A Conversation with Dean Drieberg
on Australia's Sondheim repertory company, Watch This
It’s a pleasure to welcome Dean Drieberg to The Sondheim Hub. Dean is co-artistic director of Australia’s first and only Sondheim repertory company, Watch This. We discussed Australia’s Sondheim landscape, the challenges of maintaining a musical theatre not-for-profit, and Watch This’s latest production, Color and Light. Our conversation begins below:
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It’s so good to meet you. I’d love to start with Watch This. How did it start, and what does it exist to do?
Of course. Watch This was founded by Sonya Suares, and it’s a group of music theatre artists, performers, directors, creatives, who all have a collective adoration for Stephen Sondheim. What we wanted to do is create something that didn’t exist here, which is an indie, not-for-profit, grassroots company that would present the productions of Sondheim in different spaces—mostly intimate venues.
In Australia, we only ever see Sondheim’s productions presented by large national opera companies, state opera companies, or large main-stage or commercial productions. We weren’t getting independent productions of Sondheim’s work, and in fact, independent music theatre at that time wasn’t really a thing in Australia. It just wasn’t viable compared to straight plays. It was so rare. There were a few companies that would do a show here and there, but there wasn’t a collective of artists who were doing paid independent theatre.
The first production was Assassins in 2013, performed at a venue in Melbourne called 45 Downstairs, which is pretty much a basement gallery. It attracted some really strong names in the industry. What attracted them was the opportunity to play roles that they don’t often get to play, and to do a style of production that wasn’t really seen in Australia. It was a great success, and it ended up touring to regional venues around Victoria.
The other aspect of the company that’s really important for me to mention is that we have always made our productions accessible to audiences. So even right now, our average ticket price for our shows is $50, which would be about £25 [$33 US]. Commercial theatre prices go into the hundreds. It was so important to give people who wouldn’t spend $300 on a ticket access to see Sondheim’s work in an intimate space.
That’s so commendable. Tell me a little about the practical challenges of maintaining a not-for-profit repertory company like this for more than a decade.
The model that we work off is an equal honorarium system where every person working on the production is paid the same fee. We fund our productions through a mixture of applying for government grants and a circle of donors who donate yearly to our productions. We try every avenue possible to raise the funds. We always make sure that we can pay everyone first, and then we just need to break even on the costs. And of course, if there’s a little bit of surplus at the end, that assists the following year’s production.
My co-artistic director, Melanie Hillman, and I, we actually spend a lot of our year filling out government grants, reaching out to philanthropic funds, keeping our donors and our supporters engaged—rather than the actual creative dreaming up of the shows themselves. We’ve done all sorts of things to keep people engaged and invested in our company. But it’s not easy, and every time we do a show, it may be our last.
There was a big boom in independent music theatre in Australia around 10 years ago. More companies were doing it. And a lot of those companies no longer exist, because they can’t afford to. So we’re really proud that we’ve lasted since 2013.
Your latest show, Color and Light, is an original revue. Is presenting his work in new or surprising ways something that’s particularly important to you as an organization?
Creatively, we want to try and cover the entire Sondheim canon. As I said, every show may be our last, so if this is our last, what do we do? And so we thought, let’s do something that encapsulates all of Sondheim’s work. We didn’t want it to be one of the existing revues. We wanted to really put our mark on Sondheim’s work. Because we are a Sondheim repertory company, and we’ve produced so many of his works in the past, we have a great audience that have followed us through the years—so we wanted to give them the experience of revisiting some of the shows we’ve performed before, and also give them a taste of how we might approach things in the future.
We call the piece Color and Light, obviously as a nod to Sunday in the Park with George. That was to talk about the artistry of Sondheim, and the range and depth to his work. What we wanted to say to audiences is that you can take certain pieces of his work away from a particular show or character, or you can change the gender of the performer, and it still stands.
And we felt like it was a really great representation of our company, because we tend to take our own bold swings at Sondheim shows, and not perform them necessarily in the way that they’ve been performed before, or how people might expect to see them. That goes to the production concepts, and also how we cast our shows.
In Australia, Watch This was one of the first companies that was actively inclusive of people of color being able to perform Sondheim’s work. And from the very first production of Assassins in 2013, that’s something that has become really important to us as well. I don’t like the term color-blind casting. It’s more about color-conscious casting, and we think about the dramaturgy of what it can mean when you hire someone for a certain role. What does that add to that character and their story and their truth?
For Color and Light, we started by asking the actors for their Sondheim wish lists. Then my co-director, our music director and I also drew up our own. And then from there, we started piecing it together. What are the songs that we can take away from story and character that will still stand alone? And also, what are the songs that we absolutely have to perform, that audiences would riot if we didn’t do?
I think one of the things that has drawn audiences to our productions more generally is the timing of them. When we did Assassins, there hadn’t been a major production of Assassins in Australia for years. We did Pacific Overtures, and I don’t even believe that’s ever been performed here.
In terms of Sondheim’s work being performed in Australia, there is a kind of ongoing opera production of Sweeney Todd that has been touring here for years. But other than that, it’s quite rare that we get a main-stage production of Sondheim. There’s never been necessarily a boom of Sondheim’s work in Australia, so I think we’ve always had a point of difference.
Where did your own Sondheim spark come from?
It was my uncle, actually. From a very young age, I was a huge music theatre fan. I must have been in my early teens when my uncle, who was a performer himself, and in fact played Sweeney Todd in a production in London, gave me the filmed versions of Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods on a VHS. I had never seen a Sondheim musical before. I primarily knew Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Les Mis, and Miss Saigon, all those major shows.
When I saw Sweeney Todd, it just blew my mind. Here was this musical with such a dark subject matter, that was so different to anything I’ve heard or seen before. So that was what drew me into Sondheim’s work. After that, I started binge listening to as much Sondheim as possible, and discovered Company, and Merrily, and A Little Night Music, and the rest of his work. So I think that’s where the attachment started: it was just forming an early appreciation for a composer whose shows felt deeper and more human than anything I’d seen before.
I think the human aspect of his stories is the most compelling thing for me. In all of his works, you see yourself, you see other people, you see the world in a really specific way that’s kind of rare. That was what brought me into him, I think.
And I’ve connected to different works of his at different ages, because of what’s going on in my life. I remember loving Company when I was maybe in my early twenties. I really got into Merrily when I was studying theatre: that whole idea of the life of an artist, and where that might lead to, and what happens when you make certain choices. And now I’m obsessed with Sunday.
I worked as resident director for Hamilton for the Australian and the international tour, and when I started working on Hamilton, I started seeing a lot of George in the character of Hamilton, and a lot of Dot in the character of Eliza. And in fact, in the last season I worked on in Sydney, Vidya Makan, who was my Dot in Sunday in the Park with George, was cast as Eliza. We were always having these conversations of how similar these characters were.
I didn’t think I was ready for the challenge of directing Sondheim, but the minute I held that Sunday script and started reading it, I knew exactly what I wanted to say with the piece. I felt so connected to George, and also wanted to really give Dot agency. And Sunday’s second act is such a great second act. A lot of people dismiss it, but you need it. You need that part of the story.
So it was later in life that I got to approach these works, but now I have dreams of directing so many more Sondheim productions.
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