January 22, 2009
We had our first performance of the
Fidgety revival Wednesday at the
Nay Ah Shing school on the Mille Lacs Reservation north of Onamia. We’re running two casts now–the Grimm cast (mostly original members) and the Perrault cast (all newbies)–and because we want to squeeze in a few more rehearsals with new cast members we are using Grimm for the first two performances. But as it turned out, we had to swap in a few Perrault members anyway…so for this performance we had only three original cast members of eight: Jared, Drew and Sam.
The new actors-Marianna, Seraphine, Mary Grace, Grace and Deja–did very well. Already an ensemble is developing. They support each other and work together beautifully. Some first-show jitters, but that is to be expected. It was fun to see new interpretations of characters, and I found myself smiling as I played. Now that the show is up, they will really start to play with it.
Our audience was quite young; most looked like preschoolers. They loved the physical comedy. And they adored Deja, our youngest actor who plays Li’l Hood. Yeah, Deja is pretty adorable. At the end of the show the audience stood up and shouted “Migwitch!”
Friday we take the Grimm cast to Mankato, a two hour drive on a cold, cold Minnesota day. It’s great to get out of the city and to drive through the snowy countryside. The actors amuse each other during the drive by calling back and forth between cars on their cell phones. Kids!
January 14, 2009
Rehearsals for the
Fidgety school tour are coming along. We cancelled one rehearsal on account of bad weather, so are feeling a bit pressured. Two more rehearsals and we hit the road. We have a marvelous bunch of young actors working on the project, and they will rise to the challenge.
I’m working on Baba Yaga songs. I have two written and will let them sit for a few days, after which time I will hate them and rewrite. One is a lullabye and the other is a getting-pushed-in-the-oven song. Next up is a dancing chicken-legs hut song. Must. Not. Listen. To. Moussorgsky.
Wikipedia’s Baba Yaga entry discusses “…an ordinary construction popular among hunter-nomadic peoples of Siberia …invented to preserve supplies against animals during long periods of absence. A doorless and windowless log cabin is built upon supports made from the stumps of two or three closely grown trees cut at the height of eight to ten feet. The stumps, with their spreading roots, would give an impression of ‘chicken legs’. A similar but smaller construction was used by Siberian pagans to hold figurines of their gods.”
Sami Storehouse, from wikicommons
I will be participating in a Hanns Eisler evening in March, an idea which is being bruited about by Dreamland Faces . The plan is to have an event to coincide with “Uncivil Wars”, an adaptation of Brecht and Eisler’s “The Roundheads and the Pointyheads” by David Gordon, which is showing at the Walker in mid-March. I am planning on assembling a children’s choir to sing some of Eisler’s music from “The Giant”, a theatre piece we played with a children’s group in Berlin a few years ago. These are some nice quirky little songs, most with text by Brecht, from ”Five Children’s Songs” and the “Hollywood Songbook,” dating from the thirties and forties. Revolutionary and seditious, and all the moreso for being delivered in treble voices. If you are interested in joining the choir, let me know.
