My Fair Lady's encore

The Encore! Educational Theatre Company is a tight-knit family that aims to teach the next generation and deliver quality entertainment.

By BARRY DAVIS
ELIZA DOOLITTLE (Miri Fraenkel) on the set of My Fair Lady (photo credit: courtesy: Brian Negin)
ELIZA DOOLITTLE (Miri Fraenkel) on the set of My Fair Lady
(photo credit: courtesy: Brian Negin)
‘Teach your children well,” sang seminal folk rock quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1970 in what was to become their trademark mellifluous watertight harmonic style. It is a tenet Robert Binder adheres to closely as stage director, chief cook and bottle- washer of the Encore! Educational Theatre Company.
The enlightenment component of the company’s official title is central to what Encore does. Binder says the theater company adopts a multi-pronged educational ethos. “We set out to educate young audiences by exposing them to the classics of the musical stage, as well as lesser-known works, and encourage them to be the theater-going public of the future. We also aim to train young people in theater crafts.” The latter are very much involved in Encore’s upcoming production of My Fair Lady, which will be performed six times at Jerusalem’s Beit Shmuel between May 29 and June 7.
I meet Binder and set designer Roxanne Goodkin- Levy at Encore’s jam-packed warehouse-cum-workroom- cum-rehearsal space in Jerusalem’s Talpiot commercial district. One of the walls of the long industrial space is completely taken up by several pieces of scenery for the new show, all lovingly created by, or under the guiding hand of, Goodkin-Levy. Along the opposite wall there is a large wheeled clothes rack groaning under the weight of several dozen voluminous costumes produced by Binder, all awaiting further attention in preparation for the impending show.
Both Binder and Goodkin-Levy are clearly enthused with their work on the new production – although “enthused” is probably something of an understatement.
“I’d say we’re more obsessed,” says Goodkin- Levy, hurriedly adding “in a good way.”
Encore is not just about Binder and Goodkin-Levy.
There is a small army of volunteers who help to build the sets, schlep, make the tea, make sure rehearsals run smoothly, sell tickets, recruit sponsorship and a myriad other tasks that go into presenting the public with a polished and professional piece of entertainment. Some, like Arlene Chertoff, combine several roles. Chertoff is responsible for Encore’s choreography, and she also chases up sponsorship and runs the box office. “She’s the only person I know who has equal command of both sides of her brain,” Binder observes. “She takes care of the artistic stuff and the practical side of things too.”
“Professional” is the oxymoronic operative word here.
In fact, very few of the people involved in Encore’s productions get paid for their labors. “Almost everyone involved here works on a voluntary basis,” says Binder.
“Everyone puts so much into it.” Here, the educational ethos comes to the fore once again. “We all learn as we go along, and learn from each other,” he continues. “I have learned so much since I started in this business.”
BINDER HAS been in “the business” for a long time and has quite a theatrical resumé. He has a BA in literature and art from Columbia College, a master’s degree in fine arts from the Yale Drama School and graduate degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
He was a founding member of the Mekorot Theater in the Old City of Jerusalem and established Bimadaf (“Page on the Stage”), for which he has produced and toured in puppet-and-people performances of Jewish tales throughout Israel and in North America and Britain.
In 1984, he founded the Jerusalem Gilbert & Sullivan Society, for which he has directed Cox and Box, Into Futurity, The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe and HMS Pinafore. In 2001 and 2004 he was invited, along with Encore musical director Paul Salter, to appear at the annual International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton, England.
Binder, Goodkin-Levy, stage manager and set construction chief Ronnie Burns, et al., have been giving their all to keep the Encore production quality flag flying high for quite some time. It is an all-consuming passion for everyone involved.
“Encore is a little over six years old,” explains Binder. “We produce two major shows a year – a Gilbert & Sullivan opera in December and a Broadway or West End show in the spring.”
Considering it takes five months to get a production ready, it doesn’t require an advanced degree in mathematics to work out that Encore is a year-round occupation.
It is not just a temporally engaging venture, either. “Over the years we have assembled a marvelous company,” states Binder. “It is not only an acting and performing company, it is a very tight-knit family.”
Burns also feels close to his fellow Encorists. “I live in Ramat Sharett and a friend once asked me if I wanted to move to Tel Aviv, but I decided to stay in Jerusalem because it would have meant I wouldn’t have been able to carry on working with Encore,” he says. “Encore is really like a family for me.”
Naturally, however much fun the bunch have and camaraderie they feel with each other, at the end of the day it is all about putting on an entertaining and professional show. Over the years Encore has produced well-received renditions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeoman of the Guard, the British pair’s lesser known Ruddigore work, and Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Like with anything, there are benefits and disadvantages to professionalism. “The experience of producing the show and performing the show is really unique,” Binder notes. “We are more or less devoid of big egos and prima donnas, and people really help one another. People who have had principal roles in one show are in the chorus in the next, and it’s not a question of what part they’ve played, it’s a question of being in the show.”
BINDER IS equally effusive about Goodkin-Levy’s contribution to the company’s output. Indeed, judging by the quality of the sets, which are close to the final stage of their aesthetic evolution, the Birmingham, UK-born designer puts all her talent, and probably several bucketloads of sweat, into her work.
“Roxanne has added so much to what we do,” declares Binder. “She came to audition, a few years ago, for the chorus of [Rodgers and Hammerstein musical] Oklahoma. One day she came along to a set-painting session and pointed out that, to be effective, the set needed ‘light and shadow,’ and the others just said ‘what?’. We didn’t know what ‘light and shadow’ was in those days; now we live ‘light and shadow.’” The Goodkin-Levy factor is clearly evident in the emerging My Fair Lady sets. “She has spent countless hours” – “and a few nights”, she interjects – “and many nights working on the sets,” says Binder. “That’s why we got the chaise longue [one of the props], so she could get some sleep,” Binder laughs.
“I love this work,” states Goodkin-Levy unequivocally. “I designed all the sets for HMS Pinafore, which was our last production in December, and we started on My Fair Lady straightaway after that, so we’ve been working on this since January.”
No detail is too fine for her, either. “She starts with a sketch and then she does a model,” says Burns, adding that sometimes his cohorts have fanciful notions. “They come up with all sorts of ideas, and I have to make them work.” That isn’t always the case. “Sometimes things just cannot be done, so I tell them and we work out something that is doable,” he says. “Ronnie sometimes says some things are totally impractical, and let’s see how we can get something to stand up and be safe,” says Goodkin-Levy. “Ronnie is very precise and he makes things very sturdy.”
Goodkin-Levy does get some help. “We have a marvelous crew of volunteers on Friday mornings, and we usually have between 12 and 20 people here painting and learning art from Roxanne,” explains Binder. “It is a wonderful learning experience for all of them.”
IF ENCORE is something of an obsession for Binder, Goodkin-Levy, Burns and the rest of the Encore gang, it appears to be a healthy affliction. “There is something very therapeutic in art and doing this work,” says Goodkin- Levy. “I teach art, mostly to senior citizens, and there was one woman who felt it was too much for her, but her doctor said that if she wanted to be well, she should come back to my art class.”
Producing immaculate sets for the shows also involves some serious detective work. “Roxanne has gone into such detail with her research, how street signs of London of the period would appear, and the signs of the pub. It is quite amazing.” Binder also does his fair share of investigative work before he gets down to working on the costumes. “I mostly get the clothes from a secondhand charity organization and then I individualize them for each of the performers and adapt them based on research of the period, and the clothes the different classes would have worn at the time,” he explains.
He certainly has his work cut out for him. “I have to improvise quite a lot – fit round pegs to square holes sort of thing. For this show we have about 200 costumes. I make them all. Everyone changes costumes two or three times during the show.”
Goodkin-Levy has no problems with Binder’s propensity for extemporizing. “He’s brilliant at it,” she says.
“And I have a part in this production, and I wear the best dress.”
There are also around 50 hats, one more splendiferous than the next. “We have a marvelous volunteer called Rachel Miskin who has made 25 hats for the ladies,” says Binder. “You need a big stage to get these hats on,” Goodkin-Levy observes.
The attention to detail in the sets is inescapable. The books on the shelves in the study of central character Prof. Higgins, for example, look so real you almost feel you can pull one out and leaf through the pages. The impression of depth and perspective is very convincing.
But one wonders whether all the painstaking work is worth it. Do the members of the audience really catch all that? “To me it’s important,” declares Goodkin-Levy.
“There’s a movement of people that like really simple sets, minimalists. This is a maximalist set,” she says with a laugh. “Look at this. This is a painted desk. This is trompe-l’oeil,” she adds with undisguised pride, describing the technique she employed to paint in very real-looking desk drawers with gilded handles that appear three-dimensional.
The mantelpiece over the hearth in the Higgins study naturally sports a couple of busts and other decorative pieces. “That’s a bust of Irish playwright [George Bernard] Shaw [who wrote Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based],” says the set designer. “And this is Pygmalion [the legendary sculptor who fell in love with the female statue he carved], who wants to bring his statue to life.” Binder goes on to explain that the character of Higgins in My Fair Lady attempts a parallel stunt by trying to turn Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady by improving her elocution. The study set also bears testimony to phoneticist Higgins’s efforts to streamline his disciple’s upward social mobility. “This is a phonetic alphabet developed by Prof. Higgins,” explains Goodkin-Levy pointing at a chart with strangelooking symbols painted onto the set. Even the study wallpaper got the royal treatment. “I wanted to have the Victorian style,” she continues. “I wanted it to look authentic.” It does.
Mind you, Goodkin-Levy doesn’t get it right every time, but she is always reading to following the advice of the better-informed. “This is supposed to be a crosssection of a skull with the vertebrae showing, but a dentist told me you don’t get vertebrae all the way up there, so I had to paint them out.”
By now it is abundantly clear that Binder, Goodkin- Levy and Co. are deadly serious about their theatrical work – but their professionalism does not preclude the odd humorous interjection. There are several visual quips in the sets, some more subtle than others. Goodkin- Levy kindly enlightens me about some of the smileinducers.
“In those days, people tried to hide the fact that they were hard of hearing,” she says, pointing out a painted object that looks something like Victorian theater binoculars. “This thing sticking out is a hearing aid attached to the theater glasses.”
Then there’s the name of the pub, The Men O’Raleigh, which at first glance looks faintly Gaelic. Nothing of the sort. “Robert likes to put a new connection into the shows,” says Goodkin-Levy while covering the two ends of the name, leaving the letters Men O’Ra – menorah – in view.
Binder says he draws great pleasure from the mix of people who get Encore productions off the ground. “We have such a diverse bunch of people, a full spectrum of people. We have no religious or political affiliations. A regular feature of rehearsals and even performances is an evening minyan. It is quite something to see a cast of men, dressed up as sailors or pirates or Beefeaters from the Tower of London, all davening [praying the] minha or ma’ariv [prayers]. Some daven, and others who don’t want to don’t. It is just indicative of how comfortable everyone feels as a group.”
However, it is not all roses. “We have an ongoing battle to fund the work,” Binder explains. “We have supporters and donors but it is a struggle to stay afloat.” He says there is a classic Catch-22 predicament: “If we were a professional company, we’d qualify for government support, but as a volunteer body we just have to do what we can.”
Binder, Goodkin-Levy, Burns and the dozens of volunteers have proven, time and again, that they are capable of delivering quality goods and they will, no doubt, do so again when the My Fair Lady business starts in earnest. ■
For tickets and more information: (02) 620-3463, 054- 578-9006 or www.encore-etc.com