Anyone ever take advantage of Christmas or your birthday to give you a diet book? or a hair removal system? or mouthwash?
I worked for a director/producer once, who slapped a musical together in about half the usual time, partly to save money on our salaries, (3/4 of us had done the show for him before,) and partly because he wanted to jet off on a ski vacation.
He popped back in for one evening, and left several pages of notes, all of them general, all of them insulting.
At the end of it, it said something like, "Not all of you are guilty of all of this.".
He apparently cared about the show, but not enough to address any problems specifically, or to talk to an actors individually, (or maybe privately?) or, heaven forbid, to take the time for a brush-up rehearsal. (Sticking around another day would have required him to miss a day on the slopes, he'd only been in Tahoe or something, you see, but now was on his way to Europe.)
So essentially, he had dressed down all of us, in front of each other, even though, as he admitted, we weren't all guilty of whatever it was to which he objected.
Which we... well, we weren't sure what it was to which he objected, since his criticisms were so vague and full of buzz-words and cant, ("not in the moment", "making the stakes too high some places and not high enough in others", "not feeling the journey," etc.
The stage manager had no idea, either.
The upshot was that nothing much changed - except that anyone who hadn't already kind of despised him, (he was a lousy director, and a kind of dilettante who fabricated his resume - to what end I don't know, as he owned the company and didn't need to impress anyone to get or keep the job,) began to.
What was his purpose, I wonder to this day.
I suppose it's possible that the entire Curia suffers from each of the 15 - not sure i'd want to be around that many old guys with existential schizophrenia.
| "And watch out for that funeral face, you guys...." |
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