Farewell From the Roof Tops

Director’s Notes:

“Chapter 33 was one of the big climaxes of the whole piece: Lucha has to say goodbye to the illusions of ever knowing what happened to Jameson. She finds herself on a rooftop and sees and hears a trumpet player on a faraway rooftop, dressed as Jameson, and sings a distant duet with him. She turns a corner, and a trombone on another rooftop, also dressed as Jameson, gives her a second chance to say goodbye. At the end of this scene, she gets back into the elevator and claims a feeling of serenity so strong as to be almost supernatural: ‘I feel my powers now. The city is orchestral: I lift its baton.’

“Ellen and I worked on the dramatic arc of this scene perhaps more than any other. During the preview performances the scene ran as originally written: Lucha went in a tortured state to the top of the building to ritualistically cast off the memories of Jameson, and then emerged at the other end as a transformed and tranquil soul. Somehow that arc was too much to try and encapsulate in the relatively brief 10 minutes of the scene. Moving around the roof also made it difficult to truly follow the minor gradations in her journey towards peace – for those that were so transfixed by the sight and sound of the instrumentalists on the rooftops, they missed the character’s turning point, and the ride back down to street level was just confusing. Finally, the first version of the score was routinely 15 minutes long, and each chapter had to be precisely 10 minutes – including elevators up and down! – if it wasn’t going to throw the whole route into havoc.

“After we got the Red Route on its feet for its preview, we all went to work on staging the Yellow and Green Routes, which gave us a lot of perspective on what worked and what didn’t in time to make corrections. Once the entirety of Hopscotch was on its feet, it seemed clear that the chapters that communicated the most effectively were ones of isolated moments and atmospheres – less large-scale dramatic arcs and more essential states. Ellen and I agreed to have this piece framed by a sense of Lucha’s peace – her music on the way up to the roof and down from the roof expressed a similar acceptance, with the interlude on the roof as the last and perhaps most difficult disturbance. I loved the sense that enlightenment is a gradual process: even when the light-bulb turns on, there are relapses that still have to be overcome. To keep the chapter at a predictable 10-minute running time, Ellen made some internal cuts that kept the story and character clear. By the time we opened, the scene was as focused, direct, and strong as the other chapters.