When it comes to musicals, operettas and, now, Shakespeare, out Chicago director Gary Griffin has certainly been getting around. And he's not just wowing the Windy City, either.
Time is running out to catch Griffin's superlative revival of Meredith Willson's The Music Man for Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire (playing through Jan. 9), while performances resume Jan. 5 for the remaining seven performances of Griffin's 1920s take on Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta The Mikado for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Later this month, Griffin returns to New York to direct the City Center Encores! concert staging of Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's Lost in the Stars (an ambitious 1949 musical adaptation of Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel Cry, the Beloved Country) for a Feb. 3-6 run. And Griffin returns to Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival (where he previously helmed hit productions of West Side Story and Evita) to stage Lerner and Lowe's beloved 1960 musical Camelot from April 16 to Oct. 30.
But Griffin's most pressing assignment is his current one: Shakespeare's romantic cross-dressing-filled comedy As You Like It for Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST). Griffin has carried the title of associate artistic director for 10 seasons at CST, where he's made most of his impact staging musicals by composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
With As You Like It, it's the first time Griffin has tackled a main stage Shakespeare production for CST, aside from his Short Shakespeare! family-friendly adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet. As You Like It begins previews Jan. 5 and ends March 6.
Griffin is happy to have a full plate of work, though he recently pointed out that the different productions roll out on very different timetables.
"What's fascinating, for me anyway, is that they all have different pre-production processes," Griffin said, noting that Lyric Opera of Chicago productions are often planned years in advance with technical lighting rehearsals months ahead in the summer. That's compared to City Center Encores!, where rehearsals with the cast are only 10 days.
"They all have different trajectories of arriving," Griffin said. "I love that no process is the same, but at the same time on paper, it's like 'Wow, how do you do that?'"
When interviewed mid-December via telephone, Griffin said he was "deep in the Forest of Arden" for rehearsals of As You Like It. Collaborating with costume designer Mara Blumenfeld, Griffin said they opted for an early 19th-century Regency-period setting for the work.
"The period reflected a lot about what we thought were important things that we might be able to explore," Griffin said. "We thought that Celia and Rosalind felt like characters that easily could fit comfortably in the universe of intelligence and wit of Jane Austen."
Griffin said the Regency fashions were also extremely masculine and feminine period in terms of the look and silhouette.
"The way the clothes defined sexuality fascinated us," Griffin said, focusing on the heroine Rosalind's decision to disguise herself as a man through much of the play. "I was more interested in looking at not so much the matter of confusion, but the matter of roles and identity and the play to me has so much to say about actually exploring your identity not knowing what you like when you get into the forest and the whole journey of finding out what you do like."
In terms of casting, Griffin is very proud to boast that both his productions of As You Like It and The Music Man feature completely Chicago-based acting companies.
"In neither case did I set out to say, 'I'm going to do this as Chicago-only,'" Griffin said. "When we started our casting process and worked our way through it, it was the Chicago actors that felt most right to create those companies. So we have fortunately a repertory company of Shakespeare and musical theater here and it's just been fortunate that I've been able to do projects where they've been available."
Griffin said that since many of the local actors already know each other from previously working together, there's pre-existing trust in the rehearsal room and much more willing to explore and take risks than with actors who might be unfamiliar with each other.
Not that Griffin is against using out-of-town actors in favor of a Chicago-centric view of casting. Instead, Griffins said that he often wants to expose visiting performers to how strong the talent is in Chicago and how local actors work together with a strong sense of community.
"I have thought that out-of-town artists learn more from us more that we learn from them," Griffin said. "That overused word 'ensemble' in Chicago maybe gets a bad rap, but it is alive and working."
For more information on Chicago Shakespeare Theater's As You Like It, visit www.chicagoshakes.com . For more information on the Lyric Opera of Chicago's The Mikado, visit www.lyricopera.org . For more information on Marriott Theatre's The Music Man, visit www.marriotttheatre.com . For more information on Lost in the Stars at City Center Encores!, visit www.nycitycenter.org . For more information on Camelot at http://www.stratfordfestival.ca.
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