With ‘Camelot,’ a legendary fight director exits the fray
NEW YORK >> In a hushed and empty Broadway theater, two men appear onstage in street clothes, each wielding fearsomelooking broad swords. One lunges at the other, who quickly strikes back. They exchange a flurry of slices and counter-slices, with the screech of metal on metal.
Watching it with a smile is B.H. Barry, the legendary fight director who is choreographing this clash for a lush new revival of “Camelot” at Lincoln Center Theater. An hour before every show, he leads the actors through their movements, like a conductor with an orchestra of lethal instruments.
“I’m having fun,” he says. “It’s back to being an acting scene and not a fight scene, which is what you want. Ideally, I want it to be when the audience doesn’t know what I’ve started and what I’ve finished.”
The fight scene he created for “Camelot” is pure poetry, a mix of muscle, humor, ballet, pride and aluminum swords. There are actually three minifights, with escalating levels of intensity, until the last combatants wield two swords each.
Barry, 83, created it from his imagination. In the original musical, there’s a joust, but it’s offstage and the audience never sees it. “My job is give me a script, give me a problem, and let me try and solve it for you,” he says.
Fergie Philippe plays one of the fighting knights, and he admits he was reluctant to do the scene, fearful he’d hurt someone. He credits Barry with empathy and encouragement, letting him come to the fight at his own pace.
“He doesn’t yell, he doesn’t scream, he doesn’t taunt, he’s not a belittling person. He’s a man who understands humanity very deeply, and he understands storytelling,” says Philippe. “And the basis of everything that he does always is going to come from that place. It’s why he’s worked for so long. It’s why he’s a legend in the fight community and in the theater community.”
This may be Barry’s last fight scene. A proud grandfather, Barry is tired of battling New York’s winters. Florida beckons. He may return to consult here or there, but it’s time for this faux fighter to hang up his gloves. “I like what I’ve done. I’m very proud of what I’ve done. And now is the time, I think,” he says.
Barry helped bring rigor, safety and artistry to fight scenes in England onstage and TV and then was lured to America in the 1970s to teach and spread his unusual sort of magic. “There are very few people like me,” he says. “I’m a kind of a niche product.”
He’s worked with everyone from Richard Harris and Susan Lucci to Kelsey Grammer, Ethan Hawke and Rudolf Nureyev on works by Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller to David Mamet and Tennessee Williams.
“I think it’s probably safe to say that very few people have had such an influence over one part of our work the way he does,” says Tony Awardwinning director Bartlett Sher. “He’s been traditionally known as one of the greatest fight directors that we’ve ever had.”
Barry is the only fight director to earn a Tony Award, an honor extended for excellence in the theater. In his speech, he graciously thanked all the people like him — stage managers, props people and ushers — who work behind the scenes.
He’s not sure if there should be a specific Tony for fight choreography. “I would be scared to death if there were a category where people would be risking actors to get the recognition of being a fight director.”
His tools are swords, daggers, boxing gloves and fists. He knows slaps, too, having worked for 17 years on the soap opera “All My Children.” He designed the huge army battles in “Glory” and choreographed an attempted rape and violent brawl with hammers and shovels for Susan Sarandon in the play “Extremities.”
“Sometimes it keeps me awake at night because I try to understand why that violence takes place,” he says. “I’m not frightened of violence. It’s a way of expressing something that you can’t do with words.”
He’s crafted struggles on “Doctor Who” and Wednesday’s fencing scene in “The Addams Family” and even advised on animated characters fighting in 1998’s “Mulan.” If you look carefully at Roman Polanski’s 1971 “Macbeth,” you’ll see Barry, in a suit of armor, quietly stepping in for actor Terence Bayler as Macduff in the climactic final hand-tohand combat.
“B.H. is in a long line of these kind of great artisans who work in the world of fight choreography,” says Sher. “Just to have him in the room and to have his experience and to have his wisdom is just an extraordinary gift to the work.”
Barry’s legacy is dozens of memorable theater, opera, film and TV fights, but it’s also his students. He has trained 10 proteges to spread his philosophy, each having worked under the master for three years.
While his vocabulary may be violence, Barry is effortlessly courteous and friendly, elegant and endlessly encouraging. “I will never let you down if I promised you something, and I will be fair with you,” he says.
He has taught at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Yale, Temple, NYU and The Juilliard School.