Dan Posluns

So last night we had a follow-up condo meeting to the failed vote on our assessment a month ago. We revoted on essentially the same package with some minor modifications (for example, it’s now conditional on 15-year funding being acquired for those that need it). It passed this time with 61% approval… not exactly a landslide, but I’m glad the board isn’t trying to proceed with just a marginal majority either.

The board has really screwed the pooch on the management of this, in my opinion, and they are lucky to have passed it on a second go-round. It’s not that the plan is a bad one - it’s solid enough, even if I think we could have gone with some less-expensive options to placate the people who are really going to be struggling with it - it’s just the public relations from the board and the management company to the homeowners have been absolutely abysmal, to the point where people before the meeting were practically brandishing their pitchforks in full lynch mode.

In the end, though, enough people saw that it was the right thing to do to vote it ahead… now all the board needs to do is find a bank willing to negotiate 15-year term loans for the people that need them and settle a few final terms of the contract (they’ve been given a 3% leeway for increases since the previous bid expired). Once that happens, I can officially be poor… as Roseanne said when they shut the power off to her house, “well, middle class was fun”.

Of course, the intent behind this is to protect our investments and recover the value of the assessment in renewed appreciation on our homes, but as I said before, it’s still a mighty bitter pill to have to swallow.

In other news, it seems I will be playing Bob Cratchit as well as any number of other auxillary characters for the entire run of Unexpected’s Improvised Christmas Carol, opening toward the end of this month and running through December. I’ve already contacted my dialect-coach friend and in exchange for a nice dinner she plans on helping me master a rudimentary (and most likely comically exagerrated) cockney. So I’ve got rehearsals for that, and I’m also going to Austin all next week with the improv entourage, so while things aren’t quite like they were during tech week for Rocky, they are busy as usual.

Dan.

Well, Rocky came to its bittersweet conclusion this past weekend. I had somehow talked myself into the responsibility of making gifts for everyone who had been helping out on the show, and this proved to be a fairly monumental task, as there were no less than 17 people helping out at every single performance, plus five others we wanted to suitably honour: the director, producer, stage manager, music director and costumer. My initial plan called for a cast photo to be taken, which would be turned into photo-greeting-cards that we could sign and distribute to everyone. I was then going to find five inexpensive collage-frames for the others and load them up with photos of the show.

I ordered the greeting cards online and they arrived on Wednesday, but were printed at about a quarter of the resolution of the original file I sent in and looked horrible, so without sufficient time to place another order I wound up spending an evening designing them myself, going to Kinko’s and getting them printed and cut there. Meanwhile I was unable to find suitable collage frames in the budget I’d requested from the cast, so at one person’s suggestion I undertook the task of making the collages myself and fitting them into generic 16×20 inch frames, which was of course a much larger project than I’d originally signed on for or imagined.

In addition to these, in a stroke of luck/genius I’d come across mad scientist alphabet blocks which seemed like a perfect cast gift, but in order to give everyone blocks with meaningful letters on them I would have to order several sets. In a quick correspondence with the business, however, I found out that not only for a small price increase per block I could select individual blocks, but for a slightly greater increase they would let me pick all six sides for each block, which meant I could custom-tailor a block for each cast member. So for a smaller price than ordering multiple sets I was able to get each cast member their own customized mad scientist alphabet block with letters that I found meaningful to them. Sweet.

On top of this, I wanted to give the cast members a framed cast photo, so I had to get that taken care of as well. So last week was pretty much spent embroiled in getting all that together, and my condo looks like an arts-and-crafts tornado ran through it as a result.

Emotions ran pretty high for closing weekend. All three shows had sold out early in the week, so we knew we’d have good audiences. It was a long run and a good run and of course the only alternative to ending it while still wanting to do more would be to end it once we were sick of it, so there’s no option but to grieve and move on. My only frustration was that after many months of pristine health that was nothing short of miraculous I finally succumbed to a cold on our closing weekend, which of course had to be when they decided to make a video recording of the show. Boo. Fortunately the cold hasn’t affected my throat much, but it hit my lung capacity pretty badly, which wreaked havoc on my solos. The various meds I put myself on also impacted my acting in general, I think. Oh well.

I’ve added some more photos of the production to my gallery, including a whole slew that were taken when we went to see the movie version at the Admiral Theatre, and a couple of the cast with our most famous guest narrator, United States Congressman Jim McDermott:

Some newspaper came and snapped photos of the event as well, but I haven’t heard anything yet about the article.

As sad as I am to see Rocky pass on from my living world and into my life’s history, I finally made it back to an ensemble workshop at Unexpected yesterday and was startled at how much I missed my life there and doing improv. As much as I love doing scripted work, there is a naked honesty that improv provides that other forms of theatre cannot, and the people over there are so excellent that it pains me retroactively to have been removed from them for so long.

I suffered from the usual I’ve-been-away-I-sure-hope-I-remember-how-to-do-this syndrome, but I managed a couple of really decent scenes (and one spectacularly terrible one, but that’s how the improv cookie crumbles) and once I got into it and the feeling of it started flooding back to me, I was almost shaking from how much I missed doing it. I really look forward to sinking my teeth back in over there.

Dan.

The last week or so has been stressful. A friend who is close to me had a health scare, and my personal life has been even more heightened and ineffable than normal. It’s Friday, though, so the show reopens tonight for its second-last weekend and I get to leave my mundane life and problems behind and go lose myself in the insanity and inanity that is my character.

Rocky Horror only has six more shows, so please buy a ticket and come see it before they all sell out! (Oh, I just stumbled on another awesome idea for cast gifts, so that’s something else I’m looking forward to.)

Out of the blue, I’ve been offered a spot through Unexpected Productions to go down to Austin, Texas for a week in November and perform improv at an annual Microsoft conference, expenses paid (and a handsome stipend for myself to boot). Normally they request six specific company members, but this year they asked for a delegation of twelve and I suppose I lucked out in getting offered a spot in the remaining six. It actually took some time to decide if I would do it, as it means liquidating my remaining vacation time for the year, and just as our team is starting to ramp up it’s size. But on further consideration and consultation I realized that I would be a complete idiot to turn down the chance to have a free vacation somewhere warm and that I’ve never been before, where I’ll be getting paid to do the thing I love alongside some of the most fantastic performers I know. So I ultimately said not so much “yes” as “hell yes”.

Once Rocky Horror wraps up I’m going to have nearly half a dozen shows of various friends to go and see, improv to catch up on, and this conference in Austin. I’m still optimistic that November will be less busy than September and October were, but the gap is narrowing.

Dan.

Opening for Rocky Horror was pretty good, although we had some severe technical problems with the microphones. I had forgotten that there had been a guy with a video camera at our tech rehearsal on Wednesday, and was a bit mortified to be shown the following:

Not a particularly good rehearsal night for me (my voice is tired and inconsistent and breaks toward the end), but it’s at least some evidence for those of you who can’t come see the show that I’m actually doing this.

So, if you’re not too turned off by my performance there, be sure to get your tickets while you can… unsurprisingly, Five-Buck Friday is already sold-out. Only thirteen performances remain!

On the subject of morbidly embarrassing videos of me I didn’t know existed until today, you can check out this final scene at the end of the 54 Hour Improvathon, where I was made to deliriously retell The Fellowship of the Ring from the dead bodies of everyone else on stage. Please be kind and remember that I had been performing for 54 hours straight, and had been awake even longer:

There is also an interview of me after the fact:

Yeesh.

Dan.

The Rocky Horror Show opens in less than two weeks. Tickets are available online; be sure to check out the performance schedule as we are having a number of exciting guest narrators from various dignified public offices. I shouldn’t have to inform you that this is one of those shows that is going to sell out, but in case you hadn’t realized, its the freaking Rocky Horror Show. I’d especially purchase early if you were thinking of attending five-buck Friday or any of the Halloween performances, or the shows with the more celebrity guest narrators.

The cast is fantastic. I’ve worked with two of them in previous shows, but there are three that I’d only known socially and through having seen their own incredible performances, so I’ve been experiencing a lot of pressure not to disappoint them in their first show with me, especially when I’m feeling so out of my vocal league. The vocals are coming along but there’s only so much that’s possible in the time we have… I’m doing everything I can, though, including seeing a “rock specialist” that one of my castmates goes to. It’s a tight rehearsal schedule, and while I’m not being worked quite as hard as I was in Urinetown I feel like there’s a lot more at stake. We had a four-hour vocal rehearsal on Saturday, and I must’ve done my solo in “Over at the Frankenstein Place” a dozen times (not to mention Time Warp and other stuff). I then did three improv shows in the evening, rounded out by my MC’ing for Theatresports… probably not the best move in hindsight, since it involves a lot of loud talking and I could hear my voice cracking the entire time. (I’m cutting down on my improv by only doing one night a week, but it’s still pretty heavy.)

It’s going to be a great show, though. We’ve started rehearsing with the band, and they rock, and we’ve started getting some of our costume pieces, and they also rock. I was feeling a little left out because my Riff Raff costume is designed to be “elegant”, which basically makes me the most heavily dressed person in the cast of a show where the norm is to be, well, more exposed. It also doesn’t help that between the layers and the wig I’m going to be drowning in my own sweat. My space-suit costume for the end of the show, however, is a fantastic silver spandex number that leaves little to the imagination and plenty for the audience to appreciate, which is just fantastic.

Most of my friends know I don’t go out of my way to promote most of my shows… I’ll never tell people to come see a show just because I’m in it, and won’t unless I think you’ll definitely be getting entertainment value on your dollar. That said, this is definitely a show worth seeing… not so much because of me, but besides the overall stellar cast and awesome general rockitude of it, if you can’t cut loose and have a good time watching The Rocky Horror Show then you’re probably beyond my reach. Plus it’s an extremely sexy show with an extremely sexy cast, so you really can’t lose, eh?

Dan.