Movin' Right Along

I need more creative titles.

We do six shows in four days: 1 Thursday night, 2 on Friday, 2 on Saturday, and 1 on Sunday afternoon. It's quite a feat! The audiences really seemed to enjoy our performances this weekend. It's great.

Today, we had a special event called "Sunday Salon," in which an invited guest comes to discuss some topic that deals with the show. Today we heard some WWII stories. One couple was invited to explain how they used song titles as a code system. If "White Christmas" was mentioned in a letter, the wife knew her husband was in Hawaii. "I'll Be Seeing" you meant he was in Japan and so forth. It was very clever and never censored! Other people chimed in from the audience, sharing their stories from the war and using the radio as a means for entertainment and news.

It's great to hear these accounts. There were lots of tears in the room during the salon. This medium has a powerful impact on people. I think this show takes many by surprise.

Yesterday, we had a rehearsal look-back. The cast gathered with the artistic director and discussed how the rehearsal process went. We expressed what we loved, what was frustrating, how we grew as artists, etc. It was interesting to hear what people had to say. I won't go into details, but it's great that we had an honest conversation about what worked and what didn't. Hopefully what didn't work out so well can be remedied for future shows of this nature and others. We're constantly learning in this company, which I appreciate. We'll also have a production look-back or post-mortem to examine similar elements (outside of rehearsals, obviously).

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GRAD SCHOOL COUNTDOWN

I'll be auditioning for grad schools in less than two months.

Tonight, I'll be lookin' over Shakespeare stuff. I've got a bit of anxiety about choosing the right Shakespeare monologues. I'm looking at the ingenues, which just seem to be so cliche, but with my age and looks, that's my options (it's just weird to me to think I may end up working on Romeo's lines). There's a lot of Shakespeare that I haven't read. So I'm trying to find a good balance of working with what I know and stretching beyond that a bit. As much as I enjoy Shakespeare, I can't just sit and read it for long periods of time. I need to speak it and hear it. The problem is that time is ticking and I've got some finalized decisions that need to be made sooner rather than later. I aim to have a list picked out by Tuesday (probably of five or so monologues).

I do have my contemporary monologues. One is Alan from Picnic and the other is Pip from Three Days of Rain (which may be a bit too old for me, but it's got such a great amount of energy and humor, and I genuinely love the piece)