So, apparently there was a lot of wind last night:

( pictures beneath the cut )

Whoo-hoo!  I just landed the part of Narrator / Mysterious Man in Turtle Lane's production of Into the Woods!

And now I just have to figure out what I'm doing from now until September when the rehearsals start. :-)

In spring of 2001, gmtarkin and I went to a show on Broadway. It had been open about six months, and still featured the original cast. The story was based on a small but well-received independent film, and had been rewritten by Terrence McNally. The music was by a new composer whose previous connection to Broadway was that he'd played in a band with Adam Guettel.

The show was The Full Monty, and I was spellbound.

The music was a lovely jazz-rock hybrid score, with lyrics filled with humor. The first act had probably the funniest song I'd ever heard, and the second act showcased two lovely moving ballads. Jerry Mitchell's choreography was perfectly suited to the storyline, and the cast -- anchored by newcomer Patrick Wilson -- was clearly having a blast.

And the orchestra...I'd just begun to think about music direction, and this conductor -- Kimberley Grigsby -- was riveting. She was lively, and actually was using her skills to draw attention to the orchestra during the quick-paced overture and entr'acte. It was eye-opening, and influenced much of my thinking about how music direction should be.

In the summer of 2003, jxkirtley was putting together a Guild cabaret night, with the stated intention of featuring songs from musicals that the Guild would never do. This was the start of what would eventually be known as Selectionless, and my choice was clear -- the Guild would never be doing Full Monty, so I'd teach Jamez and sirrogue that hilarious song from Act One -- "Big-Ass Rock". It brought the house down.

In the fall of 2004, sirrogue and jainamsolo asked me to suggest a song for a friend to sing at their wedding. I dusted off another Full Monty number -- "You Walk With Me". Although it's a bit odd when considered in the show's context, it was an absolutely lovely choice. I spent a few weeks adjusting it up a diminished fourth, created a bunch of MP3s to find the right orchestral background for the piece, and carbon_scoring did a marvelous job singing it at the ceremony.

Clearly, this show is kind of important to me.

And now, the Guild is doing the final weekend of this show -- this show that I thought they'd never want to do. Music directing it has clearly been a labor of love, and I think it shows in the voices, and the orchestra, and the exuberance you see me put into the conducting as I do my best Kim Grigsby imitation. If you haven't seen it yet, please come. We're on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, and tickets are still very much available.

I don't think you'll regret it, and if you don't know the show, maybe it will grab you like it did me.

MTG has put Titanic up on the show selection ballot again. What they clearly don't realize is that there's a way to take that show and seriously inject the awesome.

Basically, buy the rights for both Titanic and Anything Goes. They're the two great tastes that taste great together.

First, you can jettison the plot line for Goes. All three versions. If you really like the comic brilliance of people pretending to be other people, have a steerage-class character hang out a lot in first class. Apparently, even if you write it really badly, people will eat it up.

Second, you can jettison most of the music for Titanic.  Let's be honest; it features an ode to Morse Code, a cargo manifest set to music, and the most anti-climactic first act closer ever written.  But now you can close the first act with "Anything Goes", and run an iceberg into it.  Imagine the climactic second-act scene with Andrews, after realizing that he's totally screwed his ship designs and is about to kill off 1500 people, starting to sing a bitter, angry version of "Blow, Gabriel Blow".   Forget how many eggs have been brought on board, and board the ship with a few rousing choruses of "Bon Voyage".  One of the ladies' maids can sing an absolutely lovely song about how she's going to make a new life in America by being "Like the Bluebird".  The Astors love song would be so much better as a duet version of "I Get a Kick Out of You".  And heck, let's pull "Heaven Hop" from the 1962 Goes  to close the entire show.  Sure it's in bad taste, but so's a musical about an epic tragedy.

Finally, this means you can end the show by drowning Hope Harcourt. Honestly, it's a win-win-win.

Current Mood: silly

I just got a fascinating brochure in the mail. It's from former MIT President Paul Gray, who has apparently been spending the last five years building a new "cooperative community" on Third St. in Cambridge; specially designed and planned for affiliates of MIT, Harvard, and MGH.

The residences at 303 Third Street will offer homes in an intellectually vigorous community alive with sociability, creativity, and the lively debate of ideas. The residences will be those whose focus in life is teaching, research, communication, and learning.

While this residence will be multi-generational, the building is designed to make possible aging in place.

gmtarkin

Sigh. I miss defacing the Guild website every April 1st.

So, my home website used to have a feature I called "Quickie Theater Reviews". Basically, it was intended to be the two- or three-sentence review of a show that you give to a friend so they know whether or not they should see it. Unfortunately, I stopped updating that stuff about four years ago. But I did used to get some good hits on my website from it. :-)

So now I'm bringing it back to my LJ, starting with the recap of the London theatre gmtarkin and I went to a few weeks ago, and ending with last night's show at Speakeasy.

2008-03-13 God of Carnage, Gielgud Theatre, London. An interesting piece by Yazmina Reza and Christopher Hampton, although not as good as Art. Ralph Fiennes is clearly the best thing about this show, but Ken Scott and Tamsin Greig both do really good work.

2008-03-14 Absurd Person Singular, Garrick Theatre, London. Ayckbourn comedy from 1972 about three different Christmases. Jane Horrocks is fun as Jane, and Lia Williams steals Act II without uttering a word. Sadly, the third act doesn't live up to the promise of the first two.

2008-03-15 Man Who Had All the Luck, Donmar, London. An early play by Arthur Miller, which sadly feels like it's not as focused as some of his later works. The production is up to the Donmar's usual high standards, with fantastic acting and beautiful tech work. Watch for the appearance of the life-size Marmon motor car in scene 2.

2008-03-15 Speed-the-Plow, Old Vic, London. Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum are electrifying to watch every time they're on stage together, but Laura Michelle Kelly's scenes with Goldblum in the second act just bring the ride to a screeching halt. Worth it for the Spacey-Goldblum show, but it would be nice to have a fast-forward button for the middle bit.

2008-03-28 Some Men, Speakeasy, BCA, Boston. Terrence McNally's chronicle of the gay lifestyles and attitudes over the past 80 years, well-executed. Standouts are Diego Arciniegas as the conflicted Bernie and Will McGarrahan in just about every scene he's in.

Drat. 0 for 2.

On the bright side, I'm pretty sure that I didn't get Ruthless because I'm fundamentally way too young for that part.  So I'm just going to be pleased that there are still parts I'm too young to get. :-)

Well, wish me luck, people.  I've taken advantage of MIT's Spring Break -- and the ensuing break in Monty's rehearsal schedule -- to audition for not one but two musicals, so I can start shoring up what I'm doing after Full Monty closes.  Last night I auditioned for Ruthless! at MetroStage (only one male part, and its in drag -- perhaps wendyhouse will finally get her wish of costuming me as a woman), and the night before I tried out for Assassins at a company that plays down at the BCA.

Callbacks (whoo-hoo!) for Ruthless are tonight, and I'm sure eventually I'll hear something for the other one.  Keep your fingers crossed.

So, everyone's stealing all the good films.  I've tried to remove films that have been done by others, so we're now down to obscure quotes from movies you've never seen!  It's fun for the whole family!

But anyway...

1. Pick 10 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Italicize when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
5. Looking them up is cheating, please don't.

1) "Well, you know what they say: if you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me!"-- Steel Magnolias,  -- gmtarkin

2) "So you got pinched in the elevator, so what? Would you rather be picking lead out of your navel?" -- Some Like It Hot -- sonata960

3) "We have blue soup to start, orange pudding to end, and, well, for a main course you have, uh, congealed green gunge."  -- Bridget Jones Diary -- ninagnome

4) "Yeah, let's slip away under cover of afternoon in the biggest car in the county!" -- MST3K: The Movie -- jmspencer

5) "Would you qualify that as a launch problem or a design problem?" -- Real Genius -- heisenbug

6) "But don't go thinking we sacrifice quality. I never make more than two motion pictures a week, but I'll spend up to a thousand dollars on each of 'em if I have to."  -- Chaplin -- lemurtanis

7) "The Master of the Revels despises us all for vagrants and peddlers of bombast." -- Shakespeare in Love -- heisenbug
 
8) "That's wonderfully sensitive... especially from a man who wears such tight pants." -- Music and Lyrics -- lemurtanis

9) "If you are what you eat, then I only want to eat the good stuff." -- Ratatouille -- sonata960

10) "Don't you worry. If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it."   -- Apollo 13 -- wesleyjenn

Wow, it's been over a month since I posted. Since that time, I've:

• Finished doing King and I at Turtle Lane. It was a nice group to work with, but we sadly had to cancel a couple of the performances due to massive amounts of snow.
• Did synth programming for the Guild's Pippin and started work on the same task for Wild Party. WP is going to be huge, patch-wise. It's a pity I don't have the time to do it well, what with me also doing sound for that show.
• Finished the Untitled Lego Project. I swear, I'm going to post pictures soon. I would have done it right after I finished, but instead gmtarkin and I...
• Went to Italy for Christmas. A marvelous tale involving five cities, lots of photos, and numerous calls to airports to figure out what the f**k happened to our clothes. I should probably post pictures from that as well.
• Participated in my very first MIT Mystery Hunt. I'd thought about doing this for ages, but had never had a team of people to do it with. But spending the weekend with Evil Midnight was just a blast. Oh, and we won, so that's just icing on the cake. (And now I get to be the computer guy again like I was last year!)

The Tech is showing a new hack that appeared on Monday, in which various board games appeared around campus, including a game of Scrabble on the side of the Media Lab.

I find it disturbing that my immediate reaction was not, "how clever!" or "neat!", but "How did they manage to play 'INSTITVTE' with only seven tiles that early in the game? And why didn't someone challenge the V being used as both the Latin V and the Roman U?"

The writers strike is officially having an impact. American Gladiators is coming back.

And the project ( continues... )

And the Lego build continues. Really, I'd be much further along if I wasn't having fun trying to find meself a Scottish accent for lurknomore's show at TLP.

( more pictures )

And now, it's time to watch Sliding Doors and listen to John Hannah speak.

This afternoon, gmtarkin and I saw the road tour of John Doyle's Sweeney at the Colonial. It's impressive -- I don't think we thought we could be surprised by that show anymore, having seen and worked on a number of very good productions of it, but this show did the job.

For those who don't know, Doyle's a British director who has lately started doing interesting re-stagings of musicals by combining both the actors and the orchestra -- the actors are also musicians, usually capable of playing two or three instruments, and the score is completely re-orchestrated to take advantage of that fact and allow them to perform with or without instruments in hand as needed. Doyle's done that with Sweeney, a new revival of Company which just closed on Broadway, and the West End recently had his Mack and Mabel done in the same style.

The concept probably makes performing really tough, since there's really no orchestra director onstage -- the cast must basically be really good at listening to one another and setting a common tempo. Plus, everything: vocals, blocking, lines, and score -- has to be memorized. So, really, I have to marvel at the work the performers have put into this.

For this version, Tobias is far more the focus than usually occurs. The show essentially is him reliving the storyline in the insane asylum he's been committed to, so he's constantly watching the action as well as performing some absolutely lovely violin work. Johanna is also more manic than usually portrayed, but it really works rather nicely here. The other actors (ten in all) are all marvelous, but I found myself drawn most to those two.

The acting is less interactive than usual, with most lines delivered straight out to the audience rather than too each other. This, along with the excellent use of string harmonics, a few more dissonant constructions than I think are in the original score, and the quick pacing in many of the musical numbers, all adds to the insane-asylum setting of the piece. Really, the orchestrations were all well done, with the possible exception of adding Mrs. Lovett playing a tuba -- a choice I felt was clearly done more for the comic effect than for the tuba's musical contribution.

It was also interesting seeing it with an understudy in for Anthony. Since the understudies don't always have the same musical abilities as the leads, they had to substitute another understudy to basically play the cello for all of Anthony's bits that he couldn't perform. This was a bit of a disappointment, since much of the staging clearly was making use of the fact that both Anthony and Johanna were paired cellists, and so much of the time that they would be playing together he instead was left sitting there while she played onstage and the cellist understudy playing off to the side of the action.

All in all, an excellent show. Playing in Boston until November 4th -- go grab a ticket if you can.

I've started a new Lego kit build, to go along with the big burly people building us a new porch:

I won't say what it is, in homage to xiphmont's "Untitled Gardening Project". But we've opened the box, and are able to aah at the thousands of little pieces:

( Pictures )

Ignore the elephants. They just like construction projects.

Right now I'm in the organize-everything stage. Soon -- the building begins!

OK, the best part of Wednesday's Pushing Daisies has to be Kristin Chenoweth and Ellen Greene harmonizing to TMBG's "Birdhouse of your Soul". Just brilliant.

So, for those of you who wanted the update on our house painting / minor demolition, here's an ( update (with photos!). )

Oh, and an update on the squirrel situation that gmtarkin mentioned in her recent post. Apparently, one of the reasons that said squirrels were running around is that they were looking for a home. And one has apparently decided that the open area where the now-removed porch beams came in would be a lovely place to build a little home. It even brought in various twigs and such to decorate. Since we felt that we'd already put a house in that location, and I wasn't interested in offering them a rent-free domicile, I'm now working on evicting them. This will be done through the tried-and-true method of putting wood up around the entrances to that little area, thus encouraging the squirrel to seek other locales.

So, I think I may have found my favorite new show this season.  I mean, "Chuck" looks fun, if only to see Adam Baldwin combine Jayne, Hamilton, and that guy he played in My Bodyguard all in one.  "Journeyman" seems interesting, if only because of it's "Time-Traveler's Wife"-like premise.  "Reaper" and "Bionic Woman" look entertainingly mockable, so they might survive for a while.  "Big Shots" and "Moonlight" didn't last on my TiVo long enough to finish their first episode, and for "Dirty Sexy Money" we made it to the end, but it won't be returning to the DVR ranks anytime soon.

And then came "Pushing Daisies".  This is kind of like what Tim Burton would have decided to create if he were interested in network television.  Gorgeous, lush visuals, rapid-fire dialogue with real wit, and a startingly neat premise (especially considering that it sounds like a retread of "Tru Calling").

But think Edward Scissorhands, or Amelie, and you've got the right feel.  And the supporting cast is a who's who of Broadway: Swoozie Kurtz, Ellen Greene, Kristin Chenoweth, Jim Dale.  Throw in Barry Sonnenfeld as the director, Heroes-creator Bryan Fuller as the exec producer.  Plus, Raul Esparza is supposedly going to appear soon as a guest star, which will pretty much mean the show will get gmtarkin's love for life.

I urge everyone to catch at least one ep of this.  You may love it, or you may find it insufferable (and I reserve the right to say you're wrong) -- but either way it will be unlike any scripted drama you've ever seen on TV.