collisionwork | Jul. 3rd, 2009

A nice, busy week. Whee!

Well, the three larger August shows - A Little Piece of the Sun, Blood on the Cat's Neck, and George Bataille's Bathrobe are completely cast, and Sacrificial Offerings is 1/2 of the way there. These are some fine fine superfine casts that it's a pleasure to work with, and here they are:

A Little Piece of the Sun
David Arthur Bachrach*, Fred Backus, Aaron Baker, Olivia Baseman*, Adam Belvo, Eric Feldman, Ian W. Hill, Colleen Jasinski*, Gavin Starr Kendall, Roger Nasser, Tom Reid, Melissa Roth, Patrick Shearer, Alyssa Simon*

Blood on the Cat's Neck
Gyda Arber, Eric C. Bailey*, Danny Bowes, V. Orion Delwaterman, Rasheed Hinds, Toya Lillard, Samantha Mason, Amy Overman, Roger Nasser, Shelley Ray*

George Bataille's Bathrobe
Sarah Malinda Engelke*, Liza Wade Green, Justin R.G. Holcomb*, Bob Laine, Kathryn Lawson, Patrice Miller, Timothy McCown Reynolds*, Bill Weeden*

Sacrificial Offerings
Eric C. Bailey*, Larry Gutman, Stephen Heskett*, Eve Udesky* and four others as yet unknown (though I've asked two people and will be reading a third shortly).

*appears courtesy of Actors' Equity Association, as I have to say even here I think, so AEA readers, you can get in free to all of these, space permitting (I doubt it will be a problem but I hope it will, of course).

So now we're 35 days from the first show opening, and 31 days from planning to have them all "finished" for several previews/final dress-techs for close friends, Brick staff, and significant others of the cast (maybe press if I think we're all ready long before - each show has two tech rehearsals before that, a damned luxury for me, so we may actually be ready before opening, for once).

Now, besides having to deal with some things coming into (and continuing at) The Brick in the next week, I just rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. All the shows are now almost completely blocked, I just need to plug in the actors we haven't been able to have in there yet, and run and run and run the things. From now until August 9, Berit and I are in rehearsal or tech every single day anywhere from 3 to 10 hours (except tomorrow, where we're working at The Brick most of the day and night).

And in our downtime, we have to design and send out the postcards for each show, build the set and get the props (and hope we can do this early and store them in The Brick while the July shows are going on), do the fairly complicated sound designs, and figure out what the hell we're going to do about costumes. B & I can do everything in theatre except costumes, hair, and makeup, and we were only able to hire a costume designer (the always-wonderful Karen Flood) for George Bataille's Bathrobe this year. So now, with very little money and resources, we struggle to imagine what we want for the rest of the casts (as opposed to other design elements, we just CAN'T visualize costumes; we know what's right when we see it, but before that, it's just vague senses of color, cut, and period).

But actually, four shows or no, we're ahead of where we normally are on all of them at this point, so we're feeling okay. Not cocky, but okay. Paperwork and press releases all done (though I made a minor date mistake on two of the releases I'll have to fix in an update in a couple of weeks). Moving forward.

This week, I took the time to clean about 200 songs off the iPod that I didn't really need on there, and then I wound up grabbing about the same amount of songs from the iTunes playlist of "Things I Want to Move to the iPod When There's Room" and putting them on, so it's full again, at 25,612 songs (with another 401 that I still want to definitely move over when I have to chance to clean it up again). Here's a Random Ten from the newly-cleaned iPod:

1. "Roll Over Beethoven" - The Beatles - With The Beatles
2. "Teacher Teacher" - Rockpile - New Wave Hits of the 80s Volume 3
3. "Let Me Sorta Touch It" - WFMU - Station Promos
4. "Remorse" - Gerald Fried - Star Trek - "Amok Time"
5. "Audience Of One" - Peter Ivers - Terminal Love
6. "Blue Suede Shoes" - Johnny Winter - The Johnny Winter Story Vol. 2: Eternally
7. "Flypaper Boogie" - L.B. Lawson & James Scott Jr. - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 1
8. "New Dawn Fades" - Moby - Heat
9. "Trackin' Down Jody Pt. 1" - Darker Shades LTD - Jody
10. "She's A Drag" - Dry Grins - Back From The Grave 8

And we have the camera charged and ready around the house once again, which means we're back to shooting endless pictures of our kitties.

Here's Hooker demanding attention by grabbing B's foot:

And here's Hooker with Moni on a chairload of clutter (including, I see, an obsolete rehearsal/performance schedule for one of the August shows):

And I've saved up too many good videos to drop all at once, but here's two I really liked this week (reminder - if you read this when it reposts on Facebook, the videos won't make it there; you have to click on "View Original Post" to see them). First, on a Sammy Davis, Jr. show in 1966, The Andrews Sisters meet The Supremes, and a medley is done . . .

And Hitler's subtitler, like so many others today, thinks having a lot of fonts makes them a typesetter:

And finally, a couple of other classic images, from the history of advertising, with a Cats & Dogs motif.

First, beware of the lean dog of Despair: