Home'r Bust! in the David Geffen Hall Lobby
The David Geffen Hall lobby isn't a stage, and shooting it like one was the main constraint of the morning. Four performers at music stands, a title card on a screen behind them, a keyboard off to one side, and a children's audience already seated on the floor by the time I was set up. The whole question of the morning was how tight I could work without stepping into the sightlines of kids sitting right at the front.
Home'r Bust! is a new musical by A.J. Freeman, with music by Maria Caputo, presented as part of Lincoln Center's Summer for the City and the Library for the Performing Arts' Storytime series. The premise is cheerfully literal: Ulysses walks home from youth soccer, and the walk does not go smoothly. It runs about forty minutes and this was its world premiere.
The staging is stripped down by design. Sienna Aczon, Connor Marsh, Claire-Frances Sullivan, and Racquel Williams each work from a stand in matching blue mesh vests, scripts in hand but fully in the scene. That gap is where the photographs live. A show performed off the page still has moments where the page vanishes and the performer is only in the scene, and those are the frames worth waiting for.
Marsh and Aczon had a long two-person stretch that gave me the tightest frames of the morning. Aczon's and Marsh's plugging each others’ ears while the siren sang behind them. The expressions were large and the two of them were close together, which meant the stand in the foreground was something to shoot around rather than pretend wasn't there.
Caputo worked from her own stand just off center, and I found a window to get a cleaner angle on her. Head down, both hands on the keyboard, smiling. She wrote the music, so getting a real frame of her at it matters as much as any of the performers.
The wide shots took patience. The full company at their stands, the title on the screen behind them, the audience along the bottom of the frame. In that establishing shot Sullivan holds a megaphone, Marsh has a finger up, and Williams sits watching the other two, and the title card reading "words by A.J. Freeman / music by Maria Caputo" is fully legible above them. That legibility is doing work a close crop can't: a wide that names the show and its creators earns its place in a way a tight frame doesn't.
Williams came in at one point wearing an eye patch and bear ears, which set her as the antagonist to the two performers opposite her. Aczon and Marsh both had hands raised toward her, all three smiling, sand dunes on the screen behind them.
Later Sullivan stepped away from her stand holding a clarinet, still mic'd and in character. I wasn't expecting it and had to adjust fast. She was mid-speech, the other two seated behind her, the clarinet raised in one hand as a prop that was also plainly a real instrument, the title card visible again above. That frame holds two things a presenter might want at once: the live music and the theater running on the same track.
A world premiere for young audiences at Lincoln Center needs coverage that reaches past a single press photo, into grant applications, the artists' portfolios, and Lincoln Center's own archive for the program. There's no second take on a first performance.
[PHOTO: Home'r Bust! (Lincoln Center-David Geffen Hall Lobby)-85.jpg | Two performers center stage at music stands with fingers raised to their lips in matching gestures, a third performer seated at far left, fourth performer seated far right, 'Home'r Bust!' title card on a screen behind them, audience in foreground]
If you're premiering new work for young audiences in a room that wasn't built to be a theater, that constraint is exactly the kind of thing documentary coverage is good at working with. Reach out here so we can talk about it!
