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Bay Street Theatre's "Turnadot" In Wrestling Ring

Posted: Jul 9th 2007 By: CMBurnham

Ugh! Oof! Pow! Slam!

This is an opera?

The show making its world premiere at Sag Harbor's Bay Street Theatre this week is billed as a new rock opera.

But that's not the half of it.

"Turandot: The Rumble for the Ring" takes place in a wrestling ring. At a recent rehearsal, actors weren't just practicing songs. They were getting tips from a fight instructor on how to strangle opponents, throw them against a wall, pull their hair and kick them in the groin - or make it look as though they were, without inflicting real harm.

"You need a vocabulary. We're going to choreograph our fights," fight director Rick Sordelet told them. Cast members already had immersed themselves in videos of pro wrestling, an entertainment based on flashy mock combat. A day earlier, they'd received a pep talk from Mick Foley, a former champion wrestler known by such monikers as Cactus Jack and Mankind.

"I grew up with this. Now we're all converts," said Randy Weiner, who created the show with his wife, Diane Paulus.

Soft-spoken, sweethearts since their days at Manhattan prep schools and later at Harvard, and now parents of 2- year-old and 4-month-old daughters, they don't seem the most likely fans. But Weiner, 42, said he fell in love with wrestling as a teen. "It's loud and outrageous and so obviously theatrical," he said. "It's also strangely poetic." He wrote the show's book and lyrics. Paulus, 40, is directing.

Their last hit together was "The Donkey Show," a disco version of "Midsummer Night's Dream" that ran six years Off-Broadway and still tours internationally. Lately, Paulus has directed operas. Weiner produces Las Vegas shows. The new musical has been brewing a few years.

"It's this crazy mash-up of ingredients," Paulus says. "We're taking a classic story and making it into a pop culture event." The audience will be asked to cheer and boo, and some will participate in a round at "The Royal Wrestling League."

The opera Puccini wrote in the 1920s, based on older tales, centers on a Chinese princess who forces suitors to answer three riddles. If they can't, they're killed.

This "Turandot" follows the traditional plot. But the new lyrics are set to "greatest hits" from many operas, starting with the "Habanera" from Bizet's "Carmen."

"These are the melodies you've heard in cartoons and pasta commercials," Paulus says over a sandwich during a lunch break. "They're in our subconscious, our cultural DNA," Weiner says. An onstage band and Broadway singers coached to "rock out" give them a different sound.

The pair's liaison with Bay Street began in 1999, when the theater's co-founder and producing director, Sybil Christopher, saw "The Donkey Show" soon after it opened.

"I loved it so much, I went back with my daughters," then returned again with co-founder Emma Walton and Walton's husband, Stephen Hamilton, the theater's executive director. Later, she introduced Paulus and Weiner to Bay Street co-artistic director Murphy Davis.

Davis says he remembers hearing the two explaining their "Turandot" idea to him and Christopher in a Manhattan cafe. The mixed arias sounded great, he says. Then, they mentioned the wrestling.

"Our crullers kind of fell out of our mouths," he says. But the pair "explained the pomp and the storytelling. By the end of the coffee hour, we were totally sold."

Davis contacted wrestler Foley - Davis' sister and Foley's father worked together at East Setauket's Ward Melville School District - and Foley got involved.

"I was really impressed with the story and the unique idea," says Foley, 42, who is now a part-time wrestler, best-selling author, father of four and St. James resident. He says he advised the "big, bruising bad guys" to simplify their moves to "create the idea that they're an insurmountable force." Theater and pro wrestling, he says, aren't far apart. "We've always considered our ring to be something of a stage," he says. "We try to draw a line between pain and injury. You hope to avoid injury."

"Turandot: The Rumble for the Ring," Bay Street Theatre, Long Wharf, Sag Harbor, July 10-Aug. 5, $75 and $65, some "pay what you can" tickets available

Tuesday at the box office; 631-725-9500 or baystreet.org."