“It’s very immediate here. Nobody’s lying around,” declares cabaret performance icon John McDaniel, currently holding forth at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.
That’s a funny thing to hear about an idyllic seaside retreat like the O’Neill. But for more than half a century, the center has used a bucolic sprawl of green lawns and quaint cottages — adjacent to a beautiful town beach — as the location for intense artistic collaborations. A big, old-fashioned barn and other buildings have been tricked out to become professional theater spaces, with professional lighting and sound systems and comfortable seating.
Top-flight national theater talents flock to Waterford every summer. The center hosts several different “conferences” of theater artists each summer, all of them designed to aid the development of new scripts. The National Playwrights Conference and the National Music Theater Conference are the best known, but there are also gatherings for cabaret performers, puppeteers and theater critics.
The O’Neill Theater Center has been around so long that it’s set a standard for how new works are developed. Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute took the O’Neill model and applied it to film.
The O’Neill conferences allow writers to work in peace on their latest projects, and share their work informally with fellow artists at the center. Just as importantly, the playwrights (and musical theater book-writers and composers, and puppeteers, and cabaret artists) have an opportunity to perform their works-in-progress to the public at large, usually through readings.
Many of the readings take the established form of actors sitting in chairs, their scripts resting on music stands. That’s a well-proven, effective way to get a new script “on its feet.” Some go further. At the National Playwrights Conference in July, the play “Laura and the Sea” by Kate Tarker was staged and blocked around a couple of work tables. The reading took into account the abrupt changes from one location (an office) to another (a boat).
The O’Neill Theater Center’s series of summer conferences wraps up this week with the final days of its 2016 Cabaret and Performance Conference. For the past four years, the cabaret program has been overseen by the celebrated theater composer/performer/accompanist/conductor/producer John McDaniel. His credits include helping create cabaret shows for Patti Lupone, Tyne Daly and others, serving as musical director for the Broadway musicals “Catch Me If You Can” and the 1999 Bernadette Peters revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” (which he also produced), and leading the house band for six seasons of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” during which he became a theater-geek hero for playing extremely obscure show tune melodies as lead-ins to the commercial breaks.
McDaniel has an extraordinarily busy career, but in a phone interview earlier this month, claims that helming the cabaret conference is “one of my favorite things I do. It’s so joyous and positive.”
Given the distinct nature of cabaret performance, the conference can take different approaches than the O’Neill’s more script-based and textually inclined playwrights and musical theater conferences.
“It’s a mixed bag,” McDaniel says, “a combination of professional artists who do shows all the time and the cabaret fellows who study and take master classes with those artists.”
McDaniel says the established performers learn as much as the novice ones. “I walk away every year having learned a whole bag of tricks. A lot of it is about getting people outside of their comfort zone. What they always say at the O’Neill is, ‘Risk, fail and risk again.’
“One of the fellows last year came to the conference with a very specific idea of a show she wanted to do. I saw her perform a few months later, and instead of that show, she had come up with a whole new show, with all new people.”
The 2016 Cabaret Conference began Aug. 3, with performances.
The Cabaret Grand Finale concert, featuring “guest artists and fellows from throughout the conference” concludes the conference on Saturday, Aug. 13.
“I’m excited about all the shows,” McDaniel says. “…The audiences here really get it. They know what a special little place this is.”
THE CABARET & PERFORMANCE CONFERENCE runs through Saturday, Aug. 13, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’ Dina Merrill Theater, 305 Great Neck Road., Waterford. All shows are at 8 p.m. Tickets for the Wednesday Thursday and Friday, Aug. 10 to 12, performances are $40 for general admission or $55 for premium “table seating.” Tickets for the Cabaret Grand Finale on Saturday, Aug. 13, are $50. Information: 860-443-5378, theoneill.org.
