Calamity Jane

Shout It From The Highest Hills

Director Richard Carroll and actor Virginia Gay discuss the genesis of their production of Calamity Jane

First published in the 2018 Calamity Jane souvenir tour program

  Richard: Do you remember the first conversation we had about doing Calamity Jane? 

Virginia: Yes, indeed I do. Sitting in your sofa, in the apartment before the one you’re in now. We had just done High Society together and you said “I want to do a show with you - do you know… Annie Get Your Gun?” And I said, “I don’t”, and then you gave me the Bernadette Peters recording and I dutifully took it away to listen to it, and as I was leaving I think I said “Do you know Calamity Jane, because I love Calamity Jane and it sounds like it’s got similar themes in it.” And we were going to look at it for Neglected Musicals and it was going to be your second directorial… or was it your first one? 

Richard: The Neglected Musicals presentation of Calamity Jane was the first thing I ever directed, apart from a cabaret show - two cabaret shows.

Virginia: What a trial by fire! The very first thing you do, you have one day’s rehearsal! And then when we started selling Calamity Jane, we went from three performances, to five performances, to seven performances in the end. And that was when we kept looking at each other and being like, “Huh, people want to see this show.” This is a show that’s important to people - and the idea of us doing a kind of rough-and-ready version of it, there was enough interest in that to make us think.

Richard: Yes, and the idea behind doing it as a Neglected Musicals presentation in the first case was because we thought - or I especially thought - that the script was not strong enough and that the show was a bit dated and it wouldn’t work as a full production. I think you were more confident than I was at the start and …

Virginia: It was something that I was very fond of, so I knew the material a lot more.

Richard: Whereas I had just watched the movie as a kid and then came back to it once you spoke to me about it. And then we did the Neglected Musicals presentation and we had this wonderful experience where -

Virginia: God, what a treat that experience.

Richard: You are an actor who thrives on that kind of flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants just about every night - hell, what’s my next line? What the hell’s going on? Which a lot of actors don’t. But you were fantastic in the Neglected Musicals presentation, and you brought the character to life in a way that was really exciting - and that was a big factor in thinking about taking the show onwards. But also the liveliness of that experience and that whole feeling of ‘we’re all in this together’ - the audience and the cast are in this together - that was a big influence on what we then decided to do with the full-scale production.

Virginia: Absolutely right - and I remember us looking at each other again after one of the shows and going “If we just did this, but more …” This beautifully ramshackle, stripped-back, more audience contact - and then, when we started looking at doing the full production at the Hayes, you started to say this word which is like catnip to me: immersive.

Richard: Yes, I think there’s a couple of reasons behind that. One was the Neglected Musicals presentation, and the vibe of how much the audience got involved. But also, the fact that we were doing a show in the Hayes with 111 seats, we’re going to pay everyone properly. The show’s written for a massive cast of 35 people, there’s a big male ensemble, a female ensemble - and so I thought - well OK, we’ll have the seven principal actors, and then the audience can be the ensemble. So we had 20 audience members seated on stage, so they could be the customers at the Golden Garter, and so it came from that place of ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. And I remember standing in the Hayes with the General Manager and the Technical Manager when we had to do the ticket build, before the show was announced - and we had to talk about how many tickets we were going to sell onstage. And I was saying “OK, well, we’re going to have 20 people on stage. We’re going to have a table here, a table here, table here, table here…” And they were saying “Well, that’s not going to leave you any room to do the show”. I said “No, that’s where we do the show. We don’t want them at the edges and then leave space for the playing space. No, no, they’re in the show.” And thank God you guys made it work.

Virginia: My God, it’s such a treat to do the show - every time I think about it I get excited. But I remember you too, in the foyer one night while we were still doing the Neglected Musicals shows, coming up to me with just a very excited look in your eye, and going “One of the audience is Joe.” I’ll never forget it. “We’ll give him a neckerchief!” And I was like “How will… Joe has some important lines, how will we do it?” And you were like “We’ll give Joe the lines on a card!” You were hilarious. And other stuff that we found too when we were making the show - especially for Calamity. She’s this very gloriously transgressive character, and the person who is in and out of the audience the most, and who is contacting the audience, and God, it’s pretty weird looking back on this 1860s world through the prism of a 1952 musical comedy, through the prism of 2017 or 2018. And then when the big denouement happens in the second act, and Calamity sees Katie kissing Danny - at the same time as still being in that show - everything has to be incredibly real for her, and the stakes are real, and the audience has to also come on that journey with her. And if I was to mark one point that I think makes this production successful, it’s the fact that it’s both very funny and joyously irreverent - but so true. It treats our characters with respect. 

Richard: We were always faithful to the characters and the story. Whatever we did was our way of bringing that and them to life in the best way possible. We never went against the script or the story, because that would be a crazy thing to do, because that would not work.

Virginia: And that’s not why people go to the theatre. I remember finding that quite hard to navigate. It’s a difficult thing to be a fearless clown and a character who then goes from great joy and madness into very real stakes - and it’s a situation that we all know too, that feeling.  It’s a heightened situation, but it’s also a tenet of all dramatic comedies always - we know that feeling where you go “I thought this was for me, but it’s not for me.”

Richard: Talk to me about the character of Calamity, and why you respond to her so much and what you love about her?

Virginia: I love her so much. I love her! She’s like me at 14 - she’s like everybody at 14. I feel like she’s trying on versions of herself for size. She’s trying to fit into society, and she’s also so furious that she has to try and fit into society. I don’t mean to make her small when I say she has a child-like quality. There’s a purity of thought that comes with child-like, when you’re like “But why does it have to be like this?” That’s the thing that drives her. “I don’t want to play by these rules, but - at the same time - why doesn’t this beautiful thing love me, why, am I not good enough, is that not enough?” There’s a purity of her intent. She just goes so boldly for what she believes in, and I really love that. I love it so much, and so often you don’t get stuff like that as the woman - you get tempered stuff. But Calamity just refuses to play by those rules. She puts on all of the coats in the world that she sees. So she woos Danny, and she saves him, and she carries him - that’s just how she’s seeing love. She doesn’t see it as a gendered thing to love someone like that, and she certainly doesn’t see it as a way to emasculate him, or to make a love impossible between them - which of course this does to Danny. She just sees it as showing her love and saying “You are the most important thing to me. I will carry you into this room. I will clear a chair for you. I will tend to your wounds. I will do everything for you. Why doesn’t that make you love me? I can’t understand that. If it was a man doing this for a woman, she would love him.” I love the simplicity of that, because she has clear lines in a very complex world. And this is something that was very important to us too - she doesn’t become a thin woman and put on a dress and have a Cinderella story and then everything’s great – which is slightly how the final image of the film is. But also there’s all of this stuff actually in the film, leading up to the final image, and in the script - which is, she gets back into her buckskins, she rides again, she saves the day. She gets Katie. She’s so active. She has such agency – like, it’s unparalleled, this level of agency. The person who she reminds me of most is Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, but Beatrice is enough of a person in the world to have so much less agency. She’s a member of society - even though she’s on the outside, she’s still a member of that world. She’s the daughter of a noble person. She’s evolved as much as she can, but she hasn’t taken these bold steps away from what society thinks she should be, and Calamity just like bounds away from it. It’s beautiful to me. We made it very important that she’s performing an idea of masculinity. She’s performing what she can see as powerful around her in the first act, and she performs what she sees as powerful around her in the second act - which is she tries on a hyper-femme performance because she sees the power that Katie Brown has in the world. And she ends up getting married to somebody, she ends up getting married somewhere in between, like she’s picking and choosing, as we all do when we grow up. We try and view these performances of gender and then we go “I’m going to sit somewhere in the middle of this, and I’m somewhere on the scale, and I’m going to wear pants some day and I’m going to be really rough and ready. And then other days I’m going to be hyper-femme and I’m going to be on a red carpet and that’s all going to be a part of me as well.” But, yes, it’s lovely having Anthony Gooley in the show too because he brought a very unexpected version of masculinity to Wild Bill, and so we’ve got these two beautiful weirdos, these two real outsiders. Gooley’s theory about Wild Bill is that he’s a dead shot, he’ll kill you in an instant - so he can behave exactly however he fucking wants. He can be crass, and he can squeal and drop his hat because the man will kill you. He’s the fastest shot in Deadwood. So that’s another example of power and gender interplaying - because he’s got all the power, he doesn’t have to do any gender roles at all. He can do exactly what he wants. 

Richard: Yes, that’s so interesting isn’t it? And I love what you said about the combination of the masculine and the feminine. That’s really how we approached it in terms of - how do we navigate this storyline, which is about a woman who is very butch, and then experiments with being more feminine, and people respond so positively to that, and she ends up taking part in the patriarchal institution of marriage. And so I think there’s got to be an element where she has feminine traits as well as masculine traits, but she suppresses her feminine traits. She thinks that because she doesn’t feel comfortable in the world of femininity that society dictates for her, then her only other choice is to throw herself into the world of masculinity completely. And what she learns throughout the show is that she can be exactly who she wants to be, and that does involve some femininity as well as masculinity, and that she will be loved and accepted for who she is if she’s true to herself. And I loved that we see that vulnerability from her all the way through. That’s so important, because it shows us her strength. All through the first section of the show, we see her being teased and mocked by people for her masculinity and masculine traits, and I think it’s important that she’s not just a character who is 100% constant about who she is and says, I don’t care about what anyone thinks. It hurts her - and yet she’s still true to herself despite that. She won’t say “Well, I’ll just put on a dress and shut my mouth, so I don’t get teased anymore.” She will put up with the teasing and the hassle and being the outcast, because it’s just not an option for her to lock into normality.

Virginia: Totally. That’s another beautiful joy to play- she is so transparent. And she’s transparent to everybody on stage with her, even though she thinks she’s not- even though she thinks she’s covering up. But it’s so beautiful to be allowed to be so artless, to have no artifice. She just feels, and you see everything.