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November 8, 2021:

GETTING FRUSTRATION OUT OF THE WAY

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, we didn’t have “THAT” rehearsal yesterday, we had the everyone is frustrated rehearsal yesterday, so it was good to get that the HELL out of the way. This mostly stems from the fact that there are six or seven songs in the show – parody lyrics to public domain tunes, but not always scanning and metered correctly, so that’s always gonna be a problem. The author was with us – really nice guy and very funny – so he’d sing it the way he heard it, but the pianist struggled to make musical sense out of it, and I finally said that for this reading we had to stick to the actual tune as much as possible, or we’d be in crazy land. For a production you would, of course, have several days of music-only rehearsals, the pianist would have proper music and we’d have the luxury of time. When you have to put together a two-hour reading in three three-hours sessions, one of which was only two-and-a-half hours and the staging isn’t quite as simple as Doug Haverty’s play is, and there’s little time to finesse things, all you can do is get it on its feet as best you can and hope it will all be clear to the audience. The cast is excellent and amazingly the little bits of easy musical staging I’ve done they get perfectly, so that’s fun. We’ve got the pacing down much better – it seemed endless when we began, but act one is running under an hour now, and act two comes in about forty-five minutes. It’s a very wordy play and so the actors constantly have to be more careful than usual about tripping over words and lines – some real tongue-twisters here, plus one of our leading men is foreign and struggling with some pronunciation things – but he did much better at this rehearsal and I know he’ll be working on it on his own today before we meet. There were a few times at the rehearsal where I just had to come on strong to make sure we kept moving forward, especially with the music stuff. When musicals are not in people’s blood you have to make starting really easy for them – getting into the song’s first line. So, I fixed all the openings so that it would not be hard for them to hear. I’m sure the author is frustrated in certain ways because there are a lot of staging things we simply can’t do in this reading. I do have the narrator speaking a few of them and having fun with that, but yesterday the author told me about one bit that has the narrator leaving through a window, crossing behind the stage, and re-entering through a door on the opposite side. He asked if we could have the narrator say it, and I said fine and then added “Of course, we can’t do that tonight because this is a staged reading.” When you do that, it becomes fun for the audience.

Otherwise, I am sitting here like so much fish, listening to Joe Hisaishi’s magical score to a movie called Little Tom Thumb. I really love this guy’s music, although it’s all of a similar piece in terms of how he writes for anime films. Prior to that, I watched a few things on the Tube of You, including about half the ballet film Black Tights, directed by Terence Young (he of the early James Bond films), with ballets by Roland Petit, featuring him, his wife Zizi Jeanmaire, Cyd Charisse, and Moira Shearer. The copy on You Tube is in some weird ratio that cuts off the sides of the image. The film seems to be a lost film – shot in Technirama, a process similar to VistaVision but scope. There seem to be no decent video copies and who knows where the negative is. The movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1960 under the title of Une, Deux, Trois, Quatre – after the four ballets in the film – that presentation may have well been in 70mm. The film didn’t come out here until 1962, I believe, retitled Black Tights and with added introductions and sometimes invasive narration during the ballets by Maurice Chevalier. RCA released a soundtrack, but with much of the individual ballet music truncated beyond belief. The first ballet, The Diamond Cruncher, has music by my favorite, Jean-Michel Damase and delightful music it is. It’s a twenty-something-minute ballet – the album gives us five minutes and that includes the awful Chevalier talking. It would be really fun if we got a restored version from the Technirama negative of the French version with no Chevalier – that would be something I’d love to see, and one could conceivably grab all the nice music from the film right from the stereo tracks.

Yesterday, we had our frustrated rehearsal and got that out of the way. I did get nine hours of sleep and felt pretty good. After the rehearsal, I came right home and made two egg sandwiches on two bagels. They were okay, and I had a third bagel with cream cheese. That was about it for food. Then I watched stuff, listened to stuff, and relaxed.

Today, I’ll be up by noon at the latest, I’ll have a telephonic conversation, I’ll relax, and then I’ll shave and shower and get ready for our staged reading. I’ll stop at the mail place (haven’t been since last Wednesday) and see what’s there, and then I’ll mosey on over to the theater. We’re convening at five o’clock and we’ll run as much of it as we can, leaving enough time at the end to run several of the songs, including the two that end the show – we did run those several times as we did the end of the play, but we never got to them to make sure the ins were smooth and easy for the actors. Then we do the reading at seven-thirty and I’m pretty sure there’ll be some food intake afterwards. I will, of course, have a full report.

The rest of the week is meetings and meals, announcing two new titles, choosing the rest of the songs for the Kritzerland holiday show, and doing whatever else needs doing – oh, and praying for some little miracles along the way.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up by noon at the latest, have a telephonic conversation, relax, shave and shower, hopefully pick up some packages, convene at the theater, run stuff, do a reading, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite dance films, including musicals of film, ballet films, and that sort of thing? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, hoping we got the frustrating out of the way and that we all have a lot of fun with the second staged reading.

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