Our production of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take it With You opened Friday night to a packed house. Saturday evening was right near capacity as well.  All of the organizational machinery clicked along nicely. Lights and sound effects went off as expected. The cast showed up in good spirits and ready to perform.

A hilarious scene from The Moon Theatre Company production of You Can't Take it With You. (Photo Credit- Berthoud Recorder, 2010)

I have to say that it is exceedingly gratifying to fill a venue and have the audience laughing through the play. We were unsure of the laugh lines initially, but now have a better idea of where they are. In the photo above, Mr Sycamore restrains Mr DePinna who is waving fireworks near the Internal Revenue man. Grandpa and Essie prepare for the worst. Note: I’m not in the photo.

I play an uptight Wall Street businessman and father of the young man courting the daughter of Mr Sycamore.  My acting job is to make the emotional transition from being against the marriage to being in favor of it.  Acting is a real hoot and I’m grateful that others will consent to allow me on the stage with them. Of course, it helps to be on the board of directors.

Our community theatre project has gone from a spare time activity to the Monster that Ate Philadelphia.  Producing, directing, and acting in a production is somewhat more strenuous than it looks. Much more so when you have little budget and multiple jobs. 

The off-stage activity requires some acting as well. You have to convince actors and crew to set aside their natural suspicions and work without pay. You have to coerce local media to cover your upcoming production for free. You have to find lights, props, and materials for stagecraft. And you have to compel the public to plant their ticketed backsides in the seats. All in exchange for an evening of what you’re proposing to call entertainment.

Rehearsals have been brutal.  We have a cast of 19 for You Can’t Take it With You. Turns out that the probability of everyone showing up at any given rehearsal is somewhat less than unity.  Set construction from bare lumber and recycled flats to assembled and decorated flats has taken perhaps a hundred manhours with all of the running around.

Why do it?  Well, it’s Show Business!  What kind of a question is that?

I have a guitar and sometimes I pick at the strings before I retire for the evening. Regrettably, I can’t produce much that is recognizable. It’s just an elementary condition related to a lifelong neglect of this kind of activity. My brain plasticity has produced a tough layer of rythmic dissonance between my grey hair and grey matter like a skin of old playdough or expired custard.  

What I have come to understand is this- guitar players whom I have taken for granted as providers of background music were in fact some extremely clever fellows.

In trying to convert the sheet music of a few players into sound, I have come face to face with the truth of their talent. And I am humbled. Most people learn this well before their fifties. But not me. My insights are hard won and accumulate when most of the other runners have already passed the finish line.

I was just surfing Youtube for guitar players like Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jeff Beck,  and a few others.  Another way of looking at the spectacle of their art is this:  Behold what neurons are capable of!! The player’s central nervous system seeks maximum satisfaction in the refinement of the exercise of producing sounds from an external object. It is a feedback loop that explores for a target state and, through brain plasticity via evolving neuron interconnectivity, refines its own capacity to produce a desired effect.  What an amazing universe it is that can produce such things.

And what an amazing demonstration of the marvel of brain biology. Even if they find the Higgs boson next week, we’re still a long way from a fundamental mechanistic understanding of how someone learns to excel at Spanish guitar.

Lately I’ve been listening to Trombone Shorty. He has brought new life to that venerable background instrument, the trombone. This is from his album Backatown.

Ok. So I’m one of the founders of a theatre group more or less based in my home town.  Truthfully, I’m the least experienced of this group.  We’re a bunch of community theatre enthusiasts who have decided to start our own theatre group. Together we’ve had a few critical successes, but we wanted some autonomy.  Most of our shows ended up with a modest surplus of cash with only one production that was well executed but poorly attended. The next show is largely funded by the receipts of the previous show.

Together or in groups we’ve done Proof, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Murder Room, Beets, and Love letters. Last fall I was in Room Service. We’re starting to accumulate a bit of experience. Luckily there have been no disasters.

What does it really mean to be a board member of a theatre group? It means that you are a producer. It means that your main purpose is to find and allocate resources so that others- sniff, sniff– can perform. As a board member you find out what it really means to be a producer of a show. It’s a lot of work.

So here is the deal. We have two productions scheduled, one at a very nice municipal theatre next January.  The question before us is this- how do you marshall resources and staff willing to work for free to put on a good show? Yes, we have 6 board members who are also actors, writers, and directors. But we can’t do everything. We need people for props, costumes, sets, and makeup. We also need someone to do lighting and sound. Possibly two or three of us may be in the show with bit parts.

In show business, there are several criteria for success. Obviously there is critical success. Everyone wants to be part of a great show.  We’re obligated to provide a nights entertainment in exchange for tickets. So, we need to snag some good actors and a director up to the task of directing upcoming Neil Simon production. Fortunately, we have an experienced director who has contacts in the local network of actors. So,  with some luck the audition will be well attended with prospective actors.

But beyond all of the handwringing about production value, what matters most to the producers is that we put butts in seats. We could put on the best performance in history, but without an audience, it’s all a silly exercise.

The question arises, then, as to how does one get the message out? We recently learned the expensive lesson that newspaper advertising is highly unreliable. A good writeup in the local entertainment insert can be very helpful, though. But the staff writers have to see a compelling newspaper story in order to do a good writeup. So, if you’re doing a Neil Simon play, one that has been done many, many times, how do you stir up the excitement?

Well, you have understand who your audience is and what they respond to. Who attends plays, anyway? In the case of community theatre, there is a substantial reservoir of blue hairs and the Q-tips who love to see a show. You know, retired people. So then, how do we get the message out to the retired folks? This is the nut we have to crack in the dog days of summer. Who is willing to go out on a January night to see a show?

Happy Bastille Day, if that is an actual greeting. A little bit of Edith Piaf is in order. And some wine and cheese.

Never have so many voted so overwhelmingly for so little as the members Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did for The Hurt Locker, this years Best Motion Picture.

Th’ Gaussling sat through a screening of The Hurt Locker last weekend. I must say that it was competently produced and directed. Without a doubt, the cast and crew did a fine bit of journeyman film making. However, an outstanding bit of film making it was not. It should have been titled Opportunities Lost.

What is so tragic about this movie is that all of the elements of an outstanding motion picture were there. An action packed setting, the threat of explosive death, flawed characters, intrigue, and comraderie. But somehow the director was unable to pull it together. Despite all of the raw materials available for a cliff hanger, director Kathryn Bigelow managed to patch together a picture that utterly lacks the fizz and crackle of a thriller. It’s as emotionally flat as a pancake.

Here is my primary beef with The Hurt Locker. It lacks application of the fundamentals of storytelling. While there is a lead character, the emotional hook that connects a viewer with the character is missing.  The viewers emotional connection to the lead character, Sergeant First Class William James, is lost through a series of missed opportunities. The director tries to paint this character as a man of steel or a “wildman”. But never convincingly. Even the attempt to hook you in with his half-hearted try to befriend a camp rat (an Iraqi kid) was botched.

The film makers tried to give this picture a documentary feel with the handheld photography. But it doesn’t catch. There are movies out there that use this method successfully- District 9, Cloverfield, and especially Saving Private Ryan.  But to do this successfully, in my opinion, the director must focus on a the characters.  One of the characters in The Hurt Locker was, by default, Iraq. But the development of even this “character” was poor.

To be compelling, the director must use some narrative trick to put the viewer on the spot with the characters. Either through a first person presence by a principle character as with Private Ryan, Cloverfield, District 9, or Apocalypse Now, or some other storytelling device like good character development on sympathetic characters. View the  Blackhawk Down and look at the difference.  In Blackhawk Down, there was better development of Somalia as a kind of character. It was not a sympathetic character, but it certainly had more depth.

OK. They did a few things right. They did not fall into the ridiculous cliche about the trick detonators. You know the scenario, there are many wires around the bomb and if the wrong one is cut, the detonator fires immediately. This is a regrettable dramatic device introduced foisted generations ago on ignorant audiences to raise the suspense level during the bomb defusing scene. Well guess what, audiences are still ignorant but at least the writer & film makers had some integrity this time. The EOD guy was portrayed doing the proper thing- looking for the initiator. That is where the drama is.

All in all, I would recommend viewing this movie if you have NetFlix so the financial investment is low. But I wouldn”t spend $19.95 on a DVD.

So they finally nabbed Polanski. It’s about time. Back in 1977 or so when I made a meager living as a movie projectionist, I ran a movie called The Tenant, starring and directed by Roman Polanski. It was a dark psychological story about a man living in an apartment previously occupied by a woman who committed – or was driven to – suicide. In my view, Polanski should get a few years tacked onto his sentence just for making this grim stinker. OK, I’m indulging in sarcasm. Shelly winters and a few other notables were in it. But they were unable to bring it to life.

I recall that the lead character, Trelkovsky, tried to jump to his death from his (2nd floor?) apartment window, but tragically survived the fall. So, he drug himself up the steps and tried one more time, only to fail once again. There is more, but I won’t waste time over it.

Over a short period of 4 days we sold perhaps 12 tickets, and of those, more than a few customers walked out. In an attempt to cut his losses, the owner of the theater pulled it and booked something else. Little did we know that a movie called Star Wars would soon be wound onto our 6000 ft reels and beaming quietly from twin Norelco 35 mm projectors onto our single screen. The Tenant was evicted from our theater.