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First reading last night of Richard Foreman's Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville, for my August production, with the comparatively small cast of six. Went well, and the cast is damned good and has a good time mixing outside of the work as well. Some fine single-malt scotch was poured at the intermission break (thanks, Josephine!) and we had a well-lubricated time. Amazingly, the reading lasted one hour and 47 minutes -- when we originally performed the show, it ran two hours and 50 minutes, plus two intermissions. WAY too long, but we were doing the premiere production, so I felt we should do the complete play. Foreman's first comment (besides thanking me for the production) was that if I ever did it again, I should cut it, so I did. I cut 25 pages, which was less than I had hoped to, but they must have been the right 25 pages, because I certainly didn't expect to lose an hour with that - but I'm glad I did. It'll run a bit longer in performance, with business and so forth, but not too much longer (plus one intermission). A good length.
Another image from the Modern Mechanix blog with a headline that caused some hilarity around this home: 
The hilarity was actually more from the fact that the moment Berit and I saw it, we began singing the intro to "The Immigrant Song" together without a pause.
Here's the video trailer for the Piper McKenzie production Babylon Babylon, opening soon at The Brick, which I'm lighting (and I appear briefly in the first minute of this trailer):
There's also a blog for the show, HERE.
Jules Dassin, one of my favorite noir directors, has died at the age of 96. I've written enough obits recently, and plenty of people are paying tribute to this great filmmaker, so I won't go on about him too much.
He has been known best for many years for his later films Rififi and Topkapi. With the increased interest in noir (and fine rereleases from The Criterion Collection) the four great noirs he made, one a year, from 1947-1950, Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves' Highway, and Night and the City, are now regarded as the best of his works. They are all essential noirs, and if you haven't seen them, I can't recommend them enough.
Consumer news: The new Region 1 DVD of Lynch's Lost Highway is pretty crappy and inferior to recent editions from France, England, and Germany - if you have a region-free player, go for one of those (I have the German edition, which is bare-bones and quite cheap, if you can find it).
Also, I'm making my way through the Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-Ton Megaset DVD box set, and, besides looking better than I've ever seen them, the episodes are turning out to be more complete than I've ever seen them before -- I've watched every episode multiple times, on PBS, cable channels, VHS tape, laserdisk, and earlier DVD editions, I practically know them all by heart, and this new set has little bits and pieces throughout that have been sliced from the episodes for years. It's kinda weird (but great!) seeing these episodes for the umpteenth time and seeing new bits (and entire sketches!) that are brand-new to me.
Sean Rockoff told me that when he saw MPFC on channel 13 back in the 70s when they first ran it, there were still some Gilliam animations in a few episodes that have always been cut since (and I've read about them elsewhere) -- I'm expecting to see them show up when those episodes come around.
UPDATE: Nope. The three edited animation segments were still edited, even though lots of other little bits and pieces I've never seen before keep showing up (fewer and fewer as the series goes on). And while I'm glad to see all these pieces restored, it turns out that there's some other cuts/replacements as well - apparently for music rights issues (though for some reason, Graham Chapman's rendition of "Girl from Ipanema" in one episode is dubbed over with "I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair," but is left in when sung by Cleese and Chapman in another).
I DID finally find one of the cut animation segments on YouTube, and here it is:
We've wound up with a night off we didn't expect. More Python and ordering in take-out. Nice.
