Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2

Southern Crossroads Diaries: Opening Tonight

Here we go. Today we do a matinee preview and then open Southern Crossroads tonight. We've got good houses for both shows and we're all excited, nervous, anxious, worried, and eager to get on with it. We had a small audience for the final dress last night and they uniformly loved what we have created. That was encouraging and I think it lifted all of our spirits a bit.

Today is the real test though. We've made no secret about how and why we are doing this show, everyone who pays attention in our community knows we are struggling to keep moving ahead. There is tremendous emotional support out there for the theatre, but in the end the reaction to the show will tell the story.

Are we ready? Yep. Will we succeed? I believe in my heart we will. We'll know soon enough.

This Is Me Today

The NEA is a Republican Talking Point Again

Well we’ve moved from contraceptives to the National Endowment for the Arts as a talking about in the great stimulus debate while the Republicans continue to find something to nail their protests on. Here we go again.

I won’t go into the specifics about how the arts do indeed stimulate the economy in areas where there is a vibrant art scene. I also won’t go into the fact that theatres and arts organizations are scaling back programming and indeed shutting down, putting more folks on the unemployment roles. Not necessary. Those are facts beyond talking points.

Here’s what I will go into. The only art the Republican talking heads ever like is an ad banner hanging around a NASCAR race track. I’m not tarring every Republican here because many are avid supporters of the arts. I’m just talking about the folks who are doing the cherry picking. I can certainly question the priorities, but the cherry picking here is getting a little ridiculous. The reason the NEA has come up has nothing to do with the dollars and cents, but more to do with the supposed sensationalist crap we went through two decades ago. We’ve moved from condoms to STDs to the NEA. See the connection. I guess in this battle its more fun to gin up fear about sex and depravity than it is economic failure.

This is a big picture fear for many artists as we see government support dwindle with the economic realities. If the sensationalist” smears come out and catch hold again, it will only make the battle back, assuming better times do show up some day, even tougher.

Here we go again.

Southern Crossroads: Pay What You Can

We finished a grueling weekend of rehearsals for Southern Crossroads and there’s a show in their somewhere. It should begin to surface about Wednesday night or so, which is a good thing since it opens on Saturday night.

Things are indeed coming together and we’ve just about locked down what we’re doing so the writing phase is over and now it is time to focus on getting the actors ready to perform.

Parallel to that, are our marketing efforts. We’ve had to cut back significantly on our advertising efforts so we’re relying far too heavily on word of mouth.

One of the things we’re doing for this show is offering Pay What You Can Nights during the week. We realize that many in our area will think twice about spending money on theatre tickets during a touch economy, but we don’t want them to be shut out for that reason. So, the way it works is this:

48 hours before a show we’ll release any unsold tickets for that performance for those interested to pay what they can to see the show.  Typically in our biz, this kind of thing happens on the day of the show, but given our rural location, we don’t do much walk up business and depend largely on phone sales.

This show should appeal to a broad range of folks and hopefully by giving them an avenue to afford it, we’ll be able to boost the word of mouth for the run.

At least that’s the theory.

I Wrote a Play This Week

It has been kind of quiet here on The Wicked Stage this week, simply because on our stage at Wayside Theatre things have been quite hectic and fast paced.

We’ve made some tough choices that will hopefully insure the survival of this “little theatre with a big heart” and they weren’t easy ones to make. We decided not to go forward with our planned and announced production of Harry Chapin’s Lies and Legends, simply to avoid having to pay the royalty advance. We didn’t have the cash. We’ve also restructured our agreement with the actors union to allow us to go forward as well. None of this was easy, but in comparison to what we are doing now, it seems like it was.

To replace Lies and Legends, we decided to create our own new theatre piece. We’ve got a tremendous amount of ridiculously talented folks who consider themselves a part of the Wayside Theatre family of artists, and they all have a stake in the theatre’s survival. I guess you can call this using talent and innovation to create in the face of adversity, but at times it does feel like desperation.

The name of this new piece is Southern Crossroads. Our gifted music director and composer Steve Przybylski and I came up with the idea. Steve pieced together a collection of songs that are pre-1922 that speak to hard times and how people endure them. We’ve set the story in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1933. There is a traveling band of family singers who go from town to town playing their music. On arriving at the unnamed town in our story they discover that the bank has foreclosed on the site of their show that night, The New Hope Theatre.

Without much money, they decide to do what they do best which is to play some music, but right on the street in front of the theatre. They hope enough folks passing by will toss in a few nickels that will help them buy train tickets to the next town.

Of course that’s just the beginning of the story and it unfolds and unveils itself from there. And, yes, it certainly parallels our experiences here in the real world.

Beginning this past Sunday night I started writing what was in my head and my notes about this story and by Tuesday we had a draft. I didn’t get to sleep much during that stretch and still haven’t yet. We start performances next Saturday, January 31 and have a lot to do between now and then, as the wonderful artists taking this journey bring life to the words, the music, and the story.

I think this will turn out to be a wonderfully entertaining evening, and our patrons who we have reached out to about the change universally seem to be in support of the effort and like the concept.

Now it is up to those of us in the rehearsal room to execute and bring this story and these songs to life.

If I told you I was confidant, I’d be lying. If I told you I wanted to be anywhere else but in the middle of trying to make this work, I’d be lying as well. We’ll find out what we’re made of as we rely on our talents and each other in this next week.

Assuming for the moment we come up with a great show, we’ll then find out if that matters here or not.

History

PETA Says Fish are Sea Kittens

Give me a break. In order to call attention to the plight of fish, PETA is launching a campaign to call fish Sea Kittens. Yeah, you heard me. Sea Kittens. Under the assumption that no one would want to put a hook in the mouth of a kitten and drag it behind a car, PETA is trying to stop the US Fish and Wildlife Service to stop promoting the hunting of Sea Kittens. I’m guessing folks at the USFWS are asking what the hell a Sea Kitten is.

So, if fish are Sea Kittens, what does that make Sushi? I’m just asking.

The Uptown Theatre in Chicago

Interesting piece on The Uptown Theatre in Chicago, which is the world’s second largest movie palace. When I worked for a theatre company in the Uptown neighborhood for a brief time there always seemed to be some initiative or the other afloat that we were involved in to revive this giant show place. Of course none of that ever came to be.

I got to go inside the building once and its decayed condition (much like you see in this picture) reminded me so much of the neighborhood that surrounded it. Uptown was then the last hold out on the Lake Michigan shoreline, resisting the rebuilding and reclamation that had happened all along Lake Shore Drive and further west. This was largely due to politics and the existing power structure that didn’t want its base of under privileged voters to move away, as had happened in wards all around it.

Seeing this story, I’m sad we didn’t pass through Uptown on our recent trip to see if and how things are changing there.

Via Neatorama

Holding our Collective Breath and Waiting for the Inauguration

My life in the theatre is full of moments of great expectations that either pay off or don’t. Success and failure. You spend great amounts of energy creating a piece of theatre for an audience and then you bring them in. They love it, like it, hate it, or worse yet, just don’t care. As the creator and bearer of those kind of expectations I’m used to the highs and the lows that come with that game.

None of that can come close to the magnitude that this country, and I think a good part of the world, is experiencing as we await Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday morning. I can not conceive of the weight that his own expectations must bear on him and his team. The pressure is enormous both for and beyond the crowning moment. Add to that the expectations that others are placing upon him and the burden must be almost suffocating. When I fail in the theatre, outside of the immediate there isn’t much pain to spread around. Failure on this historic level is difficult to contemplate.

Everywhere I go, and in just about every instance you can tell folks are holding their collective breaths to see what happens next. Some say so outright, and some tell you with their subtext. Change is coming, and we don’t know how or what, but we know it is coming. Can the energy fueled by uncertainty and doubt turn into positive momentum? Can the old cycles be broken? Will the big picture overwhelm the details? Will attention to the details obscure the big picture? Who really knows.

Watching individuals lining up along rail lines to see the Whistle Stop train pass is amazing. We all know something profound is about to happen, and we know it will have an effect on all of us. And yet, you since a calmness behind the anxiety. As I was nursing a shoulder injury yesterday and watching some of the Whistle Stop coverage, unfortunately having to listen to some of the talking heads in the process, I was reminded of the history behind what has led us to this point as we all are looking ahead. It is truly a remarkable one, and maybe it is just the optimist ruling the cynic in me at the moment, but I feel strongly that Barack Obama gets it on all levels surrounding these moments about to unfold. He knows the scrutiny he will be under, and he knows the stakes. In my opinion he is also smart enough to know that the answers aren’t clear yet, but the approach to finding them is more important at the moment than the eventual results.

Our crazy culture of the immediate won’t adjust well to that mode of operation and that will be the ultimate first battle as the messaging gets shaped and spun. But the real battles are more important in the long run, even if those smaller spin skirmishes seem to preoccupy the early going.

Never in my lifetime have I sensed so many so collectively so ready for so much that is so unknown.

There ’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is ’t to leave betimes?

Hamlet Act v. Sc. 2

Sunday Morning Reading

It has been a few weeks since I shared some Sunday morning reading due to travel and other things, but here goes.

The US Presidential Inauguration is the big news this week and will suck the oxygen out of just about any other story (and rightly so, it is historic on many levels.)  Below are a few interesting links on the upcoming events and what they mean.

David Wild: Our Inauguration Day, Our Father’s and Sons.

Michael Parekh: On Generational Politics

How to follow the Inauguration events on-line.

Frank Rich: White Like Me

Andrew Sullivan: The Hope They Saw on that Train

And some other stuff to share:

Gretchen Rubin: Don’t Let the Perfect Be The Enemy of the Good.

GigaOm’s Jose Fermoso looks at Windows 7 and Netbooks.

Brian Hollar links to at interesting piece about Wall Street getting drunk and Washington setting the table.

More on the unbelievable story of US Airways Flight 1549. Something I find amazing is that the pilot hasn’t been all over the media. But apparently that starts tomorrow.

Death By Peanut Butter. Who knew?