In The Darkness The Shadows Move

Thanks to brooklynite, I've seen the lineup for this Summer's Celebrate Brooklyn free concerts in Prospect Park.

A few things there of interest to me slightly, that it might be nice to make it to, but one in particular that I MUST be there for: Mr. Richard Thompson.


I've been interested in RT since I saw a video of his for the song "Wrong Heartbeat" in 1984:

Amusing and fun, and just that -- but it made me just keep an eye out for anything by him. I wound up hearing the great Richard & Linda Thompson album Shoot Out the Lights soon after, and being blown away.

My late friend Will McCarter and I went to a concert at the Berklee Center in Boston in late 1985 and saw Thompson on a double bill with Randy Newman ("an acoustic evening") - and I was now hooked on RT. For Christmas that year, I got my first CD player and a $100 gift certificate to use on CDs at a local record shop. Back then, that would get you 4 CDs, and the first four I got were Laurie Anderson's Big Science and Mister Heartbreak, Talking Heads' Remain in Light, and Richard Thompson's Across a Crowded Room. Still have all of them.

The RT is still a pretty damn good album, if suffering more and more to my ears from a tinny 80s production and early CD mastering (I did a big re-EQing on it for my iTunes/iPod rip and it sounds a lot fuller). RT spent the rest of the 80s putting out albums of good or great songs (again, unfortunately, not always well produced - he also was downplaying his guitar playing on the recordings somewhat, saving his extending soloing for live performances). I got to see him again, this time with a full band, around 1989 or so at The Bottom Line. An incredible show, spoiled only slightly by my sitting a little too close to a Music Industry Weasel who made frequent trips to the bathroom, returning to the table sniffing and rubbing his nose, then violently rocking in his chair and pounding his table during the songs with no sense of rhythm at all (the first time I was ever aware that some cliches about drug use have a factual basis).

But, still, an amazing show, and pretty much right out of the gate when, as the second song of the night, he did an epic 10-minute long version of "Shoot Out the Lights" with an endless, beautiful guitar solo. This isn't quite that version, but it's from around the same time with pretty much the same band:

He finally put out a truly great album in 1991 with Rumor and Sigh - and I don't know how many copies of this one I've given people over the years to turn them on to Thompson. I gave a tape of it to writer Bob Spitz when he was a customer at a video store where I worked (he would give me tapes of Dylan bootlegs, and I gave him Richard Thompson stuff), and he became a one-man crusade for the album, calling up his friends at Capitol Records and trying to get them to promote the album better. Didn't work, though apparently RT did have some minor chart success with "I Feel So Good":

(Bob later wrote a book about the New York Knicks that I am amused to see he called Shoot Out the Lights)


RT has kept doing wonderful work since, and it was hard to choose only four videos to put up here -- there are plenty more of interest at YouTube (including a great version of "96 Tears" done with David Byrne), though unfortunately no versions of "Calvary Cross" and very little from his 1000 Years of Popular Music project/tour (where he performed songs ranging from Gregorian chants to "Oops! I Did It Again").

But, probably, the song of his that will wind up being the most beloved and remembered is the acoustic folk song "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" from Rumor and Sigh. A favorite of mine, which, um, I featured on many MANY cassette mix tapes to female friends of mine in the 90s, and very popular with them it was, too. Berit, on the other hand, hates the song and finds it unbearably sappy, and I am a bit chagrined to discover it is the most-requested song of all time at NPR, that bastion of polite "sensitive" entertainment. I still love it. Here's one of the many MANY versions you can find at YouTube, either done by RT or being covered by someone else in their basement or at a local club:

Enjoy.

Ghosts, Soldiers, Courtiers, and Dreams

I think I come on here and post videos as relaxation from all the rest of the time being spent on Ian W. Hill's Hamlet. When I get home from another rehearsal, I don't feel all that much like recapping it here, though that's supposed to be a big part of the point of this blog. There is a point where you can't say, "another good rehearsal, some problems, worked them out, got stuff done, got more to do" any more.

I know this is a big weekend for people going away, but I'm still a little stunned that no other companies in the Pretentious Festival are rehearsing in The Brick this weekend. I'd think with all these shows about to go up, starting this coming Friday, at least a couple would be able to be in town and working in the space. I can't have large cast rehearsals, as I'm down a great number of people, but I have a cast of 18! No one-person to five-person or whatever shows around? There's one rehearsal in after me tonight at 6.00 pm (a one-person show), but no one else has been in since Friday afternoon. Huh.


Yesterday we did scenes with the soldiers (Francisco, Bernardo, Marcella), Horatio, and Hamlet. Lots of talk and working things out. Difficult scene now, the opening. I cut it down severely - I might have cut it altogether, as I've now seen a couple of productions do, but for the fact that the Fortinbras material is so crucial to this production, and all of that is set up here. But the scene has all kinds of awkward in it, and my cutting, unfortunately, maybe makes a bit of it worse - I'm not sure that The Ghost has quite the feeling he should. He needs to have a bit more awe and respect around him. Now, he seems more important as merely a creepy omen that something is rotten in the state of Denmark rather than also having the impact of "Holy shit! It's a fucking ghost! And it's our dead king! And he's dressed for battle! This ain't good!"

The conversational and colloquial aspects of the scene are working beautifully. Just a scholar and some soldiers, cold as hell, sitting around chatting worriedly.

The scene where Horatio and the soldiers tell Hamlet what they've seen went well, though my own performance was off. Usually, I find it easy to direct myself - I've done it for long enough and often enough to be used to it - but Hamlet's another case. The director in me keeps telling the actor in me to hurry up when that's not always the right choice, and I don't seem to be getting scenes right unless I'm going into them from other scenes. I'll be a lot happier when we get into just doing runthrus and I can feel the whole arc. Right now, I spend the rehearsals of some scenes trying to imitate what I've done in previous rehearsals that has worked without actually filling it or expanding on it.


Did I say this before? I'll say it again. I haven't had stage fright as an actor in many years. As a director, yes, every performance of mine that goes up, sure. But as an actor, no, not in over 15 years. I'm nervous about my Hamlet. I think I'm doing the right thing, and what I want to do, but I can't shake the nervousness.


I had two dreams recently. I almost never remember my dreams but these stuck with me. One was a nightmare where as I was waking up yesterday, I completely believed that it was the opening day of the show, and we weren't any more prepared than we were yesterday. Not pleasant. I had several minutes of terror as I was positive that we had a show that night, with a sell-out house waiting, and nothing nearly like a ready show.

Another dream started nightmarishly, then took a completely opposite turn. In this dream, Jessi and I were doing the Hamlet/Ophelia scene, and right after a bit at the start of the scene, where something rather nontraditional is done, some of the large house began booing and hissing. Then a shoe was thrown at me. I dodged it and kept going. Then as I got to the "indifferent honest" bit, the same person threw their other shoe and clocked me in the head (woman's shoe, a high heel, hard and sharp, from the fourth row, house right). I stumbled and caught the shoe as it bounced off me, made eye contact with Jessi and got across between us that we were going on with the scene, and went on, angrily using the pain and twisting the shoe in my hand as part of the scene.

Here's the oddest part . . . the most "nightmarish" aspect of this dream was that I was aware that I was giving a crowd-pleasing but bad performance at this point -- that my anger and pain was causing me to overact in a way that was impressing the audience, but destroying the show. Just one note of impressive violent anger - something I can turn on very easily that blows people away but is just impressive in its awesome size rather than for anything rich or deep about it.

Then, in a part of the dream that felt . . . well, the opposite of "nightmarish," triumphant, I guess, I continued the scene, yelling the lines as I walked up the aisle and to the front door of The Brick, taking a pause in one line (I don't remember where) to exit the building, run halfway across an empty Metropolitan Avenue (only possible in a dream like this) and toss the shoes thrown at me into the vacant lot across the street, then return quickly to the stage to finish the scene, to the audible approval of the audience.

The show happened in fast-forward after this point, and the dream ended in confusion at the curtain call as I was left wondering if I had done the right thing or not in using the disruption rather than ignoring it. I was aware that the audience was cheering and applauding wildly at the end because of the extra energy the incident had put into the performance, but I was also aware that we had done a shallow, easy show that had played to that aspect of the audience, and not the deeper, richer aspects of the play we're trying to plumb. We were being rewarded for being brazen and supposedly "heroic" rather than for anything truly virtuous. I awoke disturbed and confused.


In the real world, after scene rehearsals yesterday, Christiaan Koop dropped by to have a detailed character meeting about Voltimand.

Yes, Voltimand. Interestingly, but understandably, I'm having more and longer discussions with the actors in the "smaller" roles of the show. The "main characters" all talk a lot and explain themselves and you can get where they're coming from, but everyone who stands around a lot and listens? We've been having many talks about them, what they're doing in this world, their positions, how they feel about the incidents of the show, etc. etc. They are so crucial to the feel of the world of this production (people are always around, people are always listening, people always have opinions), they've been taking up a lot of the rehearsal process. So we pretty much filled out the whole backstory of Voltimand, and what she goes through over the course of the show. Worked well.


Then Berit and I did the photo shoot for the postcard. With any luck, we'll have some images from that up here soon. We leave for The Brick shortly to rehearse scenes with Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude and Hamlet. I need to get my lines down for the closet scene a lot better. More soon.