A pretty strong note

Posted 4 days, 19 hours ago on June 28th, 2009

It’s been a long week. Fiddler wrapped up last weekend, with our final three performances followed by the cast part on Sunday.

My performances had their ups and downs but I felt I ended on a pretty strong note; more so on Sunday than the Friday that I most recently reported on. We had an elaborate and highly embarrassing cast party that was concocted as a wedding anniversary between Tevye and Golde, at which I was made to sit at the “head table” along with the other daughters and their husbands. The couples each took their turns cutting the wedding cake, and Tzeitel and I pied each other with our slices. They were a really wonderful group of people and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to play the role, but I was exhausted and don’t think I could have managed another weekend of it.

I’ve assembled some of the photos that were taken and added them to my gallery. There are some quite good ones, but probably none of them sum me up right now as well as this one:

Backstage 04

I’ve been working seven days a week, minus last Sunday, and late every night. Wednesday was the worst; I didn’t leave the office until 2:45 AM. When I left the following night at 10 PM and found myself feeling relaxed at getting out so early, I realized that this is probably unhealthy. Fortunately it’s only for another week or so, and things are actually looking quite positive with the project. Barring anything unforseen, I think we’ll make our ship date without much difficulty. There are some exciting things to look forward to, including a national TV ad campaign that I’m sure is costing our client millions of dollars and looks really cool from what I’ve seen so far.

There’s been other impacts, though. It’s delayed my return to Theatresports, for one, and it drove me to cancel an audition for The Secret Garden I was going to do on Tuesday.

Hopefully it’ll all be worthwhile.

Dan.

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The puppet and the puppeteer

Posted 2 weeks ago on June 19th, 2009

In improv we sometimes talk about the puppet and the puppeteer, where the puppet is the character you’re playing on stage, alive and in the moment, and the puppeteer is the actor part of your brain, subtly pulling the strings from up above the scene, where you have a broader view of the story and where it’s going, its characters and relationships. This concept has translated pretty much directly for me to scripted work… one director I worked with was fond of the expression “do that thinking actor thing”, and that’s worked its way into my own vernacular.

Tonight’s performance of Fiddler was probably the worst I’ve had so far in the run. Other than borking the end of my song (something I’ve managed not to do since preview night), both the puppet and the puppeteer were completely on the fritz. My reactions all felt forced and insincere, and most of them came either a moment early or late… I even caught myself telegraphing, something I almost never do. Buh.

We’ve got two more performances, tomorrow and Sunday. I’m going to be working tomorrow as well, as we are in mega-crunch mode on my project. They’ve blocked off traffic on the street on my office, though, as there is a Solstice Parade with naked bicyclists who will be going through there. Should be interesting to try to get stuff done.

All this week has been the International Festival at Unexpected Productions. Between work and theatre I haven’t been able to attend, but I made it out last Sunday to the opening night barbecue, which was really interesting as it took place at a legitimate mansion, the kind I had no idea existed in Seattle.

The story behind it is that a divorced couple haven’t been able to sell it for the past two years or so, and about ten friends who are part of an improv/film ensemble found it on Craigslist and decided to rent it at about $6 thousand a month. The place is an incredible tribute to excess, boasting such features as a swimming pool/jaccuzzi with a retractable roof, a giant koi pond, a movie-theatre style projector screening room, a whole roof patio, a full second floor bar/lounge with a grand piano, an incredible ivy-covered gazebo, a walk-in wine cellar, a full-sized kids’ climbing playground with swings and slides, an outdoor pizza oven, and a barbecue that’s so large it has a fridge inside it. I felt like I was in an episode of Entourage.

Probably the best feature, though, is that it’s directly overlooking Puget Sound, with a view of the water from every level that’s worth a million dollars on its own.

I spent most of the evening flipping burgers for people, as I was incredibly hungry when I got there and it seemed if I didn’t then there would be no food for anyone. It was still a great time.

I will be very glad when my project at work wraps. It’s been late nights every night this week; yesterday I didn’t get home until close to midnight. It doesn’t help that there are all sorts of traffic conundrums, such as the 520 bridge opening last night (something that’s never happened to me before), stalling me from getting home for about an additional 20 minutes. The bridge is closed all weekend so I’m going to have to detour around the lake, not to mention the parade and the naked cyclists.

A breather will be welcome…

Dan.

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A little more sunshine in it

Posted 2 weeks, 5 days ago on June 14th, 2009

Things have been pretty crazy at work. We’ve been having a couple of late nights, and there will be several more if we’re going to ship this app on time and in good condition. Things are looking pretty positive, though. There’s a lot of buzz around the office about the new iPhone model and OS 3.0, both of which come out this week, so it’ll be interesting to see how that drives our business.

Fiddler is in its second of three weekends. It’s experiencing the usual mid-run quirks, but overall it’s playing out as expected. I feel like I could really use a break after this one… I know I’ve been missing improv, but maybe I’ll wait a couple weekends before getting back to it, especially with the way things are amping up at work.

It seems that all of the kids and several of the adults in Fiddler own DSes, so any of my old coworkers from Griptonite who read this thing should take heart in this photo in which there are no fewer than seven DSes in operation. Your jobs are looking to be pretty much recession-proof.

Yesterday I meant to go see a friend’s show but wound up shopping for groceries and going to the farmer’s market instead. I got some smoked tuna, but it seems it’s still a little early for the quality fruit to come out. Although I’m pretty consistently disappointed with the quality of fruit out here… peaches are particularly a downer. I love the Rainier cherries, though, so there’s that to look forward to.

A couple weeks ago we had a crazy summer-like heat wave. Things have cooled down a bit but (fingers crossed) it looks as though the warm weather is here to stay. After the last couple of relatively dismal summers, I’m optimistic for one with a little more sunshine in it.

Dan.

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Minimally invasive

Posted 3 weeks, 6 days ago on June 6th, 2009

Made it through hell week. Fiddler is open! Had a few friends come to opening night, which was really nice of them.

Notwithstanding the typical challenges of hell week, things were made especially brutal when Tzeitel (my primary scene partner) didn’t show up on Tuesday, because she was being rushed off to the hospital to have her appendix removed.

The surgery was laporoscopic, which apparently means minimally invasive, and she was hell-bent on being sufficiently recovered to perform for our preview on Thursday. As far as choosing people to be absent the last two tech rehearsals goes, she and I were certainly more at the “fine-tuning” stage of our stuff, so it was an acceptable albeit extremely scary scenario. (A brave villager understudied Tzeitel those two nights at the cost of rehearsing her usual scenes, which was excellent of her.)

What had me more worried about it, though, had to do with my song, Miracle of Miracles… the musical director added a harmony line for Tzeitel to the very last line of the song, which had been fine until very recently, when we got to sitzprobe last weekend and for some reason I screwed up my own melody line when she came in with her harmony. I thought it was a one-time thing, but the next time I did my song after moving into the theatre it happened again, and I surmised it had to do with my reduced ability to hear the accompaniment. We experimented, and found that when I was close to the keyboard I could sing with her doing the harmony no problem, but on stage my success rate dropped closer to 50-50.

So the plan was pretty simple: we were going to nip the problem in the bud and over the next couple of days we’d practice the hell out of it before and after rehearsal. Except the next day was Tuesday, and Tzeitel was in the hospital instead of at rehearsal and nobody else knew her harmony (which she had concocted with the musical director and wasn’t written down). So I was unable to practice it before preview on Thursday.

So preview rolled around and sure enough I got it wrong, but also in general had a lot of trouble following the orchestra. I was not alone in this and some begging and pleading got them to set up a monitor on stage (actually, got the musical director to bring in his own from home). Last night (our opening) I didn’t screw it up, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’m now hearing the orchestra well enough to have eliminated the problem. The next couple performances should paint a clearer picture of that.

I’ve had some nice compliments on my performance but I’m still very much working the kinks out of it. My song in particular there’s a lot of new mechanical things I’m dealing with and thinking about (such as listening to the orchestra) that reduce my ability to be in the moment. I think I’m being believable and playing my intentions for the most part, though, so I’m pretty satisfied with that.

Eight more performances over this and the following two weekends!

Dan.

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A stressful ride

Posted 1 month, 3 days ago on May 31st, 2009

Things are pretty rough at the moment, mostly due to the convergence of events between work and theatre. A sudden change in our project at work has caused us to bump into overdrive, at the same time as Fiddler enters its tech week.

Much of the success of this project rides on my ability to deliver a superhuman effort over the next month. My coworkers understand tech week means I’ll be leaving early (well, early for the tech world anyway) and that I’ll be making it up in the weeks to come, especially as my evenings free up (which hasn’t been the case during the rehearsal period). But we’re on an extremely tight schedule and failure really isn’t an option, so it’s scary.

We had our sitzprobe on Saturday, and I was surprised by the orchestra. It’s about 18 pieces, which is a lot for a community theatre show, and they’re surprisingly… good. Not necessarily the most incredible that I’ve ever been fortunate enough to work with, perhaps, but they sound really tight and are all clearly very professional and highly skilled at their instruments. I heard it bandied about that many of them are volunteers from the Everett symphony. Whatever the case, we’re damn lucky to have them.

Likewise, the Historic Everett Theatre is a pretty monumental venue, and one of the reasons I was interested in the part. Orchestra pit, full flight gallery and over 800 seats with a balcony level. Gonna be a fun space to work.

The show is pulling together, but it’s a stressful ride. We had the cue-to-cue today, and it lasted two and half hours longer than it was scheduled to run (for a total of five and a half hours). I try to be a role model for professionalism amongst the rest of the cast, but my patience is wearing thin and lately I’ve had to settle for just doing my best to keep my mouth shut and not to make things worse for everyone else.

I wish I had a clearer sense of my own performance. The cast and crew are all very generous with their praise, but I know the complexity of what I’m trying to accomplish and it’s not a helpful metric to measure things by. I’m strong with the comic aspects of my character but it’s like walking a tightrope for me… I’m astutely aware that many of my choices run the risk of coming across as absurd and more of a caricature than real life. For example, there’s a bit of comedy I do in my first scene. It’s nothing much; I just play a startled reaction to seeing Yente. The timing is really tricky for me, though, and I rarely get it perfect. A few rehearsals back I dropped the ball on it entirely, and wound up being way too big and mugging it completely. The rest of the cast went into hysterics and loved it… I didn’t know how to express to them I’d actually failed at what I set out to do.

I desperately want to be believable… I love the comedy of my character, but I know I won’t be the slightest bit funny if I read as insincere. It’s easy to make people laugh; it’s a lot tougher to make them care about what happens to your character… for it to matter whether he lives or dies, succeeds or fails at getting what he’s after. Hopefully some of my more honest friends that come see the show will be able to critique it for me.

After rehearsal yesterday I permitted myself to get unexpectedly dragged out to a production of Rocky Horror down in Gig Harbor of all places. I went with a bunch of people, but mainly a couple of my friends who had been in my production of it, and we had a blast shouting all of the callbacks we’d learned during our run. I managed to make their Riff Raff break character twice, and felt pretty accomplished for doing so.

My Theatresports team won for its fourth weekend in a row. I keep feeling like we are getting lucky with our victories. I don’t think there was anything lacking to my performance in particular, but I know I’m capable of better. Anyway, I’m officially on hiatus now until after Fiddler closes three weekends from now, so it’s up to my team to carry on without me. I’m actually kind of glad for the break… it’s good to get a chance to be away, and let it be renewed for me and remind myself of how much I miss doing it when I get back. It might even be what I need to break me out of the funk I’m in and get me back to the level of performance I ought to be at.

Dan.

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