Don't Cry for Me, Corky Sinclair...
Apologies to all those racing to check in every day for up-to-the-minute reports on the rehearsals for my triumphant homecoming. The lack of high-speed internet access has been a disincentive. Plus, the wild Big City highlife of Sault Ste. Marie has been keeping me out all hours, leaving little time for more productive pursuits like blogging in the wilderness. So, let's see if I can quickly recount a few impressions from my first week reliving the community theatre life in Northern Ontario:
Tuesday:
Arrived at the airport in Kinross, MI. Took the lovely scenic drive from there to the Soo, surveying the quaint snow covered wastes of the Upper Upper Peninsula. At the border, the customs official asked my "driver" where he lived. He said he lived on the Michigan side but was going to the theatre center. The customs guy didn't even get a look at my face much less ask who the fellow sitting in the passenger side might be or what his citizenship was (American? Canadian? Yemeni?) and whether he just might have designs to blow himself up under the Water Town, thereby flooding the Lone Star Grill and perhaps the Tim Horton's and Wendy's across the way. Thus, having crossed the border undetected, I am free to pursue my nefarious designs...
But instead of self-detonation, I went straight to rehearsal, not even stopping to say hi to Mom and Dad. Warmed up, and as I was doing so several kids in the show stopped as they passed in the hall and seem to freeze in the doorway, whispering my name in awe. "This is it," I'm thinking, "You are a SUPERSTAR." (Wrong ALW show, I know.) But for much of the rehearsal I was. My voice was in fine shape so I was kicking some EVITA ass. Miked to the gills. Pretending I was a rock star. A rock star who sings show tunes....
JT, who played Evita when we did it a gagiliion years back is doing it once again, and she's a sweetheart. She was feeling schmutzy - chest congestion or something - so I felt a little bad for showing off. But just a little. She and all the principal actors (TM, GW, the mistress girl who's name I can't remember) are handling the music with considerable aplomb. The chorus is another story. Yikes. Inaudible much of the time and inattentive most of the time. And they've been rehearsing since like the beginning of January. This in spite of the presence in the ensemble of two estimable veterans of the original Evita, BR and AS. These two ladies are rather put out at being placed amongst the unwashed masses, since they feel that their seniority and their well-honed stage talents should guarantee them a bigger slice of the Argentine pie. Alas, they are forced to content themselves with being mere descamisados.
Just getting started with the rehearsal took half on hour or more of crowd control. Not just seating assignments (it was the first night in the theatre for everyone) but trying to get people to shut up and get going. They were spread out along the length of the back of the stage, so it was sort of like that Whack-a-Mole game - as soon as you pacified one side the other was going again, and racing over to tame them would only guarantee that the now peaceful flank would once more erupt in violent, uncontrolled rancor. Somehow, eventually, we got underway.
At the end of rehearsal we went to grab a couple drinks at a classy watering hole by the name of Twist and Shout. Copious nachos and Molson Canadian, along with widescreen TVs showing race cars and half dressed women walking past upward angled cameras for no apparent reason. I was left to marvel at how hearteningly distinct Canadian culture is from that of the NASCAR behemoth to the South. In between bites of breaded, deep-fried, cheese-soaked everything I offered my three or four cents on the rehearsal that evening and what might help us moving forward. Always a tightrope to walk, actors offering their directorial advice - particularly given my position this time out. I think it was all taken well though.
I arrived home far too late to find my parents asleep in their clothes with the bedroom light on and the TV still going. Whoops. And didn't they pop right up and offer me a drink, at 1 AM. So we sat down and had a little liquid midnight snack. We then sent each other to bed and ended my first night back in the Soo.
Wednesday:
Awoken at 9 AM (too early...) by the reporter from the Sault Star, who was nothing if not punctual. Did an interview with him while half asleep for an article to appear in Friday's paper. Then I went back to bed until like 1:00. The rest of the day was relaxing and catching up, and then off to rehearsal in the evening. This one was just the principals, so that was a nice chance to actually work on the music instead of trying to do everything at once. Our director/music director, SB, is a riot as always and really creative. Of course she can't count, which becomes a problem at times. And she's wearing so many hats that when she's playing she often seems to lose her focus on just what it is she's playing, allowing her fingers to wander off into very lovely and interesting chords that nonetheless have more in common with Shostakovich than ALW. But, overall a good rehearsal. Both JT and I keep marvelling over certain passages in the music that seem strikingly unfamiliar to us, since we're certain that those were not the notes we sang last time around. Ah the good old days, when if you didn't know it you just made it up and nobody was the wiser and your friends and family still clapped real loud regardless.
Thursday:
Full cast. The stage has been rearranged to put the ensemble in closer proximity to the audience. You still can't hear them. Perhaps that's because half of them don't know the words. That's alright. They've only had the music for a month.
We did Act 2 onstage. I oversang. My rock star stuff is in Act 2, and I was finding that my voice was willing to go to places it isn't usually willing to go, so I let it. Bad, bad actor. Save it for the paying customers. I'm sure the lady in the house who was blithely videotaping the entire rehearsal appreciated it. That is until I called her out from the stage and threatened to impound her camera. Someone's mother making home videos I suppose. Sorry lady, but I don't want to be the video entertainment for your Aunt Consuela's 66th birthday party. She shut the camera off, but I could feel her contempt oozing towards me from Row Q for the rest of the rehearsal...
JT was still feeling concerned about her chest congestion, though she decided to dive right into "Rainbow High" full voice. I approached her afterwards and told her she could totally pull back and just do as much as she wanted to, or just mark it. (The idea that someone might mark something in order to save their cords is an anathema concept here in our community theatre world - a sign of a lack of commitment or love for the theatah rather than an astute move to conserve your energy for when it's needed most when faced with vocal difficulties.) Of course, after counseling JT to take it easy, I then proceeded to strut around the stage wailing like Steven Tyler. (Well, not really, but let me have my dream.) Needless to say, JT didn't want me having all the fun, and so the vocal battle was engaged. Phlegm or no phlegm.
Friday:
A day off. Thank god. After Thursday's vocal blowout I needed a day to recoup and recalibrate. Still in fine shape, but need to remind myself to pace myself. It may be the Soo, but it's more fun to go in feeling fresh than haggard, regardless of the venue. Plus, the intimations of post-nasal drip seem to have appeared in the vicinity of my soft palate. Damn you Evita. This is your revenge for my Steven Tyler antics - biological warfare. Hasn't Canada signed the Convention prohibiting that shit? Where are the blue helmets when you need them...
The feature article appeared in the paper this morning. A hatchet job. A couple good quotes, but I should have written and submitted the thing myself. Even though I was half-asleep, I know my sentence construction was more competent than what he had me saying once or twice. And the picture (which they were so picky about) came out blurry and small and not good. The colours distort into one another so that I sort of look like Dorian Gray's portrait in later life, after he's been very very bad. Ah well. Free publicity. And he did get the title quote right. Funny how I knew long before I gave the interview that that quote would be the one that he'd center the piece around. I suppose there's a lesson in that re: message construction and framing... At any rate, it'll look good hanging on the fridge.
In lieu of me returning to Argentina that evening, my parents, my sister and I went to dinner and had a lovely time, though it turned out to be pretty pricey (what is this, New York?), in large part because we drank too much wine. And when I say "we" I largely mean "I". Passing out sauced did little to help the trickle of schmutz that is fast becoming a raging torrent pouring over my soft palate and on to my tonsils. Of all the parts of my body to be professionally obsessive about, the back of my throat has to be one of the least glamorous options.
Saturday:
Gorgeous day. Went for a walk with TM along Pointe Louise and we reminisced about trees and poison ivy and icefloes and all the landmarks of an outdoor childhood that was thoroughly defined by this beach and these forests and this river. It really is a blissful place, in contrast to much of the semi-urban mediocrity and soot-coated smallness that often define parts of this resource-extraction based town, one that rises and falls on the fortunes of "The Plant" (as in steel).
After our walk we played a game of Scrabble with my Mom. I lost to both of them. I'm still not sure how that happened. I'm king of games. But Scrabble, and particularly chess (to my great chagrin) seem to be my Achilles heels. It's because they're strategy games. I have no trouble with the vocabulary of Scrabble - it's the thinking three steps ahead and figuring out how to open up future opportunities or prevent your opponent from getting them that confounds me. Same with pool. I played pool for the first time in forever a week ago (on a "date" no less) and I suck suck sucked. Lack of skill and practice. But I also kept inadvertently setting up brilliant shots for my opponent/date. You'd think such unintentional generosity might be appreciated. But, alas, in the manly man world of pool and chess and Scrabble, aggressively screwing someone over is inevitably sexier to them than allowing yourself to get screwed for their benefit. The implications of this are, I think, obvious.
Post-Scrabble was a cue-to-cue rehearsal with just JT and I and the band and the techies. I'm a little disappointed in the lights. It makes me appreciate what great lighting designers I routinely work with. These cues just seem clumsy and stark and unattractive to me - a big square of light, poorly focused, pops up over here and then another one over there and with no real coordination with musical phrases or buttons. Occasionally a follow spot. Mostly a general wash. It seems to me that, absent a set, the lights are what will give this thing its flair - or not. Another reminder that these folks are doing this in their spare time and haven't seen enough to know what's possible (as long as you have the instruments, which I think the place does). Nevertheless, what they've come up with should do the general trick. I just need to keep calibrating my expectations. We aren't taking the thing to Broad-WAY. We're running for three nights in the Soo, and given the circumstances I think a lot of it will be quite good.
I finished off the night by making the requisite appearance at Twist and Shout and then heading to a raucous gay dance party at the Algonquin Hotel. Ok, well, "raucous" may be a poor choice of words. "Depressing" is probably better. The place was seriously decked out for Valentine's Day. Obviously a lot of personal effort had gone into it. And apparently the turnout sucked relative to what they usually get. It was a pretty modest crowd. But, that said, I was actually heartened that such a thing was happening at all and that it was publicized and that a decent number of people did in fact show up. I don't remember anything like that when I was growing up in the Soo. So I'm glad it's there, even if most of the clientele didn't really inspire me to "get my freak on" (as the young folks say nowadays). I ran into a couple of folks from high school who I thought maybe were gay back then and now were obviously willing to say so. And I had a nice visit with a gay couple who I hadn't seen in years, JD and TJ, who've recently built a new house here and seem to be making a quite viable life as the best (and cutest) candidates in the Soo to exercise their newly acquired gay marriage rights, should they choose to do so. So, while my first ever visit to the Alginquin Hotel was more an exercise in cultural anthropology than it was in booty shaking, it proved to be a somewhat profitable venture. I stayed too late though. And one young fellow would have had me out all night if given his druthers. But I resolutely refused to give him said druthers. Instead, I retreated to Pointe Louise, druthers intact, and dozed off in preparation for another day of community theatre superstardom.
Tuesday:
Arrived at the airport in Kinross, MI. Took the lovely scenic drive from there to the Soo, surveying the quaint snow covered wastes of the Upper Upper Peninsula. At the border, the customs official asked my "driver" where he lived. He said he lived on the Michigan side but was going to the theatre center. The customs guy didn't even get a look at my face much less ask who the fellow sitting in the passenger side might be or what his citizenship was (American? Canadian? Yemeni?) and whether he just might have designs to blow himself up under the Water Town, thereby flooding the Lone Star Grill and perhaps the Tim Horton's and Wendy's across the way. Thus, having crossed the border undetected, I am free to pursue my nefarious designs...
But instead of self-detonation, I went straight to rehearsal, not even stopping to say hi to Mom and Dad. Warmed up, and as I was doing so several kids in the show stopped as they passed in the hall and seem to freeze in the doorway, whispering my name in awe. "This is it," I'm thinking, "You are a SUPERSTAR." (Wrong ALW show, I know.) But for much of the rehearsal I was. My voice was in fine shape so I was kicking some EVITA ass. Miked to the gills. Pretending I was a rock star. A rock star who sings show tunes....
JT, who played Evita when we did it a gagiliion years back is doing it once again, and she's a sweetheart. She was feeling schmutzy - chest congestion or something - so I felt a little bad for showing off. But just a little. She and all the principal actors (TM, GW, the mistress girl who's name I can't remember) are handling the music with considerable aplomb. The chorus is another story. Yikes. Inaudible much of the time and inattentive most of the time. And they've been rehearsing since like the beginning of January. This in spite of the presence in the ensemble of two estimable veterans of the original Evita, BR and AS. These two ladies are rather put out at being placed amongst the unwashed masses, since they feel that their seniority and their well-honed stage talents should guarantee them a bigger slice of the Argentine pie. Alas, they are forced to content themselves with being mere descamisados.
Just getting started with the rehearsal took half on hour or more of crowd control. Not just seating assignments (it was the first night in the theatre for everyone) but trying to get people to shut up and get going. They were spread out along the length of the back of the stage, so it was sort of like that Whack-a-Mole game - as soon as you pacified one side the other was going again, and racing over to tame them would only guarantee that the now peaceful flank would once more erupt in violent, uncontrolled rancor. Somehow, eventually, we got underway.
At the end of rehearsal we went to grab a couple drinks at a classy watering hole by the name of Twist and Shout. Copious nachos and Molson Canadian, along with widescreen TVs showing race cars and half dressed women walking past upward angled cameras for no apparent reason. I was left to marvel at how hearteningly distinct Canadian culture is from that of the NASCAR behemoth to the South. In between bites of breaded, deep-fried, cheese-soaked everything I offered my three or four cents on the rehearsal that evening and what might help us moving forward. Always a tightrope to walk, actors offering their directorial advice - particularly given my position this time out. I think it was all taken well though.
I arrived home far too late to find my parents asleep in their clothes with the bedroom light on and the TV still going. Whoops. And didn't they pop right up and offer me a drink, at 1 AM. So we sat down and had a little liquid midnight snack. We then sent each other to bed and ended my first night back in the Soo.
Wednesday:
Awoken at 9 AM (too early...) by the reporter from the Sault Star, who was nothing if not punctual. Did an interview with him while half asleep for an article to appear in Friday's paper. Then I went back to bed until like 1:00. The rest of the day was relaxing and catching up, and then off to rehearsal in the evening. This one was just the principals, so that was a nice chance to actually work on the music instead of trying to do everything at once. Our director/music director, SB, is a riot as always and really creative. Of course she can't count, which becomes a problem at times. And she's wearing so many hats that when she's playing she often seems to lose her focus on just what it is she's playing, allowing her fingers to wander off into very lovely and interesting chords that nonetheless have more in common with Shostakovich than ALW. But, overall a good rehearsal. Both JT and I keep marvelling over certain passages in the music that seem strikingly unfamiliar to us, since we're certain that those were not the notes we sang last time around. Ah the good old days, when if you didn't know it you just made it up and nobody was the wiser and your friends and family still clapped real loud regardless.
Thursday:
Full cast. The stage has been rearranged to put the ensemble in closer proximity to the audience. You still can't hear them. Perhaps that's because half of them don't know the words. That's alright. They've only had the music for a month.
We did Act 2 onstage. I oversang. My rock star stuff is in Act 2, and I was finding that my voice was willing to go to places it isn't usually willing to go, so I let it. Bad, bad actor. Save it for the paying customers. I'm sure the lady in the house who was blithely videotaping the entire rehearsal appreciated it. That is until I called her out from the stage and threatened to impound her camera. Someone's mother making home videos I suppose. Sorry lady, but I don't want to be the video entertainment for your Aunt Consuela's 66th birthday party. She shut the camera off, but I could feel her contempt oozing towards me from Row Q for the rest of the rehearsal...
JT was still feeling concerned about her chest congestion, though she decided to dive right into "Rainbow High" full voice. I approached her afterwards and told her she could totally pull back and just do as much as she wanted to, or just mark it. (The idea that someone might mark something in order to save their cords is an anathema concept here in our community theatre world - a sign of a lack of commitment or love for the theatah rather than an astute move to conserve your energy for when it's needed most when faced with vocal difficulties.) Of course, after counseling JT to take it easy, I then proceeded to strut around the stage wailing like Steven Tyler. (Well, not really, but let me have my dream.) Needless to say, JT didn't want me having all the fun, and so the vocal battle was engaged. Phlegm or no phlegm.
Friday:
A day off. Thank god. After Thursday's vocal blowout I needed a day to recoup and recalibrate. Still in fine shape, but need to remind myself to pace myself. It may be the Soo, but it's more fun to go in feeling fresh than haggard, regardless of the venue. Plus, the intimations of post-nasal drip seem to have appeared in the vicinity of my soft palate. Damn you Evita. This is your revenge for my Steven Tyler antics - biological warfare. Hasn't Canada signed the Convention prohibiting that shit? Where are the blue helmets when you need them...
The feature article appeared in the paper this morning. A hatchet job. A couple good quotes, but I should have written and submitted the thing myself. Even though I was half-asleep, I know my sentence construction was more competent than what he had me saying once or twice. And the picture (which they were so picky about) came out blurry and small and not good. The colours distort into one another so that I sort of look like Dorian Gray's portrait in later life, after he's been very very bad. Ah well. Free publicity. And he did get the title quote right. Funny how I knew long before I gave the interview that that quote would be the one that he'd center the piece around. I suppose there's a lesson in that re: message construction and framing... At any rate, it'll look good hanging on the fridge.
In lieu of me returning to Argentina that evening, my parents, my sister and I went to dinner and had a lovely time, though it turned out to be pretty pricey (what is this, New York?), in large part because we drank too much wine. And when I say "we" I largely mean "I". Passing out sauced did little to help the trickle of schmutz that is fast becoming a raging torrent pouring over my soft palate and on to my tonsils. Of all the parts of my body to be professionally obsessive about, the back of my throat has to be one of the least glamorous options.
Saturday:
Gorgeous day. Went for a walk with TM along Pointe Louise and we reminisced about trees and poison ivy and icefloes and all the landmarks of an outdoor childhood that was thoroughly defined by this beach and these forests and this river. It really is a blissful place, in contrast to much of the semi-urban mediocrity and soot-coated smallness that often define parts of this resource-extraction based town, one that rises and falls on the fortunes of "The Plant" (as in steel).
After our walk we played a game of Scrabble with my Mom. I lost to both of them. I'm still not sure how that happened. I'm king of games. But Scrabble, and particularly chess (to my great chagrin) seem to be my Achilles heels. It's because they're strategy games. I have no trouble with the vocabulary of Scrabble - it's the thinking three steps ahead and figuring out how to open up future opportunities or prevent your opponent from getting them that confounds me. Same with pool. I played pool for the first time in forever a week ago (on a "date" no less) and I suck suck sucked. Lack of skill and practice. But I also kept inadvertently setting up brilliant shots for my opponent/date. You'd think such unintentional generosity might be appreciated. But, alas, in the manly man world of pool and chess and Scrabble, aggressively screwing someone over is inevitably sexier to them than allowing yourself to get screwed for their benefit. The implications of this are, I think, obvious.
Post-Scrabble was a cue-to-cue rehearsal with just JT and I and the band and the techies. I'm a little disappointed in the lights. It makes me appreciate what great lighting designers I routinely work with. These cues just seem clumsy and stark and unattractive to me - a big square of light, poorly focused, pops up over here and then another one over there and with no real coordination with musical phrases or buttons. Occasionally a follow spot. Mostly a general wash. It seems to me that, absent a set, the lights are what will give this thing its flair - or not. Another reminder that these folks are doing this in their spare time and haven't seen enough to know what's possible (as long as you have the instruments, which I think the place does). Nevertheless, what they've come up with should do the general trick. I just need to keep calibrating my expectations. We aren't taking the thing to Broad-WAY. We're running for three nights in the Soo, and given the circumstances I think a lot of it will be quite good.
I finished off the night by making the requisite appearance at Twist and Shout and then heading to a raucous gay dance party at the Algonquin Hotel. Ok, well, "raucous" may be a poor choice of words. "Depressing" is probably better. The place was seriously decked out for Valentine's Day. Obviously a lot of personal effort had gone into it. And apparently the turnout sucked relative to what they usually get. It was a pretty modest crowd. But, that said, I was actually heartened that such a thing was happening at all and that it was publicized and that a decent number of people did in fact show up. I don't remember anything like that when I was growing up in the Soo. So I'm glad it's there, even if most of the clientele didn't really inspire me to "get my freak on" (as the young folks say nowadays). I ran into a couple of folks from high school who I thought maybe were gay back then and now were obviously willing to say so. And I had a nice visit with a gay couple who I hadn't seen in years, JD and TJ, who've recently built a new house here and seem to be making a quite viable life as the best (and cutest) candidates in the Soo to exercise their newly acquired gay marriage rights, should they choose to do so. So, while my first ever visit to the Alginquin Hotel was more an exercise in cultural anthropology than it was in booty shaking, it proved to be a somewhat profitable venture. I stayed too late though. And one young fellow would have had me out all night if given his druthers. But I resolutely refused to give him said druthers. Instead, I retreated to Pointe Louise, druthers intact, and dozed off in preparation for another day of community theatre superstardom.
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