Break a Leg

Well, it's been busy week all around.  New people coming into existence, people celebrating another complete circuit of the sun, the release of the hilarious Episode 14, and a sudden, unexpected fascination with burritos. 

Though I will admit that burritos ARE tasty.  Did you know that "burrito" means "little donkey"?  Hope I didn't just ruin the experience for anybody.

Anyway, the pirate version of Taming of the Shrew that I've been babbling about for months finally opened this weekend.  For the most part, everything went swimmingly...hmm, perhaps that's not the best term to use when talking about pirates.  People loved the show.  People have called us a dream cast (not the video game system, but a talented assembly of actors).  The park has been full almost every night, and even when it wasn't we were given standing ovations.

There were a couple hitches, though.

One of the actors had some personal emergency, so two hours before opening night, the director had to find a replacement.  The producing director of the company went on stage that night with book in hand.  The next night he went up with the part fully memorized.  This is not the first time I've seen this guy do this.

- A couple years I was doing a show with this company called The Fourth Wall.  There are only 4 people in that show: two men and two women.  After the 1st rehearsal the director had to drop out because his wife had cancer.  It took two weeks to find a replacement director.  During that 2 weeks one of the female actors dropped out for whatever reason.  So we had to replace her as well.  THEN, 1 week before we opened the other male actor still couldn't learn his lines.  It turned out he had a brain tumor.  So the Producing Director (Scott) learned the part in a week. Pretty impressive. -

So, everything was going well, the audience was loving the show, I got to sing pirate songs to a group of people who had, by and large, never heard them before and laughed at all the funny bits.  A bunch of my pirate friends came and saw the show in full pirate garb.  They dranka lot and had a lot of fun, as pirates do.  Because of this, the director said they could come back any time and see the show for free as long as they came in garb, got drunk, and had too much fun.  Which is how we always roll, so no problem there.

Then, Sunday night, just as we finished the 1st scene of the 2nd act, the lights went out.  Probably some bad wiring because they could get the lights to flicker, but not stay on for more than a few seconds.  And what did we do?  Well, as they say: the show must go on.  There was some meager lighting from the park lamps, some of the lights backstage werre still working, and one of the volunteers went to the back of the lawn and stood there with a flashlight for the rest of the show.  As I mentioned, the tech crew was trying to fix the main lights, which would flicker now and then, so we had a sort of strobe effect, but only if the strobe machine was being run by an epilecptic cat with no rhythm and a serious case of the trots.

But the audience hung in there, and yelled "Yarrr!" in all the appropriate places.

That's one of the things about live theater that is so unlike film: in film when you're watching it, if you haven't seen it before everything is new and hopefully exciting.  Then, when you watch it again, it's the same.  With live theater, every night is new for both the audience and the actor's and we all have to find ways to deal with whatever goes on.  You know that tingle of excitement you get every Monday morning when you log onto this site to see the new Episode?  Well, take that excitement, multiply it by 10, then add that same amount of knee-trembling, bladder-squeazing fear and give it to about 300 people and squeaze them all onto a small lawn.  Because it really is a shared experience between the actors and the audience, and if the actors are doing their jobs right, then the audience is right there with them, sharin whatever it is they're going through.  And at the end everybody feels like they just survived something.  It's powerful stuff.  The stuff that dreams are made off.

Happy Jenday!