My questions for ask BK Day.
How much do you rely on audience response of your stage work when it tweeking and shaping it?
First off, congrats on the reading. If something is really obviously not landing with an audience I usually know that instantly and change it as quickly as I can. If I feel it's an actor problem and that something isn't being delivered correctly, I'll wait until I hear it done the way I want - if it still doesn't land, I change it. I talk about this stuff a lot in the book. I am rarely stubborn about anything, but sometimes I just feel that something can work if I tinker with staging and delivery and sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm wrong. But if audiences are clearly not getting something or clearly restless I can usually see why and fix or attempt to fix.
I talk about the very first public staged reading of The Brain, where the Kritzerland designer came up to me and said it was the most perfect reading he'd ever seen and to not change a thing. I just looked at him, thanked him, and said "Are you insane?" Because after two performances I knew that one character had to undergo a complete metamorphosis, another character had to have major adjustments, and another character was playing the same joke in every single scene. All that stuff changed instantly. One song was clearly horrible (the original Donna and Rod song was a duet and very 50s and blechhh). Days before we actually did the reading I knew that Zubrick didn't have the right song and David Wechter and I just looked at the character and figured out what it needed to be about, and then I wrote All About Men in about twelve minutes, in it went, and it killed from the beginning.
So, I'm actually willing to do whatever needs to be done. That said, audiences can be deceiving. For What If, we had amazing audience reaction at almost every performance, but there were some where the audience just sat there - well, that happens and you can't go rewrite your show because some audience had a bad day or a bad dinner or was drunk. That happens at every B'way show, including the biggest hits. In the end, though, it's your show and you have to be true to your intentions while trying to make it appeal.
