rob Mish 21:41
My experience with Total Theater goes all the way back to when I was a student, when that course... the concept of that course was maybe five or six years old at that point. We're talking the Spring Terms of 1975 and '76, when I was able to... when majors could actually take it twice. And we were in a six-week term.
So the idea was to... That was the course that you took, a six-credit course. And a production would be staged during that six weeks, and you had the... You had a company made up of the students who were, in fact, in those plays. The idea of Total Theater actually comes from... Wagner used the term Gesamptkunstwerk, which means total art, all art, and the idea of all of those arts coming together to make a production, from design, from the script, from the actors and so forth coming together to make a full production. And so that was the idea.
My favorite was always the... my junior year when our Total Theater project was to do "Othello" and "The Tempest" in rep. And we were using the Little Troubadour Theatre, which is now a hair salon. And for some reason... and it's springtime, lacrosse, all of that kind of stuff, beautiful weather in Lexington. And we're rehearsing "The Tempest" in the morning. We all built the sets. We marketed the shows, and then rehearsed "Othello" at night. So we are in that theater for more than 12 hours a day.
And that was the... that's the impressive part, I guess, not able to go out and see a lacrosse game or do any of that thing. But we still had an amazing academic, although we weren't thinking academic, but we were having to learn lines for two Shakespearean plays. Those of us... I was the stage manager, assistant director for "Othello." So I was having to run everything backstage for that production. I was in "The Tempest." We had created a children's version of "The Tempest," which we took around to elementary schools during the early mornings, before these things even opened, and there was a wonderful lady whose husband taught at VMI. And she had this ramshackle old Army truck that we'd get in the back of and she'd drive us all over, bouncing over the Rockbridge County roads.
So that... Total Theater evolved over the years. They even set up one... At one six-week they set up Henry Street Playhouse, which was a summer stock theater, they set that up in the Spring Term, and it continued almost up to the present. When we started doing the Bentley Musical, which was an endowed musical from Betty and Robert Bentley, and those musicals were having to be presented during Spring Term, that was the best time to get the Music Department and the Theater Department together to do a musical, at that point, Total Theater ceased to exist in practice. It was always on in the catalog.
And then, a couple of years ago, I was talking... I was sitting at, you know, after a rehearsal or a show, and I was talking to the students in that show. And I was telling them, you know, about this experience with Shakespeare, and they're going, "Can we do that again? Can we get back into that as well? You know, if there's interest?" Sure, I'd love to do that.
So we started again, and the first one was a series of four one-acts. And we did that. Then there was... And they did all of the things, some of them assistant directed the one-acts, they did the marketing, they put together simple sets and things like that. The next year, we did a full play called "The House of Yes." Then this past spring, when we had to go into virtual type of things, we did a production of Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage," all virtually. So it gives the students who are involved the experience of every single aspect of a play. And they... there's a responsibility placed on them to make sure that, to have a successful production, that they learn those aspects, whether they're familiar with them or not, and put them into practice.