12 posts tagged “theater”
We went to see Into the Woods at an outdoor amphitheater as performed by Sandstone Productions.
I like this theater. There's something about watching theater outdoors that seems very real. After about two hours on the stone benches, though, and I've had enough reality. This show ran almost three hours long, and I would say that pretty much all of the slack was due to the over-rated song stylings of Stephen Sondheim. The songs in this musical are not that musical, not pleasant to listen to, and I can only imagine that they aren't pleasant to sing, either, though the cast did their best with the material at hand.
The story itself is cute, though I think it, too could have been shorter. I would have been very happy with the play as it ended in Act II, before the intermission. The play is basically a re-telling of several fairy tails - Rappunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cinderella - weaving the stories together into one, inter-related überfairy tale. At the end of Act II, all of the stories are sufficiently interwoven, and have ended in more or less the traditional way. Act III tears all of our traditional stories apart and seems to have an overall theme of "there aren't really any happily ever afters," which, I don't know about you, but I already knew, thank you very much.
The Foreigner has a scene in it where a guy in a Ku Klux Klan costume has to "melt" into the floor. This is done by lowering him into the floor through a trap door while his sheets stay above. The stage of the theater where TEA performs doesn't have a trap door.
Other than building a platform on the stage and thus raising the performance area another four feet or so, does anyone have any ideas of what we could do instead?
The theater group I've been involved in is now having weekly script readings to pick its shows for the 2009-2010 season. Yes, they pick them out a year and a half ahead. They do this because they operate partly off of a grant from Conoco-Phillips, and they have to have their shows planned before the grant application deadline, which is in June.
Basically, we all get together, pick parts, and read through a play that one of the members recommended. Tonight we read A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller. It's hard to say how a man who was having sex with Marilyn Monroe could write something so depressing. Depressing as it is, however, it's a good play. We'll see if it makes the final list.
Next week, we're reading The Foreigner. I recommended it. The play is almost overdone, but it hasn't played here for about ten years, and it's screamingly funny.
And, on a completely unrelated note...
Please...
Don't leave personally owned geese.
Seriously.
I went on stage tonight, dressed as a woman (a really ugly one, at that), and made a fool of myself to make the audience laugh. This was opening night for "Love, Sex, and the IRS." They did laugh, so... mission accomplished. It would have really sucked if I went through all that and no one thought it was funny.
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!
The play is over! Thursday was the pickup rehearsal, with performances Friday night and last night. We struck the set last night, so Friday night we had the cast party at my house.
Last Sunday was the matinee performance, and I took my camera in because after the show we did show shots, where we basically go through all the scenes in costume and do the blocking so they can take pictures for the theater group's website.
I took this one backstage before the performance, with all the girls getting their stage makeup on.
Sure this is community theater, but who says we don't get paid for it? Donuts and coffee kept us going... though of course one of the other actors had to buy it and bring it in.
Michelle is the wife of one of the actors, and as such she got roped into being a stage hand. Her son Talon is here signing posters with her. Each actor, stage hand, and tech got a poster, and as a result each of us had to go through and sign each one, which takes a while.
And here are the show shots. Of course, I didn't get any of the scenes with me in it, but Strix was there and took shots of all of them with a nicer camera than what I have. You can see her shots on her Flickr page.
From Act 1:
I didn't get many shots of Act 2, mostly because I was in most of it, but also because the stage lighting was much darker and most of my shots came out blurry.
Act 3:
A shot of the set with no actors on it, with Act II lighting. Act I and Act III take place entirely in the house, on the left side of the stage (stage right), which was set up on a giant rotating platform built just for this play. In Act II, the house is rotated around as you see it here, and all the action takes place on the right side of the stage (stage left) where the tree and rocks are.
The moon played a large part in my Act II scenes, so they projected it up on the wall off stage right. Of course, it has a fire alarm right in the middle of it. Pretend it's a Lunar colony, okay?
Joey, in the red dress, between show shots. She was playing my character's wife, and here was dressed up for Act III, with a leaf still stuck in her hair. Lisa, right, was the show's director, and she's telling us who's up next.
Strix, taking a picture in the dark.
Lisa, making herself at home.
The only decent shot I got of the after party Friday night. I took this from the loft while my friends played 80's trivia.
So that's all for now, and I'm caught up. Until next time.
I work 8 to 5, then for no extra money I work from 6 to 11 rehearsing with my fellow cast members for no pay? Now I see why more people aren't into community theater. And yet, I wouldn't have it any other way... except that I am very, very tired.
I did managed to get over to the polling place for the caucus today and fill in the little box for my candidate. I see from CNN that New Mexico is still too close to call. Interesting. Anyway, I am glad to see that McCain is the front-runner for the Republican party for most of the states thus far. Of all of the Republican candidates, he makes me the least queasy. I do worry that if it turns out being between him and Hillary, a certain percentage of Democrats may cross party lines to vote for him instead of Our Lady of the Perpetual Mood Swings.
A better polling place would definitely have been in order. It was at the college at one of the buildings with very little parking, so I had to park in the unpaved overflow lot and walk through the snowy, slushy mud to get to the ballot box. Of course, I realize this is nothing compared to the days when you had to ride in the wagon for a day to get to the polling place, and risk being strung up if you voted for the wrong candidate, but hey, we're used to our modern conveniences now.
This movie can really be summed up in two words: Holy Crap.
I had seen the play once years ago, but had to leave at intermission because I was working nights and the play was very long. Of course, seeing half of the stage production cannot prepare you for this extremely bloody screen adaptation of the morbid musical known as Sweeney Todd.
Excellent performances by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman make this very watchable, even if you do occasionally have to look away from the screen because of the buckets and buckets of blood. And oh, is there blood! You could fill a swimming pool with it, then go for a dip, the way this movie uses it. Still, if you like your darkness dark and your mobidity morbid, this is your movie. Plus, true to Tim Burton form, he made sure to spray a lot of blood directly into Johnny Depp's face.
Interesting trivia: Former Branagh-Thompson homewrecker Helena Bonham Carter is now engaged to director Tim Burton. This isn't really news, because they've apparently been engaged for six years and have had two children in the interim. So what do out-of-the-box actress Bonham Carter and creative genius Tim Burton name their first child? Billy Ray. Go irony.
In unrelated theatrical news, I auditioned for the next Theater Arts Ensemble play last night and this afternoon, and got a call today telling me that I got one of the lead roles. It's called Love, Sex, and the IRS, and it's a farcical romp and is going to require a lot more on-stage physicality and running around than I've done up to this point, to it should be interesting.
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.
Tonight, we saw a play called "Night Watch," performed by Theater Ensemble Arts, the same community drama group that is doing the version of the A Christmas Carol that I'm performing in in December.
The stage design was amazing, and the acting was good. A couple of the actors needed to learn to project a little more, but it was a dialog-heavy play, and the main characters did a great job of keeping it all together and got through it all perfectly, despite it being the first night of the first show of the season.
I am freaking amazed, however, at people who insist on talking and giggling during the live performance of a play. I realise it's "only" community theater, but show some respect. And I'm not talking about children, I'm talking about adults in their forties and fifties, people who should know better. I wanted to smack them in the back of the head.
