We really don't care about theatre do we?

Saw Hamlet at the National yesterday. Shakespeare is a v weak spot for me, but I just followed the emotions in the speeches.

Hamlet as teenager w/ a strop worked.

another bummer crowd. i seriously don't get people who go to comedies and then just sit in silence...first night crowd was great, but then again I think the average age the last two nights was 73.

Mean to say it ramped it up, perhaps? Wore a hoodie, his madness was a bit panto, etc. xp

xyz, i think i'm coming to London for Patrice Chereau's first english language show at the young vic.

http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/i-am-the-wind

i'm booking tonight once i get hold of sam. shall i let you know if/when we got tickets for it?

Yes let me know.

The trouble with doing comedy for a small audience is a good argument for donation-based performances, where either the audience pays at the end of the show or the ticket price includes a pay-what-you-can option -- better to have a house of 50 paying an average of $5 than 10 paying $25.

This company isn't too well known in Chicago, but they play to sold out houses because they have an usher at each entrance at the end of the show, taking donations. Since they do family-friendly (though not childrens') theater, they definitely do the kind of shows that work better with a full house. And as far as ticket revenue, they do as well and better than similar companies charging $15-$20 a head.

Ugh. Finished a readthrough for my 4th Fringe Festival show. My close friend wrote it. He's always had a tendency to overwrite, but he really turned the corner on the last production (we did a mashup of @nnie and Sw33ney T0dd).

This script tonight was forty five pages of bloated "hey, remember when we..." moments. Almost every line is three-four sentences. Its a comedy too.

Gave our feedback as usual, but as an illustration, we have an hour timeslot...this took 75 minutes to READ. Hoping this gets better before I devote three months to it!

xyz_, sam and i booked for a midweek matinée on tuesday the 3rd of may because it had decent seats available and tickets were cheap on that day.

Tricky situation, 'Te. Hope it turns out to be fun to work on.

yeah but it's best just to bear with it if you can. if it turns out not-so-good you can still be good in it, and if it turns out great then so much the better. with a few weeks to go i was on the verge of pulling out of panic patterns because the director and i were not seeing eye to eye, i was just making too big a deal about the differences and we sorted it out (she was great to work with in hindsight!)and it turned out very well. glad i stuck with it, it was the best thing i have done theatre-wise.

actually j, i just found out c de la b are at sadlers the same week. might rejig the dates for the chereau so i can go to both. will keep you posted x

well the good news is the writer himself admitted to many shortcomings in his script even before I got to my keyboard to send my feedback this morning. I sent him a long email about what I found the faults to be, and he agreed and is going to go back and overhaul a bit.

some whispers of people dropping due to the script are about, and I mind I'm not going to decry anyone for that as it's their right, but I've never quit a production in 40+ shows so I'm not going to give up that easily. especially since we've got time.

and more along those lines, our mashup last year turned out to be a crowd favorite, was well reviewed, and we sold the most ticketsi n our venue despite having the least # of shows. sold out all but one.

and yet a month before we went up, the script was a mess, and the show was awful. we worked as a group to rewrite bits that didn't work...I actually supplied the ending, as well as about 5-6 other jokes/edits. I think every actor had a writing contribution of some degree.

so definitely too early to throw in the towel, I agree.

best to wait til a week before the performance ;)

haha. oh people have done that to us before.

jed - excellent, sounds like a packed week - def try to go to one of these shows, email/txt closer to the time :)

j, booked the ballets c de la b on the 6th of May. i know it's five months hence but it was about 2/3rds sold already - it's in the small studio space and the ticks are a flat £15 so get on it if you can. my seats are c12 & c13.

four months, rather.

gonnna look into this !

yes, nice one!

don't leave it too late.

C14 on a whim :D

just keep your hands to yourself :D

I'll bring some wine gums

desert sorted, i'll bring criss

Just done this, btw - don't know what I'll bring

great!

big 2 ltr bottle of coke?

sure :-)b

want this shirt
http://images.tbd.com/entertainment/team_edward_017_606.jpg

James 'fucking' Corden in One Man Two Guv'nors at The National Theatre. Yeah ok he was actually pretty good in this. Starts out like an 'ironic' revival of an awful 1960s sitcom, terrible jokes and all, interspersed with moments of 'hilarious' slapstick. Most of the audience seemed to think this actually was the funniest thing they'd seen in their lives, I was considerably more sceptical, but as the slapstick got thicker and the scenarios got more ridiculous it pretty much won me over. The story is so thin as to be nonexistent but most of the performances are top notch. There are a couple of audience interaction moments which beggar belief, and they try something interesting and different with the between-scene music numbers - fun when the cast are doing their turns, not so much when the house band are wearing out their welcome.

I was at an amateur production of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead last night. Great fun.

13 at the National Theatre, a big ol' mess of bad philosophy, vague mysticism, fill-in-the-blanks zeitgeist, and pointlessly rehearsed old political arguments. I can't figure out what exactly what the message was, but the available options are either obviously stupid, stupidly insulting, or insultingly obvious.

Finally got on the Jerusalem bandwagon, fantastic. Amazing character and performance. Let down a little by my crappy restricted view seat. Wonder what A Farrell of this parish thought...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jan/20/jacobean-tragedies-changeling-duchess-malfi

^sorta wanna see...

we're bringing back a musical we did two years ago to the local Fr!nge Festival. last time, it sold out all but one performance, got great press, and won the venue, but we knew there were weaknesses with the script, so we tasked out to make rewrites.

I was not one of the script writers (of which there were two), but I was asked to consult last time. I made a lot of suggestions that got used, and didn't really bitch about the non-writer credit as I was overwhelmed by the positive experience and got swept up in the teamwork of it all (we all really helped finish writing it together).

This time, though...i'm starting to wonder why I'm not at least getting a "with additional material by" credit. The original music director, who really gave one minor contribution, got this credit.

I actually supplied 13 of the lines, and wrote the entire conceit for the ending, which is the one thing that was holding the show up. kinda feel like I should demand an "additional material by" credit. I don't want a regular writer's credit because the script is still overwhelmingly the two main writers', but I gave more than just a few throwaway jokes.

*sigh*. dunno if it's worth pursuing, not like I'm getting money out of it anyway.

I would pursue it but if it looks like resulting in any kind of stress or bad feeling i'd probably advise you to forget about it.

kinda what I'm thinking

i'm more like a script doctor I guess anyway

pretty much just a dude that says NOT FUNNY when the writers get out of hand

a valuable service!

Was at a cast party for a show my friends did last night. Usually fun, but man, sometimes actors can get so sensitive about press that they wind up being out of character offensive.

Take my close friend, D, for example. He's a compassionate, family man with two kids, who occasionally lapses into childish territory, but no more than any other emotionally stunted actor. He was very friendly and supportive a few years ago when quite a few notable local theatre personalities tragically passed away.

So it was quite uncomfortable and disturbing to me when he got on the topic of this awful show we did together last year (that he wrote). It was one of the worst things I've done, and quietly, many of us involved have admitted as such after the fact. Except him and a few others. We got a bad review in the press by one of the local critics, and he was stung by it at the time.

However, six months later, she tragically died in her sleep. Many people in our circle knew her and were devastated by it...and D knew this. For whatever reason, though, he still hasn't made peace with the review, and starts whining about this woman and her lack of credentials last night. Which would have been somewhat harmless if he wasn't doing it in front of one of the late critic's friends, who I could tell was trying to get him to pump the brakes, before reluctantly tuning him out for two minutes until he got on another topic.

o_O. Awk...ward. Actors who can't see their own faults and hate critics confuse the everliving shit out of me.

(the 'she' that died being the critic)

Profile of Mike Nichols:
http://nymag.com/arts/theater/profiles/mike-nichols-2012-3/index2.html

He's using the original set and score for his Death of a Salesman revival. Hmm.

Just booked tickets to see Juliet Binoche in Miss Julie at the Barbican in September. PSYCHED!!!!!

Off to Other Desert Cities tonight (annual Broadway splurge); haven't seen Stockard Channing in awhile (2 Guare plays) and Stacy Keach never...

saw brimstone and treacle at the arcola in dalston (london) last night... very good though lots of changes from potter's original, and hackneyed use of punk music between acts to show changing britain or some similarly dumb overdone thing.

only saw the film with Shting

jesus just googled that, crazy! is it any good?

the original tv play is brilliant.

stage version last night did have the amusing cliffhanger at the end whereby nobody wanted to applaud too soon after the rape scene that ends it. long, long and awkward silence.

I remember it being good... probably the 3rd Potter I saw after the two versions of Pennies from Heaven.