I love getting photos from backstage. It can be so beautiful and ephemeral and it’s a view I feel privileged to share in.
Backstage, fifteen minutes before curtain
Tag: theatre
Verdict: California bound
Wish me luck. From the moment I land I’ll have one hundred hours to fix and save this musical.
Protected: It’s nice to be wanted
The Thrilling Adventure Hour at SF Sketchfest
Had a great time this past weekend, starting with the Rifftrax: Night of the Shorts 5 on Thursday. I got to the Castro Ttheatre about twenty minutes early, had to park about six blocks up the hill, and found a seat just before the show started. Great show, lots of fun. My favorite short was definitely "Live and Learn", a 50's era PSA about childhood accidents. After the show I got Paul F Tompkins’ signature in my Thrilling Adventure Hour graphic novel, and then I had to walk six blocks back up the hill to get to the car. That last block was a killer.
Protected: Brain dump, part 1
Protected: ♫ On my way to where the air is gray! Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Erie PA?
Protected: It’s the Thrilling Adventure Weekend!
BoingBoing Ingenuity
This past Sunday Gillian and I headed into San Francisco to attend BoingBoing Ingenuity, sort of a TED like meetup for readers of the BoingBoing blog. I won my ticket in the first giveaway, and Gill managed to score hers in one of the latter ones.
It was a really fun day. Early day; we had to leave the apartment at quarter to eight to catch the BART into the city, and we were lucky enough that the first train was a couple minutes late so we didn’t have to wait around. On the train ride in we saw a Ringling Brothers circus train just before we went under the Bay.
The event was held in the old Masonic Lodge on Sutter. We took a ride in the original elevator, which still has an operator, up to the third floor and the big stage. Beautiful room. Apparently all 31 backdrops are original, and they had a scene from hell on stage, complete with devils tormenting damned souls.
While we were waiting for things to get started the lady sitting in front of us turned around to introduce herself, figuring that the kind of people to get invited to this kind of event had to be interesting. She was pretty nice, she makes props and scenery for photographs with her art partner.
There were a lot of great speakers, and a few okay ones. I liked the opening speaker, Ferdanando Buscema, a
Between speakers, and during some of the breaks the organist kept us all entertained with a variety of sci-fi tunes. I recognized the Eleventh Doctor’s theme, and the original Star Trek, and I think bits of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.
The final block of block of presenters was a mixed bag for me. Up first was the music duo Barn Owl, who did electronic drone music. If it had been about a third the volume, or if I hadn’t had the first stirrings of a headache, I might have enjoyed it. As it was I rushed out of the room clutching my stomach, nearly ready to vomit. I stood in the lobby by an open window until they were done, and I think I may have loosed the tide because I saw several other people leave and hang around the lobby until they were done.
After Barn Owl finished Adam Savage came on to give the closing talk. He gave a brief rundown on his career as builder and then outlined his ten tips
Protected: Too many gut punches
Surprise, I’m alive!
So, I’ve kind of spent the last eight weeks building three different shows. The first to go up was “Marriage of Figaro” about three weeks ago, then “Anatomy of Gray” last week, and a couple days ago we opened “Eurydice”. I’ll talk more about the whole process later but Eurydice is most on my mind, for obvious reasons.
The thing that sticks out most right now is something that happened at the opening matinee for a bunch of high-school students. After the show the cast and crew came out and sat on set and took some questions from the audience and there was this one girl in the front row who asked about the baptism theme and if that was intentional (it wasn’t on our part, but might be inherent in the story). After her question, she just sort of sat there sobbing while the cast answered a bunch of other questions. When we finished up I remarked to Mat (playing the role of Father) that she looked like the kind of girl who’d go home and start up a Tumblr about this play.
Then last night Gill and I were at the opening night performance and I’m positive baptism-girl was sitting behind us with a bunch of her friends. After the play was over I overheard her say “This play just gives me so many feels” and I knew that if we hadn’t banned video recording that there’d be a bunch of sepia-toned animated GIFs of our actors in a couple of days.
P.S. For support – the mood “blah” was pre-selected for me when I started writing this entry. Firefox 20.0.1, Windows 7 Professional.