Brazilian Bomb
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Settle began to realize the production had problems when she discovered the set construction was running a week behind schedule; the construction shop, located in a slum of Rio de Janeiro, wasn’t equipped to handle such a massive undertaking. “Brazil is a hammer-and-nails culture,” quips Eric Snodgrass, the show’s sound designer. “They don’t know from power tools.” According to Settle, conditions in the shop were so poor that the set designer developed a severe lung infection while helping to finish the project. Costumes for the show were late as well, because the seamstresses were in no hurry to finish their work. “They knew that the more hours they worked, the more pay they would be able to take home,” Settle explains. Because the set was late, Massine had to cancel the first week of a two-week run in a 2,600-seat theater. Settle had been told she’d have eight days to tech the show, but she wound up with only three, scrambling to incorporate the scenery, lighting, and costumes before opening night.
Settle learned, perhaps too late, that Massine’s big-time operation wasn’t so big. He’d never staged a show in South America, and his partner, Marco Lemanski, was a wealthy Brazilian with no experience as a theatrical producer. According to Snodgrass, a review from a Curitiba newspaper convinced Massine that the show was too loud, and while Settle was out of town he ordered Snodgrass to lower the volume. “When I left Curitiba, the show was rock ‘n’ rolling,” Settle recalls. “But when I returned I felt like I was in church.” She also discovered that Lemanski was giving his own notes to the cast. “There are no unions and no rules and regulations in Brazil to protect directors from this sort of thing,” she says. As the show listed into the red Massine and Lemanski turned on each other, and three weeks into the Sao Paolo run they closed the show and sent the cast back to the U.S. for Thanksgiving. The production was scheduled to tour Rio, Buenos Aires, and other South American cities, but in early December, Settle got word that the tour had been canceled. “It would have cost a fortune just to move that set from Sao Paulo to Rio and get it loaded in.”
Last week the board of directors for City Lit Theater Company met to consider the fate of the financially strapped company. (As reported here last month, the company has scrapped plans to produce adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Lefcourt’s The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story.) City Lit might stage some coproductions with other companies while it tries to regroup, and its education outreach programs have managed to stay in the black, so they’ll continue for the foreseeable future. “We’re exploring several possibilities,” says Mark Richard, artistic director, “but shutting down the company is still entirely in the realm of possibility.”
