Getting closer now! My new play, GOING GOING GONE! opens for previews ONE WEEK FROM TONIGHT. Tickets are discounted.
Here's where you go for discount tickets. It’s a very funny play set in a baseball pressbox. And I've got a great cast.
I’ve been taking you through the
rehearsal process each week (my version of HBO’s HARD KNOCKS except without the violence). And today is another chapter.
Last Saturday we had a “Designers’ Runthrough.” All of the technical people involved in the production watch a full runthrough of the play. This includes our set designer, costumer, lighting director, sound director, prop master, stage manager, producers, etc.
I personally find Designer Runthroughs hard to sit through, especially with a comedy, because rarely does anyone laugh. They’re all viewing the play in relationship to their own department’s involvement with it.
Following the runthrough, our director, Andy Barnicle presided over a production meeting. Questions and concerns were discussed along with timetables and when dinner breaks would be.
This week, for the first time, the actors are rehearsing in our actual theatre. It seems it makes a difference performing on your actual stage and not a chalked out outline. Who knew?
The thesps pretty much got the play memorized and I’ve stopped torturing them with new pages after every rehearsal. This is the week when it’s all starting to really come together. Actors no longer are holding scripts, and they’ve really started to make the piece their own. And the sense I get is that they’re having more fun.
This weekend the tech rehearsals begin. Less fun will be had. More on that next week.
Again, come
join us for previews and opening weekend. I’ll be there pacing.
Note: The photos of our cast (Annie Abrams, David Babich, Troy Metcalf, and Dennis Pearson) were taken by Ed Krieger.
6 comments :
Can you tell us about the audition process? How did you find the actors and how did you select them? What were you looking for? I sort of have a limited sense of how it happens for tv and movies but not for theater.
Thanks!
Mark
Why don't you direct your own play? It's not like you have no experience.
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Laughed at everyone's reactions in the kiss shot. Great way to kickstart the morning. Thanks.
Break a leg with tech rehearsals. As a former sound designer and A1, I'm looking forward to reading about how things go.
Are there understudies? I'm guessing not. What happens if one of the actors gets ill?
It's too late for today, of course, but here's a Friday question for next week or whenever you can fit it in.
When is a "spinoff" not a "spinoff?"
When "Cheers" ended and Dr. Frasier Crane started the 1993-94 season with his own, enormously popular "Frasier" series, that certainly was a spinoff.
But is it a "spinoff" when a series introduces one character as a guest shot and then. lo and behold, next year, that character has his/her own series? I'm going all the way back to "All In The Family"/"Maude" for this one -- Bea Arthur was on AITF twice, first visiting the Bunkers, then in the second spot at her own home in Tuckahoe with husband Walter (Bill Macy) and daughter Carol (played there by Marcia Rodd).
My point is that seemed more like a pilot for the series than a spinoff like, say "The Jeffersons" from "All In The Family" or "Good Times" from "Maude" in which the characters were either regulars or semi-regulars.
I've read that "Maude" was considered a "spinoff" but disagree. Still, I may be splitting hairs with a meat cleaver, but I'd like to read your thoughts on that, Mr. Levine.
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