Long Overdue for a... Blog Post!

Hello my poor neglected blog, how do I blog you? Let me count the ways. Actually I guess I probably blog about once a week. 

So let this be my weekly blogging. Seen a lot of theatre! What have I seen, let's see, 28 Seeds, Much Ado About Nothing with a Twist, Trog and Clay oh and Troilus and Cressida. All of which I enjoyed for different reasons, and which I could find things to criticize. Actually I think this is an interesting excercise, I'm going to compliment sandwich them one by one, meaning a positive note, a critique and a positive note. 

28 Seeds, I liked the music. Great songs and great instrumentalists who played with panache and style. Ok critique. I know the company spent some time workshopping the script, but I felt like it needed more. I felt the narrative was kind of disjointed and episodic, which was OK but I wanted a stronger narrative thrust to establish the characters, their individual conflicts and why we should care about them. As it was, they felt more like ideas and dare I say it cariactures although that feels harsh. Which isn't to say the actors didn't do some nice work. When I was in college Will Lebow had us watch a play and write two pages about a performance and if that actor had the three fundamentals be taught, intention, relationship amd high stakes. And they had that! So bravo. 

Next up was Fresh Ink. I thought this show was solid, with some really nice character work and especially strong use of lighting (all the light bulbs hanging from the ceiling were pretty cool, and I liked the sort of sepia quality they gave off like it was a live action black and white photograph). I did feel like the script was inconsistent, there was a stronger arc then in 28 Seeds and although the people in the play were quirky, they felt more or less like people and not just quirky character tropes. That said, the tone was very all over the place, and when it landed at the climax it felt like "OK this is the climax" but I didn't feel like the script earned the catharsis that the playwright was after or really landed the ending. Despite those flaws and inconsistencies, their were fun characters and funny lines, which the cast pulled off nicely.

I sort of feel like I just made the same review sandwich twice in a row, amIright? Liked this design aspect, thought the script was flawed, liked the acting. Well, to be honest, Troilus and Cressida is much harder to nail down to a culinary metaphor. I liked the idea of the production, and Troilus and Cressida is probably worth considering as the Bard's satire of war and the politics involved, and also it has some great pieces of text. But as a play, I don't think it was ever really finished, similar to Timon of Athens. According to some quote somewhere in it's Wikipedia entry, the version we received may have been edited or updated at some point to the fairly dark piece we have today from a previously lighter treatment of the Iliad, but who really knows. Ultimately, all of these pieces and plot lines get thrown up and Shakespeare starts to juggle them, then the action accelerates like something is about to happen, in this case Achilles kills Hector and then the play ends. Troilus ran close to three hours, which is just way too long, and in my opinion it had too many characters. I think for the production to work, it needed more of what ASP pulled out when it did Timon of Athens a couple of years ago, a whole lot of textual and structural rejiggering. In the case of Timon, they only kept a few of the characters and then the rest were portrayed by an ambiguous ensemble in painter's outfits (which I frankly never really got why that was, but whatever) and much of the story's thematic push came from sound design motifs and a really bad ass set. For this production, they had the Modern which they used in the round. Kinda cool, but I don't really know what it added. The set was some grey blocks that got moved around. There really wasn't much in the way of sound or lighting design. It had some nice performances, I liked Ross Macdonald as Hector, but many of the performances didn't feel lived in, more like some character traits and choices imposed over text. I think the solution was to dump as many of them as possible, pick one or two storylines and really tell those stories and make them work, as the play itself is just an overstuffed mess.

Then again, I'm talking like I have the recipe to make Shakespeare work, and I certainly don't, I'm a guy with a blog. And that's a tricky thing, because in Shakespeare's plays almost everything exists in relation to something else, so knowing what to cut and how to cut it without detracting from the whole is extremely difficult! I don't know how to make that play work, or how to make anything work, so I applaud Actors Shakespeare Project for bringing the show to the stage and I'm glad I got to see it, even if just to say that I have.

Oh, and the other show I saw recently was Bad Habit's production of Much Ado About Nothing. That was show was pretty much theatrical chocolate, it was just great. And I don't know what else to say about it! And also it was like two weeks ago that I saw it. Thinking back though, really strongly delineated characters, really crisp pacing and plotting, fun music, fun cast, really fun show.

What have I been up to? Well, I've been rehearsing Three Sisters and had the pleasure this weekend of delving into my big act four showcase scene, you know the one I'm talking about, with the declarations and the coffee. Man, what a fantastic scene. You know how sometimes theatre feels like a giant pain in the ass, all the commuting and memorizing and waiting around  but then you get to that moment where it's like "oh right fuck yeah this is awesome" and I had that working on this scene. So that felt good.

Oh and last week was the staged reading of The Last Jews by Larry Jay Tish with myself, my friend Chuck Schwager who brought me on board, the talented Amber Williams who I met that night and oh yeah BOBBIE STEINBACH who is of course awesome and it was kind of a dream come true being on stage with. I'm happy to say that it went really well, our audience of 30 or 40 people laughed a lot, had some great feedback and seemed to enjoy themselves throughly. For my part, I didn't blow it. So good on me!

Most immediately on the horizon... Crooked Arrows comes out this Friday. I'm excited and nervous to see myself, and also wondering how much of me you'll be seeing in the final cut. Whatever else happens with it, it will be a great cap to what was a fantastic experience. My fantasy of course is that it comes out and immediately Hollywood starts calling, but more likely it will give me some small piece of ammunition should I head that way, which I am actively considering. We shall see! 

Up and running!

Swimming in the Shallows is up and running, woo hoo! Last night was an invited dress rehearsal, attended by I suppose twenty or so members of the Salem Theatre Company community, various actors, technicians, board members and other folks with an existing relationship to the theatre. One of them, Jonathan Simcosky, wrote this awesome review in North Shore Art Throb! Thanks Jonathan! Last night was pretty intense, we were all hyped on that adrenaline you get performing in front of people for the first time and man were they receptive. Which on some level was to be expected. They had been invited (and thank you all for coming) to see an invited dress, so they were getting an exclusive first look at the piece and I'm sure they all had motivations for wanting to see it go well and do well in the future, so they were supportive as well as receptive and they all laughed their asses off. Which was great! Part of the DNA of this play is just a tiny bit screw ball. Every like, fourth line can be interpreted as a joke. It's not particularly realistic, but still grounded in it's heightened logic. The point being, they had a huge amount of energy and they showed in their laughter, and it was a decent sized crowd for the space.

Tonight's public preview audience however, as these things often go, was much, much quieter. And something like ten people smaller. And generally on the older side. So, you know that means (of you do if your a performer) less responsiveness, less energy, more pensiveness, more chuckles, some out and out laughs but less unrelenting torrents of sheer LAUGHTER. And that was an adjustment. Generally speaking, the second performance is usually more of a challenge than the first, especially with comedy. Because with comedy, laughter and the energy of the audience are big factors in the room. Your laughs, audience members, drive the performance. So when you come out of tech and into a room full of people you respond very immediately to that energy and when you get a lot of it (or not a lot, depending) then you scale your expectation of how much "force" to anticipate coming from the audience. BUT no two audiences are the same, and neither are any two performances and that's part of what makes theatre so fantastic. Personally, I think sometimes I maybe even do better when there is a lower energy crowd than when there is a big, young, possibly drunk on excitement and/or alcohol kind of audience that laughs heartily and readily. Not that I mind those audiences. But tonight, man? I was working that shit. I was doing whatever I could to make those fuckers LAUGH pardon my french. I think part of my DNA as a performer is that of a comedian, not necessarily a stand up because in the case of stand up when they aren't laughing then it's really painful and I feel that, but you know what I mean. I like making people laugh. And I'm good at it. I discovered that kind of early on, and I think it was part of my impetus to becoming an actor.

So anyway, in terms of audiences, we've already hit both extremes so from here on it I think we'll be ready for whatever comes our way. Man, did I mention how good I feel about this show? Did you read that review? Damn, it's some good shit.

One Audition Down!

Well, today was audition number one: Wheelock Family Theatre! How did it go? WHO FUCKING KNOWS! No, but seriously, pretty good I thought. Here's a play by play; the last few auditions I've gone on, I've been a few minutes late. In the past, it hasn't seemed like that big of a deal, time slots felt like they were pretty loose at the auditions I was going on locally. But at these two, and at one in particular where I got what came close to being a hard time when I was there right smack on my time slot but wanted a minute to look over a side and the producer or auditor or whoever was like "well you know your time slot is for 3:30 and I can give you a minute but you'll have less time in the room" so I was like "OK let's just do it, that's fine". For me, personally, as long as I roughly know what the play is about I don't find that having an extended period of time with a piece affects my cold reading skills since... it's a cold reading. Your basically making it up as you go along and trying to follow your instincts and a few additional moments with the words, for me anyway, doesn't have much bearing on my ability to do that. Anyway, since none of the postings or correspondence I'd gotten said any different, I kind of figured I would be reading a side for this audition, and hadn't thought about a monologue. I had skimmed the play, the parts pertaining to my potential character particularly, and sort of knew what his deal was. Did I mention the play is the Miracle Worker, and the character the older half brother of Helen? Anyway, I was determined to be early for this one, my appointment was for 4:50 and I got to the green line platform at Park St around 4, a D train came a few minutes later and I was on my way to the Longwood T stop, a few minutes from the theatre. Except then the train went out of service at Fenway, a stop away from Longwood, I consulted my Iphone and decided the quickest thing was just to walk from there since it's basically the same distance and I would avoid getting a new train and going just one stop on it. Thank god for my Iphone, by the way, because I have a terrible sense of direction. I'm pretty good at following directions, and I've used Google Maps a hundred times to find a hundred different auditions, potential apartments, restaurants, stores, etc. Taking a different T-stop, I got a little turned around in the Fends, but found my way to the theatre at about 4:35, 4:40 and was brought in early. You see, they had slotted ten minutes per person, but they wanted a monologue. I assume it was a monologue, and not two, since they had never specified when I got up on stage I heard a "whenever your ready" from the director and said "Oh? You want a monologue? OK this is from The Glass Menagerie" and launched into Tom's speech to his mother. Mind you I was completely unprepared, still a little sniffly, my throat a little parched and my hands still thawing from the cold, but I've done that piece so many times I can basically pull it out of thin air and that's what I did. I gave it a solid beat of silence at the end, then turned to the auditors who seemed to be nodding and saying "yeah, pretty good" (subtext: for someone who didn't know they would be doing a monologue) and they said their "thank you, we'll let you know either way, might be a call back later" schpeel. And that was that!

In other news, reviews have started coming in for Uncle Vanya. If you read blog posts I don't link to from Facebook, then you might have seen one I wrote about secretly wishing in the back of my ego to have a reviewer comment on the effect of my guitar playing in our show. Well, right after I wrote that, I encountered Larry Stark's review on his Boston theatre website Theatre Mirror and this is from the beginning of the review: "Take for instance Mike Handleman playing a house-servant, with no lines to speak of. He turns up in several scenes, fetching things, but mostly learning to play a guitar. But when the farm's overseer comes in, the guilty snap with which he jumps up and bows, doffing his cap, defines not only him but an entire society." Hey! A positive notice! In a review! Of a play where I had next to no lines! This is a legitimate first for me. And it made me feel pretty proud. It doesn't reference the guitar playing as doing anything in particular, but it's cool that a little moment I came up with made that kind of an impression.

Larry's review as a whole was especially glowing, and so far all the press has been positive. The Globe review did not mention me by name which is fine, and felt to me... I don't know, kind of contrarian, the reviewer took issue with the translation (which I think is pretty good) and a few performances (which I also think are good) but hey, critics are critics. So far all the shows are selling out and audiences are enjoying themselves, and that's what matters.