Casey Kaleba, of Tooth and Claw Combat Arts, has been a fight choreographer at Signature Theatre for approximately a decade, teaching combat arts for shows from Jelly’s Last Jam to Midwestern Gothic to Road Show to Miss Saigon.
“Very often, it’s a simple thing. I’ll come in for a slap or a character has to fall down, or maybe a whip has to crack,” he says. “We’ve also done some shows like Billy Elliott and West Side Story where they have some substantial fights.”
But with Blackbeard, a world premier musical that runs through July 14, it’s the first time Signature has had a show where they had to dedicate a lot of time for “massive, whole-cast swordfights that take up the entire set,” and that was music to Kaleba’s ears.
“It’s a show about pirates! It’s very rare that you get an absolute gift of a production like this,” he says. “As a fight director, for something like Blackbeard, where we have the entire cast doing sword fights, stick fights, gun fights, swinging on things and jumping over things, it really is a chance to use all the tricks that I have stored up over the years.”
John Dempsey has written the book for this new musical, and Dana P. Rowe the music. Blackbeard’s director is Signature Theatre Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer, and choreographer, Matthew Gardiner. Kaleba says it was important to work with all of them early on.
“We started talking about this show more than a year ago, even before what we knew the script included, and we’ve had multiple versions,” he says. “We’ve worked people in and out of fights as the script has changed, so a sword fight could be between two characters one day and three days later, the same fight is between two completely different characters because the writers are developing the script as we go.”
Kaleba and Schaeffer got together with the rest of the design team about six months ago to map out the entire show, and part of the challenge was making sure the lighting would work with the way the swords were being utilized in the battles, and how the costumes fit into it all.
“Now that we’re up and working the show, some of those ideas have come to pass, some have changed, but the trickiest part is that the writers are writing the script and music around us.” Kaleba says. “Usually, if I’m working on a production of say something like Romeo & Juliet (and he’s done 44 productions of that show!), I know who needs to die, how they need to die and I can look at the set and figure it out. With this, every part of the machine is moving and changing as we rehearse.”
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That’s meant staging some fight scenes with music that had been written and staging some without it.
“It’s one of the most complicated shows I’ve ever worked on,” Kaleba says. “Usually I know I have to fill 16 measures of music or 40 seconds of stage time with some type of fight, but with this, everyone is working off of everyone’s work, so it’s really a complicated machine.”
Chris Hoch and the cast of Blackbeard. Photo by Margot Schulman
Another challenge is Kaleba is turning “triple threats” into quadruple threats, as many actors have limited stage fighting experience. The production stars Chris Hoch as Blackbeard, Rory Boyd as Roger, Maria Egler as La Mer/Morgan, Ben Gunderson as Gerrick/Maynard, Kevin McAllister as Caesar, Christopher Mueller as Kamikaza/Jack Five Fingers, Nova Y. Payton as Dominique/Sal, Lawrence Redmond as Samuel, Awa Sal Secka as Kali Maa/Shanti, and Bobby Smith as Karl.
“I have an amazing team of performers, most of whom I have worked with on different shows over the years, and they are amazing actors, singers and dancers; we are trying to add a completely new skill set on top of that,” he says. “Now they need to be fighters. That’s not a skill set many came into the room with. Some have never even picked up a sword in their life. My job is to get them to look as good as their characters are.”
Kaleba teaches stage combat at universities and, in one semester, can transform a student who has never picked up a sword to do a professional-level fight. But that’s almost 50-60 hours of training to get them to that point.
“We don’t have that with this cast, so what I need to do is the same process but much, much faster,” he says. “One of the ways you do that is by building on the skill set that the performers already have. I will talk to them in dance language, maybe say something like, ‘this sequence needs to feel more Fosse and focus on the isolations’ or ‘this needs to be more modern and jazzy and play with the flow.’ It’s mixing the languages of the type of rehearsal I am usually in with the type of rehearsal they are usually in.”
The journey to becoming a fight coordinator for Kaleba had its genesis in his being an actor back in high school. He did some shows with sword fighting in them and he liked doing them, so he started taking classes through the Fairfax County Institute for the Arts.
“I only thought this was going to be a special skill; I would be an actor and every couple of years get to do a swordfight,” he says. “But I kept taking classes and traveling to train and I hit a point where no one was asking me to act or direct or build sets, but they were asking me to do sword fights. And I was pretty good at it.”
That was about 25 years ago, and since then, Kaleba has staged fight sequences in about 500 shows at theaters including Shakespeare Theatre, Round House, Ford’s, Woolly Mammoth and just about every venue within a 60-mile radius.
He gets asked all the time what his favorite fight scene has been, but he has a hard time answering.
“For me, it’s the tiny, tiny things that are really satisfying. It might be a single moment in a show—a slap that makes the audience gasp or a really well timed-stab where the sleight of hand makes the audience not believe what they’ve just seen,” he says. “At the end of the day, stage combat is really closer to magic. We’re making the audience believe a thing that’s never really existed and that’s a beautiful thing to create.”
