3 directors face challenges with start of new season

For Marc Robin, Gary Griffin and Sean Graney, three award-winning directors at the helm of some of this season's most anticipated productions, the fall brings some unique challenges.

For Robin it means getting the first crack at re-imagining "The Producers," one of the biggest Broadway shows in recent memory. For Griffin, who made his Broadway debut with the hit "The Color Purple," it means returning to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to stage an intimate production of Stephen Sondheim's "Passion." And for Hypocrites founder Sean Graney, who is directing Joe Orton's "What the Butler Saw" at Court Theatre, it means moving up to the majors.

The Daily Herald spoke with each of them recently about the challenges and rewards of staging these shows.

Marc Robin, director of Marriott Theatre's "The Producers"

On Marriott securing the show's regional premiere: "They have proven in the past they've been successful in that they take shows, make them their own and breathe new life into them.

"By virtue of the fact that it's in the round, it inspires you to think out of the box. There's an inherent guarantee the show will be revitalized and re-imagined in some way."

On re-imagining a show that has emerged as a Broadway phenomenon: "For me it's easy, ignore it. Ninety-nine percent of the time that works because you're not trying to re-create someone else's work.

"If you talk to people who've seen 'The Producers,' 99 percent of them ask if you're doing the walker number. To which my response is: 'If it says they enter with walkers in the script, I'll do it.' "

On "The Producers" appeal: "This is the biggest, the boldest Broadway-style, classic musical theater show. It will appeal to anyone who loves that big, glitzy, flashy, in-your-face entertainment … It's classic musical comedy at its best.

"What excites me the most is not that it's the first production (outside of Broadway). It's that I know people who see it will leave happy. With everything that's going on in the world now, there's a part of us that wants to escape. This is a great way of doing it."

Gary Griffin, director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's "Passion"

On CST's scaled-down version of a show he calls Sondheim's most intimate: "It will give us an opportunity to present it and get (audiences) close to it musically in a way that can be very evocative.

On "Passion's" appeal: "The great thing with all of Sondheim's works is that if the show is done well, it always reveals new things. A lot of the time, that's something we as directors get credit for, but it's all Sondheim. His work is timeless. Here you're able to take that in, in an intimate space with actors who bring new colors that we haven't seen before."

On what he hopes audiences take away from the production: "I hope audiences find or rediscover a love for (Sondheim's) work. That's what happens to me.

"The show has a lot to say about how much of our perception of beauty and our perception of people's capacity to love is almost a prejudice; how people who frighten us can have a capacity for great love and how that changes how we relate to them."

Sean Graney, director of Court Theatre's "What the Butler Saw"

On directing at Court Theatre for the first time: "It's a great opportunity to direct on that scale. The challenge is the challenge of making any play. You have to have a strong, well-thought-out relationship with the play: Where you are and who you're doing this for."

On the involvement Graney, who is also a set designer, has with Court's design team: "A director's main job is to unify the production so I feel it's important to be present and involved in all the artistic decisions being made. It's going to be slightly different from most Court shows, but they're open to us trying anything."

On making a once-shocking, mid-century play relevant to today's audiences: "The problem of the play, which is a great play and very funny, is that people read it and think it's dated in dealing with sex and homosexuality.

"I think with the right treatment, it can be as shocking and freeing as it was in the late 1960s.

"The play to me is about repression and the dangers of repression … I think we're still repressed, but we're repressed in different ways, maybe even more than society was in the late 1960s.

"We're repressed, but we think we're not repressed."