Tonight's your last night to se ME (and Week 3 recap)

Tonight’s your last chance to see me perform in Theater: The Musical!

I missed last Thursday’s show because I had laryngitis, but my voice had recovered enough for me to play in Saturday night’s Tennessee Williams show. We kept it lighter this time, since the audience clearly wanted it lighter. I played a character who smoked the whole time which was a good exercise in space object work, and a character who was subtly in love with Larry’s character. It worked well, considering the main storyline was about Tara being secretly in love with Laurie. (The audience wanted lesbian Williams.)

Tuesday night at rehearsal we worked a lot on absurdist playwrights (Albee, Ionesco, Beckett) and split screen scenes. Something we’d been having problems with. I’m excited to play tonight, but sad it’s my last night.

Come tonight! If you can’t, come see the show before it closes May 31.

Here’s what happened last weekend:

Thursday: Writer’s Block – in the style of Woody Allen (yes, he wrote plays)
Marsha (Mandy) has writer's block until she starts dating her accident-prone therapist, Dr. Allen Goldstein (Christian), who is even more neurotic than she is. But when her cutthroat editor Kathleen (Laurie) convinces her to put everything into her new novel, Allen starts to wonder if Marsha's been grabbing the extinguisher because his arm's on fire – or because her career is.

Friday: Shooting Richard – in the style of David Mamet
Famous actor Richard Sylvestri (Christian) wants to make art films, but his agent (Mandy) and producer (Sal) keep forcing him into mindless Hollywood schlock. When the mob calls Sal’s loan, he needs Richard dead to save his skin, but he can’t dupe the young Hollywood starlet Cassandra (Debra) into pulling the trigger. So he pulls it himself.

Saturday: The Broken Figurine – in the style of Tennessee Williams
Virginia (Laurie) is becoming a woman and Peter Calhoun (Larry) has come courting. Melinda (Tara) tries to talk her best friend Virginia out of returning his advances. He’s a mean brute of a man, but that’s not the Melinda’s only reason. Melinda doesn’t like men. She wants Virginia for herself.

Week 1: We Can Do It and I Can Sing!

Theater: The Musical successfully opened last weekend. Our houses Thursday and Friday were on the lean side, but Saturday sold out, which is great for opening weekend. I came away from the weekend with two nuggets of incite.

First off, we can do this show and do it well. Thursday’s Mamet was definitely the rockiest, but it was the first night and happened to be the cast least suited to doing Mamet well. Tara excelled, but everyone else seemed a bit at sea. Even so, it was a solid show. Friday night we nailed Eugene O’Neil right down to his darkly depressing core, and Saturday night we did a highly entertaining Neil Simon. There was some room for improvement on the Simon, but I’m not sure we could do a better O’Neil. Maybe if we sung less in the first half. Either way, I’m convinced now that we can take any playwright the audience gives us and do an entertaining and satisfying show, even for playwrights we’ve never heard of (I’ve never read any O’Neil).

Secondly, I had a bit of an epiphany in regards to my singing. I’ve started listening to the music more closely, mostly as a way to not listen to the sound of my own voice. When I’m focusing on the music, I can harmonize more naturally and singing feels easier. When I’m paying too much attention to the notes I’m singing, I get too self conscious and singing gets really difficult. I’ll have to see how that works moving forward.

Here are little summaries of each of last weekend’s shows:

Thursday: Don’t Screw Up! – in the style of David Mamet
Miss P (Laurie) hires competing photographers to follow her ex-lover Laroue (Mandy), but one of them (Susan) double crosses her. The slow-witted Tina (Tara) figures it out and spells doom for Laroue’s double (Larry). In the end, Miss P discovers that Laroue was right under her nose the entire time.



Friday: The End of the Play – in the style of Eugene O’Neil
Aspiring author Tim (Alan) struggles to break free from his overbearing family. His father (Karen), an alcoholic washed up actor, uses the young Mary (Debra) to recapture some of his youth, while Tim’s younger brother Robert (Christian) resentfully fills the void left by their dead mother.


Saturday: Big Plans – in the style of Neil Simon
Christopher (Christian) has gotten into UCLA, but his mother Rachel (Tara) doesn’t want any of her children to leave their home in New York City. Meanwhile Chris’s father (Alan) is so eager for his kids to move out, he’s started turning Chris’s bedroom into a solarium, complete with fully grown corn. Will Chris and his sister Kathy (Laurie) finally have the courage to stand up to their mother?

Rehearsal #1: Theatre the Musical

We had our first rehearsal last night for Theatre the Musical. The premise of the show is simple: Take a playwright and improvise a show in the style of that playwright… only as a musical. We’ll play everything straight and the comedy will come from the juxtaposition. I mean, lets face it, Ibsen or Becket as a musical is comedy enough right there, let alone the untapped melodic potential of Mamet, Wasserstein, Albee, Miller… need I go on?

Last night we started by getting to know each other a bit. We have three people in the show who’ve never been in one of our shows before, and one understudy who is completely new as well. In fact the understudy has no improv experience at all, but has opera experience. Between rehearsals, my intro class, and Christian’s Thursday night class, we hope to have her up to speed to perform in at least a couple of shows by May. Otherwise, we’ll just enjoy having her voice around.

Then we worked on various status and style matching exercises. Style matching is one of the cornerstones of Un-Scripted’s improv philosophy. If you can style match, you can play any genre, even ones you know nothing about, as long as one cast member does. You just style match the person who knows what they’re doing. This allowed us to do a Brecht long form that drew a standing ovation when only a couple cast members knew anything about Brecht.

Then we closed by working on some improvised Mamet. The newbies leapt into it pretty well, though I noticed a tendency to rush and add more information than was necessary. Christian, our fearless director, isn’t so good at improvising Mamet, largely because he’s not a big fan of the playwright in general. He did quite good though.

I have no nugget of blinding incite to give you all from this first rehearsal. As we move forward, I’m sure epiphanies will follow. In the meantime, you have 2 weeks left to see our current show: Three (also designed to be more like a modern play than a traditional improv show.)

(photo: Brecht)