A Chorus Line (5)

Conceived by Michael Bennett

Book by James Kirkwood & Nicholas Dante

Music by Marvin Hamlisch

Lyrics by Edward Kleban

This book is everything. I’ve listened to the cast recording countless times. I’ve choreographed to “One” for my musical theatre classes, and I’ve danced to “I Hope I Get It,” but I’ve never seen it. And the next best thing is reading it, right? (wrong. but. I spend a lot more time on a bus than I do in front of a tv)

If you DON’T know what A Chorus Line is LET ME TELL YOU REAL QUICK. Michael Bennett had some long conversations with some of his dancer friends about what life is like for a Broadway chorus dancer. The interviews were turned into this musical. In A Chorus Line, a room full of dancers are auditioning for a musical, and are told by the director that not only their dancing will be judged, but their personalities, and he tries to get them to open up. What follows is a story of love, loss, and theatre. Will watching it help you understand why we crazies do these shows? Maybe.  

CASSIE: “But I don’t want to prove anything anymore. I want to do what I love as much as I can and as long as I can. But at least, now – I’m doing it for me.”

For me, this new path I am taking, diving into teaching and studying child development and learning is so fascinating. Teaching is rewarding to me in the way that I think making art should feel. If you've missed this in the past, I'm an actress. I've wanted to be an actress since I was five, but have pursued it timidly, never being the child who desperately wanted to move to LA or New York. I wanted LA to want me so badly they made me move because that's where I was going to be working. But the nomadic reality of becoming an actor, doing touring shows (if you're lucky!) before you break into Broadway, going from LA to New York, to a regional house that will pay you.... I just don’t want that enough. I want to do the shows and the roles I want to do and not worry about whose watching or how doing show A might get me to theatre Z at some point maybe.

Reading this play was like hearing a resounding "that's ok!" from the artistic community. "Do what you love! Love what you do!" I am so proud of all of my friends who are literally chasing their dreams to New York or Broadway, and I am equally excited about my next year studying teaching. Who knows what the future holds.

Water By the Spoonful (5)

"I just remember the instant I saw him, there was just something changed in his eye," Hudes says. "You know, he was still absolutely the same young clown of a cousin I had always known and had grown up with, loving, but there was something different. And I felt that I might never understand it. And that's the simple spark that it came from," (NPR Morning Edition). 

The play starts in a chat room. Haikumom and her devotees make up a chatroom for recovering crack addicts, and are checking in with each other. Orangutan, a young Japanese-American woman who decided to run from her addiction back to Japan to meet her birth parents. Chutes&Ladders, an IRS worker in his 50s. Fountainhead, new to the site.

We also follow Eliot, a 20-something Iraq vet & Yasmin, the family rock -cousins dealing with their aunt's death and funeral arrangement.

Far be it from me to give less than five stars to a Pulitzer Prize for Drama Winner, but this one earned it. It was lovely, yes, but it also spoke to me, which it should. And I understood it. Perhaps because I know someone who's struggled with addiction, and I think it speaks truths that you're afraid to ask that person. Hudes also finds a way to be so forgiving and loving to her characters, while allowing her characters to be unforgiving to each other. It's a truly beautiful piece and I can only assume it's a total bitch to stage.

Boston's Lyric Stage Company

I mean, the characters are chatting online...but they're real and present and really connecting to each other, they know each other in that online way, where you can know everything about a person, things they won't admit out loud but feel free to type. Yet you wouldn't recognize them on the street. How do you stage that?

It has just enough heartbreak in it to make you feel human, but not so much that you want to go numb yourself afterwards. And that is what makes this play really beautiful.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (5)

I desperately want to see this play. Like with many plays, much is lost in translation when you merely read it. How different to see Sigourney Weaver as aging star Masha lamenting being cast as a grandmother and getting paid less than she did in her glory days then to read a faceless character you are somewhat ambivalent towards. I never connect as well to a play I'm reading unless there's a character I desperately want to play that I am imagining myself being.

Cassandra

And yet, it is funny. It is both current, three aging siblings considering their lives, and the state of global warming and the world in general, and ancient, with Cassandra, their maid, a modern version of The Cassandra, from Agamemnon touting prophesies at each turn of the page. Spike is the only character firmly routed in the current world while Vanya, Sonia, Masha, and Nina are all Chekhovian. I would love to hear reactions from someone with less knowledge of classic theatre, and also the reaction of someone who understood EVERYTHING. Who knows The Sea-Gull and The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sister like I know The Hunger Games and Harry Potter and A Game of Thrones.

Did I give it five stars because it's a Tony Award winner, and who am I to argue with the pros? Probably. But it also gave this 25-year-old a glimpse into the minds of those older than me. It did what all great art should do: it helped me understand a person different then myself. It may be funnier to someone who understands more Chekhov, but it made me want to dive back in and read Chekhov, and how many works can state that?

Most of all, I loved how beautifully Christopher Durang discussed the idea of a shared memory between the generations. How does a grandparent converse with a texting, tweeting teenager? What do they have in common? There are thousands of shows and everyone has their own tastes and opinions firmly staked, what can we all discuss?

"The Ed Sullivan Show was on...Richard Burton and Julie Andrews would sing songs from Camelot. It was wonderful. It helped theatre be part of the national consciousness, which it isn't anymore."

And yet, NBC aired a live television broadcast of The Sound of Music this year. Maybe it was in response to the production of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike and perhaps it wasn't, but it was so popular that they are absolutely doing it again next year. Please, please do NBC! But maybe cast Audra as the lead this time? Or at least Lea Michele. Pretty please?  

Rehearsing has taken over my life

Acting is my addiction. That is my only excuse for not having updated in the past six weeks. Between filming a short film, rehearsing for Jesus Christ Superstar and getting ready for TPS auditions, I haven't sat down and thought through a blog post. I I also haven't had time to go to the library, and was trying not to go on too much of a book buying spree...so I steadily attempted to plod through "A Prayer for Owen Meany."

I don't know why I keep quitting that book. It's rich and compelling, while I'm reading it, but then after a few weeks I wander into the abyss of Facebook and can't force myself to pick it back up. Perhaps one day I can admit to myself that I love love stories, and Johnny's lack of a romantic interest makes me lose interest. Maybe it's because my brain is tired, and all I can handle is some good old junk food reading, the kind where you can sit on the couch and devour the book in one sitting instead of, you know, actually thinking.

Judas give us your info

These are the books that made the ADD cut:

Cinder: a scifi YA Cinderella novel set in the future. Cinderella's a cyborg, the prince likes her but politics and all that...definitely an entertaining, fast read but the plot is a bit obvious.
Scarlet: the sequel. Adds a little red riding hood and big bad wolf character. I found this plot less predictable, but I also felt that it was very much a second-book-in-the-series, where characters are added wit their own plot and histories are revealed, but the plot itself has merely inched along.
I read them both in the span of...four? Maybe five? days in the midst of tech for JCS. The next book doesn't come out until 2014, I think I'm going to jump off a bridge. Lol

Night Circus: awesome. Love it. Want to play Celia in the movie version desperately. I'm not joking, I seriously started reading up on moving to LA in time to get discovered. It had everything you need: romance, magic, threat of death hanging over your favorite characters' heads. The book's about a circus which is only open at night which becomes the arena for two young illusionists to compete.
That being said: if a character dies in a book I want to cry my eyes out. This book did not make me cry, but maybe I've just become heartless in my old age. You be the judge.

The Thirteenth Tale: at first I kind of hated the main character, Margaret Lea, because she was quiet and mousy and just sat around and read books, but I think you're supposed to. Margaret gets chosen by the reclusive, best selling author Vida Winters to pen the authors biography.
The real story is, of course, the biography, which at times becomes so fantastical you wonder if its fiction after all. What begins as a slow, quiet novel about a shy, quiet girl morphs into an enticing mystery.

The Hunger Games and the truth about Friday the 13th

Wow, a lot has happened since I last wrote, which is probably why it took me a couple weeks to get another post up. I left one show, did a 24 film fest, and opened two shows. And read three books.

The Hunger Games (5/5/4)
Those are the ratings for all three since I'm not sure I could completely differentiate one from the other after reading them in four days. I would almost go so far as to say Ender's Game lovers would like this one, but I don't want to get your hopes up THAT high. I don't even know what to say about those books except that you should clear your calendar before starting them or you may ditch some people or get kicked out of class for reading or something, and that would be bad. I, for one, started sneaking reading it on my iPhone during a rehearsal I was directing. Yeah, I'm that responsible.

Maybe I should name this post "Lack of Responsibility" instead, I think that may be a pretty accurate theme of this post.

Anyways, the last one was really good, I was just thought that the ending was a little anticlimatic and after all that drama between Katniss and her two guys, it was resolved too easily.

the last Spirit Singers show

Friday the 13th
I've been working with a 7th-12th grade group at my church since last July, and they performed their show on Friday the 13th this year. I kind of laughed when I found out it was Friday the 13th because seriously, what director in their right mind would pick that day to open a show? Tell me how un-superstitious you are all you want, in theater you just don't mess with that stuff because too much could go wrong. So I laughed and thought "Only at church would this happen."

So we started work on this show in like, January, cast in February? (correct me if I'm wrong) and we had 5ish months to put it together.

Three weeks before opening one of our leads got pulled for reasons unbeknown to me. He'd also choreographed about half of the show and couldn't even come to rehearsals to help us work though his choreography. And that was bad, but mostly we all just felt really bad for this student  because he didn't get to be part of a show he put so much of himself into.

And you know what else happened? My co-director, my boss if you will, the pastor who had created this group and had worked at this church for 23 years QUIT HER JOB the night before we opened. She had her reasons and I don't blame her, but seriously universe? How cursed am I?

And I mean, the show went really, really well. I managed to run the sound (cue up a CD player and press "play" and "pause" not real hard work like a mix board or anything), our replacement remembered ALL of his lines even though he'd only been to about two rehearsals, and everyone just did a really fabulous job.

Sometimes my life feels a little like this.

The Truth 
So let's do a run down of the last year of shows I've done:
Law of Life (opened Sat, plays one more day): had to delay opening because other lead/choreographer dropped out two weeks before show, other dance dropped out a few weeks before that.
Prodigal: one lead got pulled a few weeks before opening, director quit
XX Fest: week one other lead got horribly sick, week two I got sick
*Winter Spirit Singers show: nothing bad happened?
Godspell: fired director two days before opening

So at first I looked at this run down and thought "OMG my theatre career is cursed!! Maybe it's a sign!! I should stop doing theatre!!" And then I realized...some of those shows got better after crazy things happened. Maybe I should run with the opportunity I may be given. As far as I can tell from a brief conversation Friday night it sounds like the church's plan is either I run the group or no one does. The only problem is, how can I run a group that meets from 5:15-7pm in Redmond and still do acting in Seattle? What exactly should I be focusing on?

Focus
The one thing I've been managing to do is keep my plants alive.

Now they're taking over my apartment! They're everywhere!!!

My cucumbers are getting big enough I actually have to start worrying about  terracing them.