Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
August 27, 2009
Mwata Bowden
Ma Rainey calls out “I’m trying to listen to my voice mail!” Levee, nearby, has discovered middle G on his trumpet and is plugging it long and hard. Meanwhile, Cutler is having less luck with his embouchure, producing a sound in his trombone that sounds something like dying water fowl.
On any given day, the rehearsal room for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom sounds less like a room full of professional actors and more like a room full of eager 5th grade band students. That’s because none of the actors in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom actually play the instruments their characters play (except our Ma Rainey, Greta Oglesby, who does actually sing in the performance, and quite beautifully too). All of the instrumentation will be dubbed in using a sophisticated sound design.
That may seem like the ultimate cop-out in a play all about the blues and authenticity. But as Ron has pointed out, it was always more important to August Wilson that the play be done by actors first, musicians second. “If you can get an actor who can play, that’s great,” says Ron, “but not a musician who’s not an actor, because these characters are deep.” In one production he saw, the director used actual musicians who could really play the music, but it compromised getting the right actors for the part.
Still, these actors need to know how to convincingly appear to be really playing their instruments. Enter Mwata Bowden.
Mwata Bowden
Mwata is the Director of Jazz Ensembles at the University of Chicago (his faculty page is here). He’s best known around Hyde Park as the Director of the Jazz X-Tet, an ensemble of university students and Chicago professionals who tackle innovative and experimental jazz pieces. He showed up at the end of yesterday’s rehearsal to give each actor a crash course in their respective instruments. The cast seemed delighted to have him there, and soon Mwata began giving style tips. (AC looked over the moon when Mwata taught him how to spin his upright bass.) “It’s all about the body language,” explained Mwata, and he directed actors to find a groove where they could improvise and feed off each other like real musicians. It turned out that details like eye contact and body language are much more convincing than finding the correct string to pluck. I’ve not yet seen Mwata with his own band, but in his afternoon at Court, he proved to be a natural theater director!
Mwata with A.C. Smith (Slow Drag)
Mwata and Director Ron OJ Parson
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