15 posts tagged “acting”
Last night was closing night. Here's one of the articles that came out opening weekend. I'm not sure how long the link will be good.
There was a review Saturday that said we had them "rolling in the aisles." :->
Something I found surprising was the difference in audiences. The first two nights were great. The Sunday matinee I thought someone needed to go out into the audience and check their pulses. The next weekend, Friday was our best show yet, with about 260 people in the audience and an outstanding response to each joke, then last night, closing night, we were back to performing for a room full of crash test dummies. Go figure.
I don't know that I've ever had an Italian Chardonnay. Now I have. That's about all I can say. I'm not particularly fond of chardonnay, anymore - it all tastes the same to me, and this didn't stick out. Still, it was very drinkable, and that's good considering it came in a 1.5 L bottle.
I'm behind in blogging my wine tasting, so you can expect more over the next couple of days. In other news, I injured myself at rehearsal tonight. There's a scene in the play where I'm supposed to be edging my way across a ledge outside the apartment window, then fall off backwards. While I was wheeling my arms around to keep from falling off, I hit a pole behind the set in the scene shop, and now I have a large, painful knot on my arm.
Also, I'm feeling a little self-conscious. There are two actresses in this play that I'm supposed to kiss at various points. Both of them have seemed really unwilling to do so, and have had to "psych" themselves up to it. To me, it's just part of the role - it's what the script calls for. The fact that they approach the task like they're getting ready to clean a litterbox seems insulting to me. Oh, well.
I went and saw Urinetown: The Musical tonight at the college. This is a Broadway musical produced locally with local talent, and I am very happy to yell KUDOS to my good friend Laura for doing an outstanding job as Little Sally. Laura, you stole the show!
So, Urinetown. It's a very strange show, and is very self-referential and is pretty much a spoof of musicals while being a real musical itself. The purposely ridiculous premise is that there has been a 20-year drought and that both private toilets and public urination have been outlawed, so that everyone now has to pay a monopolist public toilet magnate for the privalege of going to the bathroom in a public commode. I can't imagine a more bizarre concept, but it's camped up the point that you can't help but laugh.
A big round of applause also to Adam Savage, who played the toilet mogul Mr. Cladwell, and did an outstanding job, as well as to the actors who played Hope, Officer Lockstock, and Bobby Strong.
Again, Laura: you rock!
Man, I've been busy, and now that I've started rehearsing for the next play even though the current one isn't finished, it's likely to be like that for a while.
A few nights ago, Strix and I watched Finding Neverland. Johnny Depp plays J M Barrie, the Scottish playwrite who wrote Peter Pan and - not incidentally - Dear Brutus, the play I'm in right now. Finding Neverland is supposed to be about the inspiration that lead Barrie to write Peter Pan. The beginning of the movie says, "Inspired by Actual Events," or something along those lines, and that's all you can really say, because it's not a true story.
In the movie, Barrie meets Sylvia Davies when she is already a widow, in 1903. In reality, he met them when the patriarch of the family, Arthur, was still alive, in 1897. Arthur didn't actually die until 1907. Peter Pan was already written by 1903, based somewhat on the children in the Davies family, so the fact that the movie had poor Slyvia a widow four years before her husband actually died was the screenwriter's way of making her more of a love interest for Barrie.
We put this movie at the top of our Netflix list because I was interested to learn more about Barrie since I'm in a play written by him right now. The character I play, Mr. Dearth, is semi-autobiographical, I think. Barrie's relationship with his wife, Mary Ansell, was, at least according to some, a cold and possibly even sexless marriage. Mr. Dearth is in a marriage with a wife that hates him, apparently for failing to measure up to some unspoken ideal that she had set up. Dearth is an artist, and his wife is a model, whereas Barrie was a playwrite, and his wife was an actress. Barrie and his wife were childless, a fact that he apparently regretted since he romanticized childhood so much in Peter Pan, and Dearth and his wife are likewise childless, a fact which he regrets but she does not. There are a good number of parallels.
Despite the movie's playing fast and loose with the facts, it was very entertaining to watch, and had excellent performances from Depp (of course), Kate Winslet (Sylvia Davies), and an incredibly cold and unlikable Radha Mitchell (Mary Ansell, Barrie's actress wife).
So in the first Act, the actress playing my wife is quite proper looking, with her hair swooped up high on her head. In Act II, she turns into a homeless bag-lady, and so back stage during intermission in rehearsal last night, the hairdressers were working hard to rat it out big-time, hairspraying actual leaves and twigs into it. It looked wild.
Me: Hey, Joey, you got a real Helena Bonham Carter thing going on there.
Joey: Yeah, but I don't have a Johnny Depp.
Me: Well, in this scenario, I would be Johnny Depp.
Hair Dresser: Huh! If you were Johnny Depp, I would be on stage with you, and I'm not even an actress.
Uh huh. In other words, "Sir, I know Johnny Depp, and you are no Johnny Depp."
Oh, well.
We had a pickup rehearsal for A Christmas Carol tonight at the new theater. It's about three times the size of the Little Theater, where our first two performances were, and it's generally a much nicer facility. I'm looking forward to performing there tomorrow and Saturday.
In the meantime, I did what the director for the next play, Dear Brutus, asked, and wrote up an analysis of my character. Here it is:
My interpretation of Will Dearth: Will was once an aspiring artist, and met Alice while he still had high hopes for his future. She, however, had high hopes of her own, particularly of marrying an ambitious man. Perhaps she thought, but did not say, that he would outgrow his artistic phase and pursue more lucrative means. Instead, he kept at his art, and she became more and more bitter because of it. She caste him in the role of failure, and he increasingly accepted the role, until his loss of joy made him incapable of creating. He says he is a waster, but it’s obvious they have some income, because they are at least better off than she would have been as Mrs. Freddy Finch-Fallow, so I imagine he is employed in some non-descript, dead-end position.
J. M. Barrie’s marriage to actress Mary Ansell was, by some accounts, sexless as well as childless. The childless part of Dearth’s marriage could be a projection of Barrie’s own regret over not having children, and if the animosity Alice feels for Will is a reflection of Mary’s feelings for James, then it’s easy to believe that Barrie’s marriage was sexless, as it is difficult to imagine Alice and Will being physically affectionate considering her hatred of him. Barrie divorced Mary when she refused to end an affair, and so it is possible that the Dearth story line in Dear Brutus is a form of wish fulfillment – wishing that he could show Mary that her life would not have been better off without him so that she would appreciate him more.
Other things we know about Will Dearth:
He is highly educated, or at least educated enough that he can effortlessly toss off a quote from Horace, “O matre pulchra filia pulchrior,” which means, “Oh, beautiful mother with an even more beautiful daughter,” and purposely mistranslate it to tease Margaret.
He is good-spirited, being very willing to take the blame for his failing marriage in his real life and willing to happily give money to a beggar in his fantasy life.
He loves his daughter, Margaret, to such an extent in his fantasy life that he doesn’t miss being married.
He has the dry wit that comes with intelligence and self-confidence, even when he allows himself to be verbally degraded by his wife. Perhaps, even though he allows her to abuse him, he does not really believe it. This could be a bit of a martyr complex. He needs to be needed by someone, and in the absence of Margaret or the love of his wife, he allows her to use him as a scapegoat.
The performance went extremely well tonight, even better than last night, and then we struck the set. We're playing again next weekend, two performances, but at another theater on the west side of the county.
Since we struck the set, we had to adhere to an old theater tradition, and thank the ghost of the theater for allowing us to perform there. The tradition is, you ask the ghost for permission before you start setting up the set, and you thank him after you tear it down. If you don't, accidents will happen. I don't believe in ghosts, obviously, but it was fun. A Navajo member of our cast also said a Navajo prayer and left an apple for the spirit, so we had a multicultural end-of-run ceremony.
I guess what my fellow thespians said was true - a bad dress rehearsal is a sign of a good opening night. Everything went extremely well, with only a few minor hitches (such as some slighltly delayed entrances, mostly due just to the large number of actors). I was also somewhat irritated with the number of people who ignored theater etiquette and took flash photography during the performance (rude!), but that had nothing to do with us, of course.
So there you go. A successful stage debut. ::bow::
I was extremely disappointed with our first and only full dress rehearsal tonight. To put it mildly, it was terrible. Opening night is tomorrow night, and I'm not at all confident in how it will go.
Again, I am playing a very minor character that only appears in two short scenes. Even so, the second scene I was in was a disaster, with my partner on stage forgetting all his lines. I advised him - strongly - to practice tonight. This is my first stage performance, and I don't want to look like a fool. If he forgets his lines, the audience won't know that it was him screwing up and not me - they'll just know that the two of us are standing on stage not saying anything.
This was also the first and only rehearsal in makeup. I'm a 35 year old man, and I've never worn makeup, except for that time I woke up in Tijuana, but I won't talk about that.
Bosworth, in makeup.
The makeup was heavy, but they assured me that it would look good on stage under the lights. I'm not so sure, but I'm not an expert on stage makeup, so I took their word for it. Just the act of allowing them to put on the eyeliner was enough to make me glad that I am not a woman. Or a transvestite.
In mid-February, I will be taking stage in a production of Dear Brutus, by J M Barrie, playing the role of Mr. Dearth.
One of his lines is a quote from Horace, "O matre pulchra filia pulchrior." I thought it was Italian, but now I'm assuming it's Latin. According to Wikiquotes, it translates to, "O fairer daughter of a fair mother!"
If you know anything about Latin, please listen to me read this line and tell me if I'm saying it correctly. I never took Latin in school, so I'm just winging it here.
