Haines Logo Text
Column Archive
April 24, 2016:

THE HIP-HOP REHEARSAL

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, our long Saturday rehearsal began with some incredible energy. Cheryl was there along with a hip-hop dance guy, and they began the day with the LA melting pot song Grant Geissman and I wrote. Well, the kids loved learning the dance for it – it’s basically a two verse instrumental in the middle of the song, and the hip-hop guy and Cheryl came up with a great routine. Even the couple of people who aren’t really adept at movement were out there learning it and having a great time. They spent about ninety minutes on it, then moved on to a little amusing rap number with one guy and two back-up gals, written by Wayne Moore. I told Wayne I wanted a rap number wherein we could use all the crazy LA names like Diamond Bar and Tujunga and Azusa and Pacoima. He came up with a really hilarious little number and the staging Cheryl and the hip-hop guy did was simple and terrific. After two hours and fifteen minutes we lost our shared actors, who went off to do their matinee. A couple of people were still late to rehearsal, but not by much, but I think our stage manager is going to now give earlier call times so that we’re actually ready to go at the proper time. But one of our shared cast, who was two hours late the day before never showed up yesterday, so that’s bad – no communication, no nothing, but she obviously showed up for her matinee. I’ll have the result of that bit of business tomorrow. Once we lost our shared actors, we finished assembling the rest of the act – all we had left were Bruce Vilanch’s sketch and the final song. I then staged the finale, which was simple as it’s the same exact staging as the final verse of the opening number.

Cheryl staged Born Too Late, which is basically the same staging she did when it was done in What If. It’s really fun. Robert ran his songs – he’s got three of the best – my song, C.C. Brown’s, Richard Sherman’s new song, and the unknown Sherman Brothers song. It was a very good and energetic rehearsal and we ended by doing a bit more work on the very physical end of act one.

Prior to rehearsal I’d had a rough night of not begin able to fall asleep – I probably only got four or five hours of sleep. After rehearsal, Lanny and I went to a restaurant called Home – I’ve been there several times and always forget it’s there, just five minutes from LACC. I had their great Ruben sandwich – turkey, ham, cole slaw, 1000-Island dressing and melted cheese on grilled rye. Fantastic. I had some sweet potato fries with it. Lanny had some ahi tuna salad thing that he liked very much. Then I came home. I answered a lot of e-mails, began writing the commentary, and then had a work session with John Boswell – I think the material for the May show is going to work really well. After that, I had no energy whatsoever to watch anything, so I just did stuff on the computer, but the computer, namely Finder, was behaving really stupidly. I wanted to move the sheet music files back into the master Kritzerland music folder and every time I tried, the whole desktop would freeze and you couldn’t do anything at all – couldn’t move stuff, nothing worked. I could still do everything else – be online, get mail, etc. So, I restarted the computer and it did this really stupid thing it’s never done – it took all the files on my desktop, which I have in very specific places and it moved ALL of them to the extreme right of the desktop. I mean, retarded. So, I moved stuff back where it belonged and tried to move stuff to the main folder and again it froze. I’d had it by this point, so onto Google I went to see if this was a known problem and it is and has to do with the operating system Yosemite. You’d think they would have fixed this crap by now. So, the site I was on had a fix and I tried it (deleting a file in a Finder folder and then restarting the computer) – when it booted back up all the files were where they should be, and I was able to move stuff to the folder easily, so it worked fine. But my hard drive symbol at the top right of the desktop was gone – I went into Finder preferences and found the little box to check and back it came – I’d already been warned that deleting that file would delete whatever preferences had been set.

Today, I shall hopefully arise after a good night’s beauty sleep. I may try to do a jog, and then at some point I’ll eat something fun. I also have to go to the mail place – I haven’t been in five full days and hopefully there’ll be something nice there. I’ll continue and hopefully finish writing the commentary, and then I hope to get at least a little relaxing in.

Tomorrow we have our first Kritzerland rehearsal for three hours starting at eleven-thirty. As soon as we’re done I have to get right on the freeway and get over to LACC for our LA show rehearsal. No time to really eat, so I may have to get some kind of snack or something to tide me over until eight o’clock. The rest of the week is LA show rehearsals, the second Kritzerland rehearsal, a designer run on Friday, a short LA rehearsal on Saturday and then our stumble-through, and then on Sunday, sound check and then show.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, maybe do a jog, eat, hopefully pick up some packages and mail, hopefully finish the commentary, and then relax. 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 the big hip-hop number is out of the way and so much fun.

Search BK's Notes Archive:
 
© 2001 - 2024 by Bruce Kimmel. All Rights Reserved