January 23, 2009
We played
Loyola school in Mankato today with the Grimm cast. Kaela and Seraphine rode in my car both ways. Kaela is one of the veteran Fidgety players. I have almost stopped being surprised by how much she surprises me with her thoughfulness, creativity, patience, sense of fun and professionalism (amazing in an adult, even moreso in a thirteen-year-old.)
I popped in a Jimmy Smith CD on the way up, and had a conversation with Seraphine, who was sitting in the front seat. She came to the US from Cameroon when she was in ninth grade, and will graduate from high school this year. Her parents have political asylum here. She is their only child. Fidgety is her first bit of acting. I told her about my daughter Hannah’s experiences in Cameroon last summer; how she said on her return, “I keep looking for little kids selling boiled peanuts.” Seraphine tells me her grandmother owns a little store back home and that she used to be one of those little kids selling boiled peanuts. And of course…it turns out Seraphine is in the tribe of John Fomuso, whose family Hannah visited there. Then Hannah called me to find out how many cups are in a pound of butter, so I put Seraphine on the phone with her.
Matt sat next to me in the wings during the show and from time to time we would beam at each other as Seraphine was performing. She is utterly convincing and clear, and enchanting to watch. “Oh, I get so nervous,” she tells me on the drive back. On the CD, we were listening to the Latcho Drom soundtrack. “I love singing,” I said to her. “I love to sing and dance,” she replied. I dropped her off at her home, a big apartment complex in New Brighton. The wind was blowing fierce; it was ten degrees below zero. As we neared her house she raised her arms and did a dance in her seat. “I’m almost home!”
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.
January 2, 2009
After too much dithering on my part we have a website up here. Much credit is owed to design guru Jenny Gibson and photography goddess Pat Cassidy. Whatever is wrong is my fault.
2009 commences with a revival of Fidgety Fairy Tales. We will be taking the show on the road to schools throughout Minnesota in January, February and March. The tour is not yet fully booked, so contact MACMH if you would like this fabulous musical theatre piece at your school.
In the meantime, Matt Jenson and I are creating part two: Fidgety Folk Tales. We will be workshopping the stories with school children this spring. The first story will be a Russian version of Hansel and Gretel, featuring Baba Yaga, the witch whose hut is on chicken legs. Gretel (who will have a cool Russian name) suffers from PTSD on her return home…not surprisingly, given the brother-almost-roasted-by-the-witch trauma, and the story will be told through her dreams.
In preparing to write this piece I revisited some Stravinsky songs I had taught children a number of years ago for a Ballet Russes project at Children’s Theatre Company. Very challenging material, and I can’t believe I was doing it with middle-school kids. Ah, that was fun…
Enjoy the website, and feel free to drop me a line.
MFH
