Poetry in the hands, waiting to be shared

“Put your hands down. Thumbs up, don’t curve your fingers. And do ‘happy’ from your elbows, not your wrists .... “

At the Kirk Douglas Theatre, American Sign Language expert Elizabeth Greene is coaching hearing actors Kevin Earley and Erika Amato through the intricacies of a sing-and-sign song during a rehearsal of “Sleeping Beauty Wakes,” the new musical being mounted by Deaf West Theatre.

A little later, running through another song, Earley flubs it. Deaf actor Troy Kotsur signs good-humored sarcasm. Earley breaks up. Then Kotsur, who relies on visual cues and counting to match the music he can’t hear, is out of sync.

Deaf West’s audacious “deaf musical” approach has been seasoned through revivals of “Oliver!” and the Tony-honored “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The latter went from its beginnings in 2001 at the company’s sub-99-seat theater in North Hollywood to the Mark Taper Forum to Broadway and beyond.

But “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” -- a modern twist on the fairy tale by songwriters Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda of the indie rock band GrooveLily and librettist Rachel Sheinkin (“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”) -- is Deaf West’s first original musical.

And while using the company’s signature intermingling of hearing and deaf actors, it is also testing the limits of the genre: Deaf actors have solo songs; many deaf actors are voiced by more than one hearing actor; all hearing actors sign; and some hearing actors are voiced by others.

A month before the Center Theatre Group co-production’s opening Saturday, the actors are still in a rub-your-stomach, pat-your-head mode. ASL master Linda Bove makes notes. Director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun has them go through it again. And again.

“The process is as hard as it sounds,” says Earley. “For the first two weeks at the end of each day, every one of us was just dumbfounded at the amount of information that we were trying to cram into our brains.”

Besides providing the voice for Kotsur’s Prince Charming, Earley speaks and signs as a royal messenger, an insomniac and other roles in the show’s two settings: a fairy kingdom and a sleep disorder clinic.

Kotsur is also voiced by drummer Shannon Ford and by co-composer and keyboardist Milburn. Ford, Milburn and Vigoda play other storied deep sleepers (Rip Van Winkle, for example), and Milburn -- “I’m the utility infielder” -- sings and speaks for Beauty’s love interest (Russell Harvard) and others. During one comic scene, he even sings for Earley.

Meanwhile, co-composer, lyricist and onstage electric violinist Vigoda also sings and speaks for Beauty (Alexandria Wailes) and plays Snow White as a signing role -- which is voiced by cast member Christia Mantzke. Only deaf actor Wailes and hearing actor Clinton Derricks-Carroll, as Beauty’s long-suffering father, play those roles throughout.

Kotsur, a respected stage and screen actor as well as a four-year “Big River” veteran, is accustomed to teaming onstage with a singer, but here he has a solo spot playing the Vegas-y Prince Charming, with an unseen Earley singing for him.

Kotsur says through an interpreter that as a person deaf from birth, he relishes exploring music and rhythm, but this show is “the most challenging for me ever. I’m up there by myself. I’ve got it memorized, I’ve got my blocking, but it’s a challenge.”

It’s a departure as well for Earley, who’s used to being in the spotlight as one of L.A.’s favorite musical theater romantic leads.

“To find a hearing actor who’s willing to sort of give it up to the deaf actor -- ‘cause there are moments when Kevin is voicing for Troy and we’re not supposed to be looking at Kevin -- that takes a very special type of selfless actor,” says Calhoun, who helmed both “Oliver!” and “Big River.”

“Every time I’ve worked with Deaf West,” he adds, “it’s been the highlight of my career because of the people that it attracts.”

Still, figuring out how to blend and choreograph speech, music, movement and ASL -- which isn’t a literal translation of English -- and to make the result accessible and readable to deaf and hearing audiences alike doesn’t get any easier, Calhoun says.

“Even though this is my third Deaf West production, it’s like I forget every time and start over. You can’t do too much until everyone learns their lines and learns their lines in sign. Then you can really start directing and finding and defining the story.”

Several days later, rehearsals have moved into the theater. Signed lines and lyrics have become visual choreography as the seriocomic story unfolds: Beauty declines to awaken to Prince Charming’s kiss and is taken for a coma patient some 900 years later.

“The goal is to make it a seamless ballet,” Calhoun says. “Awake and sleeping scenes should feel like a hypnotic dreamscape, a sort of ballet about when are we dreaming and when are we awake -- and what’s the difference?”

Onstage, stained-glass effects soften set designer Tobin Ost’s clinical white tile floors and metal railings. Calhoun watches for trouble spots and asks for lighting adjustments.

The cast wrestles with costume changes, script and staging revisions. Some lines have been swapped among the actors since earlier rehearsals, and blocking has been changed to ensure the right focus for audiences.

By the time the rehearsal ends, the cast is exhausted.

“I feel like my brain is exploding,” Vigoda says the next morning. “It’s a completely different and separate language, ASL versus English. It’s its own poetry, its own syntax, its own art form. And it just enhances everything that we do, any words that we might put on the page.”

When Deaf West commissioned the GrooveLily musicians and Sheinkin to do the show, Milburn says, they were told not to write for deaf audiences.

“They said, ‘Just write a good musical, and together we will turn this into something that works for deaf and hearing audiences.’ ”

As things have turned out, he says, the melding of music and signing has only made their songs better. He offers Wailes and Harvard’s graceful signing of a love ballad as an example.

“I don’t know if we can ever do that song in gigs without me seeing them in my head and thinking the song would be lacking without them.”

Milburn’s reaction is what Kotsur hopes for. Many hearing people, he says, talk about the showstopper in “Big River” during the rousing anthem “Waiting for the Light to Shine,” when the vocals stop abruptly and the deaf actors continue signing.

“In that silent moment,” he says, “was just a touch of our real culture. It really opened some minds, and I saw more hearts warming up.... It’s just time.”

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lynne.heffley@latimes.com

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‘Sleeping Beauty Wakes’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: Opens 8 p.m. Saturday. Runs 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Exceptions: 7 p.m. only this Sunday. Additional shows: 8 p.m. April 27, May 4 and May 8-11.

Ends: May 13

Price: $20 to $50

Contact: (213) 628-2772 or www.CenterTheatreGroup.org