Another little theater trip this past weekend for me and gmtarkin. BTW, if you can visit Times Square after an evening show in the middle of a snowstorm, it's a pretty cool sight.

It's been a while since our last trip, and I think even longer since I last did one of my quickie theater reviews. So, I'll include a recent SpeakEasy show here as well. And now, without further ado...

( Quickie Theater Reviews )

OK, that's really odd.  As regular readers know, my live journal pic has for lo these many years been a picture of an elephant taken on safari way back in 1999.  Now, without my having done anything to my LJ pics, it's been replaced with a totally different picture.

Even more disturbing, that picture appears to be of Katie Holmes.

For those of you wondering what's happened to my head that I've promoted Katie to my LJ, it's totally not my fault.  But I'm going to blame Scientology.

And now I have to find that elephant picture again...

Update:  Elephant is back.

For an actor whose name people don't usually know, Mark Sheppard sure has been getting a lot of work.

I swear, this guy appears on every drama series I see lately.  A few years ago I first noticed him as "Badger" on Firefly, and he then popped up as a terrorist on 24.  After he gets offed by another terrorist on that show, he turns up as Romo Lampkin on BSG.  He was in the pilot of Bionic Woman before that show turned to crap, and now he's in the middle of recurring bits on both Dollhouse and the season finale of Leverage.  Plus, in the past couple of months I've turned on my TV to find him on In Plain Sight and Burn Notice.  I swear, this guy must have the hardest-working agent in showbiz.

Oh, and for classic sci-fi fans, here's a neat tidbit -- his father was Blank Reg on Max Headroom.

Don't know why I felt the need to write about it, but I feel like this guy's stalking me now when I watch TV...

I'm having a bit of a movie weekend, apparently.

Friday ML managed to score tickets to the live show of Cinematic Titanic at the Somerville Theatre. For those of you who don't know what this is, CT is one of two groups that has risen from the ashes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and are doing movie riffs. CT is closest to the original MST3K -- it's Joel Hodgson, Mary Jo Pehl, J. Elvis Weinstein, Trace Beaulieu, and Frank Conniff taking bad movies and doing the standard jokes while they are shown in silhouette. That's on the DVDs, of course, of which they've now created six. For the live show they're standing around the movie screen, going through their scripts for the night's feature.

The feature that night was Blood of the Vampires, a film from 1970 set in Mexico in the 1920s, clearly filmed in the Philippines with local actors, bad dubbing, poor lighting, and a figurine of the Virgin Mary accompanied by a giant chicken. For its purposes, of course, it was perfect.

(BTW, the other MST3K players -- Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy -- are now doing RiffTrax, a venture where you can download an MP3 commentary track to play along with the DVD for more well-known films, such as Star Wars Episode I or Battlefield Earth. Also very funny.)

My day yesterday was mostly taken up with an Oscar marathon. A couple of years ago we managed to get into the Best Picture showcase at the Framingham premium cinema, but were unsuccessful the last couple of years. So, yesterday some friends had a marathon of nominated films from last year's awards, so we could see what we had missed.

On offer were Atonement (gorgeous to look at and listen to, but apparently linear storytelling is for pussies), No Country for Old Men (really great characters and acting, but the open plot threads made me wonder if there was a sequel coming), Charlie Wilson's War (which I thoroughly enjoyed), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (actually followed it better than the first one), and Lars and the Real Girl (which was both not at all what I expected and a marvelous little film).

And of course, tonight is the Oscar ceremony. So, by Monday I'm going to be pretty much movie-d out.

Does anyone else find it rather disappointing that apparently more Californians believe in rights for farm animals than in rites for gay people?

So, a while ago I wrote a piece of software for the Guild. It was a nifty little program to switch synthesizer patches on the fly, and I've used it to do synth programming for a bunch of shows. I made it open source software, and I've called it Qualm. Mostly it's just been used for Guild shows, although dmrzzz has also used it for A New Brain at the Longwood Players.

I have had one other user, however. There's a music director in Ohio working with the Heights theater who contacted me when he was doing Children of Eden, and I helped him use Qualm to set up the three-keyboard orchestra. Recently, he contacted me again for some guidance about quickly setting up splits and layers in Qualm for a production of Aida. They've just gone through the first orchestra read, and it was apparently a success. He's just sent me the following note:

...all 3 key players commented on how wonderfully controlled the programming was. And the conductor was equally complimentary -- which I take to be a good thing since he conducted the Aida tour as well.

Best CNN headline ever:  "Lost baby whale thinks yacht is mom".

Heard on the Olympics commentary: "And that just goes to show: in diving, you never give up."

Presumably, that's opposed to all those Olympic sports where giving up is just good strategy.

gmtarkin and I took a little trip down to NYC this weekend.  "Wow," I hear you cry.  "You went to see that wrestling show that thedan went to?"  To which I reply, "Um, no."

This past weekend was our anniversary.  Sadly, we've now been married long enough to reach the point where there are no more official anniversary present types.  I mean, there's one site which thinks we should be getting silver hollow-ware this year, but since that site sells silver hollow-ware, i doubt its veracity.  Oh, and Wikipedia says we should give each other tungsten.  A nice thought, but light bulb filaments aren't nearly as romantic as most people think.

So, rather than spend the weekend at Home Depot trying to pick out that very special PAR 38, we decided to hop in the car ("Take that, annoying airline industry!") and drive down to New York for a few days and see some theater.  We do this every once in a while, and usually it's a mixed bag -- we'll get two or three shows we like, and one that just doesn't quite measure up.  Sometime when you're drunk ask us about Dance of the Vampires -- I'll even sing you a bit of their "Garlic!" song.

Anyway, this weekend was different.  Four Broadway shows, all of them just marvelous pieces, all for different reasons.  I recommend any of them if you're going down there.  The shows were Xanadu, The 39 Steps, Boeing-Boeing, and [title of show]. I'll hide my usual quickie theatre reviews behind a cut in case anyone wants to be unspoilt:

I'll be putting up a post later that may explain the context for this question, but I'm curious as to how the stage managers who read my posts -- both amateur and pro -- might respond in this situation.  Actors, directors, and techies should feel free to weigh in as well. :-)

You're running a comedic play.  The set consists basically of a large number of doors opening onto a central room, with the actors and actresses rushing through them constantly.  During act II, one of the actresses kicks open a door while angrily searching for another character, and ends up breaking both hinges.  Your lead actor covers well -- "wow, you're really strong" -- and is able to manhandle the door back into place, but every time the door opens he has to grab hold of it and fit it back into position.

Now, the actors are handling it, but the audience clearly knows that this wasn't intended and is laughing along with the antics of wrestling the door back.  The door is going to have to be opened and closed another six times or so before the end of the show.  You have to make the decision -- do you let things go on, with the actors struggling with the door, or do you take advantage of the next scene to quietly screw the hinges back into place and deal with the fact that you might break them and the audience when they realize the door has been magically fixed?

You have 20 seconds.  Go.