Hoping to Cast a ‘Witches’ Spell on Stage

Many people are familiar with “The Witches of Eastwick.” They’ve either read the John Updike novel or seen the 1987 movie, starring Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as the witches and Jack Nicholson as the “horny little devil” who charms them.

While preparing to direct the musical, American Eric Schaeffer watched the movie once. “Before that, I had rented it on video but never finished watching it,” he says. “Three-quarters of the way to the end, it was going haywire. It didn’t hold me.”

He thinks Updike’s story makes for a better musical than dramatic film. “It’s the kind of subject matter that really wants to sing,” he says. “When all of a sudden they break out into song, you don’t think, ‘Oh, we’re in a musical.’ You can get away with breaking into song because it is fantasy and it is very heightened.”

He prepared for “Witches” by putting together a booklet he titled “The Eastwick Word.” It contains descriptions of each character, places of interest in the town, and a map telling where each character lives.

“We’re creating a town like they did in ‘Edward Scissorhands,’ more or less,” he says. “A town with a heightened reality, a fake reality, weird and yet very believable.”

In most musicals, members of the chorus are types rather than characters: merry partygoers, street toughs. But in “Witches,” each ensemble member would portray a specific character that would be maintained throughout the show. Making the townspeople “real” characters rather than types was a key element to the “off-kilter reality” that Schaeffer considers crucial for the show.

“The show has to have one foot in reality and one foot out--you have to find that balance. When you have it, it goes gangbusters. And when you lose it, you’re like, ‘Oy!’ You feel it instantly.”

The Eastwick witches are played by Lucie Arnaz, Maria Friedman and Joanna Riding. Schaeffer says the chemistry among the three women--and the blend of their voices--was most important.

Casting Darryl Van Horne was a little harder. “The hardest thing for people to get was the rhythm of the show,” Schaeffer says, “because the timing of it has to be ding-ding-ding. You can’t sit back on it. You have to ride the edge.

“We had looked at so many people, and it was hard to find someone who was dangerous and sexy, someone who had that charm but could be as nasty and as bad as he wanted to be.”

Then someone suggested Ian McShane, a respected British stage actor also well known to television audiences here as the star of “Lovejoy,” a popular series. “He’s the kind of guy that you’re instantly attracted to,” Schaeffer says. “As Darryl, he just charms you to death.”