Those who decide to bolt from their seats, bound for the parking garage, right after the final scene in “Mamma Mia” should be forewarned. They’ll miss a party-hearty hunk of the performance.
Nightly in London, where the show that showcases the hit tunes of the ’70s pop group ABBA is sold out through September 2001, folks in the audience are on their feet for the seven-minute curtain call. They wave their arms, dance in the aisles and sing to a booming reprise of “Dancing Queen” and the show’s title song while colored lights rake the house.
Just when you think the show is over, another show has begun.
“Mamma Mia,” scheduled to open at the Cadillac Palace in May, is one of a number of successful productions with curtain calls that take audience members on a theatrical ride.
Among those shows with an unexpected bonus are two currently running in New York: the hit revival of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” with a heart-charging curtain call that transforms the cast into a big, brassy marching band, and “Contact,” the Tony Award-winning dance-play that ends with an exuberantly sensuous swing-dance number.
These curtain-call extravaganzas, with emphasis on the “extra,” are reminiscent of another crowd-pleasing closer many Chicagoans may remember — the 12-minute “Mega-Mix” dance-athon that capped performances of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” starring Donny Osmond. That show had a hugely successful 16-month run here from 1993 to 1995.
“We danced our little buns off in that curtain call,” said former Chicago actor Blake Hammond, who played the comical, plumpish brother Napthali in “Joseph” (remember his cartwheels?) and now appears in “The Music Man.”
But the great-granddaddy of knock-’em-dead bows is the final number in “A Chorus Line,” according to Dominic Missimi, head of Northwestern University’s musical theater program and director of “The King and I” currently at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire.
The “Chorus Line” reprise of the production number, “One,” with dancers in white tails and top hats, is “perhaps one of the most fabulously crafted concepts of a curtain call ever created,” said Missimi. “One by one we see the characters re-enter the stage, and the final moment is not a bow but the kick line as the light is fading and the music is mounting. By then, the audience is beside itself.”
Curtain calls are almost always tidy little events, with actors lining up, locking palms and briefly bowing to the people sitting in the dark. The audience expects to applaud briefly, then go home. Taut little dramas, in particular, call for spare bows. But certain splashy musicals seem to beg for a bigger ending that offers an opportunity for cast and crowd to connect, to even whoop it up together. And many innovative directors relish a chance to add a distinctive finishing touch.
Said Missimi, “[Directors] sometimes want to build a curtain call to elicit a standing ovation.”
Elaborately staged curtain calls are particularly appealing to audiences because they come as a delicious surprise, according to Broadway dance star and actress Karen Ziemba, who won a Tony last June for her performance in “Contact.” She calls the production-number curtain call at the end of that show “a last-minute dessert” — like a plate of handmade chocolates that arrives unexpectedly at the end of a fancy meal.
The curtain call is “the jaguar cat leaping off the hood, the last thing you remember,” said Broadway veteran Rex Smith, who recently starred in “Annie Get Your Gun” at the Shubert Theatre. That boisterous set of bows included cowboy-hat tossing, a child’s back flip, and a reprise of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with the audience clapping along.
Still, for many productions, the curtain call is almost an afterthought. “It’s often the very last thing a director does and that is usually at the last rehearsal before you open,” said Judy Kuhn, who starred on Broadway in “Les Miserables” and played the title role in Steppenwolf Theatre’s recent production of “The Ballad of Little Jo,” directed by Tina Landau. For another Landau musical, “Dream True,” that starred Kuhn, “Tina never did get around to staging a curtain call.”
Tony Award-winning choreographer and director Susan Stroman, by comparison, could be called the Queen of Curtain Calls. Shows Stroman has choreographed — “The Music Man”; “Contact”; the Kander and Ebb revue “And the World Goes ‘Round”; and the Gershwin musical “Crazy for You” — all have meticulously crafted, big-deal curtain calls. According to Tara Young, Stroman’s associate choreographer for “The Music Man” and “Contact,” Stroman “explained her vision” to the cast for the spectacular “Music Man” curtain call “on the first day of rehearsal. There is a famous line in the show: `I always think there’s a band, kid,’ [spoken by traveling salesman and con man Harold Hill] and she wanted to create that band onstage every night for the audience to enjoy.”
At what seems to be the end of “The Music Man,” which opened on Broadway last April, cast members take bows and exit, with Northwestern University graduate Craig Bierko, as Hill, leaving the stage first. At the conclusion of the bows, as people in the audience are gathering purses and programs and starting to depart, he returns to an empty stage in an eye-popping red uniform.
The conductor in the pit tosses a drum major’s baton to Bierko, who blows a piercing whistle. Then cast members, who have just done lightning-quick changes into band uniforms, march back onstage, playing instruments, for the Finale Ultimo: a brassy, full-blast, precision drill performance of “76 Trombones” that takes the audience by surprise.
“Beginning the first week of rehearsal,” said Blake Hammond, who plays the baton-twirling member of the show’s barbershop quartet, “we would rehearse the show all day, then have band practice from 5 to 6 p.m. About three to four weeks into the rehearsal process, we all got together to hear what we had, and it was horrible. We all fell down laughing at this bunch of actors playing instruments.”
Said Young, “We taught everybody not only how to play instruments, but also traditional military-style marching steps: marking time, forward march, about-face and pivot turns. The piece works really well now because of the precision. And the one thing that has really improved over time is the cast’s ability to play the trombone.”
The big marching band finale also includes cymbal crashes, bass drumming, baton twirling and the unfurling of a gigantic American flag. “Some people in the audience stand and march throughout the curtain call,” added Young.
In “Contact,” still playing to sold-out audiences at New York’s Lincoln Center, performers appear in three “playlets” with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of electrifying dancing.
“Swinging,” inspired by the famous painting, “The Swing,” by the French artist Fragonard, features a lady in voluminous skirt, an aristocrat and a servant who become entwined, literally and figuratively, on and off a swing. In “Did You Move?” Ziemba is a submissive 1950s housewife stuck with her boorish husband at an Italian restaurant, where she dances her fantasies when he leaves the table on sour-faced prowls for dinner rolls. The concluding “Contact” focuses on a distraught advertising executive (Boyd Gaines) who finds new meaning in life after he meets a seductive girl in a yellow dress at a dance club.
After Gaines takes a bow, “people start leaving up the aisles because they don’t know what’s coming,” said Ziemba. Then the late 1960s Van Morrison hit, “Moondance,” starts, she said, singing the first line: “Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance.” She called the swingy song “romantic, jazzy, sexyand playful.”
The entire cast — including the creme de la creme of Broadway dancers — comes back onstage for a bonus number lasting several minutes that has “hand-in-hand swing dancing with a little soft shoe, ballet lifts, pirouettes and big flourishing dips with the men bending the girls back to the floor,” said Ziemba.
Stroman’s choreographed curtain call reinforces the overall point of the production, which is “all about individuals making contact,” added Ziemba. “It’s a celebration, with everybody dancing together, and the audience gets a chance to share in that celebration.”
If the “Contact” curtain call is a dance party on stage, the “Mamma Mia” curtain call is a party throughout the theater. “The audience feels it is their moment,” said the show’s London-based producer, Judy Craymer.
Craymer is careful to separate the curtain-call celebration of ABBA tunes from the musical, which is “not the story of ABBA, but is an original musical with a proper book,” she said.
In it, a young woman named Sophie is about to be married on a Greek island where her mother, formerly the lead singer in a pop trio called Donna and the Dynamos, runs a small hotel. Looking for her biological father, Sophie discovers her mother’s diary, with details about three ex-boyfriends, and invites all three to her wedding, hoping to discover which may be her dad. Twenty-two ABBA hits are neatly woven into the story.
At show’s end, Sophie sings the wistful ballad, “I Have a Dream,” and disappears in a mist with her new husband as the lights go down. Then the party starts, with lights flashing and cast returning to the stage for reprises of “Dancing Queen” and “Mamma Mia.”
The disco-party curtain call has been so successful in London, where the show has grossed $56 million in ticket sales since it opened in April 1999, that a third ABBA tune, “Waterloo,” has been added to it for the show’s North American run.
There is one problem, however, with a curtain call that puts the audience in a party mood. They don’t want to leave.
One night early in the London run, said Craymer, “cast members were in their dressing rooms, almost changed to go home and they could hear people yelling, `We want more. We want more.’ So we had to create a line to use as an announcement after the company has left the stage and orchestra finishes the `play-out’ music: `Ladies and Gentlemen, Donna and the Dynamos have left the building.’ “
Added the producer, “That was the only polite way we could think of to get people to go home.”
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE: COOL CURTAIN CALLS
DO NOT LEAVE YOUR SEATS (UNTIL IT IS REALLY OVER)
Barely bowing: At the end of the musical version of “The Full Monty,” which recently opened on Broadway, the six lead men end up “butt-naked” in the final number, though particulars are concealed by a well-timed lighting effect, according to Andre De Shields, one of the six.
Then they run into the wings, slip into white terrycloth robes and return to the stage in what seems to be a continuation of the show. But on a particular musical cue, said De Shields, the six suddenly “grab hands and rush down to the edge of the stage, which literally causes the audience to rear back in their seats, because after witnessing the Full Monty, they’re not sure we’re not going to come off the stage into their laps.
“We come to a screeching halt, at which point they clap, they scream, they hold their faces, they hide behind their programs,” added De Shields.
“And we just make sure the robe stays closed.”
Shakespearean Riverdance: Shakespeare doesn’t usually have the audience clapping in time, but that is what happened during the musical “after-bow” staged by director Joe Dowling for last winter’s acclaimed Chicago Shakespeare Theatre production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
After traditional bows following the soliloquy by Puck that ends the play, the entire cast hopped into a quick-stepping jig, said Timothy Gregory, who played the lead roles of Theseus and Oberon in the production. “It was a sendup of `Riverdance,’ and a reprise of a number danced earlier in the play-within-the-play that made the audience roar,” he added.
“We ended with arms up in the air, just like they do in `Riverdance,’ and the audience burst into applause again,” recalled the actor.
Frozen actors: Dominic Missimi, who often directs at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre, ended a production of “1776” several years ago there with “the famous freeze of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. After the final enormous clang of the bell, the audience clapped wildly for the beautiful tableau,” said the director.
“But after a minute or two, we turned up the house lights with the actors still frozen on stage. The audience didn’t know what to do. They thought, at first, that perhaps a mistake had been made and the actors had been accidentally left onstage, with no blackout to get them to their dressing rooms. Gradually, they realized the actors were not going anywhere, and they would come to the edge of the stage to peer into their faces.
“Slowly, the ushers would clear the audience so the actors did not have to stay frozen for more than eight or 10 minutes. It was a fabulous effect. On the other hand, the actors were not amused at having to stand there with people looking up their noses. I think [cast member] Kurt Johns stopped speaking to me after that curtain call.”
Skirtless: Actor Blake Hammond said his “most embarrassing curtain call” occurred during a production a few years ago of “A Christmas Carol” at Drury Lane Oakbrook. “I was playing Fezziwig and also a charwoman. In the curtain call, when I took a bow as the charwoman, I turned around and stepped on the bottom of the skirt. Down it came and there I was in my white jockey briefs . . . “
