Well, dear readers, it is late and I must write these here notes in a hurry so I can hopefully get another good night’s sleep. I will tell you right now that yesterday was yet another day, despite nine and a half hours of blessed sleep, wherein I had a headache all day and night long. I’m thinking the Tylenol I have here is either not effective or has lost its potency. I was given some Excedrin PM, which I just took and it’s already helping just fifteen minutes after I took it, and also for today some Extra Strength Excedrin. If all those work, I’ll go buy some.
I had the kind of day I needed. I never left the home environment until it was time to go to dinner. I relaxed, did a bit of work on the LA show, heard Lanny’s orchestration of Born Too Late, which is really fun and funny, watched about twenty minutes of something called Bad Asses with Danny Glover – really bad and it looks like it may be the first or second sequel – who knows, who cares? Then it was time to mosey on over to Doug Haverty’s and he drove us to the Dale of Glen, where we met up with Adryan Russ and ate some Japanese food in a Japanese restaurant, which is always the best place to eat Japanese food. I don’t really do sushi, so I had my usual combo of teriyaki chicken and tempura and it was really good and very light. Then we walked for quite a bit because Doug had been told it was a seven o’clock curtain when it was really an eight o’clock curtain. Then we saw My Fair Lady.
This was at the Glendale Center Theater, which has been around forever. They do very good shows there, but it is community theater. It’s a five hundred-seat theater-in-the-round. Our pal, Amy Gillette, was playing Eliza and she did a fine job. They used tracks, and that’s always not to my liking – the poor actors are stuck a) trying to hear them over their singing, and b) trying to stay with the pace of the tracks, and having no room to actually feel music. The direction was standard community theater – these types of places don’t ever really seem to want to bring in better directors. But let’s talk about My Fair Lady itself. It’s a long show – in this production the first act ran almost an hour and forty minutes. It’s a real book musical, meaning that unlike today’s shows, there’s a real actual book with real scenes that go on for many pages and long stretches of time. And it’s a great book – beautifully written (Shaw and Lerner), and because it has a real book, the characters have room to breathe and live, unlike book musicals today, where you’re lucky if you get a two-minute scene in between the twenty-three songs. The score is a marvel, it just is. If this had been written today, the exact same show, it would have fifteen readings, then labs, then workshops, twelve regional productions, but that’s only IF someone actually liked it enough to want to do it. The “producers” today would want more songs, want it to adhere to all the “rules” of musical theater writing, and by the time it would be done, you probably wouldn’t even recognize it as My Fair Lady. But you just sit there, no matter what the production is like, and you marvel at the writing, the structure, the craft of the score, which are all, by the way, timeless. But some jerk producer today will revive it – they’ll workshop it, of course, because they’ll be making it more “relevant” for today’s audiences – they’ll be cutting some of that pesky book and maybe even Harvey Fierstein can do a little rewrite. Perhaps they’ll add They Call the Wind Maria to the show. They’ll make it politically correct, too – you know, maybe switch up the ending so that Eliza says to Higgins “You fetch MY slippers.” We all know that’s going to happen, too.
After, we said hi to Amy, then I came right home and took the Excedrin PM.
Today, I shall hopefully arise after a good night’s beauty sleep. I think this will be an all salad day – one in the early afternoon, and one in the evening. I’ll do a little work on the LA show, and perhaps finesse the commentary, but that’s about it.
Tomorrow begins our busy Kritzerland week. We have rehearsals on Tuesday and Thursday. I’ll also continue working on the LA show, plan the May Kritzerland, which I have to have fully cast and songs chosen by April 1, so that I don’t have to think about it as I go into rehearsals for the LA show. As you might have surmised from yesterday’s topic, it’s a tribute to the great singer/songwriters of the 1970s. I’ve already chosen most of the songs, including a few that were on your lists. I also have some meetings and meals, and then our stumble-through is on Saturday and our sound check and show is on Sunday.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, have a ME day – do a little work on the LA show, finesse, and eat two salads. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have seen such a perfect musical as My Fair Lady.