stop a moment, take it in

Wow - I've already exceeded the posts I had on the Smoke and MVP blog.

PARADE is up and running. There was some drama on opening weekend when we had the Blizzard of 2010, or at least Georgia's version of a blizzard. Because of ice/snow/road conditions, the director cancelled our Friday night preview and called a last-minute mandatory rehearsal on the afternoon of the opening day. I was supposed to have the first BABY rehearsal of the new year that day, but I had to get out of it. Fortunately, the director (Sarah) was uber-understanding about it, and everybody welcomed me with open arms at the second rehearsal of the new year.

PARADE has been great. Audience response has been very very positive, and we all are glued to our local theater reviewing websites. [Well, I always am. theaterreview.com has been a guilty pleasure of mine since 2002.] Jason is incredible in this role. I think he's a little disappointed there are no MAT Awards involved in this production - as if he needs another one. Since this show is based on a real-life event, I'm not spoiling anything by saying his character gets hanged at the end. The first time we tried hanging Jason we ran into the problem of him spinning around in circles like a wound-up yo-yo. To solve this, one of the members of the lynch mob has to hold his foot to keep him in place.

In a trend I'm trying not to think is due to me, I sometimes find I'm in a show where the director announces at a rehearsal that he/she is about to blow up for the first time in a while/years/so many shows/etc. In 2004, when I did a concert version of TITANIC, the director said one night "this is the first time I'm having to become an asshole director in 20 years." Now, our PARADE director said "I am about to lose it for the first time in 4 shows" - and then proceeded to go off on the cast about how they were not looking sad enough in the funeral scene. They took the "direction" well - too well. They ran it again, and this time around it was like a Greek tragedy, with melodramatic wailing and gnashing of teeth, and some sobbing that was so loud it was drowning out dialogue/singing. To his credit, he praised them and said it was nothing short of brilliant. A few run-throughs later, he toned them down and said the emotion is great, but not so loud. He put it best when he said they went from mourning a death of a 13-year-old girl to mourning 9/11. He seems to have a sense of humor about it. He was preparing to do a radio interview, and I said I hope somebody calls in and asks how he got the cast to look so sad in the funeral scene. And in my TITANIC director's defense, I don't remember exactly what his tirade was about, but we moved on from it, had some fun, and put on a damn fine show.

Yesterday's BABY rehearsal was long and very productive. We covered so much ground. It went in phases - I felt like I had aged 20 years that afternoon and should be playing the guy in the old couple. First, we took pictures with the professional photographer. They always do individual headshots for the wall, and a cast picture. We did the headshots, then one with the 6 main characters. I wanted this well-documented, so at the risk of the cast wanting to kill me, I kept suggesting things. "Let's do some with each couple. Let's do some with just the women. Let's do some with just the men. Now let's do some with just the 6 of us doing such-and-such." Those pics will be up on the guy's website any day now (or any minute now), and rest assured I will be sharing them here, there, and everywhere. It ended with us running the scene from hell. I have 5 pages of dialogue with the Lizzie character followed by my least favorite song in the show. We did the scene and blocked the song. The last part of the song - once all the singing solos are over with - is actually pretty fun. We were taken into a big room with our choreographer, who we had never met before and didn't know from Eve (at least I didn't). She was mainly just working with the ensemble, and Lizzie and I came up with our own stuff which everyone seemed to like.

We didn't have any BABY rehearsals from December 19 until January 9th. Since my Lizzie is married to the director of PARADE, we got to meet up a few times and run lines. The other night when we did the scene from hell, we were both a little shaky on lines, but I noticed that the parts we knew the best were the lines about sex, masturbation, and whether womens' chests stay as big as they are after the baby is born. Overall, we had a lot of laughs doing the pictures and doing the song we hate.

Is it okay with you if I do the occasional mini-movie review? I know this blog is supposed to be about skits, but movies are filmed skits, right?

I bit off more than I could chew once we got our DVR. I went a bit crazy with recording movies, and now, I'm forcing myself to not record any more for a while since I just got a bunch of new DVD/Blu Rays for Christmas. So I'm finishing up the stuff that's already recorded, then I'm getting started with what I got as a present. I loved Lakeview Terrace. Samuel L. Jackson creates a character like Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, Tim Robbins in Arlington Road, or Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights. The kind of character that gets under our skin. I give the film an A- or an A. Enjoyed it so much, I bought the Blu-Ray with some of my gift money. The ending is perfect. More or less, exactly what I wanted to happen happened, and just enough was revealed that I wanted more, but was still satisfied with what I got. Broadway/national tour vet Patrick Wilson starred opposite Jackson. To think I saw him in the tour of CAROUSEL in 1997 - and now he's starring in movies opposite Samuel L. Jackson. I then saw the remake of Cape Fear with De Niro and Nick Nolte. Saw the original with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum already. Very enjoyable. Scorcese took some plot liberties with the main character and the way things end, and it's very interesting to watch. It's either a B or a B+. Tonight or tomorrow I'm hoping to finish The Good Son, or as I think of it, the R-rated Macauley Culkin movie. He did this film right after the first Home Alone. The reviews said that kids would inevitably want to see it because it had their hero Culkin, but they should not under any circumstances see it, no matter how many guardians come with them. So far, I haven't seen anything to warrant an R rating - maybe a PG-13. Roger Ebert didn't like the movie at all - he said that kids shouldn't be put into situations where they say and do the unspeakable things the characters do in this film, and never has he disliked a film's ending more.

My breath is bated.