BWW Interviews: Scott RC Levy, Max Ferguson and Cory Moosman Discuss Fine Arts Center's THE DROWSY CHAPERONE

Starting today, the Fine Arts Center is delivering a love letter to musical comedy with The Drowsy Chaperone, a show the New York Times praised as "a revved-up spoof of a 1920s song-and-dance frolic." At a recent dress rehearsal I was able to sit down with several members of the cast and crew, beginning with Scott RC Levy, director of the Fine Arts Center who is making his Colorado acting debut as Man in Chair, the character who guides the audience through the cast recording of the titular Jazz Age musical.

Christi Esterle: Why this show? What made you go onstage at this time?

Scott RC Levy: Those are two separate questions, actually. When I chose to do the show, it wasn't like "oh, so I can be in it," that wasn't the impulse. Really, I decided to do Drowsy Chaperone because we have a great tradition of doing Broadway musicals here at the Fine Arts Center and I find this one to be so funny and so loving of Broadway musicals. And then when I really started thinking about the casting, and I thought "you know, there's a lot of similarities between myself and Man in Chair, with this love of musicals." I got my BFA at NYU in acting, it's what I went to school for, and as artistic director in other theaters that I've worked in, it seemed like it's something that the subscribers and the community would like to see, the artistic director on stage. And it's great for me to be on that side of the wall also, to see what the operation is like backstage. So for all of those reasons, and because the part is so fun, I decided yes, I want to sit in a chair for two hours.

Christi: It is a very fun musical-it's probably one of my favorite scores in the past ten years, so I'm really excited that you're doing this.

Scott: It is a lot of fun-and really in the end that's what it is, it's just fun. [Man in Chair] even says that. It's just a good springtime fun time.

Christi: Do you have a "Drowsy Chaperone"--a musical that you keep coming back to?

Scott: Wow, I probably have more than one, but one that I do keep coming back to, that also keeps ending up on my short list of what to produce but never quite gets there is The Apple Tree by Harnick and Bock. It's one of their lesser known works, so that's one that I keep coming back to. I always love Stephen Sondheim, so you could put any Sondheim musical on and I'll be quite happy. If I were to go back to the period of the fake Drowsy Chaperone, 1928, something like O, Kay! or Girl Crazy, those early Gershwin shows. A Connecticut Yankee, the Rogers and Hart show, is one of this period that I really love.

Christi: The Drowsy Chaperone is kind of the polar opposite of Sondheim, where it's this light, silly plot.

Scott: Well, yeah, but it's so meta, it's so smart.

Christi: Yeah, the show-within-the-show is the light Jazz Age musical, but it also explores it on a metaficitonal level.

Scott: Well, and I think that this show could very well have been called something other than The Drowsy Chaperone. Because even though that's the show within the show, the show outside of the show-I don't know what it is. It's Man in Chair's one man show, practically. This started out as a stag party gift for this wedding, so I don't think anyone ever had any grand plans for the show, but it became such a wild hit at the Toronto Fringe Festival. It was in an era that was just before Spamalot, after The Producers, clearly before Book of Mormon,that was really beginning to make fun of theater. Laughing at theater I think is a fairly new thing. So it was just the right show at the right time.

Christi: You talked about similarities between yourself and your character. Could you go a little further into that?

Scott: Just purely this idea of love of music theater. We were putting up all this set dressing [photos and posters] today, and I was like "Oh, I know that person, I saw that show." It's interesting, Man in Chair was not played like this on Broadway, but the text suggests that he is Jewish, which I am, and I lived in New York for twelve years. I'm certainly not lonely like the Man in Chair is in the play, but being able to listen to a musical, listen to a record, even if I've never seen the show but be able to visualize the show and enjoy myself doing that is a core similarity. Also, I like records, I have a record collection, just like he does.

Christi: Do you have a favorite moment in the show?

Scott: There really are so many, that's hard. But what I'm really looking forward to is getting an audience in here. For the most part, that's who I have to play with. So that's going to be really fun for the next few days, to be able to have my acting partner in the room and figure out what's working and what isn't. I really love [Zach Guzman], who plays George, he's an amazing tap dancer, I love watching him. The Drowsy Chaperone, Amy Sue Hardy, is totally a hoot. There's a couple of songs that I'm able to just watch, and that's fun.

Christi: How does that feel, to be in this show but on the outside watching it at the same time?

Scott: Like I say, it's hard, because for most the time even though we're a company of sixteen actors, it's fifteen actors and me. So that separation is hard sometimes, but I've done one-person shows in the past, so I'm comfortable with that. I'll say that the separation between me being the boss of the company but also being part of the company has been really fun, and I've really tried my best when I'm in the rehearsal room to just be an actor as much as possible. And I've surrounded myself with people that I trust on the creative side here. I decided let's have Cory [Moosman] direct this piece, because if I was going to even explore this idea of performing, I needed to make sure someone's directing that I trust. Same thing goes with all the designers, I have a great team around me, so I don't have to be worrying and sitting out here looking at the big picture because I know there's so many talenTed Eyes doing that.

During a break in rehearsal, we got in a couple questions with Max Ferguson, who plays the role of Robert Martin, the romantic lead of the show-within-the-show.

Christi: How did you get involved with this particular production?

Max Ferguson: Well, I came back to Colorado Springs from New York City in 2009, and within not too long of having been settled again I started to audition at the Fine Arts Center, and sort of started just getting cast. In the 2010 season I was in four of the five shows, did three shows last season, this is my first time here this season but there's been a pretty steady relationship here.

Christi: You're playing Robert Martin, but also on another level you're the actor who was playing Robert Martin in The Drowsy Chaperone.

Max: Percy Hyman, sure. You know, this is probably not the thing I should be saying, but I haven't really given that much thought to Percy Hyman. (laughs) It's interesting to me, because in the text certainly the Man in Chair tells you some things about him, and there are a few moments where we're playing with the one-upsmanship, for instance, between the two leading ladies, the Chaperone and Janet Van De Graaff, the way they sort of step out of the script. So there's a little bit of playing with the mystified nature of that, and tailoring my approach as an actor to how I think Percy would approach the show, in terms of how I place it vocally and pull on those tropes from the 1920s. There was definitely some minstrel show research that I did as well.

At this point the actors were called to get ready for the dress rehearsal, but as the cast prepared I got to chat with director Cory Moosman.

Christi: I'm really excited to see this show; it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.

Cory Moosman: It is, and we're still in process, we'll process right up to opening night, as you do. It's such a deceptively big, scenic show, so we're going to be working right to the opening. It's really coming together.

Christi: Yes, on one level it all takes place in this little apartment, but on the other level it expands into the universe of the musical.

Cory: It's like you're doing a play, so you've got your play set, oh but then we're also going to do a musical so the play set becomes a musical set. They're usually two very different creatures.

Christi: The Drowsy Chaperone is an affectionate parody of musicals, it makes fun of a lot of the tropes and conventions but it also loves the genre so much.

Cory: Yeah, it's one of my favorite musical comedies because it's got the old warhorse musical comedy feel like [A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the] Forum, but it also makes fun of itself which makes you love it more. And then at the end of the day it still has a lot of heart to it. And that's the build of a great musical comedy-you can be fairly ridiculous throughout and then at the end you actually get a little bit of a story where you actually care about the characters. It's a very well-structured, well-written piece.

Christi: Has there been any particular challenges to this production?

Cory: We were very lucky. We got a really good cast together, and everyone's working really hard and everyone's a good comic actor, so we kind of lucked out. Knock on wood.

Christi: This is Scott's first acting role with the company. What's it been like working with him as an actor, as opposed to working with him as the fine arts director?

Cory: It's actually been great. He and I both, I think, had the question "What will this be like?"--me with what's it like to be directing the artistic director, and that'll either be really good or really bad. And him going, what's it going to be like to have someone directing me. It's been great, the whole process has been great; he's a blast to work with and has been very collaborative. It's almost like you're building two different shows when you do this, because you have the world of the show and all that cast, so that's stylistically one thing, but then with him it's like doing a different play so the way he and I work together is different than the way I work with the rest of the cast, because he has more room to organically fill things out. He and I have been able to take time as we go along and sort of fill in the gaps, and he can play around and discover stuff.

THE DROWSY CHAPERONE is playing at the Fine Arts Center now through June 2nd, Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30pm and Saturdays and Sundays at 2pm. For tickets, contact the box office at 719-634-5583 or visit www.csfineartscenter.org.

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