With Evita, starring Juan Chioran and Chilina Kennedy, Griffin aims ‘to really explore the language of the piece.’
Chicago director Gary Griffin and British director John Doyle's international careers have been near mirror images of one another.
In 2003, Griffin crossed the Atlantic to London's West End and won two Olivier Awards with his minimalist Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures; two years later, Doyle won over Broadway - and beat Des McAnuff to a best director Tony - with his Watermill Theatre production of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, where the actors doubled as musicians.
Both have become much sought-after directors since these Sondheim successes, and both now find themselves working with the musical company at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival this summer.
One of Stratford's guest directors talks to J. Kelly Nestruck about staging Kiss Me, Kate.
After his massive success with West Side Story last year, Griffin, 49, returns with a new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita, while Doyle, 57, is making his debut with Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate. The Globe's J. Kelly Nestruck sat down with the two directors at the Festival Theatre to talk about Stratford, Sondheim and directing hot shows in the snow belt. Here is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Nestruck: How did you both end up working with Artistic Director Des McAnuff at Stratford this season?
Griffin: Des called me and asked me to do Evita. I hadn't ever really considered it before.
Doyle: I met with Des in New York, nearly two years ago now, and he asked if I'd like to come do something. You don't get many opportunities to work in places that have got this degree of facility and this number of actors running around in all these different productions. You go to theatres all the time where they say, "Can you possibly do it with six people?"
Griffin: Exactly.
Doyle: To be able to do it with 24 people is something else. I also just did something in San Francisco and, living in Britain, thought if I was going to be away from home I may as well come away for a block of time.
Nestruck: So you're working your way back to the U.K. from California.
Doyle: Yes. It was a little shocking to come from San Francisco to the snow at the end of February, however. Holy Lord.
Griffin: I had John's schedule last year, and Stratford is very, very quiet at the end of February. I had just been in New York, so I had a bit of culture shock in the first two weeks.
Doyle: I thought: Why have I done this to myself? Not the coming to work, that bit of it, but your evenings…
Griffin: With West Side Story, it was hard, because we were trying to evoke hot, August New York in cold February weather. That show is so much about the temperature, the heat. If you've New York in August, it's miserable - it affects why people get violent.
Nestruck: Did you have trouble getting the cast to feel the song Too Darn Hot in Kiss Me, Kate?
Doyle: It's interesting you were saying that because we kept talking about New York all through the process, how this is written by people from New York City. And I was then shocked by how many people hadn't been to New York. I had to rethink how I approached this.
Nestruck: When I've seen your work here and in Chicago, Gary, I have always been impressed, but I haven't walked out thinking, "Oh, that was a Gary Griffin show." Whereas from what I've seen of your work, in San Francisco and on Broadway, there's seemed to be a John Doyle stamp. Do you each feel you work within a particular aesthetic, or does every production emerge from the material?
Griffin: I really work best when you give me a really defined challenge - I don't work well if you say 'do anything.' I think I'm creative when I'm trying to work my way out of a situation. I also tend to make a mess that I need to sculpt. What I'm basically doing is taking away everything that isn't the thing. I really admire those people who seem to know that delicate stroke on day one. I never know that.
Doyle: Nor do I. I like to start with a room - a messy room full of stuff. I like a lot of junk and then end up with a few pieces that have emerged out of that as being the most important ways of trying to tell the story. I was artistic director of four different theatres in the U.K., none of which had any money, so out of that comes a way of working. In the last five or six years, I've been in a position where, when you work at somewhere like the Metropolitan Opera, there's a phenomenal amount of money spent on those shows and that doesn't necessarily make me feel happy creatively.
Nestruck: How does an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical fit into a classical theatre company?
Griffin: Evita's also a Tim Rice musical. I think Tim Rice was the best lyricist that [Lloyd Webber]ever worked with - a lot of the lyrics in Evita are more sophisticated and intelligent and ironic than I think people realize. One of my great goals with this production is to really explore the language of the piece. In a theatre that celebrates classical language, it figures beautifully. I've never directed an Andrew Lloyd Webber piece before - he paints in lavish strokes, so unlike Sondheim [who is]spare and economical, so it's been fun to figure out where that lives in theatre, what the gesture supports that.
Nestruck: Do you have interest in doing Andrew Lloyd Webber, John?
Doyle: If I say no, not because I'm disparaging about it. How did anyone think about writing about Evita? It's a wonderful idea - you think, "God, that's really bright." I do think a lot of that is Tim.
Nestruck: Tim Rice was the one who initiated the project. He became interested in Eva Peron.
Griffin: Evita is also a piece that Lloyd Webber wrote as a younger composer, an edgier composer. We were actually more inspired by the original [1976 concept]album. Rick Fox, the music director, and I spend a lot of time talking about that sound, which is a little more raw than what came on Broadway. Evita was the album I wore out as a college student - that and Sweeney Todd.
Doyle: Me too, me too. In the U.K., very recently there has been the beginning of looking at scaling down Lloyd Webber's musicals. I don't know if you saw the Sunset Boulevard they did on the West End last year, which was done with 10 or 12 actor-musicians. It took that lushness that you talked about, but made it something different - it purified it a little, and that's a good thing.
Nestruck: Cole Porter is, of course, one of the great songwriters, but he wasn't really a dramatic composer until Kiss Me, Kate came along. How has it been for you to tackle those songs as theatre?
Doyle: The lyrics are pretty good for its time, for 1948. The second act begins with Too Damn Hot for ten minutes. And what does it sing? That it's Too Damn Hot. That's what it says. You're never going to get anything more than that out of it dramatically if you tried. It is set on the first anniversary of someone's divorce, so it has the potential to be at least a little grown-up. But it would be churlish to make it feel like anything other than a relatively feel-good experience.
Nestruck: Is there anything that you're doing with Evita that will be different from other productions?
Griffin: What we're trying to do is place you more inside the world of it. I always have a really hard time watching actors on stage watch performances on stage. A lot of Evita is watching a crowd watch an event. I think maybe some of those moments that were originally meant to be alienating could actually be hugely emotionally driven. I was in Boston working on another version of The Color Purple when Michael Jackson died and I was very taken by how people got to a television, and how his life was debated.
Doyle: Like Diana.
Griffin: Exactly. In the death of an icon, their life is debated, and for someone to come in that moment and say you have to reconsider this life [as happens in Evita] that's what interested me about this play.
Doyle: It's complicated and challenging for people like us who are of a generation where those productions - of Evita or Sweeney Todd, for example - the original [Harold Prince-directed]productions were incredibly iconic, incredibly famous. I remember with Sweeney not quite getting hate mail, but people saying, "How dare you do this to this piece?" People become very protective of those musicals that they saw for the first time.
Griffin: And it changed their lives.
Doyle: Yes. " Sweeney changed my life, it was my first Broadway show."
Griffin: Someone who works at the theatre was telling me that the other day [about Evita] It's only painful in that you don't want to lose that experience for that person. You're hoping revisiting it reengages that and, at the same time, they'll hear new things in the text or you see colours in the material that they didn't know existed.
Evita plays Stratford's Avon Theatre through Oct. 31; Kiss Me Kate plays the Festival Theatre through Oct. 30. For details, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.