Well, dear readers, it is late and so I must write these notes in a hurry. First of all, this month is flying by, like a gazelle in yoga pants. I myself have never been in yoga pants. Wouldn’t that be a horror show of epic proportions, especially given my current epic proportions. And speaking of epic proportions, I had a lovelier than lovely meal with Marshall Harvey last evening at a Mexican jernt that’s only a mile from the Group Rep, where we would be attending a play, The jernt is called Mucho Mas and while not quite up to Don Cuco, it was really quite excellent. After that, we saw the play, entitled You Can’t Take It with You by Kaufman and Hart. It’s a classic comedy and one of the best – it holds up wonderfully. In 1965, the APA rep company did the play at the Huntington Hartford and then Broadway. I saw it and it was a brilliant production directed by Ellis Rabb, starring Donald Moffat (with whom I would later work), Rosemary Harris, Keene Curtis, and others. I did the play at LACC and wrote about it extensively and fictionally in Kritzer World. I played Donald, boyfriend of the cook Rheba. In the original, they’re Black, but in our production at LACC, a lavish affair, both of us were white. We just had to cut one small exchange to make it work. There were a multitude of reasons to go in that direction back then, which you can probably imagine. I could remember almost nothing about what I did until the actor playing that role said his first line – then it all came back to me instantly – blocking, how I spoke the dialogue and the big laughs I got doing so. I had just had my motorcycle accident and had to do the play with my broken arm in the cast and I vividly remember coming up with a couple of comic bits with the cast the night before we opened that worked really well. The jokes are still as funny as always, the characters quirky and funny, and it’s a huge cast to have to move around constantly. They did what most do today and which I’ve refused to do with any three-act play I direct – reconfigure it for two acts. These plays were built carefully, structurally and specifically to be done in three acts. Combining part of an act into another act hurts the construction of the piece and throws it out of balance, at least in my opinion. I’ve always loved three act plays and I even wrote one in the 1980s that did very well. When I got home, I’d saved a televised production from 1984 or thereabouts on PBS when the show was revived on Broadway. It starred Jason Robards, Jr. as Grandpa, Elizabeth Wilson as Penny, Maureen Anderman as Alice, and Jack Dodson as Wilson’s husband, and it was once again directed by Ellis Rabb. The production ran two years on Broadway.
So, I began watching it but was disheartened to see the directed for television credit – as soon as the name came up, I knew exactly what we were in for and boy did we get it. The director for TV? The horrid, unbearably awful fool known as Kirk Browning, who has singlehandedly ruined a humungous number of filmed operas, ballets, and plays. The play begins and what do we get – extreme close-ups that’s what we get. At no point EVER do we get any geography or a wide shot of the full set. It is so amateurish to do what he does and yet that’s his thing. Maybe he thought he’d bet a movie out of it, but he wasn’t shooting a movie, he was shooting a Broadway production and when you’re doing so we need an opening curtain rise and a full shot of the stage so – wait for it – we know where we are and what we’re looking at and who is where. I watched twenty minutes of it then fast forwarded to the end of act one – not ONE single wide shot. You miss the entrance of Mr. Robards – he’s suddenly just in the room. I think I’ll watch the Oscar-winning film version, but there are a couple of other TV versions directed by better folks, and I’ll see if I can find those. But the play is still a marvel of construction and dialogue and characters.
Prior to that, I got eight-and-a-half-hours of sleep, got up, answered e-mails, then went to the mail place and picked up three important envelopes and a couple of small packages, then went to Macy’s and did a return, an even return for a new shirt I bought, so that was nice. Then I came home, did a bit of work on the redo of Benjamin Kritzer, relaxed for a bit, then it was time to eat and see the play. And here we are.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, but mostly it’ll be a ME day with the exception of preparing everything to send to the designer on Monday morning. I’ll eat something at some point and then later I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow, I’ll send in all the stuff they’ll need for the redo of Benjamin Kritzer, then I’ll continue casting and choosing songs for the June Kritzerland. The rest of the week will be more of that – I have to have the cast finalized so we can get tickets on sale ASAP.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, do whatever needs doing, have a ME day, finalize all the design adjustments for Benjamin Kritzer, eat, and then watch, listen, and 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, where I shall definitely dream of being in yoga pants.