Give Me The Biggest Lecture I Ever Had

This morning's videos are something obscure from someone famous and something obscure from someone obscure.


First, possibly my favorite Saturday Night Live musical performance ever -- k.d. lang performs Joanie Sommers' 1962 hit single (#7 on the Billboard charts!), "Johnny Get Angry." I've been wanting to see this again for years (I think it's from 1990), and it's less violent and more ironic than I remember (and the studio audience really doesn't seem to get it) but it's still a classic (though Sommers' original might actually be more disturbing in its straightforward, non-ironic reading, plus it has an incredibly creepy piano part only hinted at here):

And second, a video from Leslie Hall - whose wikipedia bio can be found HERE, and might explain a bit more of where she's coming from. Suffice to say, she's from Iowa, went to art school in Boston, went back to Iowa and creates music and videos of a very specific style - somewhat public access meets Sid & Marty Krofft - in which she displays herself (as well as other people and things in general) in "strangely glamourous and unflattering ways." I guess her work's had a cult following for some time, but I only just found it through Twisty Faster at I Blame the Patriarchy. I wasn't sure which video of hers to put here, but I settled on her fantasy epic, "Willow Don't Cry," after catching what I'm pretty sure are subtle MST3K (the Cave Dwellers episode) and Divine (Female Trouble) references (as well as some of my favorite cheesy sounds from the same cheap SFX CD I've used in multiple shows):

Her salute to her collection of gem sweaters, "Gem Sweater," is HERE.


Enjoy.

Are You Reading Me (over)?

So I use Bloglines to read the many sites, pages, and blogs that I like to check in on. Unfortunately, it doesn't always seem to like to work with all sites (Video WatchBlog stopped updating at the start of 2007, and it only recently finally started working with The Mirror Up To Nature).


Now, this blog is one of the sites not working on Bloglines, as far as I can tell. A pain, as I know at least 25 people who read it that way.


It looks like LiveJournal is updating the RSS feed, so my question is to anyone out there who might be reading this in any kind of RSS reader/blog aggregator OTHER than Bloglines -- am I still coming in loud and clear for you?


That is, I'm trying to figure out if the problem is with LiveJournal not putting out properly, or with Bloglines not reading properly . . .


Thanks. IWH.

Pleasures and Frustrations

So, the fact that I'm sitting here in Brooklyn writing my third post of the day, and not in Petey Plymouth on my way to Maine (as has been intended for weeks) is a sore point right now.


I had an appointment with my dentist in Maine (and I go to a dentist up there for a number of reasons, not worth going into now) for this coming Saturday, which would have involved some work that would have led to my teeth being completely fixed by the opening of Ian W. Hill's Hamlet on June 12. It was a pain in the ass to arrange this - my dentist was going to be out of town most of this week and I could see him either this just past Monday - which would have meant canceling three rehearsals, no way - or Saturday - which meant moving a 3 pm rehearsal to 7 pm that very day, and getting in the car after leaving the dental office and driving six hours from Maine to NYC to just make it to that rehearsal. But this was the only time I had free to handle this before opening, so I picked the latter, which then also became more of a pain and meant losing the only full cast rehearsal of the show that I could have before tech on June 11, as one cast member couldn't do the later time.

But it was important to me to have the teeth done (and several other people close to me felt it was important, too).

The dental office called yesterday and canceled the appointment - the doctor will still be out of town. "Maybe June 2nd?" Uh, no, won't work.

Which appears to make it a no go on getting my teeth fixed in time for the show. And means I moved everything around for no good reason and lost my only full cast rehearsal. Great. Just fucking great.

So I'm in a funk. I'm going to call the office back today and see if there's anyone there that can at least do the impression for the partial piece - the main thing that HAD to get done now - even if they can't do the other work. And if so, drive up tomorrow. If not, I'll just have to live with it.

Which will, at least, make things easier for me as Tech Director of the Pretentious Festival, as I'll have some more free time now to get in The Brick and clean and fix things up well for the Fest. The cast member who couldn't make it is going to try and see if she can get out of her conflict for the Saturday night rehearsal, but I'm not assuming she will (nor pressuring her; it's my own damned fault).

Dammit.


On the other hand, rehearsals are going wonderfully. I feel like I should go into them in a bit of detail, but I'm still so pissed off and depressed that it's hard to think straight about them. Working with Gyda, Jessi, Adam and Bryan last night at least kept me positive, while the work was going on. Afterward, back to feeling shitty and stewing in my own frustration, wanting to punch something.

It's getting easier. The world and tone of the production seems clearer to everyone, and we fall into it faster. Scenes we're working on specifically in detail for the first time come together faster, scenes we're doing for the second time just need a few runs and some tweaking (thus far . . . harder scenes are to come, again).

The character relationships get clearer and richer. Many are changing from my long-held conceptions as the world is filled out differently by the actors -- that is, the world of the play I've been picturing for many many years is staying the same, my specific view of Hamlet, but the way that world functions as a piece of drama is changing and being made richer from the inclusion of everyone now in it.

We've gotten to finally work on a couple of the scenes that were the first things that came into my head as to why I wanted to do this production. Notably, the Horatio/Hamlet scene between the graveyard and Osric's entrance and the finale and entrance of the English Ambassador. It's weird, having pictured myself doing the former scene with Rasheed for 7 years now, to be standing in a rehearsal room with him and having it happen, and happen pretty much the exact way I imagined it and wanted it to, with all the subtle little things going on underneath their words.


It was this scene, in a version of the play directed by a friend in 1989, that made me start thinking about the play as a director. That director, like me, has positive feelings about Horatio, but couldn't come to grips with Horatio just standing by while his friend Hamlet screws up so badly and heads pretty obviously to his own destruction.

His bold solution was to write a new speech himself for Horatio, explaining his motivations. Bold, yes, but . . . kind of cheating, to me. So, how to make the point work with the actual text? It came for me in playing another level to Hamlet's speech to Horatio about having no qualms sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.

That is, under that speech, Hamlet is saying to Horatio, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were my friends, and I loved them. But they betrayed me, and got in the way of my necessary revenge. So I killed them. You, Horatio, are my friend. And I love you. Don't get in my way, please."

And we did it that way and it worked like gangbusters. Nice to see a nearly 20-year old idea actually happening and working.


Which was also the case with the English Ambassador and the ending, which we worked with Gyda last night. It involves a very specific sound cue and a rather radical way of ending the show (though it's somewhat influenced by Ingmar Bergman's take on it, which played at BAM with, I think, Peter Stormare as the Prince) - one of the earliest, clearest, and most specific ideas I had about this production. We did it with the sound cue, and me standing in for Horatio, a few times last night, and it just kept reducing Berit and I to giggles with how perfectly it's going to work and do what I want it to. Oh boy, am I looking forward to having this in front of audiences. You have no idea . . .

We also did a couple of Polonius clan scenes last night - the farewell to Laertes and Ophelia telling her dad about Hamlet acting cuckoo. Better and better and better. I think I'm kinda happy with this (I'm never happy with anything, especially in rehearsal; it's always a compromise, and I'm a miserable bastard, but I think this will work).


So, good, thinking about what's working has cheered me up considerably. Okay, onward, bad teeth or not . . .

How To Feel Better

Well, as noted previously, I was feeling a bit down with frustration over a (minor, really) setback, which tends to put me in a general funk about everything, miserable, and wondering if there's any point to any of this work I'm doing. Yes, I know it makes no sense. My brain is simply a little broken.


I've discovered a couple of things to suddenly cheer me up today. First, if I have any doubts at all about the worth of my version of Hamlet, it seems that all I have to do is watch a filmed version and I feel a LOT better.

Just got this version, with William Houston as the Prince. Yeesh.

Not that it's bad, per se -- and I've seen a few now that I would say that about -- but it has no depth or point-of-view.

I'm a little confused, as both IMDb at the Netflix envelope list it as being 3 hours 40 minutes long, and thus far (I'm 43 minutes in, the Ophelia/Hamlet scene) it's been MASSIVELY cut, and I can't imagine it going full-length (the DVD time code seems to indicate it's going to come in at just under 2 hours). And it doesn't seem to be a cut video of a longer version, as the scenes and text flow naturally. I appreciate the cutting, but it seems to be done just with the thought of "what can we cut while keeping the plot and the famous quotes intact?" rather than with any sense of trying to focus the play in any way.

I can't say at all that it is badly acted, but it is boringly and shallowly acted -- which I suppose should = "bad," but it's not like they can't act, they speak just fine and get across the bare meaning of the words, but there's no sense of really thinking about what they're saying. With every rehearsal of Ian W. Hill's Hamlet, we seem to find more and more going on in the text, subtleties and levels to explore and bring out. Such depth and richness. None of that in the one I'm watching now.


Okay, we're doing something good and valuable. I feel better.


And, second, if that didn't cheer me up, there's always the Kitty Dance:

Hee-hee!

Promotional Considerations

Word is getting out there about The Pretentious Festival (The Most Important Theatre Festival On Earth). It seems to be a good hook.


David Cote has a nice little piece at the Time Out New York blog, and Brick Person Jeff Lewonczyk is interviewed by Michael Criscuolo at the nytheatrecast. I and Ian W. Hill's Hamlet get some nice mention there.

The Festival is also in the Sunday Times Summer Preview -- the blurb is HERE at the Pretentious Festival Blog, with annotations from Mr. Lewonczyk.

I'm getting interviewed next week for The Brooklyn Rail. Better get my ego-bag on.


And I'll be on my way to Maine tomorrow to get my teeth worked on - I got that all worked out. So, good.