Sean Graney, the Chicago-based director of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard, takes an approach to musical theatre that has been growing in popularity in recent years: Instead of a separate orchestra or band, the actors accompany themselves on instruments. This concept perhaps got its greatest exposure with Scottish director John Doyle, who staged an acclaimed 2005 Broadway revival of Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd with 10 actor/musicians.
Graney, founder and artistic director of The Hypocrites, a company dedicated to reimagining and deconstructing classics, saw Doyle’s production. In an interview last summer, he said, “I thought it was really cool and very inspirational.” So inspirational, in fact, that he went on to stage three Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with The Hypocrites—The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore—using the actor/musician hybrid. While Yeomen marks the first time he’s developed a show from the G&S canon outside his own company, all three of The Hypocrites’ prior G&S shows have gone on to other theatres: Boston’s American Repertory Theater has hosted all three, Pinafore had an outing at Actors Theatre of Louisville and Pirates played at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
But for the performers—some of whom may have no prior experience playing instruments—this directorial choice can be intimidating. During rehearsals, Yeomen cast members Kate Hurster and Jesse Baldwin, in separate interviews spoke about what it’s like to walk, talk, sing and play all at the same time.
Hurster portrays Elsie, an itinerant singer caught up in the madcap antics surrounding the imminent execution of Fairfax, a soldier-turned-prisoner. Baldwin, a longtime musician, plays what the script describes as Charming Yeoman. He is also the bandleader, which means he is responsible for keeping the musical arrangements—adapted from the original by Music Director Andra Velis Simon and Associate Music Director Matt Kahler—in tune over the eight-month run, since Kahler and Velis Simon return home to Chicago after the show opens.
Learning new instruments
Hurster had to teach herself guitar in a hurry for her role. “I had no prior experience with the guitar,” Hurster says. “I had a year or so of piano lessons when I was seven years old, and very little music theory in high school chorus. My father plays guitar and mandolin, both very well, and I grew up with him playing around the house and in church.” Hurster says she “picked up [a guitar] during a Yeomen workshop in September, received one as a gift from my dad in October, and I’m getting a crash course for the show. Actually, Jesse Baldwin has been giving me lessons, in addition to some FaceTime lessons with my dad.”
Other than that, Hurster says it was “mostly on-the-job training, since we rehearse six hours a day and play for much of that time. I work at home as much as my patience will allow. It’s incredibly challenging and very frustrating to learn this skill set in a short length of time. [OSF rehearsals run six weeks.] I think most people would expect to have mastered an instrument before attempting to play it in front of a paying audience.”
By contrast, Baldwin has extensive musical experience. “My musicianship was born out of freelancing, leaping from one instrument to another,” he says. “To be sure, it has made me an undisciplined player with plenty of bad habits. I certainly don’t excel at any instrument, but prefer to identify as a ‘useful’ musician: the utility player, the handyman.” For OSF, Baldwin played keyboards, guitar and accordion in 2013’s The Unfortunates and guitar and accordion in 2015’s Head Over Heels. For Yeomen, he says “I’m playing banjo, dobro, guitar, bass and an instrument that’s completely new to me: fiddle. Learning the fiddle in the past two months has been a terrific challenge that has taken me out of my comfort zone. It’s really helped me empathize with the other actors who are picking up their instruments for the first time.”
Those other performers are Leah Anderson on guitar and banjitar; Michael Caruso—like Baldwin, an experienced musician—on guitar, bass, mandolin and harmonica; Joseph Anthony Foronda on clarinet; Anthony Heald on flute, harmonica, baritone ukulele and spoons; Jeremy Peter Johnson on guitar; Michael Sharon on accordion; Britney Simpson on baritone ukulele, tambourine and musical saw; and K. T. Vogt on ukulele and percussion.
Challenging music
What does having the actors play as well as sing add to the show? “I don’t know if playing our own instruments necessarily informs the show of Yeomen itself, per se,” says Hurster, “but it does give the audience a unique thrill.” She worked on the 2011 OSF production of The Pirates of Penzance and notes, “It was some very challenging music to learn. I would say the same for this adaptation for our stringed instruments; it’s tough music to learn sometimes. What’s more informative is that the framing device of our immersive audience experience and the spaghetti-western setting lends itself to the playfulness that G&S requires, while also providing an almost Brechtian style to underline the ever-present G&S themes of status, politics and the righting of wrongs.”
For Baldwin, part of the fun is seeing what he describes as Graney’s expertise in “mining hidden talents and turning them into valuable currency. Did Tony Heald play the flute once upon a time? Great! Here’s a few ornamental flute flourishes that will help fill out this song.”
As for the specific country-and-western musical influences, Baldwin says that Velis Simon and Kahler provided “a list of artists who they used for inspiration, which included some usual suspects—your Carters, your Cashes, your Clines—as well as some less familiar names from the country canon.” Hurster cites June Carter Cash as her role model for the show.
But while the country flavor may not at first glance (or hearing) have a lot to do with the British setting of the original, Baldwin says “the Gilbert-and-Sullivanness of our production is inescapable. There are bombastic choral numbers, tender love ballads, hummable melodies and rapid phrasing that slips trippingly off the tongue. The charm of the source material is amplified in this fresh reimagining.”
And if some of the less-accomplished musicians slip up? Baldwin notes that the immersive staging means “Everyone’s in on the fun, even if there’s a dropped line or a blown chord change. It’s all very inviting and engaging.”