Originally posted by Majicwrench  KEB54, interesting your thoughts on email. I use email a LOT and love it, I can cover a lot of things  with individual actors without the rest of the crew just hanging out.  As you so well noted however, there are some things that are much better handled face to face. But email, I love it, and it saves me and the cast a lot of time.

I've worked with many kinds of directors, which has shaped my own directing style.  When I was growing up in community theatre, we had a director who tweaked tirelessly.  If he wasn't satisfied with your "Sigh and lean against the lamppost," we'd rehearse "sigh and lean against the lamppost" until you got it right.  After working with him for several years, I got to the point where I just did it the way he wanted from the beginning.

I've also been involved with directors who were totally hands off.  I did "Joseph" with a summer theatre group a few years ago, and the director gave almost no direction other than "okay, stand here at the beginning of the scene," "Now move here on this line," "Okay, now move back."  70-80% of the blocking was "evolved" by the cast, and at least 90% of the characterization (such as it is in Joseph) came from the actors.  The result was surprisingly good, but there remained a lot of improvised lines and actions that seemed inappropriate to me.  And of course, on the final performance, since the cast got to make most of the decisions anyway, there were ridiculous and obvious pranks, jokes, and showboating occurring that I never would have allowed.

My directing style (especially since I work primarily with high school students) is to be right up on stage with the actors, guiding them through blocking, providing examples of how lines might be read or physical actions might be performed.  I try to help them to understand WHY I want it done in that fashion, and help them to develop a general sense of who their character is.

Once that is done, I tend to hand the reins on the subtlety over to the students.  My notes change from, "Be appalled here" to "React however your character would."  If something isn't working, I will certainly speak up, but in my experience as an actor, the fun comes when the audience is looking at the other side of the stage.

In my (albeit limited) experience, it's the actors who have to make the direction work, regardless of what the director says or thinks.  Good direction can still look bad if the actors don't do their job, and bad or insufficient direction can still look fine if the actors work together to sell it.

Originally posted by NDTENOR Well, my only comment about "working with him" would be to say after one show " I wouldn't be working with him". You have a brain..... you can think.... you can make decisions about your character. I have never tolerated tyrants... and I never will.

I misrepresented him, I fear.  He was an ex-Broadway actor who started our community theatre.  I did my first show with him when I was eight years old, and moved away after my twelfth when I was fourteen.  He taught a lot of us that there was a RIGHT way to do things... and "almost good enough" was never good enough.  Fantastic patience for a whole slew of children who needed to do simple things thirty times in order to get it right.

He did have a clear vision of how it needed to be, but he never came across as a tyrant.