'Big River' is a breathtaking ride
Huck Finn musical is performed by hearing, deaf actors
By J. Wynn Rousuck / Sun Theater Critic
April 7, 2005
A musical performed by a combination of hearing and deaf actors. The prospect sounds unwieldy, at the very least. But it's difficult to imagine a revival of Roger Miller and William Hauptman's Big River that flows more gracefully or resonates more meaningfully than the one co-produced by Deaf West Theatre at Ford's Theatre in Washington.
Not only does director/choreographer Jeff Calhoun's staging of this 1985 Huckleberry Finn musical succeed on multiple levels - visually, aurally, literally, metaphorically - but it is one of those rare and wonderful examples of a show that does what it is about.
In Mark Twain's novel, the story of the bond between young Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, is a tale of cross-cultural understanding. In this Tony Award-nominated revival - simultaneously spoken and signed in American Sign Language - the interaction between the hearing and deaf actors is its own demonstration of cross-cultural understanding.
And in almost every case, the interaction adds an extra layer of meaning. For instance, Christopher B. Corrigan, who plays Huck, is a deaf actor who signs his part. His words are voiced by Bill O'Brien, who also plays Mark Twain, the show's narrator. Because the novel is written from Huck's point of view, the casting reinforces the idea that Twain speaks through Huck.
Huck's father, on the other hand, is played by two identically dressed actors - Darren Frazier, who is hard of hearing, and Jay Lusteck, who is not. Together, they embody the novel's line that "Pap" has "two angels" around him - one good and one bad. Calhoun's direction emphasizes their co-dependence. When one Pap looks in the mirror, he sees the other. And after one takes a swig of liquor, the second wipes his own mouth.
This isn't one of those nontraditional casting projects in which you're supposed to forget the differences that exist on stage. To the contrary, the production celebrates difference and uses it to stunning advantage, in ways large and small.
One of the small ways comes at the end of Huck and Jim's rousing duet, "Muddy Water," when the actors jointly sign the song's final word, "ride," with Michael McElroy's Jim positioning his fingers on the back of Corrigan's hand. Their fate, riding a raft on the Mississippi, is unmistakably intertwined.
A large, breathtaking example occurs near the end of the show, when most of the cast is singing and signing "Waitin' for the Light to Shine." After the music has filled the theater, the final chorus is signed in total silence. By that point, communication barriers have been crossed; the audience can hear the music.
This rich production is further enhanced by designer Ray Klausen's storybook set, which consists primarily of huge, free-standing pages from the novel. Doors are cut out of pages; part of a page rises up to become the roof of Pap's shack; and Tom Sawyer's cave is a hole surrounded by a spiral of silver words on a black background.
The performers range in experience from Corrigan, an expressive 18-year-old freshman at Washington's Gallaudet University, to McElroy, a Broadway veteran with a stirring voice, re-creating his 2004 Tony-nominated role. As Twain, O'Brien - Deaf West's managing director and the actor who created the role in the original 2001 Los Angeles production - not only makes a wry narrator, he also plays guitar and brings an authentic-sounding twang to his catchy country western songs.
Country western music and the American musical are both indigenous forms, yet there are surprisingly few country musicals. As one of those few, Big River is a logical choice for America's most historic theater, Ford's. But the stunning way that this particular production illustrates inclusion makes it even more fitting - a genuinely democratic work that can and should be celebrated by the widest range of theatergoers.
Copyright (c) 2005, The Baltimore Sun
'Big River' blends sign language, song and dance
Thursday, March 31, 2005BY LI WANG
Of The PatriotNews
For deaf actor and playwright Garrett Mathew Zuercher, playing Huck Finn is a matter of finding and conveying the truth and emotion of Huck's journey.
But the upcoming production of "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" at Hershey Theatre Tuesday through April 10 is not the usual stage adaptation of the Mark Twain novel.
The show, directed and choreographed by Jeff Calhoun, adds sign language and has deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing actors performing each role in a harmonious merging of speaking, signing, gesture, song and dance.
"Many don't know how to respond to a play like this because they've never seen a deaf musical or even sign language onstage before," Zuercher said. "It's a brand new genre that's forming, a radical type of show."
The show is being described as forming a "third language," one that extends the range of American Sign Language through artistic storytelling devices such as dance made accessible through theater.
The production was originally developed at Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood, Calif., in the fall of 2001. After getting attention by earning several awards, the show was developed at the Mark Taper Forum stage, an offshoot of the Central Theater Group in Los Angeles, in 2002. During the 2003-04 season, the mixed-medium version of "Big River" became a Broadway show at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York as a co-production between Deaf West and Roundabout in association with the Mark Taper Forum.
For actor Zuercher, performing is only one of his creative outlets. Besides acting in "The Fantasticks," "The Tempest" and "The Taste of Sunrise," he has written and directed three plays. The play "Quid Pro Quo," a story about his personal experiences, won him two national playwriting awards.
"It had been a lifelong dream of mine to do theater, and with this show, I was finally able to start feeling like a success," Zuercher said.
Currently, Zuercher is focused on conveying the transformative journey of Huck, who escapes from his drunken father and meets up with Jim, a runaway slave. The pair take a raft trip down the Mississippi River in the 1840s.
"Even though the book was written over a hundred years ago and takes place equally far in the past, I didn't feel I had to reach back too distantly to find Huck," Zuercher said. "Huck's journey is universal and the truths he discovers along the way are just as true today as they were then."
LI WANG: 255-8168 or lwang@patriot-news.com
Copyright 2005 PennLive.com. All Rights Reserved.
Big River
The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnWashington Post Review
'Big River': Music to The Ears And Eyes
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page C01
Even if you speak only one language when you step into Ford's Theatre these days, you'll come out well versed in two.
Your new second language is American Sign, which is employed with a touching panache in Deaf West Theatre's inspiring reinvention of "Big River," the folksy musical adaptation of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The show, performed by a cast of hearing and deaf actors whose styles are imaginatively blended by director Jeff Calhoun, is ideal for parents in search of an enriching night out with the kids. And there's the added appeal of providing audiences with a feel for the poetic physicality of a form of communication that some may view only as the outgrowth of a handicap.
"Big River" is not a great musical, but it's an altogether decent one, with some ebullient songs by Roger Miller, composer of the '60s pop standard "King of the Road." Some of the ingredients are poured in unevenly. Mark Twain's piquant humor is not always apparent in William Hauptman's script, and all that gleaming Heartland innocence does become a tad tiresome. Some of the strain might have been alleviated by judicious cuts in a production that runs 2 hours and 40 minutes. Dialogue-heavy scenes, especially a second-act sequence involving the scamming of a bereaved family, cry out for trimming.
Still, Miller's music saves the day. Invigorated by indigenous forms like bluegrass and spirituals, the score brims with milk-fed American vitality. Songs such as "Muddy Water," "Free at Last" and "How Blest We Are" shimmer and soar at Ford's, where, for once, the amplification is just right. The singers, most notably Jeannette Bayardelle, Bill O'Brien and the majestically talented Michael McElroy, the last playing runaway slave Jim, infuse the numbers with a powerful sense of soul.
The evening's chief fascination, though, is its breakthrough technique, the way the narrative for those who can hear exists in tandem with one for those who cannot. Having premiered on Broadway 20 years ago in a more conventional production, the musical is now a showcase for magically malleable storytelling. (Deaf West, based in Los Angeles, unveiled this version in 2001, and the troupe has toured it on and off ever since.) Given Twain's own abundant gifts as showman and raconteur, it seems more than fitting to use one of his classics to blaze new narrative trails.
To watch, for instance, as a young hearing-impaired actor, Andres Otalora, translates the song "Arkansas" into crisply expressive bursts of gesture is to discover that there is music to be mined in the silences between the words.
Calhoun's "Big River" divvies up the parts in a spirit of cooperation. You are constantly being shown the manner in which two disparate worlds can be made one. For instance, McElroy, a hearing actor, plays his scenes on the raft with a deaf Huck (Christopher B. Corrigan, a student at Gallaudet University). While McElroy signs and sings his role, Huck's vocals are supplied by O'Brien, who also plays Twain, perched onstage as the omniscient, banjo-plucking narrator.
On Ray Klausen's multilevel set, whimsically adorned with blown-up pages from the novel, this type of pairing occurs throughout the evening. The show even devises its own notion of role-sharing. Huck's snarling hillbilly father, Pap, is played simultaneously by identically costumed actors, one hearing (Jay Lusteck) and one nonhearing (Darren Frazier), who collaborate nicely on Pap's Twainian, contrarian rant, "Guv'ment." The two actors are paired again later to good effect as the riverside con men Duke (Frazier) and King (Lusteck).
Calhoun is also credited as choreographer, but most of the synchronized movement occurs above the waist. When the ensemble signs during "Do You Wanna Go to Heaven," unison takes on a whole new depth of feeling. This idea reaches its apotheosis in the company reprise of "Waitin' for the Light to Shine." Halfway through the number, the seven-piece band suddenly stops playing, and the actors continue to sign the song in utter silence. In this brief, breath-stopping interlude, you suddenly find yourself able to listen to dancing fingers.
Competing with speaking actors for an audience's attention, the deaf performers have the toughest challenge. An audience may feel for a time that Corrigan's Huck is a distant figure, particularly because he has to share the stage with McElroy's dynamic and moving Jim. But Corrigan's presence and performance grow as the evening progresses. By the curtain call he's managed to create a distinct Huck, one who absorbs the lessons Twain imparts here, about seeing past superficial differences and understanding something new about the universal human quest for respect and dignity.
Which, of course, Calhoun's "Big River" doubly reinforces. Catherine Brunell and Stanley Bahorek deserve mention here too as a girl who stirs new feelings in Huck, and Twain's legendary rascal, Tom Sawyer.
But the real standout is the idea that theater still has the power to lead by imaginative will, that communities cut off from each other can be shown how to sing with one voice and a flurry of hands.
Big River, music and lyrics by Roger Miller, book by William Hauptman. Directed and choreographed by Jeff Calhoun. Set, Ray Klausen; lighting, Michael Gilliam; sound, Peter Fitzgerald; costume coordinator, Lynn Bowling; musical director, Nick DeGregorio. With Walter Charles, Linda Bove, Elizabeth Greene, Christopher Bloch, Michelle A. Banks. Approximately 2 hours 40 minutes. Through May 1 at Ford's Theatre, 511 10th St. NW. Call 202-347-4833 or visit www.fordstheatre.org.
Baltimore Sun Review
Singing and signing in 'Big River'
Deaf West's production opens at Ford's
By Kim Hart
Sun Staff
March 24, 2005
When Michael McElroy auditioned for the role of Jim in Deaf West Theatre's production of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he thought he'd be using American Sign Language only during the songs. He soon realized he would be signing -- as well as reciting -- his many lines. At that point, McElroy, who had never before used sign language, began to panic.
For the next week, he entered "sign boot camp," spending at least three hours a day with an interpreter to learn the signs for every word in the script.
"I still don't know how I did it," said McElroy, who is now almost fluent in ASL and last year received a Tony nomination for his role in the play's extended run on Broadway. "When you feel the magic and how special an experience is, you just learn it."
Four years after the innovative musical's inception by Deaf West Theatre -- a Hollywood-based professional sign language theater specializing in creating cultural programs for the deaf and hard of hearing -- Big River has come to Ford's Theatre in Washington. Nine of the 23 cast members are deaf or hard of hearing, and the actors synchronize voice and song with sign language gestures to perform for an audience of all hearing capabilities.
A musical for the deaf may be difficult to envision. Speaking actors both sign and speak their lines, and deaf actors sign and gesture while another actor provides the voice for the role. Coordinating the parts can be a challenge, especially for actors who are signing to music they may not be able to hear.
But the performance allows the hard-of-hearing members of the audience to see a story unfold in their own language and "melts away barriers for the hearing audience who get engaged with a play they didn't realize could be engaging," said Bill O'Brien, Deaf West managing director and producer.
"It sounds complicated, but you really just fall into it," said O'Brien, who plays Mark Twain and provides the voice of Huck. "The play is actually more clearly communicated with the combination of nonverbal with verbal communication."
Christopher Corrigan, an 18-year-old freshman at Gallaudet University, portrays Huck and relies on gestures and facial expressions to convey emotion. He saw the production on Broadway two years ago and vowed to someday be part of it. For him, the musical's greatest goal is to reveal the value in merging the two cultures to promote mutual understanding.
"Practically half the cast had never met a deaf person before working on this show," Corrigan said through an interpreter. "What's important is that both forms of the language are equal in their beauty and theatrical expression."
The themes of Big River -- adapted from Mark Twain's classic novel -- of breaking through stereotypes and embracing commonalities rather than differences make the story an appropriate choice for this type of production.
"The thing that happens onstage between Huck and Jim is the same that happens between the actors and the audience," McElroy said. "This is really what theater is all about. It educates, changes your perspective so that you're somehow different when you leave."
Deaf West Theatre's production of "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" runs at Ford's Theatre, 511 10th St. N.W, Washington, through May 1. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Noon matinees will show March 31 and April 7, 13, 20, 21, 27, 28. Call 202-347-4833 or visit www.fords theatre.org.
Copyright c 2005, The Baltimore Sun
Washington Post Article
Crossing A Great Divide
"Big River: The Adventures Through May 1 of Huckleberry Finn" 800-551-7328 Ford's Theatre (TTY: 202-347-5599)
By Lisa Traiger
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, March 18, 2005; Page WE29
MICHAEL McElroy and Christopher B. Corrigan had just sung "Muddy Water," a rousing, showstopping number from "Big River," Roger Miller's twangy and soulful adaptation of the great Mark Twain classic "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." They were nearly halfway through a two-week rehearsal period for the 1985 Tony Award winner for best musical, which Ford's Theatre is producing in alliance with Los Angeles-based Deaf West Theatre.
The cold, cluttered church-gym-cum-rehearsal-hall erupted with applause. For some members of the cast and crew, this meant clapping; for others, it meant raising hands above heads and wiggling fingers. Whatever their methods, however, all shared in the enthusiasm for McElroy (who plays runaway slave Jim) and Corrigan (his sharp-as-a-tack pal Huck). The pair took a moment to drink in the attention before getting back to the nitty-gritty details of perfecting soundless cues and unspoken dialogue.
A freshman at Washington's Gallaudet University, Corrigan, with his easygoing smile and unruly mop of chestnut hair, was pleased to see Jeff Calhoun's waving hand, a sure sign that his performance had pleased the director. Still, he heard none of the whoops and clapping. Corrigan is deaf.
When Deaf West's simultaneously spoken and signed revival of "Big River" arrived on Broadway in 2003, it served as a defining moment for deaf performers and audiences alike. The last time a Broadway show specifically integrated American Sign Language and a story with a deaf point of view was in 1980, when Mark Medoff's "Children of a Lesser God" drew back the curtain for audiences unfamiliar with the richness of deaf culture. Corrigan was not even born then.
A recent graduate of Frederick's Maryland School for the Deaf, Corrigan was smitten when he saw "Big River" on Broadway. Now, just 18 and making his professional debut, he's the youngest in a mixed hearing and deaf cast, nearly half of whom are affiliated with Gallaudet in Northeast Washington. He spoke through a sign language interpreter, Elizabeth Green, who is featured in the cast as Widow Douglas and serves as the production's sign captain, charged with ensuring that all ASL exchanges are accurate and reflective of the characters speaking. Corrigan said: "That was the first time I saw how beautiful theater can be for deaf people, from a deaf person's perspective. It was extraordinary. I've seen many, many plays. . . . I go to theater all the time. But this was the first time I felt that a play speaks to me and I don't have to watch an interpreter."
That's the point, chimed in Deaf West's managing director, Bill O'Brien, who plays Mark Twain and serves as the spoken voice of Huck in the production. "At Deaf West, every time we pick a show," he noted, "we make sure that . . . we can enhance [it] in some way or bring something to it that fits the spine of the story." The last thing he wants is for sign language to become a gimmick, or worse, an afterthought.
McElroy, who received a Tony nomination for his performance as Jim in the Broadway revival, went through what he called "sign language boot camp" to prepare for his role, which is both fully spoken and sung and fully signed, using appropriate regionalisms and 19th-century gestures that those fluent in ASL will recognize as archaic today. Of that arduous, six-day ASL cram session, McElroy said he would go through it all again: "For the actors, it's great to have another way of conveying thought and feeling. . . . What interested me about this piece is that Jim was a slave who signs. It becomes another level that the show addresses, with hearing and deaf actors onstage telling the story."
O'Brien concurred, noting, "It's already a story about reaching across cultural boundaries. . . . Throughout the course of the play, Huck and Jim find ways to reach across a divide and really find a common humanity."
This "Big River," he said, both widens the divide and lengthens the bridge over it. "We felt that that gap was not only black and white, but it's hearing and deaf. If things are working like we hope they will, what happens between Huck and Jim happens between hearing audience members and the deaf audience."
For his part, McElroy couldn't ask for a more fulfilling experience. "This is why I got into [theater] in the first place: It does what art is supposed to do. It entertains you. It educates you. It tells you something you didn't know in a way that's creative, fun and funny, yet touching. It has all the things that made us become actors."
