If Just One Person Believes In You

Jim Henson created the Muppets. Sesame Street began airing a few months after I was born. Around the time I outgrew it, The Muppet Show started up. I've grown up loving the Muppets and Henson's work.

Henson died the day before I graduated from NYU -- actor Ken Schatz, a fellow Muppet fanatic, came up to me that morning, as the Tisch School of the Arts group gathered to walk to Washington Square Park. and broke the news to me. Gradually, the news filtered around the room, and in the midst of the happy day, all of us had a sadness hanging around us now -- we were, almost all of us, exactly the right age to have grown up with Jim Henson's Muppets as they grew up.


My favorite works of Henson's now are the odder, more experimental pieces he would occasionally do on various variety and talk shows of the 60s and 70s. Like this one, which I found on YouTube through a BoingBoing link this morning, Limbo - The Organized Mind, a live performance with backing film and tape from 1974 on The Tonight Show (Carson seems to have confused Henson with a beloved NYC local CBS news anchor, however). The soundtrack is by Raymond Scott, best known as the composer of many of the classic melodies heard in Warner Bros. cartoons, who was also a pioneer in electronic music (the soundtrack to this film is featured on the great collection of Scott's electronic work, Manhattan Research Inc.).

Henson made a number of non-puppet experimental films in the 60s. His films do have a bit of the light-liberal-National Film Board of Canada-style to them at times, but at their best they are quite funny and/or moving.

I wanted to find and include his great short film Time Piece here, but it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. Darn.

Here's a shorter piece he did (again with music by Scott) for the '67 Expo in Montreal:

And here's a 10-minute excerpt from a TV special he created in 1969 for the NBC Experiments in Television series (and could you imagine a series like this today? or an appearance like the above on The Tonight Show?) -- a film called The Cube. If you like it, more about the film (including a video of, I believe, the whole show) can be found HERE.

Enjoy.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals continue for Ian W. Hill's Hamlet. All goes well. The slogging time now -- things get better, but aren't there yet; scripts are still mostly in hand; practicalities are being worked out as original concepts prove unworkable.

We've been lucky enough to be in the space a couple of times recently, and we'll have a couple more chances to do so before tech. As we work in the actual space, we are freed in certain ways, and become aware of what we can use, and also fall into bad actorial habits that need to be struck down quickly -- everyone starts projecting properly, good, but with that at first is an accompanying quality of overemoting, bad, and I have to bring back the conversational tone I've been working towards here.

My original concept and image for the finale of the show, a very important one, was impractical and had to be modified. The original involved the dragging of dead bodies from all over the place to center upstage, but as it turns out it will take way too long and be way too difficult to get done in any reasonable amount of time with any reasonable efficiency, so I had to fix it and go another, acceptable way. It won't be as effective in certain ways as I'd hoped (especially, I fear, for the back row, who will have too much of a view of something I'd rather they don't), but I'd rather go with an almost totally successful compromised image rather than a completely failed attempt at a perfect image.


In those times when people have mostly been off book and everything has been smooth, I am quite happy. The work lives, it has reason and purpose.


Other times I despair and wonder why the hell I'm doing this at all. Is it still, despite my desire to do all I can to make this play a living, breathing, relevant dramatic work, an old chestnut, and who gives a shit?

But then, there's almost never been a show I've directed where I didn't just want to walk away from it at right about this part of the rehearsal process.


I've been simultaneously reading two books specifically about 1960s productions of Hamlet -- William Shakespeare's "Naked" Hamlet - A Production Handbook by Joseph Papp, Assisted by Ted Cornell, on Papp's 1968 production (with Martin Sheen as the Prince), loaned to me quite some time ago by David Finkelstein; and, Richard L. Sterne's John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals, an edited transcript of the tape recordings made by Sterne (secretly) of the rehearsal process for the 1964 production - this book a gift from Christiaan Koop, Voltimand in my production. I probably would have hated each of these productions - well, I saw the video of the Gielgud/Burton and it was indeed laughable, but it was an inferior video of a live stage performance, and not fair to judge - but the books are quite valuable for insight, either in support of some of my thoughts, or as something to react against (as were books by Charles Marowitz and Steven Berkoff). I needed a bit of this today.


Pleasant interview today for The Brooklyn Rail about the Festival and the show. Went well, I think. Pretty low-key.


Today was mostly a day off, the only day for quite a few before and after where I did not have anything I absolutely HAD to do, so I didn't.

Back to it tomorrow.