Lift every voice and sign. The musical 'Big River' takes Twain as its inspiration -- and speaks to deaf and hearing crowds.

From: San Francisco Chronicle - San Francisco,CA,USA - Jun 14, 2004

- Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Monday, June 14, 2004

Jeff Calhoun needed some light. The director of "Big River," the 1985 Broadway musical that opens a 14-stop national tour tonight at the Curran Theatre, had words of instruction and encouragement for his cast the other day at the beginning of a dress rehearsal. Under routine conditions, it wouldn't much matter if Calhoun spoke in darkness or murky half-light or if he were out in the auditorium somewhere using a microphone.

But there's nothing routine about this production, onstage or off. The only way the director or anyone else involved in the show can communicate is to make sure a sign language interpreter is present and visible at all times.

"This is a very hard show to tech in three days,'' Calhoun told his company from the house-level stage front, as a spot-lit interpreter standing beside him signed along. "It's very hard to look simple. You can't disguise any of your tricks. Right now it's all about wigs, sound and fast changes. But the previews are for you," Calhoun said to the actors on the day before their first public performance. "That's when the power's going back to you."

Launched by a niche theater in Los Angeles three years ago, this adaptation of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" takes the remarkable step of mingling deaf and speaking actors. The Deaf West Theatre production is performed simultaneously in both sung and spoken English and a theatricalized version of American Sign Language (ASL). The hearing as well as the seven deaf actors sign their lines.

In making the musical accessible to deaf and hearing audiences together, the show suffuses the William Hauptman libretto and Roger Miller music and lyrics with a transforming theatrical grace. Mark Twain's classic American coming-of-age story, about a canny, emotionally bruised white boy afloat on the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, takes on new layers of metaphorical meaning about the nature of the outsider, the bridge between races and cultures and the bittersweet yearning to pass, as one of Miller's lyrics puts it, "to the other side."

Huck is played by deaf actor Tyrone Giordano. Hearing actor Michael McElroy, whose performance on Broadway earlier this season earned him a Tony nomination for best performance by a featured actor in a musical, plays the slave, Jim. "Big River" itself was nominated for the best musical revival Tony (won by "Assassins" last week). Daniel Jenkins, in yet another linking gesture, returns to the show that made his name 19 years ago, when he created the role of Huck on Broadway. Here he doubles as Twain, who narrates the story, and the voice of Huck.

The show's distinctive theatrical language flows from beginning to end. After an initial adjustment to the dual information streams, a hearing audience not only accepts the two modes of expression but also feels them twining together. In the scene where Jim finally tells Huck that the boy's virulent father, Pap, is dead, McElroy's signs that describe the old man's corpse in the river become a balletic gloss of both finality and mercy. At one point in the rhythmically rousing number "Waitin' for the Light to Shine," the singers and stage band go still. The song rides on without missing a beat, driven by ASL's exuberant visual music.

Making this all work is both a technical and aesthetic feat, achieved by a team that includes Calhoun (Tommy Tune's "Busker Alley"), Deaf West Theatre artistic director Ed Waterstreet and a team of ASL masters. In addition to the demands of learning ASL (for the hearing cast members) and meshing with music they can't or can barely hear (for the deaf performers), the entire company must adopt particular strategies. Hands must be kept free of props whenever signing is required. Line deliveries must be directed out to the house to be read by the audience. The deaf and hearing actors who double as Pap (Troy Kotsur and Erick Devine) are joined by an elaborate choreography of subtle body touches, bumps and other cues to remain in sync on the dialogue and music while moving as naturally and pleasingly as possible.

"All the rules you've learned in the theater you have to reinvent," said Calhoun, who had never met a deaf person before he was invited to direct the musical "Oliver!" for Deaf West. "There are no shortcuts, and everything takes three times as long. What I don't know I try to finger spell."

One of the show's ASL masters is Linda Bove, best known as Linda the Librarian on "Sesame Street." Speaking through an interpreter, Bove kidded new touring cast members about some of the practical problems of the show. "Don't wipe off your beards with your signing," she said through an interpreter. "Don't freeze your face. Keep your expressions going."

Later, in an interview, Bove illustrated the challenge of the show by patting her head and rubbing her stomach at the same time. "They're speaking two different languages at once," she said of the actors, "and they don't have the same syntax." The conventional subject-verb-object word order in spoken English is often subject-object-verb in ASL, which means the actors are frequently speaking or singing one word or phrase while signing another.

Furthermore, the show's creators have tried to reflect the character of Twain's 19th century language, by way of the Hauptman book, with occasionally antique signs and diction.

During a reverential hymn, for example, the actors refrain from touching their own bodies to suggest a higher degree of formality. And it all must be done in a way that is both emphatic enough to convey the sense of the lines and fluid enough to blend choreographically.

Technical riddles, in the theater, are best solved by exploiting their potential. And so it is with "Big River." In ways that may be clear to ASL- fluent audience members and subliminally present for others, the show seeks to enrich rather than merely translate meaning.

Betsy Ford, an ASL master who specializes in musical productions, points to the way the word "traveler" is signed at one point in the show. By substituting a more elegant, vertical hand shape for the word's finger-cramped sign, the creators supply the religious connotation of the word "pilgrim" that anticipates a sacred allusion at the end of the song. The "other side" destination in a lyric is rendered in ASL as "Heaven." The deaf audience gets the song's payoff first. The hearing audience tags along in time to the music.

With its sophisticated musical theater rhetoric, "Big River" demonstrates the expressive richness and suppleness of ASL. It puts the lie to the wide assumption, as the show's deaf star Giordano puts it, that "ASL is not a real language." Harmonized here with spoken and sung English, sign language flourishes as a poetic medium particularly well suited to the theater. With the exception of "Children of a Lesser God" (Broadway's last major sign- language production, in 1980), touring appearances by the National Theatre of the Deaf and other sporadic forays, most audiences haven't experienced it.

Dining heartily on steak and brisket during a rehearsal dinner break, Giordano, McElroy and Jenkins discussed their involvement in the production. An interpreter was there to help, but the show's principal cast members conversed with a mix of sign language, facial expressions and subliminal accord that sometimes rippled right past an observer.

Jenkins said he was initially reluctant to "return to something I had already done." But once he realized that this would be "a complete rethinking of the material," he signed on for the Broadway production. Giordano, who originated the Huck role at Deaf Arts West, then rode with "Big River" to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Broadway and the national tour, mentioned the ASL "signposts" he and Jenkins have worked out to coordinate their co-voicing of the character.

"I think of them as punctuation," Jenkins put in. "But really, after a while, it's less about looking for them than knowing the other person's rhythm. And that, because this is live theater, changes from night to night."

Giordano grinned impishly at that. "ASL," he said, "is a language you can play with so much."

Idioms and Twain's droll humor present a particular, succulent challenge. "ASL is many things," Jenkins said, "but it's not necessarily dry." Finding a sign equivalent for a line such as, "It's enough to make a body ashamed of the human race" is something they're still refining. Giordano demonstrated his sly, illustrative sign-coinage for a Twain line about touching off a powder keg "just to see where you'll go." Giordano invented his line, in part, to connect to both the hearing and deaf audiences.

McElroy learned sign language in a six-day "boot camp" before the Broadway rehearsals began. "I tried to learn it like choreography, first for clarity and connection. The emotion of what I was saying with my hands came later. It's still developing -- the way you clip or sustain a sign." Because the show is playing larger houses on the road than it did on Broadway, he added, some signs have been eliminated and others simplified.

"My life will never be the same for this experience," McElroy said.

At one point during dinner, Jenkins gazed down at his plate and looked briefly overwhelmed. "ASL will never come fully clear to me," he said. "I'll never do an ASL face while delivering an English line."

Giordano, who wears hearing aids offstage but not while performing, glanced over at Jenkins and nodded. The ASL face, he explained, is an elusive, complex set of facial cues and subtleties that binds the non-hearing community. He went on to talk about the technological advances -- in text communication and cell phones -- that have ameliorated life for the deaf in the 21st century. "But we also haven't entirely gotten beyond this idea that deafness is a race or that we are somehow a broken people," Giordano said.

No Broadway musical is about to accomplish such a social miracle on its own. But in an evening that sends a deaf boy and a black slave drifting toward their futures together on a raft, a poignant melody rises from "Big River." Here, on the broad, deep Mississippi of Mark Twain's invention, eyes, hands and voices are hopefully joined.

Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The musical by Roger Miller and William Hauptman, adapted from the novel by Mark Twain, opens tonight and runs through July 10 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets: $30-$85. Call (415)512-7770 or (874) 474-4TDD (TTY) or go to www.ticketmaster.com.

E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle