Category Archives: Theater

Opening Night

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The opening night production of Beets went quite well. The house was packed and the cast & crew rose to the occasion.  The audience was quite responsive to the script and as a result we found out where the real laugh lines were. The trick to acting is to lift a 1 dimensional string of characters from a page and give them depth and color.

The only production snag was with the house lights. For some reason the software wasn’t able to call for the house lights to dim. The lighting guy opened the door of an obscure closet in the vaudeville-era backstage to reveal a glowing, LED festooned, 6 ft tower of computerized widgetry. Working feverishly and with green pinpoints of light reflecting off his smudged bifocals (a la Dave Bowman), he finally toggled the right button and got the house lights to darken. Otherwise the software-driven lights and sound worked well.

I wasn’t nervous until 15 minutes before showtime. Standing in the wings I tried to recite my lines in my head, but just couldn’t summon them from the turbid depths. I don’t mind sayin’, this was a distressing development. But after I walked on stage the lines came on cue and we got the thing done.

From the comments at the reception after the show it was apparent that the audience understood the story and were emotionally drawn into it. For two hours we suspended reality and had a shared experience. This is the goal of the writer, director, cast, and crew. When it works it is an amazing thing.

Hot Stage at 7 PM

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Hard to believe- our show starts in just a few hours. I’ve given my 2 comp tickets to family. Folks are forkin’ over real money to sit and watch us do this thing. Ticket sales have been strong, so everyone is jazzed. If anything, the cast is a bit over rehearsed. We’re happy just to get the thing going. The sound and lighting cues are set.

Th’ Gaussling plays a sugar beet farmer, which ain’t much of a stretch, havin’ growed up on an Iowa hog and corn farm. Turns out that my step-mother grew up on a beet farm in this area and is aware of the Greeley WWII POW camp’s location. There were supposedly ~155 POW camps in the US by the end of the war.

Beets Poster

It is a decent story and certainly makes for a good dramatic situation. My part is a minor role, though I am in 5 scenes. In terms of the storytelling, my character is a device contrived by the writer to make sure that certain information gets on the table so the audience can get the facts and circumstances in context. This is part of the playwriters craft that I had failed to appreciate previously.

It is a good play and I am lucky to have been a part of it. Quiet backstage!

The Venue

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This morning we moved our set into the theatre that we will be performing in for the next two weekends. This is my first acting performance in a decent theatre. It has clean dressing rooms below the stage and reasonably up-to-date lighting and sound capability. The theatre seats 400 and has been well refurbished over the last few years.

We have a tech crew running the lights and sound, a props & costume crew for scene changes, a makeup person, a set builder, and a few other gofers who handle the 10,000 details. All we have to do is remember our lines and avoid falling into the orchestra pit. The lead character has been sick for the last 10 days, so the producers have been nervous. He is a quantum computing physicist who happens to dig acting. The physicist gets the girl. The chemist gets to shout at people and whittle.

Last friday’s local paper featured a full page closeup of me, Th’ Gaussling, hamming it up on stage. Mother of pearl! Today’s thrill of standing on the set and looking into the auditorium was soon replaced by waves of nausea at the realization that this thing is really going to happen. Holy smokes. What have I done?

No Business Like Show Business

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Th’ Gaussling has a minor part in a play produced by a local community theatre group. Opening night is May 22, so the pucker factor is presently in überdrive. I’m in 5 scenes, one of which involves some shouting and pushing. Lots of opportunities to goof up. I play a farmer, so I get to do my Fess Parker accent and country mannerisms.

Rehearsals are getting pretty intense. This is the first time this play has been performed, a fact that is both good and bad. We have the blocking in place and most everyone knows their lines. Now it is just a matter of refining the performance.  A mark of an experienced actor is the ability to recover seamlessly from mangled lines. I’m not as far from that ideal as I used to be.

This is Th’ Gaussling’s 2nd production. My acting isn’t terrible, exactly. Folks are polite with me, at least to my face. I can perform certain kinds of parts acceptably. I’m more like a Slim Pickens than a George Clooney.

Putting on a good show is much more difficult that it might seem. I do it for personal growth and the satisfaction of pulling off a good performance. It is wildly outside my normal activity and is a good outlet for nervous energy.

No business like show business

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Just got the call from the director. My audition for a part in a local play was successful. Good god. What have I done?

Doing live theater is a real kick. It has to be seamless and on cue every time. One of the perks is partying with the other actors after a show. The only bummer is striking the set when it is all over.

What I find difficult is memorizing my lines and the cues from the other parts. After a career of chemical structures and learning rules and generalizations and applying them to problems, I find that rote memorization of detailed text is contrary to my learning style. Thus, it takes considerable and concerted effort to commit large tracts of text into memory. The sticky part the first time was the process of coming to this realization.

Buddy Holly

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I was a grubby little 18 month old Iowa farm toddler, eating dirt and tripping over cow pies when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper augered into a frozen cornfield near Clear Lake, in northern Iowa. The date was February 3rd, 1959.

The pilot, 21 year old Roger Peterson, took off at 1 AM in light snow flying a 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza. A few minutes later, the aircraft impacted the ground at high speed a few miles from the airport, killing all aboard.  Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings, Holly’s backup musicians, were supposed to be on board the plane with Holly. But at the last minute they were pursuaded to give up their seats.

Last night, on the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Buddy Holly, we went to a dinner theater production of the Buddy Holly Story. It turned out to be quite entertaining. I say “turned out” because in truth I’m not much of a 50’s music fan. Being a serial doofus in the area of music, I didn’t realize that Holly was such a prolific song writer. Wasn’t paying attention.

On a side note, a Beechcraft Bonanza has been flown underneath the Eiffel Tower. It is hard to imagine that permission was given, much less, an insurance policy.

Dog that caught the car

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I’m off to participate (in a minor way) in a local historical reinactment this afternoon. Have to dress up as a beet farmer.

Like a dog that finally caught the car, my recent audition for a part in a local play resulted in my getting the part. Good god, what have I done?

Review: “Little Women” at the Lyceum

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August 30, 2008, Arrow Rock, Missouri.  Like most boys, I failed to read Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women.  Okay, to be fair, a slight elaboration is needed. I failed to summon the interest in reading it.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that we were going to drive 744 miles (one way) to see a musical based on the book. The musical production of this story was staged at the Lyceum Theatre in Arrow Rock, Missouri. The theatre is a refurbished church and sits on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River valley. Lewis & Clark stopped there according to the historical markers.

Arrow Rock is a charming though obscure tourist village configured with a handfull of antique shops, B & B’s, and minor eateries. The town was a mid-19th century river port. Numerous warehouses and transport operations were once in operation. Eventually, the town went into a prolonged quiescent phase with the coming of rail transport. As if to cement its extinction, the Missouri River later changed its course and moved a mile away.

The town is now part of the Arrow Rock State Historic Site. The historic site status of the area has brought some traffic into this sleepy little hamlet.

And then there is the Lyceum Theatre. What is notable about this Theatre is not so much the setting as the quality of the actors it attracts. The productions are Actors Equity operations and the casting calls are in New York City. The actors fly in and reside in a dormitory in Arrow Rock for the duration of the production.

The result is a musical talent pool of high quality. We found the production of Little Women to be cleanly energetic and very crisp.  The stagecraft was very professional and relied on a liberal use of scrims and lighting.

The vocal talent across the cast was superb. The actor playing sister and lead character “Jo” was Mallory Hawks. She captured considerable depth in the part and displayed a verve that never failed to charm. This actor’s voice was exceptionally strong and clear. She was cannily emotive and lead the audience through an emotional series of highs and lows during the performance. I wish her well in her career.

For accomodations I would recommend the Down Over Bed and Breakfast in Arrow Rock. It is run by a charming retired couple who present a fantastic breakfast spread. It is reasonably priced and provides a relaxing setting for chronically twittered city folk.

Suspension of Disbelief

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I have recently posted on a local play I am involved with. It is a community theater production of Proof, by David Auburn.  As the lighting guy, I have to watch the production carefully so I can pick up the lighting cues. It isn’t heavy brain work, but it does require accuracy and an ever-so-slight amount of flair. In the course of this I have the chance to watch the actors closely and note the subtilties of their performance.

Act 1 Scene 1 opens with Catherine having a discussion with her father- recently deceased- out on the back porch. Here the actor playing Catherine sets the tone for the play. She transitions from a normal tone with her mathmatician father to the glum realization that he is dead.

After intermission, Act 2 Scene 5 reverts to 5 or so years in the past. In this scene Catherine is a younger woman anxious to leave home to begin school. What is so absolutely scintillating is the manner in which this actor did so. In contrast to the morose, sarcastic, and angry young woman trying to deal with her father’s death, she now plays the character as optimistic, charming ,and enthusiastic.  Done properly, this scene lurches the audience down a completely different emotional cascade and further invests them in the outcome.

This is a sign of a good writer at work. Hook the viewers with intriguing circumstances and lurch them from one emotional track to another in unexpected ways. This promotes emotional connection with the story and the suspension of disbelief. When performed by good players, the show comes alive.

Proof

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This week a local community theater group is putting on a production of Proof, by David Auburn. It is a drama about an insane mathematician and his daughter.  Since casting didn’t require an oafish, middle-aged cornfed, my role is strictly behind the scenes. My job will be to supply darkness by turning down the lights on cue.

Spent the weekend putting in a new lighting system based on what is available at Home Depot. Actually, the lighting works pretty well.