Bitter Suite: The Making of a Musical
Compiled by Gary Gerani and Joe Nazarro
The Official Magazine: Issue 03
Certainly the most ambitious and anticipated Xena episode, “The Bitter Suite,” was broadcast the week of February 2, 1998, earning impressive ratings and wide-spread critical acclaim. Although musicals have been attended before in episode TV shows (Steven Bochco’s Cop Rock comes immediately to mind), never before has such an undertaking seemed so organic. Star Lucy Lawless came to the project with a Broadway pedigree, having played Rizzo in GREASE during Xena’s hiatus in 1997. Along for the unique ride was Broadway director/choreographer Jeff Calhoun, also from GREASE and greatly interested in exploring the musical possibilities of film and television. Series composer Joe LoDuca has been experimenting with different instrumentation, offbeat orchestrations and unusual applications of his scores for some time, and the Xena series in general seems to lend itself to the odd and unexpected, making “Bitter Suite” seem right at home. What follows is a series of mini-interviews with the key creative personnel who worked on “Suite,” providing an overview of the episode’s conception, development and flamboyant execution.
Robert Tapert, Producer
All roads lead to Rob
“It was a funny marriage,” executive producer Rob Tapert says of the diverse creative components in “The Bitter Suite.” “The story we wanted to tell at that juncture of the series - it followed ‘Maternal Instincts’ - dealt with issues that we thought, oddly enough, lent themselves to a musical. It’s all so tragically operatic.”
The origin of “Bitter Suite” can be traced back to a concept Tapert and company had been playing with over a year ago: “We’d been thinking of doing a ‘Xena goes to Wonderland’ kind of thing, really bizarre. It suddenly seemed like a fabulous opportunity to explore the rift in (Xena and Gabrielle’s) relationship through music, and music with some dramatic weight.
“The first step was to have numerous, numerous meetings with (series composer) Joe LoDuca. I certainly knew what had to happen in that story. As a matter of fact, I originally intended to direct the episode myself. I storyboarded huge segments of it, then I met over and over again with the writers, Steve (Sears) and Chris (Manheim), until I drove them mad. But then Kevin Sorbo got ill, and we had to throw out where we were on Hercules, script-wise, and sort of start all over again. So at the last minute I had to pull out of directing ‘Bitter Suite.’ But that was okay, because Oley Sassone did a fabulous job.
“Oley previously directed ‘The Debt,’ a significant two-parter that I had also prepped with the intention of directing - again, I had to pull out because of another commitment. So Oley inherited a good and bad situation, with an executive producer who had set up a lot of it, but who had also arranged to spend more money on it, and planned for it.”
Speaking of money, the budget for “Bitter Suite” was substantially more than usual for Xena, “50% more, to be exact,” says Tapert. “Although that’s still less than an average episode of ER.
“Some things in life are very fortuitous,” the producer continues. “We met (director/choreographer) Jeff Calhoun during GREASE and he wanted a chance to work in film, and we needed somebody who had worked on Broadway to do various things that we don’t ordinarily do. It wasn’t so much the musical staging, but the musical jargon, working confidently with the huge amounts of extras that we have performing. We did a couple of lavish, full-on production numbers that required a lot of rehearsing. And Jeff is brilliant at that…”
As for the composer and songwriters, “I would love to find a way to get Joe LoDuca the recognition he deserves on this one, and the lyricists, Dennis Spiegel and Pamela Phillips-Oland… because I actually think, when it’s all said and done, for something that works within out show and within our world, the lyricists and Joe did an absolutely fantastic job.”
And what about future musicals? “The opportunity to do a musical like this isn’t going to present itself in the foreseeable future,” Tapert concludes. “But we do an incredible amount of music integration that’s different than any other TV show currently on. So we may not do a full-blown musical again, but we’re certainly going to do episodes that have singing of one sort or another. We may go to a concert, we may encounter Shamans with their own unique form of singing… Remember, ‘Bitter Suite’ is the culmination of years of being adventurous in terms of music, taking on new, unorthodox styles, and running with them. We fully intend to continue this kind of creative experimentation in the future.”
Ngila Dickson, Costume Designer
Warrior chic through a Broadway kaleidoscope
Accustomed to unusual creative challenges, Xena costume designer Ngila Dickson jumped into “The Bitter Suite” with her characteristic imagination and enthusiasm. “We worked night and day on it,” she says with a sense of unmistakable pride and a touch of relief. “I think it worked incredibly well, especially since we didn’t get to hear the music until well into the shooting. I couldn’t rely on that for the inspiration of my designs.”
What Dickson could rely on was specific creative direction from the episode’s main guru, producer Rob Tapert. “There were two things about ‘Bitter Suite’ that were design start points, and Rob was very helpful in establishing our approach,” recalls Dickson. “One, was that it was all based on the look and feel of the Tarot cards, and the other was that it was brightly-colored; we wanted a very surreal quality to it. Now, if you look closely at our different characters you’ll see that they represent different parts of the Tarot… Callisto was based on The Fool, Gabrielle was The Empress, and so on. Filmically, we don’t usually want to work in such unnaturally hot colors, as we did with this one. So we did a lot of experimenting in printing techniques that we’ve never used before.”
In terms of particular costumes, “The War/Peace number was a real challenge, and we drove Lucy crazy when we helmeted her for that one… but it was necessary, in order to achieve that ‘warrior’ feel. The headdress for Xena as a High Priestess was another big deal. It’s all based on copper and very complex. I remember our frustration… we put so much time and effort into it, and then it’s on-screen for only a moment. But that’s the way it goes sometimes…”
Costuming problems of a very different nature presented themselves in the filming of the opening sequence, a shocking scene in which hate-crazed Xena drags a semi-conscious Gabrielle through earth and fire. “We went through an awful lot of frocks to do that,” recalls Dickson with a sigh. “The problem was, a lot of that was filmed by the second unit, and you’re left guessing where things are going to wind up. The close-ups of Gabrielle being dragged were shot later than the beginning and of that sequence. The challenge was to guess the damage (to Gabrielle’s clothing) so that the scenes in the Amazon village and later, on the cliff edge, match the middle footage. Then, of course, you have to allow enough costume to get through the entire routine… you can imagine how much fun that was. I think we went through eight versions of the costume, which were always being shredded.”
As far the musical numbers were concerned, “(Choreographer) Jeff Calhoun was fantastic. I probably see it more now in hindsight, than when we were actually filming. He was very specific about what he was trying to get into the dance sequences. And that kind of direction, especially when you’re doing television, is really helpful. We knew exactly what he wanted because he could demonstrate what the moves were going to be, and this would determine how big the skirts had to be for the number to flow smoothly.”
Sometimes, in spite of painstaking preparation and the best of intentions, a concept doesn’t play when the cameras finally roll and an adjustment is required. “That happened at least once on ‘Bitter Suite,’” Dickson recalls. “Xena has this sort of tango dance she does with Ares. She was originally meant to do that in the charioteer’s costume, but I just knew it was wrong for that scene. So at the last minute, we made another costume which was the Death costume. The only time she wears it was in that tiny tango bit, and to me, that was a real highlight: to make that kind of last-minute adjustment, and then to pull it off successfully.
“These kinds of things can be exciting… ‘Bitter Suite’ in general was such a creative episode. Rob wanted us to go into a style that we had never done before, and everyone just pulled out all of the stops. Of course, you’ve still got other episodes coming up, so you do have to try to ‘squeeze it’ and remain on schedule. But we poured many extra hours into this one; we tried to get it right, tried to get it as close to the original concept as we possibly could. I think that we were probably 90% successful. But of course, I’m my own worst critic…
“It’s all so challenging, though. There’s one part of you that’s saying, ‘How can we possibly achieve this thing, how much extraordinary work is required before it’s done?’ And then there’s another part of you that says, ‘Who cares? This is a great concept. Let’s give it the old college try.’ Which is what we’re always doing down here, giving it the old college try…”
Steven Sears, Co-Author
“It all comes off the page first.”
“This was a very unique episode, a very difficult one to put together, because there were so many other elements that we couldn’t see right there on the page immediately,” explains Xena senior writer Steven Sears, an old hand at unconventional assignments. Working with frequent partner and Xena colleague Chris Manheim, the two fashioned a script for this all-important musical show before a single note of music had been written.
“Out of necessity, Chris and I came up with our own particular format for writing it. We’d write the scripted portion of it, which was basically everything except for the actual song, and our script would include what we call ‘lyricizing,’ which would be the dialogue that the Callisto character or the Ares character would almost speak, except they would speak it in rhyme. Where the actual songs were, we would write out a block paragraph in all caps that would say what the intent of the song was, and make little suggested lyrics here and there. Then, after we had written the script, it was turned over to the lyricists. They would come back to us with different versions of the songs, and then we’d all go through it - not just Chris and myself, but Rob and Oley (Sassone, the director) as well - so we could correct little things in the songs that didn’t match our series overall, or didn’t match the exact feeling we were going for. Often we’d make little comments in the margins about possibilities of how to do things. Then we’d go back to the script and rewrite certain details to match their lyrics. It was a true creative collaboration.
“The story itself went through several different versions. When you have two characters who have grown that far apart from each other, either they never get together again, or there is one huge step that has to be made before the other questions in their lives can be answered… and this was that huge step. The story, in all its incarnations, always needed to point out to our characters that the most important person in their lives is the person they currently hate. There’s more to their relationship than what the common person has, and, in this case, Xena’s son Solan gave them the chance to find that out.
“Xena was going to kill Gabrielle in the beginning. If she had done that, Xena, for all intents and purposes, would have been dead. Her body would have lived on but her soul would have been dead. Solan recognized that their love was something that needed to be preserved. And Solan in his afterlife drew them into Illusia to give them one last chance to prove what they meant to each other. It wasn’t a given that they were going to end up the way they did; they could’ve taken any number of courses. Obviously throughout the entire episode, they still have their hatred. But Solan gave them that chance to overcome it. And the fact that they came together at the end wasn’t Solan’s doing; it was just the opportunity he gave them.
“With that, though, the problem with this episode is that there are so many different ways to portray the different levels of healing. The one that I’m particularly fond of is the Chamber of Echoes… they can’t hear each other as long as they’re blaming each other. And that’s pure therapy. You can’t start to fix a problem if you’re too busy blaming the other person, because you’re not listening to them. And the moment that Xena asks Gabrielle, ‘What are you feeling right now?’ and Gabrielle says ‘I hurt inside,’ that was the moment of connection… they realized that’s what they shared.
Getting back to the nitty-gritty of this unusual assignment, “It all comes off the page first,” Sears is quick to point out. “The first thing is the concept, and then we look at what best services the concept. But in this case, which was unique, the minute we came up with our initial ideas, we had to let everybody else know what was going on because of the limited lead time. Although there was some parallel working (from the musical team), nobody went off creating anything until they heard from us, or from Rob Tapert. The writing always, always comes first. Of course, it helped that both Chris Manheim and myself come out of musical theater, so we had some idea of where this thing was going.”
A key creative element in the writing, and later in the fx visualization, was the Tarot card concept. “That was really Rob’s area,” Sears confirms. “In a lot of cases, he would come into a meeting and talk about the philosophy of a particular Tarot visual, and then Chris and I would take that and try to massage it into the rest of the piece. You can’t just drop it in.. it’s got to be worked in as if it was organic to the entire episode. But it all blended smoothly in the end, I think.”
“We deal with a visual medium, so the visuals have to convey the appropriate emotion. Basically what we did was a psychological musical - a ‘psycho-musical,’ if you want to call it that - because it was dealing with the very deepest emotions, the relationship of our two characters. But how do you get that out without having them just talk to each other, like a lecture, which is so boring? That’s one reason why the musical was the best way for (Xena and Gabrielle) to take that first big step, after the arc of their rift… because just doing a ‘normal’ episode wouldn’t be satisfying enough, in my opinion.”
Summing up, “I think this is an episode that, if people tape it, and three months from now, they play it again, they’re going to find levels they missed the first time,” theorizes Sears. “And if they put it away for another three months and play it again, the same thing will happen again. There are so many different levels with ‘The Bitter Suite.’ I’ve watched the final version of it one time, and I automatically know the things that people are going to grab a hold of immediately. But I know all the other things that are underneath it, and that’ll take a little bit of thought…”
Oley Sassone, Director
Balancing the methodical and the creative
Not only was “Bitter Suite” director Oley Sassone a Hercules and Xena veteran, he also had helmed over 100 music videos - working with the likes of Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt - before turning to longform. So when Rob Tapert had to pull out of directing Xena’s first full-fledged musical, he immediately thought of the versatile Sassone. And Oley found himself realizing a lifelong dream.
“When I was in college I was a theater major, and loved every minute of it,” the native New Orlean recalls. “I’ve also been in about a dozen musicals… the classics, like ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, OLIVER!, BYE BYE BIRDIE… and that experience was perfect. Having been around musical production, it didn’t seem silly, or foreign or strange to me that people were singing and dancing in front of the cameras. Actually, ‘Bitter Suite’ was more rooted in the classic music style than it was in my music video style. I just kept seeing all these beautiful camera moves and all those wonderful things that they used to do in the great musicals of the past, and I thought, man, we gotta do this! And to support that idea, the music for ‘The Bitter Suite’ was composed and developed in the classic style. It’s so good… the first time I heard the music I was blown away.
One of the set-pieces that certainly reflects vintage Broadway was “Welcome Home, Xena/Welcome Home, Gabrielle,” the elaborate, extra-filled War/Peace production number. “WEST SIDE STORY definitely came up in conversation when we were plotting and figuring that one out,” notes Sassone, comparing the two welcoming groups to the Sharks and the Jets revving themselves up in the Rogers and Hammerstein perennial. “It was in the music, it was all right there,” the director observes. “In my opinion, there was no other way to shoot it, and I think the approach really paid off.”
“The whole project was a little mind-boggling, of course,” Sassone admits. “It’s an interesting balance of being very methodical and creative, because you envision all these wonderful things you want to do… but with TV, you’re on a tight schedule. We did have a few more days on this show, thank goodness. Eleven, instead of the usual eight.
“And there was a lot of rehearsal time. Basically it was a terrific collaboration with Jeff Calhoun, who is a very talented choreographer and director in his own right, as far as musicals are concerned. Having a Broadway director involved made all the difference. We had a great time working on the show, and there were no egos involved. While I was filming he was rounding up the best dancers he could possibly find in Auckland. During the rehearsal period, I’d be shooting stuff on weekdays, then I’d work with Jeff on the weekends, figuring out how to film a certain bit of business, where to put the camera, that sort of thing. When the whole show started to happen on set, it never felt out of place. It was totally organic to the heart and soul of Xena.”
And what about the sets for this elaborate musical, traditionally a major part of any such endeavor. “It’s like this,” Sassone explains. “You go to New Zealand, and you walk onto a stage that has sets that already exist. So basically what you have to do - because this is the way the show is made, whether it’s a musical or a standard Xena episode - you have to utilize what’s already there. You can change things and move a wall, or so… but for the most part you’re limited. Luckily, (production designer) Rob Gillies and (art director) Phil Ivy are brilliant at their jobs. We would literally take a cassette of the music and walk through the sets, listen to the music and start coming up with new ways to re-work the surroundings.”
Perhaps more so than the average Xena story, “Bitter Suite” is dependent on a variety of influences to achieve its offbeat glory.”When you’re directing or visualizing anything,” the director notes, “you’ve got to have something solid that’s going to give you a reference point. Artists borrow from artists all the time. So as a reference point for one of our key scenes, I remembered an important moment from THE WIZARD OF OZ. I thought, “You know, when they get to those big doors in Oz and the doors start to open, and - there you are - you’re suddenly introduced into this new, vast, breathtaking world… hey, that’s the way we should do it! Let’s put the camera right behind the doors as they open. And once Xena’s inside this fanciful new world we can start setting up all the gags. And a lot of that information, action-wise, is truly dictated by the musical and lyrical content. It tells you the story and gives you the ideas… that’s where you get the germ of what you’re going to do, physically. You know from the breaks in the music that you can add a couple beats between this line and the next, and within these beats we can add another little visual gag. The music winds up being your template, your guide…
“Of course, the most important things we had to keep reminding ourselves was: what is the name of this show? It’s called Xena. I’d hear the music, and then say, hey waiting a minute! - Lucy’s not singing in that number. A bunch of gags had already been set up, but built around the other characters, not her. So everything had to be re-thought. It all had to happen with Lucy involved, since she was the main focus, even if she wasn’t actually singing in a particular set-piece. It was a matter of then making the choreography work around, and through, and with Lucy… and that was a legitimate challenge.
“Let’s face it. As a director, you can only be as good as the tools they’ve handed you. On ‘Bitter Suite,’ everyone - Rob, Joe, Jeff, the writers and the lyricists - they all handed me the best tools possible. In the end, it’s all about the characters, all about where you put the camera, and making sure that you tell a good story. I hope we’ve accomplished that.”
CAPTION: At the conclusion of “The Bitter Suite,” Xena and Gabrielle have healed their emotional wounds and emerge once again as close friends… but “their relationship hasn’t been put together perfectly,” says writer Steven Sears.
Kevin O’Neill, Special Effects
Flat Earth’s most ambitious Xena job to date
Although ‘Bitter Suite’ will doubtless be remembered for its outstanding musical numbers, the technical aspects are just as impressive. According to visual effects supervisor Kevin O’Neill, whose company Flat Earth handles the vis-fx on both Hercules and Xena, “It’s the biggest fx show we’ve ever done in terms of volume, and in terms of the number of days we had to do it. There are sorts of odd, mythological iconism that we had to create in 3-D, like Tarot wheels, talking animals, it’s quite bizarre. We had a little more pre-production time, so we did a whole storyboard session, blocking out every shot including some shots that were eventually cut because of budget or time issues. From the time the cut was delivered to the time we had to deliver the show, we were looking at five weeks to produce 200 shots. It was also difficult staying on top of all the continuity issues and all the art direction issues. A lot of it was self-designed by Rob Tapert, so he could give us enough information pre-production-wise, but once it was photographed certain things had to be amended because of situations that occurred on the set.
“What was difficult in this episode more than anything else,” continues O’Neill, “was that it was one man’s vision and interpretation of a very ethereal world; Rob created this Alice in Wonderland-like world out of mythological and occult-based iconism and literature. It wasn’t all dark and scary, some of it was light and silly, so we had to incorporate a lot of fx designs around that idea. Then it dovetails into a dark and occult-based sequence, all of which was tied around music, which had us choreographing a lot of 3-D animation around singing, and blocking out dance routines for some of our creatures, which is tough. We had a singing sphinx, as well as a singing lion, bull and eagle, which are in this Tarot card that keeps floating around in different environments.
“We had a whole sequence with Torment, which is like the Reaper from THE FRIGHTENERS, which was singing and had to be floating around and dancing in the air to a song and dance sequence it was performing, so that was something we had to interpret: what is this music going to mean to a 3-D character? Plus there was this general icon of a wheel that had to appear and present the next dilemma or question for Lucy and her travels in practically every sequence.”
Despite the difficulties in finishing the ambitious, fx-laden “Bitter Suite” within a relatively limited period of time, Kevin O’Neill is still pleased with the final result.
“The Torment sequence at the end is a really nicely conceived and produced fx sequence that ties directly in with the music. I really like the card itself, how it looked and how it was involved in the sequences. Technically, there are some issues in the specific card shots, continuity issues that you can never keep on top of unless you’ve got a lot of time, but then, there are a couple of ‘one of’ shots, like the grass dress, which I think are pretty close to perfect. As usual, I wish we had another week to make some of the shots look better, but I’m very happy with it overall.”
Joe LoDuca, Composer
Scoring a surreal fever-dream
“It’s a very ambitious thing to do on a television schedule,” notes Xena composer Joe LoDuca, of the myriad challenges to be met on “Bitter Suite,” “such as the fact that we had to design songs in advance, to actually come up with songs that fit the particular storylines and actually conceive of what a Xena musical might look and sound like, what the subject matter might be. It’s also the fact that the songs had to be demo-ed and pre-produced, the singers had to learn them, we had to pre-record the singers, we had session time - I’m based on Michigan, so a lot of the pre-record sessions for the vocalists were done in Los Angeles and New Zealand, in which case we ISCN’ed or patched the phone lines so I could be involved in producing the vocals.
“There was also the fact that we decided to use an orchestra and chorus for the episode. We also brought in a Broadway director/choreographer named Jeff Calhoun, I had a chance to work with some wonderful lyricists; all the things that wouldn’t be part of an ordinary episode. There are seven main numbers, as many as you would find in a full-length musical. As you tend to find with any Xena episode, we cram that TV screen with music and images and special fx, and this episode is no different.
“Because of the time-line, in terms of when I began to write the music, we started out with songs that would be considered more special material, where perhaps the lyrics might tend to come first. I worked with the lyricists on what the songs would entail and might be about, and the writing team had lots of input with regard to that. The lyricists needed to be brought up to speed on who our characters were, and they were very good about doing their homework and finding out who these characters are. I think they did a marvelous job of crafting these lyrics that carry this particular story along.
“In terms of the songs, I used an orchestra but made sure to use a lot of the colors that I use for the score: the Arabic instruments and unusual-sounding voices are a part of that, and we’re quite familiar with the chorus and choir from Xena, so that’s certainly a part of the music. With the songs themselves, there are elements in some of the songs that have that Middle Eastern flair. One is a tango, but it’s a Middle Eastern tango. There’s a circus number, but it’s more reminiscent of the saber dance than of the circus. What I tried to do with the score that surrounds it is to not necessarily set it in the same style. That sounds a little bit more like the unusual things, where we have some Hindu vocals or some Japanese instruments, or wafts of a Bulgarian bagpipe, or all of those things that give Xena that exotic sound. We have the Amazons in the episode and they’re drumming, so the tone for the numbers surrounding the musical are of another style.”
For LoDuca, one of the greatest rewards from working on “Bitter Suite” is that Varese Sarabande have agreed to release a soundtrack album connected with the episode. “It’s been a wonderful gift for us that the show has been successful and that we can all relax and flex and be creative within that area, but at the same time, what keeps it fresh and exciting is to build upon what we’ve done and take the show to new places, so it was a great time to do it, because we do know our characters so well.”
Dennis Spiegel & Pamela Phillips-Oland, Lyricists
A matter of finding the words
In order to make the musical numbers of “Bitter Suite” even more memorable, composer Joe LoDuca enlisted the skills of top lyricists Dennis Spiegel and Pamela Phillips-Oland. Spiegel, who had a passing knowledge of the series, quickly found himself immersed in the Xenaverse.
“They were very good about answering any questions I had about characters and anything I needed to fill in my knowledge of the show.
“Of the two main songs I did, one is a seduction song that Ares sings to Xena, and the way that Rob described it to me in the initial meetings, it was really going to be quite seductive and at the end of the song, Ares was literally going to be right on top of Xena. The second song, which is a very large opus, is a duet between Xena and Gabrielle, called ‘Our Hearts Are Hurting,’ which is descriptive of where they’re both coming from at that moment in the show. There’s also a very brief song that follows the Ares seduction song, which is just a very small piece that Callisto has, after Ares has taken Xena completely under his spell.”
Phillips-Oland was already an ardent Xena fan when she found a message on her answering machine from LoDuca. “The message said, ‘Hi, this is Joe LoDuca - ’ and before he got to another word, I said, ‘Omigod, Xena and Hercules!’ Joe had very detailed thoughts about what they were trying to say and what they wanted to do. I wrote three songs, and the first one was originally more than eight minutes, and in fact, I went in for a meeting with Rob, and he said, ‘This is an hour show!’ I had to find ways of subtly cutting back the ideas in that first song, which I called ‘War and Peace,’ because it involved the warriors and villagers. There was a song about the Tarot wheel, and I used to read Tarot cards and was quite familiar with that mystical quality about them and was able to express that in a song.
“The third song, ‘Hate Is the Star,’ was about the demons the two girls were fighting as they were trying to get their relationship back on track. The moral was that you can’t let hate become the most important thing and forget who you are and what you have between you.”
Both lyricists found working on ‘Bitter Suite’ to be a gratifying experience. “It’s a wonderful group of people,” claims Spiegel. “Rob is a terrific guy and has a very clear vision and great enthusiasm and that’s a buoyant thing for all of us to be around.”
“The only sad thing about writing this material for Xena,” adds Phillips-Oland, “was the day when I was told I was done and there wasn’t another word to write! I was disappointed, because it was such a thrill to be involved in this very creative and successful show.”
Jeff Calhoun, Choreographer
Poetry in motion on a TV production schedule
For Jeff Calhoun, taking on the responsibilities of choreographer for ‘Bitter Suite’ actually started on the Broadway stage. “I put Lucy Lawless into GREASE,” he explains. “I was the director/choreographer of GREASE and Lucy was playing Rizzo, and it was at the conclusion of her ‘put-in’ rehearsal that we started to get familiar with each other’s lives. I told her that I’d just finished film school and wanted to go to Los Angeles and start a career in television directing, and unbeknownst to her, her executive producer and fiancé Rob was in the audience at the time. He heard this conversation, and a couple of weeks later, I got a call from him saying, ‘Listen, I’ve got an idea that might be in both of our best interests. If you want to start a reel as a director, why don’t you come and choreograph all these numbers, and if you stage these seven songs, I’ll let you choose three of them to direct.’ It seemed like a wonderful exchange: they got my services as a choreographer, and they gave me a launch as a director.”
Calhoun literally had to hit the ground running when he arrived in New Zealand to start work on ‘Bitter Suite.’ “I didn’t work with anybody until the day before we were to shoot, so you learn, okay, this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work and you change it. And then of course, when you’re on the set and time is running out, you continue to change it. That was quite a shock, but Lucy is very musical, both in her vocal prowess and her movement. She was a triumph in GREASE, and I think it was very wise of Rob to show off her musical skills to the Xena fans.”
Making Calhoun’s job much easier was an excellent working relationship with director Oley Sassone. “Being fresh out of film school without a lot of camera experience, I couldn’t have been luckier than to have Oley as the director. He was so gracious, and it was a compromising position for him that Rob had already made this arrangement with me to direct a couple of these numbers, but I learned a great deal from Oley. Rob was originally supposed to direct this episode, and because he’d already made this commitment to me, in going to the next director, he had to explain it was already part of the deal, so what could have been an uncomfortable situation for everybody was made wonderful by Oley.
“I actually directed ‘War and Peace,’ which we counted as two numbers, and the tango. I understand why these people are as successful as they are, because they’re incredibly talented. Kevin Smith could be a Broadway star, no question about it. We got to do a tango with the two of them, which was quite fun. There’s also a huge chorus for the war number, and it was really great, working with the Kiwis.”
Looking back on his work with the cast and crew of Xena, Jeff Calhoun found it a rewarding entry into the world of television production. “It’s a well-oiled machine there, from wardrobe down to the props or sets, and for me, it was such an amazing education in the world of television. The shooting schedule is so hectic that what would take months to do in a feature film, we tried to do in ten days of shooting. Even though we were doing Xena, it was a Herculean effort!”
As we have seen, it required a talented team of musical/fantasy experts to bring “The Bitter Suite” to life. Each artist contributed his own expertise, his own unique background and personal vision to this one-of-a-kind episode, arguably the best Xena ever made. Like the series as a whole, it reflects the kind of fun and fearless experimentation that keeps viewers coming back season after season. And when TV’s most original and groundbreaking fantasy episodes are discussed in the years to come, Xena’s “The Bitter Suite” will undoubtedly be part of that conversation.
SIDEBAR: Musical Myth-Conceptions.
As the composer on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, Joe LoDuca has to deal with new and different challenges every day: “I can’t imagine having this range and variety anywhere else,” he claims. “The same week we were doing “Bitter Suite,” there was an episode of Hercules called ‘Men In Pink,’ which is basically a remake of SOME LIKE IT HOT, so the scoring opportunities there were very funny; if Benny Goodman was an Arab, what would he sound like? He’d be playing a clarinet, but he’d be playing it in a different way. We had a good time with it.”
One of LoDuca’s more unusual experiences was working on the now-infamous Joxer Song, a joke that continues to grow each time the character appears. “Actually, what happened was, it was created as a joke on the set. One of the directors started the ball rolling and then Ted took it a step further, and then they actually wrote a stanza, and when it came to the show ‘For Him The Bell Tolls,’ Rob said, ‘I want to do this with a men’s chorus,’ so I said no problem, and from that point on, I added verses to it, and the writers took a look at it and said, ‘Oh yeah?’ and they kept going with it. We had an episode where it was sung by the bordello girls, and it keeps coming back and coming back and it’s turned into an ongoing joke. It’s a running gag that everyone still seems to enjoy, so we made sure that it was on the new Xena soundtrack.”
Although Hercules and Xena are produced in LA and shot in New Zealand, the Michigan-based LoDuca is able to work on both series, thanks to the wonders of modern-day technology. “The fact that I can send music over to the dubbing stage and have it arrive there one-tenth of a second later is one of the things that makes this kind of effort possible. Certainly the technology allows me to leave my life the way it is but still have a wonderful opportunity to compose.”