BILL IRWIN & DAVID SHINER: Old Hats

Bill Irwin and David Shiner Collaborate With Tina Landau and Nellie McKay for Old Hats World Premiere at Signature

By Kenneth Jones
06 Dec 2012

Bill Irwin
Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Old Hats is the name of the new work by clowning Tony Award winners Bill Irwin and David Shiner, who will appear in the show's world premiere by Signature Theatre Company starting in February 2013. Tina Landau directs the work, with music by retro-pop star Nellie McKay, who is also featured in the production.

Irwin, the renowned clown, is an alumni playwright from Signature's past. This presentation is part of the Off-Broadway's continuing effort to showcase work by alumni, in its Legacy Program.

Performance of Old Hats begin Feb. 12 toward a March 4 opening on The Irene Diamond Stage within the Pershing Square Signature Center on West 42nd Street.

According to Signature, "2003-04 Playwright-in-Residence Bill Irwin reunites with fellow clown David Shiner for a new work combining their inimitable magic, slapstick, and hilarity. Using music, technology, and movement, plus other tricks up their sleeves, Irwin and Shiner create another wild and remarkable outing of theatre for a new generation of audiences. Signature is proud to present this dynamic duo's first collaboration since the smash Broadway hit Fool Moon."

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Tina Landau directed Off-Broadway's Civil War Christmas, Floyd Collins, Dream True, In the Red and Brown Water, Iphigenia 2.0, Wig Out, Mary Rose, Saturn Returns, Orestes, Trojan Women; La Jolla Playhouse's Beauty, Cloud Tectonics and Marisol; Actors Theatre of Louisville's 1969; Broadway's Superior Donuts and Bells Are Ringing; and many other productions.

  The design team includes G.W. Mercier (scenic and costume design), Peter Kaczorowski (lighting design), John Gromada (sound design), and Wendall K. Harrington (projection design). David H. Lurie is the production stage manager.

Production support for Old Hats is provided by the Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation and the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater.

All tickets for the initial run of the production (to March 31) are $25 as part of the Signature Ticket Initiative: A Generation of Access. Tickets go on sale Jan. 8, 2013.

The Pershing Square Signature Center is located at 480 West 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues.

For tickets and information, visit signaturetheatre.org.

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Bill Irwin is a Tony Award winner for playing George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? His many Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional stage productions include The Goat or Who is Sylvia, opposite Sally Field; Waiting For Godot with Nathan Lane, for which Irwin was nominated in 2009 for a Drama Desk Award; The Tempest opposite Patrick Stewart; Texts for Nothing; Largely New York; The Regard of Flight; Garden of Earthly Delights; Accidental Death of an Anarchist; and the Tony Award-winning Fool Moon, which he created with David Shiner. He was Playwright in Residence for the 2003 Signature Theatre season. He was Mr. Noodle on "Sesame Street."

David Shiner made his American debut starring in the renowned Canadian Cirque du Soleil and toured North America in Cirque's Nouvelle Experience from 1990 through the spring of 1991. American-born David began his career on the streets of Boulder, CO. In 1981, he moved to Europe and honed his craft on the streets of Paris, Rome, Florence, London and Munich. He then began performing in Europe's most prestigious circuses, including starring in the German National Circus' Ronacalli and the Swiss National Circus' Knie. Between circus engagements, Shiner and partner Rene Bazinet toured Europe in a two-man show. In 1993, 1995 and 1998, Shiner starred with Bill Irwin and The Red Clay Ramblers in Fool Moon (Tony Award for Unique Theatrical Experience), touring the show throughout the U.S. and Europe. He also starred on Broadway as The Cat in the Hat in Seussical The Musical. Shiner's home base is Munich.

OKIDOK

JAMES THIERREE: Article by Jenny Gilbert

In Chaplin's footsteps: How James Thiérrée became vaudeville royalty

James Thiérrée is the scion of vaudeville royalty. Just don't tell him that he's the image of his grandfather...

By Jenny Gilbert

VIEW GALLERY


If anyone ever had good reason to want a nice quiet job in a bank when he grew up, it was the young James Thiérrée. From the age of four, alongside his three-year-old sister, he spent his childhood appearing in theatres across Europe and North America as a piece of luggage that sprouted little legs and ran around.

The show was his parents' own Cirque Imaginaire, a novelty in the late 1970s as one of the first circus shows to do without sawdust and trained animals. Its successor, Le Cirque Invisible, pushed the envelope further, and British theatre-goers of the late 1980s who managed to find their way to the old Thames-side venue The Mermaid may recall – along with memories of an elfin gymnast who turned herself into fantasy monsters by carrying quantities of chairs, and an older man with a dippy Harpo Marx smile who performed opera with his kneecaps – an uncommonly pimple-free youth, his long wavy hair flaring out in a halo, soaring about on bungee ropes like the Angel Gabriel. It was almost certainly that performance that gave Peter Greenaway the idea of casting the teenaged Thiérrée as Ariel in his 1991 film Prospero's Books.

James is lumbered with performing ancestry: his dad Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée gave up a career on the classical French stage to develop his musical vaudeville act; his dancer-cum-designer mother Victoria was the third' of Charlie Chaplin's eight children with Oona O'Neill, herself the daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. So, at an early age, he had to decide to do something defiantly ordinary, or seize his genetic fate.

In the vacant tearoom of a smart hotel in the French city of Lyon, where Thiérrée is touring his new one-man show Raoul before bringing it to London, he is, by his own admission, wiped out with exhaustion, yet strong physical family traits still shine through. His face echoes his grandfather's fine-boned wolfishness. His dark hair is the same vigorously curly mop, which at the front is prematurely blotched with silver (he turned 37 this year). Even slumped in an armchair, shod in orange trainers, Thiérrée's light frame has the high-tuned look of a body that can do pretty much anything its owner asks of it, be that descending a long ladder by slithering slowly head-first between alternate rungs, or tripping over a non-existent ruck in a carpet, only to bounce straight back up and trip over again. But if you think this sounds like stuff you've seen before, perhaps in a black-and-white silent film, you are only partly there. Thiérrée's medium is an amalgam of live theatre with elements of vaudeville, circus and dance – and you can forget about Cirque du Soleil, too. Those terms hardly begin to describe Thiérrée's celebration of low-tech, high-impact stage design, its extraordinary atmosphere, or the existential questions it lightly touches on.

"I'm still trying to find the rhythm of the new show," he confesses. "Having done three previous shows with a cast of four or five people around me [all these shows have travelled to London in the past 10 years], being alone on stage each night feels hugely different – a liberation in its way, but daunting."

Strictly speaking, Thiérrée isn't alone on stage. Raoul, the fictional hermit whose wordless story this is, makes his first entrance scrambling on to the stage from the stalls as if it's the last ridge of a mountain range he has had to cross to reach his home, a precariously constructed giant tepee of scaffolding poles. Wild-eyed and dishevelled, Raoul may be returning from fighting a war, or fending off global meltdown – we never know. What we do soon discover is that an intruder – an impersonator, even – has stolen his identity and inveigled his way into his hearth and home. To his fury and dismay, Raoul finds himself usurped.

The sleight-of-hand comedy Thiérrée mines from this situation is at once frenetic, unsettling, hilarious and profound. In the hand-to-hand combat that ensues, the audience keeps thinking the invader is about to be unmasked (as indeed, he is, repeatedly), but each time it is Thiérrée's face and body that emerge, raising the outlandish possibility that Raoul/Thiérrée really does have a doppelgänger.

More whimsically, Raoul also entertains various non-human visitors, fantastical creatures fashioned from scrap materials: a crayfish immaculately crafted out of industrial metal tubing; a giant jellyfish in shimmering antique silk; a skeletal wading bird made from frayed string; and, most fantastic of all, a spectral, life-size fabric elephant. You never see wheels or pulleys or a body inside. Part of the beauty of each scuttling or lumbering creature is its seeming self-locomotion.

Thiérrée loves the sense that, exquisite as these objects are, they're the result of someone sitting down with a needle and thread. He's also a stickler for using outmoded theatrical machinery, so no electronics. The movement of the cloth we see in the opening – a vast Gericault-like tableau of swathes of grubby sailcloth – is all controlled with cords and counterweights filled with sand. But why make life so difficult?

"Because the result is warm, and operates on a human scale. It's the same with the props. They're all things picked up in flea markets and salvage yards, with a sense of having lived a life already. You just can't compete with film and computerised imagery, so I deliberately go in the opposite direction." That's why, in a flying sequence near the end of the show, he has the lighting swing round to show the stage hands manipulating the flying crane, with Raoul, oblivious, doing his soaring through a night-sky bit, strapped to the other end. What the audience gets is a layered reality. By showing the mechanics, the routine is doubly interesting, yet the magic remains intact.

While Thiérrée himself takes the credit as set designer – along with lighting design and musical direction – it was his mother he invited to devise and make the creatures; clear evidence, if any were needed, that her son is perfectly at ease picking up the family baton. They are hardly in each other's pockets these days, though: James lives with his girlfriend in Paris, while his parents are based in Burgundy. And given the amount of time they spend on their separate tours (missing each other by a matter of weeks in London, this time round) they see each other rarely.

"People assume it must have been a problem for me, my parents being such a global success and my choosing the same creative line. But just as my father was an actor who taught himself clowning, and my mother a dancer who taught herself other skills, I've also taken bits and pieces from all over. We're all bouncing between different disciplines and I've perhaps moved further away from circus than they have. My only responsibility is to the audience, in taking them to a place in their heads where they don't feel quite secure. It's tempting to rely on rewards for comic effects, because that's immediately gratifying. But Raoul isn't meant to be pure comedy. I try to think of it as a moving sculpture, with comic moments." That said, some of the funniest at Lyon's vast Maison de la Danse passed so solemnly that my yelps of mirth had to be muffled, if only out of politeness. "Oh, that's typical French," Thiérrée quips. "They think it's terribly serious as I used the Schubert quintet on a loop earlier on, and they didn't feel they'd been given licence to laugh."

Be that as it may, the moment involved Thiérrée's character slithering stealthily down a scaffolding pole with extreme control, then bouncing vigorously on his backside when he reached the bottom, as if having fallen from a great height. Isn't that the very area of sly humour, based on subverting expectation and undermining physical laws, that his grandfather traded in as a performer?

There is a faintly hollow sense of victory in getting Thiérrée to admit that, yes, if you must, some of what he does could be seen as Chaplinesque. He is, after all, entitled as an artist to carve out his own path, not to have to retread the tracks left by a man he can barely remember. But then, as Thiérrée properly points out, Charlie may not have been the first to do those Chaplinesque gags either. He, too, was working within a genre, applying his skills to standard vaudeville tropes. Tradition, as Thiérrée describes it, "is like a strong wind at your back. You don't necessarily pay it attention, you just feel it."

I ask him, as a final throw, whether he intends his curtain calls as a tidbit tossed to fans who have come hoping to witness some directly channelled Charlie-isms. It is indeed a delicious moment when Thiérrée comes bowling on like a blown leaf, running and twirling in tiny irregular steps as if imminently about to trip over both feet, at once delighted and a touch affronted to see how many people have been out there watching him all along. And it does come across as a truly Chaplin moment.

Thiérrée's brow darkens. "Did it really look like I meant to do that? Then I must look again at those curtain calls. That was me just having fun and messing about. I really don't want anyone to think I'm making a reference. I don't want people to think that at all."

FRANCESCO BEELOO & SHEPPERD CLOWNS: Karate Entree (2005)

OTTO GRIEBLING: Haruki Murakami Quote

"I've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I'm not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I've carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry."

-Haruki Murakami

 

This Murakami quote makes me think of Otto Griebling.  This photo of Otto makes me think of the Eric von Schmidt and Rolf Cahn version of the song He Was a Friend of Mine.

GALINA & SONNY HAYES

DON CHRISTIAN & BIANCA: Cirkus Maximum

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Jacko Fossett

Jacko Fossett and Little Billy Merchant

Happy 90th Birthday today to Mr. Jacko Fossett

Jacko Fossett

Clown from the world's oldest circus clan

Jacko Fossett was Britain's best-loved clown, with a career that spanned nearly 60 years. When asked what were his happiest memories under the Big Top and in the enchanted sawdust ring of the circus, Fossett's response was straightforward. "They were all happy memories. I was lucky to have been born in the business. I have no regrets and would do it all again."

The man who became Clown Jacko, known to his many friends as plain Jack, was born Robert George John Francis Fossett into England's oldest circus dynasty. The son of a clown, also known as Jacko, and a wire walker, Maria Proctor, he first saw the light of day in Hull in 1922 where his parents were appearing at the famous Hull Fair. By the time he was about eight he was performing in the ring himself, following in the footsteps of his sisters Margaret, Louise and Emmie, who all became trapeze artists.

"When I was six years old," said Jacko Fossett,

I remember my father as a clown, making up his face in the caravan. He made the white colouring out of zinc and lard, a stick of red for his nose, and the black for his eyes came from the soot in the chimney.

There was no designer theatrical makeup in those days.

Jacko's earliest years were spent with his Uncle Bob's show, Sir Robert Fossett's Circus, and with Chapman's, a leading circus in the 1930s. While Jacko was at Chapman's, his father died and he was packed off to school in Northampton, the home of the Fossett clan.

Of the Fossetts, many of whom still populate the circus world, he was fond of saying, "It's not a family, it's a disease." It is the world's oldest circus clan, and at one time it was said that every circus in Britain contained at least one member of the family, who are noted for their red hair.

Jacko Fossett's happiest days before the Second World War were spent with Chapman's, earning 12 shillings a week for a daring trapeze act with his sisters. He was appearing in Morecambe when war broke out, and soon afterwards he enlisted, serving in the RAF and being posted to Ensa.

Ralph Reader was producing shows to entertain the troops, and Fossett found himself in the company of performers who later became great stage and television stars, among them Peter Sellers, Cardew Robinson, Dick Emery and, his best chum at the time, Tony Hancock. Fossett already had a desire to be a clown, and performing in comedy skits with these artistes developed his abilities, so that when he came out of the forces he joined the circus of his cousins, Bobby and Tommy Roberts, as their principal clown.

He stayed with the Robert Bros Circus for 14 years, despite offers from Bertram Mills Circus. He was not only principal clown, but its tent master too, and nightly got kicked around by a mule, and performed in a comedy boxing bout with a very lively kangaroo. "When the kangaroo died, I cried like a kid because it felt like I had lost one of my family," he said.

When Bertram Mills Circus finally persuaded Fossett to sign a contract, he entered the world of "big time" circus. He travelled with this prestigious show until its tenting circus closed in 1964 and worked at Olympia, London, with it until the final season there in 1967.

Fossett was invited to appear in Denmark with Cirkus Schumann, 1966-69, and then went to Cirkus Benneweis. After seven summer seasons in Denmark, he was back in England, spending six years from 1973 in Great Yarmouth at the Hippodrome Circus. After the closure of Mills' seasons at Olympia, he was invited to work at Belle Vue, Manchester, and appeared there from 1968 until 1982.
But Fossett, along with his long-term clowning partner Little Billy, a British dwarf comic who worked with him for years and with whom "I never had an argument", was always in demand for work with top circuses around the world. He worked in Munich for Germany's biggest circus, the Circus Krone, run by Carl Sembach, whom he had known before the war at Chapman's Circus, and who had courted one of Fossett's sisters. He was in Paris with Cirque Jean Richard, in Italy with Circo Enis Togni, in the huge winter circus of Vienna, in Puerto Rico, and in 1983 was in Australia with "The World's Greatest Circus Spectacular".

He said that his worst experience on the Continent was when he left Circus Krone in Munich to join Jean Richard. "I'd paralysed them in Munich, we went so well . . . and then I went to Paris, did the same gags, same acts, and died a terrible death." Of all circus acts, comedy is the thing that travels least well. What appeals in one country does not always go well elsewhere. Luckily, British clowns have often found success abroad.

In 1983 Fossett went to the prestigious International Circus Festival of Monaco for Prince Rainier, but on the opening night he was despondent at the reaction he had had from the rather starchy audience and asked the ringmaster to help him. Together they worked out a way of presenting his Anglo-Saxon humour to advantage, and he ended up a success.

Fossett's biggest ambition had been to appear as a clown at the Blackpool Tower Circus, where his idol Charlie Cairoli had starred for nearly 40 years. He got his wish in the summer of 1990, but his success was short-lived. He had already suffered a number of minor heart scares but in the middle of the Blackpool Tower season he had a major heart attack and doctors advised his retirement from the ring. The old trouper was, however, well enough to return on the final night of that season, the recipient of a special award from the Circus Friends' Association of Great Britain. Ten years later, the showmen's newspaper The World's Fair gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award at Blackpool.
Jack Fossett retired to Skegness with his wife, to the bungalow they shared with his wife's twin sister.

He had married Constance Reid in 1960, having courted her for some two decades. Connie and Marjorie Reid had toured in variety for 25 years as the Reid Twins, one of Britain's leading novelty acrobatic acts, and Fossett waited patiently until variety and music hall were dead, and the girls' own careers over, before marrying Connie.

And, although Connie became the butt of many of his jokes in the circus ring, theirs was an ideally happy marriage. She was indeed a long-suffering partner, especially in bed. "I used to lie in bed at night," he recalled, "and a gag would come to me. I'd have to wake up my wife Connie and she'd have to write it down in case I forgot it by the morning."

D. Nevil

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON QUOTE

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

CLOWN ALLEY: Barbara Mandrell with the RBB&B Blue Unit

BOBBY KAYE: Roxbury Candy Ad

BUSTER KEATON: Steamboat Bill Jr Storm Scene (1928)

STINKY! Joe Besser with Bud Abbott & Lou Costello

CLOWN ALLEY: Hagenbeck-Wallace (Circa 1930s)

This looks to be from the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. The clown cop on the far right is Jojo Lewis, next to him with the saxophone is Paul Jerome. Emmett Kelly is next to Jerome in the spotted derby. The tramp next to Emmett with the clarinet looks like he might be Mark Anthony but he's far too old to be. Behind them might be Roy Barret.

Down front with arms outstretched is Jerome's pal, Bill Ward's uncle and longtime Ringling advance clown, Earl Shipley.

The whiteface playing clarinet at Earl's left hand may be Frank Luley. The whiteface trombone player at the bell of Frank's clarinet is Horace Laird and next to Horace is Billy Rice. I'm not sure about the other whitefaces.

I *am* sure that, in the center, that is Otto Griebling in drag.

Potential Bumper Sticker

CURRENT CIRCUS REPORT?

If there is anyone out there with the current issue of CIRCUS REPORT, and wouldn't mind scanning the photo of me, I would very greatly appreciate it. I'd like to see it!

Thanks,
Pat Cashin
cashincomedy@yahoo.com

KARANDASH

Mikhail Nikolayevich Rumyantsev (Russian: Михаи́л Никола́евич Румя́нцев) (10 December 1901 – 31 March 1983), better known under his stage name Karandash (Russian: Каранда́ш which means pencil), was a famous Soviet clown. He was a People's Artist of the USSR, and was the teacher of the famous Russian clowns Oleg Popov and Yuri Nikulin.

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