How the British Play, put on by American, Colombian, Korean and South African players in Korea became The Scottish Play

(The title is in reference to the bad luck that follows that play, and how it seems to have found us, though we are totally innocent of speaking the name of that show during the entirety of our misadventure. We have put a moratorium on all Scottish accents involved in the production, just to be safe).

(This was in my classroom. The Korean on the bottom says, "Rebecca I love you")

So, Internet, I have been doing this show, this Gilbert & Sullivan show, The Pirates of Penzance or The Slave of Duty. It is a delightful show, full of the tongue-in-cheek Britishness for which G&S are so well-known. We started off, as I believe I have noted here, with only one month to get ready for our first performance, for a camp of multicultural children (which, in Korea, means a kid who is not Korean enough to be with the others, and must be sent to a special place far away from the real Koreans to get to know its place in the world with its own kind). I was the stage manager, a role rife with the liaising with actors I had assiduously avoided for so long by being a pure techie...

... Sorry, I lost my train of thought. There is an adorable baby next to me. I find its smile and giggly bits distracting. I don't want one, but this is the first public transportation baby I have ever seen so well behaved. Anyway, back to our story!

We probably should have known that this was too good an opportunity for Murphy to pass up. A month to take total G&S newbies and make them performance ready? Our casting alone miscarried when the dude we wanted for Frederic turned out to be leaving the country right after our first performance, so we couldn't use him for the others (off of which we laughably hoped to make money). So we had to get a different guy, one who, we later found out, couldn't read music. He also lived hours away and was a miserable memorizer. Not an auspicious beginning.

Our rehearsals were held in the basement of a home for the mentally infirm. By and large, the residents were very nice, and the pastor who ran the place was an exemplar of generosity. There was, however, a woman who worked there who took (what I consider) an unreasoning dislike to me from the very start. She would yell in Korean at me and slam doors in my general direction. She was unpleasant. The residents also sometimes got very much in the way, and occasionally upset about the disruption to their routine. Still, most after a while smiled when they saw us and said hello. (Annyeong!)

We couldn't seem to get suitable building materials. We weren't building a full-scale model of Manhattan or anything, but we did want two 3-step stairs. Alas, the materials we had bought (at great expense - building stuff in Korea ain't cheap) were too flimsy to distribute over two cases, and we could only build one. Props acquisition was slow and difficult (Korea is not overrun with Victorian English props and costumes, imagine that!) and costumes was complicated by the presence of personalities with notions counterproductive to our aims. Things got done eventually, rather than efficiently.

Then, the cast. The Wards were spot on practically from the beginning, though one of them promptly got sick and lost her voice. The gentlemen were plagued by absences and a lot more complicated choreography. So we worried. Oh, and our production manager went on vacation, so half of our preparation time, I was both stage manager and production manager. During most of these weekends, I stayed at R's apartment, often with Frederic and the props mistress. Frederic snores and the props mistress talks in her sleep. Also, R has a baby and two dogs. They were not restful times, and they were all the respite we had from 15-hour days. (The actors didn't go for 15 hours, but the behind-the-scenes people did).

And then the medical problems. Our older, more portly, Major General had a heatstroke. I spent one rehearsal day mostly with him in the ER, which I don't at all regret as he is a charming and wonderful man and I felt very bad for him, but it did throw a bit of a wrench in. He lost quite a bit of what he'd memorized, and was very understandably weak on his pins after it. Our sick Ward still had no voice, but her role had been sort of farmed out to other wards and she still came to rehearsal faithfully. It appeared we would have a rough, but ready, first performance. Luckily, it would be for children, who are a forgiving audience as these things go.

Three days before the show was due to go on, I was woken by a phone call from the props mistress. "[the director and Pirate King] has been in some sort of accident," she said, "I'm a little vague on the details, but I thought you should know."

"Thanks." I said. At the time, I meant it, in the sense that yes, I did like to be kept apprised of things like that. (She also reports that I said, "That might be the worst news I've had all week. Or month. Maybe year." which was not inaccurate). Afterwards, I would have given anything not to be the person people call. Call they did, all day long, and the following picture took shape: R had been hit by a car while riding his motorcycle, sustaining an open fracture of the leg. We were down a Pirate King with three days until the first performance. (For those unfamiliar with the show, the Pirate King is a distinctly non-trivial role).

As we took stock of our options, it transpired that none of us had really ever considered something happening to R. We'd never had understudies for anyone, but we had especially never worried about R, up to and including not always writing down his blocking. He was the director (we thought), he had good instincts (we thought), he'd be fine even if he invented the whole thing on the spot! He would not, it seemed, be fine if he had to invent it from the hospital, which is where doctors confined him for a week at the very least. So our options were: M, the production manager, who had just returned from what had been intended as vacation but had turned out to be a miserable trip to Chicago and who had never been asked to look at the PK, only Samuel and Major General; K, a policeman and pirate baritone who would be vocally very well suited but whose absence it would prove difficult to work around, and me.

The reason I (sopraniest soprano you ever did see) was on this list is that I had memorized the show. The whole show. I could do all of it by myself with puppets. I'm not particularly proud of this, it was mostly a byproduct of running lines with Frederic who was such a miserable memorizer that I spent about an hour and a half every weeknight being every part except Frederic, and feeding him his own lines about half of that time. I was the last resort, for obvious reasons. I spent all that day fielding calls, making calls, doing emails, working (I was at work), and telling myself it would not come to that. M and K had all day to figure out if it was even possible for them to memorize the whole role in two days.

M called that night, saying he could walk it, but couldn't talk it. K called the next morning to say that regretfully, he couldn't memorize it in the time allotted. R called from the hospital the next afternoon to say that I was it. So, the Thursday before our Saturday performance, I became the Pirate King.

This is the face I made.

Here ends chapter 1 of our saga. To follow: opening night.