CollisionWorks

Two favorite musical numbers from two favorite films, the second now appearing more and more to be an influence on the first (though I'm fairly sure it wasn't . . . probably).


From the (criminally unavailable on DVD) great 1981 punk/new wave compilation doc, Urgh! A Music War, Gary Numan & The Tubeway Army perform "Down in the Park":





And from the great original 1967 version of Bedazzled, written by and starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Drimble Wedge & The Vegetation perform the title song:





And for those who liked the 1979 Bowie "Space Oddity" video I posted previously HERE, I've updated the embedded video with a better version. Enjoy.


UPDATE: Berit reminded me that I should mention another possible influence on the Gary Numan performance above . . .

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.

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 . . .

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.

So, one of the acknowledged great landmarks of the music video form is David Bowie and David Mallet's video for Bowie's song "Ashes to Ashes," from Scary Monsters (and super creeps).

I saw it years ago at MoMA for a music video retrospective (in 1986 -- yeah, kinda early for an "overview," huh?), and the assembled crowd actually snickered when the title came up, announcing a Bowie video, then sat stunned at the piece:






I had read that Bowie had done a television appearance on the Kenny Everett show around the same time to promote his radical remake of "Space Oddity," released as a single in the UK that same year, singing it from inside a padded cell. I assumed this was the same padded cell set from the "Ashes to Ashes" video (correctly), and also assumed (incorrectly) that it was just a simple multi-camera TV appearance.


It's not. It's a whole video of its own, interconnected (as the song is) with the "Ashes to Ashes" video (and also using the same exploding kitchen set seen there and in Mallet's video for Billy Idol's "White Wedding"). If not as dense and rich as "Ashes to Ashes," it's still quite something:





Bowie fans, ENJOY!

Hey mothers, hey others, Happy Mothers' Day to you and yours.

Well, it's been a calm Sunday morning. As always, I began my day uneasily, waking up early without enough sleep and immediately wondering what the hell I was behind on and what I had to rush and get done, and eventually realized that there was nothing to do right now.

The rehearsal schedule is worked out, the first run of press releases have gone out, all emails to people I needed to email have happened, we've done what we can at this point on sets/props, and there was nothing to do until after noon (to call the parents) or when Berit got up (to set the tunes for the two Ophelia mad scene songs, which we have to teach Jessi today).

So, I got to play around online for a bit. Not much happening. Added more songs to the iPod (bringing it to 21,280 songs), then started dropping them (got to 21,170). Tried to deal with a ridiculously needy cat - Hooker has become more and more attached to me and won't leave me alone, which is nice sometimes but not ALL the time. He gets yowly and bitey and clawey as he demands for me to hug and hold him. Not pleasant. Eventually he gives up and plops down on top on sleeping Berit and is happy again.

After a few hours, Berit got up and we just spent the last hour working on the songs, finally settling on the tunes. Called the parents for Mothers' Day, left messages, got a call back from Mom. Rehearsal tonight at 6, leave here at 5 or so . . .


Ian W. Hill's Hamlet is moving right along. Friday we staggered through all of Act I, then blocked the finale. We started late, and worked long - in a very muggy rehearsal studio. It was tiring but good to see. Beginning to feel out the whole show. Saw what I have to work on more and more.

Almost everyone still has scripts in hand at least some of the time, but more and more it seems that people are in the same boat as I, holding the script and knowing 80% of the lines, just having to look down to catch a word here and there. I've asked everyone to be off book by the 19th, and should be there myself. As it is, being still partly on-book is wreaking havoc on cues and pacing - I have to keep on top of that and make sure no bad habits stick. Act I felt basically good, but didn't feel like it got GOING until the Hamlet/Ophelia scene. Of course, we really hadn't worked a number of the scenes prior to that yet.

So I figured out what to work the next few days late Friday night (well, early Saturday) and we did the Gravedigger and Osric scenes last night. About 90 minutes on the first and 45 on the second, and both wound up in excellent shape by the end, though I will keep refining them.

Tonight we work Ophelia's mad scene, Claudius' first entrance and talks with Laertes and Hamlet, and Polonius and Voltimand talking to Claudius and Gertrude. One big scene and some fragments that need work and focus.

Not exactly drudgery, getting through this part of the process, but close. Things that have to be done and dealt with now that are still unformed and almost painful to watch now which will be correct in a couple of weeks' work.

So, work tonight, a movie or IntarWeb surfing after -- maybe another night of YouTubing, link-to-link.

Tomorrow I'll deal with things that have gone a bit by the wayside as show work has been going on -- doing the dishes, doing the laundry, cleaning the catbox, returning books and videos to the library -- and write up the second press release. Gaby at Q1: The Bad Hamlet has made the excellent suggestion that we do a joint release apart from our own ones, promoting both Hamlets together, so I'm making up the basic release, leaving space for Gaby to fill in about their show.

Oh, I guess I should look over the part of the Ophelia mad scene that I cut, since I've added in part of it happening silently upstage, and want to be ready with it tonight. OK, that's something productive to do with the afternoon . . .


Oh, and here's a video I found on YouTube last night that I remembered to look for, which I had never seen in full, and only that many years ago -- Wall of Voodoo (with their second lead singer Andy Prieboy) covering the Beach Boys' "Do It Again," in a video featuring Mr. Brian Wilson himself (not entirely at a great point in his psychological health). Enjoy:

A few scattered things of interest from around the IntarWebs:


Apparently my two theatre friends - from different parts of my theatre life - Tom X. Chao and Bryan Enk have now become acquainted. Dear lord!


Tom X. Chao marks the occasion with a Peculiar Utterance of the Day that, for any friend of these friends (many of you that read this blog), MUST NOT BE MISSED! Pulse-pounding action! Right HERE!


There is something . . . unsettling . . . about putting what is basically a viral advertisement for a multi-million dollar motion picture here, but all the kids are doing it, and, as a fan of the books, I have some hopes for the film -- so here's the Daemon I got from the Daemon Generator on the tie-in website for the upcoming film of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass:






I was a little unhappy to see that Zack Calhoon got another feline with the same name as mine -- hey, how many names/animals have they got in this Generator?

Berit, another fan of the Pullman books (though she HATED the ending of the trilogy a great deal) liked the Daemon she got, though she might have preferred something in the feline range. I think this is cooler:





And finally -- thanks to a pointer from urbaniak, a music video featuring the great Bob Hoskins (definitely no stranger to lip-synching) of Jamie T.'s "Sheila." I'm not sure when I think Hoskins is better -- when he's talking and expressing completely different emotions in his eyes, with his mouth, and with his body at the same time, or when he's just thinking and reacting, and letting you feel everything that's inside of him -- the final shot of The Long Good Friday, an extended, silent close-up of his face - actually a medium shot, but there's only one place you're looking - is one of the greatest moments of film acting ever (maybe, I'm not joking, the best).





Enjoy.

I started culling out songs from the iPod again that I really really didn't need in there. It had reached 21,100 songs, and was getting low on space (which also makes it work a little slower in some ways. So I went through and took a whole bunch out -- for some reason, I find it easiest to put them in order of length and go from longest to shortest -- and got rid of nearly 200 songs after going through maybe a fifth of the whole thing, so, not bad. Then I found a whole bunch of downloads I wanted, and put them in.


It's now at 21,147. I have to do a more thorough culling. Here's what's coming out of the little stuffed device this morning:


1. "Understand Your Man" - Johnny Cash - Legend

And part of what's been filling the iPod recently has been newly-added Johnny Cash. I now have more Cash in the iPod than I'll ever need or want (and I love the guy).

Problem is, he makes everything sound so damned good. This song would just be a tossed-off nothing for anyone else, and somehow, in a simple laid-back way, he makes it sound important and significant.

The title pretty much sums up the entirety of the song.


2. "Redd Kross" - Shonen Knife - The Birds and the B-Sides

Early, raw, unskilled Knife playing live -- exciting and charming. A Japanese girl's romantic view of how great the L.A. punk scene must be.


3. "Video Prick" - Deep Wound - Deep Wound 7" EP

Tight, skilled, wonderful hardcore. Could use a better vocalist, but s'okay. A good minute and a half.


4. "Moonshiner's Dance Part One" - Frank Cloutier & The Victoria Cafe Orchestra - Anthology Of American Folk Music, Vol. 2A: Social Music

And, from an old, scratchy 78, as collected by Harry Smith, another kind of driving, exciting music -- a great dance rave-up that sounds like it should be blaring from the saloon down the block.

I used this in my production of Mac Wellman's Harm's Way pretty effectively.


5. "Teachin' the Blues" - John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection: 1948-1990

Professor Hooker schools us with a master lecture in the blues, breaking down the chords and where his beat came from -- "Now digs my feet!"


6. "I Can't Do Anything" - X-Ray Spex - Germfree Adolescents

One more piece of magnificent honking sax and handclap-driven English punk from a band that didn't give us nearly enough music before vanishing. Every song on this album is a classic. I miss this style/period/sound of rock -- hard, nasty, and yet somehow goodnatured in the midst of it all (as also with The Rezillos).


7. "December (demo)" - Regina Spektor - mix disk from my Dad

When I thought I'd had pretty much enough of the piano-playing female singer/songwriter, along came Spektor.


8. "Sammy's Theme" - Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra - Ubiquity Studio Sessions Vol.1—Music and Rhythm

Recent music trying to sound like European thriller/spy movie soundtrack music (or library tracks for such) and doing a pretty damned good job of it.


9. "Reelin' & Rockin" - Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight

I'm so used to hearing the great man covered that when this started my first thought was "Okay, who is this doing which Chuck Berry song?" Nice to hear the original.

I am always stunned by the brilliance of his craftsmanship and art, more so in having read his autobiography and seen the film Hail! Hail! Rock & Roll where it is apparent that he has no perception of his greatness in that way. He just did the songs as a good job, better than carpentry, and better-paying. To him, he just knocked them out.

Then you listen closely to the lyrics of "Maybelline" or "You Never Can Tell" or "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," and realize how great they are (on top of his musically turning R&B into rock&roll) and wonder how they could have just been knocked out for the money. Jesus. Goes to show you never can tell.


10. "David B." - Brigitte Bardot - Le Disque d'Or

And from Bardot . . . an instrumental?! Well, I wasn't expecting this. Guess this was an interstitial track between songs on this album of hers. Short and sweet, anyway.


That went quick. Short songs today. Back to work -- things to do for Ian W. Hill's Hamlet, of course. But I'll take some new cat photos to put up later, too.

Enjoying my new ability to watch videos here, a link to a link to a link jogged something in my mind, which, combined with Tim Lucas' obit for director Curtis Harrington, reminded me to look for David Cronenberg's great short film Camera on YouTube and share it with those who haven't caught it yet:

PB,


Some answers below. Thanks for being on top of some of the textual issues. It's good to have a couple of people remind me of these things (Aaron Baker has also been on top of some of this).

Regarding the things I've done to the text, having worked on it for 15 years, I sometimes can't remember the reasons I did what I did to the play anymore. I've been living mainly with the cutting that I've been doing for all that time, not bothering to look at a "complete" version of the play. When I moved my pen and pencil cuts from the paperback I'd been working with to an electronic version in 2001, other problems may have come up (the online version I went to was a different combination of Q2 and F1 than the book I'd been using). The dropping of "observation" from my line that you pointed out last night is a good example of errors that should be corrected.

At the same time, some of the cuts that apparently change the meaning of the text are intended (I'd think of it not so much as changing as I would 'clarifying"). While things that might be confusing should be brought up, at the same time the text as it stands should be approached as a "Q3," in a way. This is the play we're doing, and variants should only be brought in when needed (as one would in doing a F1 production but bringing in Q1 or Q2 where it actually makes more "sense").

The show is Ian W. Hill's Hamlet not only out of ego, promotion, and pretension, but also to indicate an individual's specific point-of-view on the play. Hamlet, a masterpiece, is not a masterpiece like King Lear, or a damned great play like Macbeth, both of which work as dramatic pieces if you just stage them as is and stage them well. Hamlet is a big, brilliant, sprawling monster that works best as a play on its feet when a focus is given to it -- and many different focii will work -- but an unfocused version without a point of view becomes a tedious museum piece or a collection of "Billy Shakepeare's Greatest Hits!"

I haven't gone as far as Charles Marowitz, whose views on the play were very influential on my own, though ultimately towards different ends -- he cut it to a 90-minute collage and called it The Marowitz Hamlet -- but it is a WAY of looking at Hamlet. Which is what any production is, after all; it's just a question of HOW you choose to place your gaze.

But sometimes I need to reconsider whether I've looked the wrong way, even for what I want to do. Thanks for the ombudmanism.


Hey, Ian.  Got your note about Saturday.  A couple of "Hamlet" thoughts, FYI, or for the blog.


In rehearsing the speech to the players last night, I was struck when you pointed out how obnoxious is Hamlet's greeting to Horatio in the very next scene.  How Hamlet assures Horatio that his effusive greeting is not meant as flattery, for the simple, if mercenary reason that Horatio has no "revenue" to bestow upon flatterers.  Apart from his "good spirits," of course.

I just wanted to be sure you're aware that you've trimmed a large subsequent portion of that speech which places Hamlet's blithe snobbery in context.  After the initial comment about Horatio's "revenue," Hamlet goes on to praise Horatio for his even temper, a trait much more highly prized.


Yeah, here's a place where I didn't remember the cut at all - but this is the way it should be for this production. Whether I knew it when I made the cut, it's a vital part of this Hamlet.

I could have maybe used the "even temper" part to make the point that ultimately this is NOT a good thing for Horatio, one of the reasons he is NOT A GOOD FRIEND to Hamlet -- he accepts things in his friend that he shouldn't stand by for.

But in the end, dramatically speaking, we don't need it here, for this production, and it goes.


Also, you may want to consider trimming Gertrude's "Lady doth protest too much" line.  In the folio text, it comes after the spoken dialogue of the play-within-the-play, a large chunk of which involves the Player Queen declaring her undying love and loyalty to the King--BEFORE he's killed.  In your version, you have it coming after the dumbshow, which presents the entire plot of the play, ending with the Queen taking up with the Poisoner.  So the only thing the Player Queen can be protesting too much of now is either her grief over the dead Player King, or her refusal to take up with the Poisoner. 

Do you mean for Gertrude to be saying, in effect, that the Player Queen should've grieved less and fallen for the Poisoner more quickly?


In the case of this version as it's developed and focused, it's more about our Gertrude's royal reaction to a pretend Queen's very unroyal histrionics -- not even so much that Adam's Player Queen performance is bad, but it goes against Gertrude's opinion of how royalty behaves, which has become an important part of this production.

Also, Gertrude is holding back lots of anger -- the dumb show is more than enough to get across to almost everyone in the room what Hamlet is saying, before the Players speak a word, and Gertrude is having to keep a stiff upper lip in extremely unpleasant conditions.


Just one other note: in the spoken section of the play-within-the-play, Lucianus' first line is "Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing."  Not "The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge."  The raven line is not a quote from the PWP, but a continuation of Hamlet's last speech hurrying the actor to leave his damnable faces and begin the next part of the play.

Because, of course, the poisoner Lucianus is not seeking revenge on anybody.  He's about to secretly poison the king for his own gain.  So may I suggest you cutting me off on "hands apt?"


-PB


And here's exactly the kind of correction we need. Yes, of course, you're right on all counts here. That's how we'll do it.


thanks
IWH