Wow...we're back from a wonderful day of fun in NY!
This morning, I did a little early holiday shopping at several museum stores while DH shopped at Gotham Audio and another sound place a few blocks from The Acorn. The place was unbelievably smokey and stuffy...I immediately felt my head imploding!
Greg bought a very fancy boom pole and he is now testing it out, listening to me as I read him some of Friday's notes.
Then we rushed to the Acorn and settled in for the 4:30 BRAIN.
I'm so glad we both decided to take in an extra showing. It was throughly enjoyable, and so nice to hear all the vocal harmonies that were missing in the LA production. (Apparently some of the ensemble could handle singing harmony.) The new musical sections that Larry added...more Brain tap, etc. were great, and Cason really got to put his tap shoes to good use!
"All About Men" and "Earthman" were two big highlights in the show. As far as I could tell, things were technically fine. The ensemble really worked well together and there were lots of laughs, throughout. The crowd was a good size, especially considering it was still during work hours. I think the house was at least 3/4's full.
Afterwards, we were delighted to see dear Singdaw in the lobby. It was so wonderufl to meet him, he really is one of the sweetest people ever. He had PennyO's book with him and said it was hilarious, so it's on my "must buy" list.
Larry, Sing, BJ, Greg and I went around the corner to grab a slice of pizza before Starfighter. It was surprisingly tasty for a quick slice. Jose, Cillaliz and Sam met us there when we were finishing up. Then Sing accompanied us to the Starfighter theatre, which was in an old church (maybe its still used as a church, too?) and we got to meet DR Julie before the show. We also saw FJL, who seemed calm. He hasn't posted much about his NYMF experience, so I didn't know what to expect, but I imagined that we had all sorts of technical problems awaiting us.
Not so! As far as I could tell, the show was near perfect, and it had a lot of technical elements to it and a very nice set with lotos of set chanes. The set design was very clever and worked well for the show.
The approach of adapting the film to a musical worked great. I don't want to say too much about it since I know others plan on coming to see it bur I admired how skillfully Fred & Skip tred the line with not being overly reverent to the film and not mocking it' either. The tone was perfect. And the music was so beautiful and the songs were so catchy, with such funny lyrics. These are songs you can sing coming out of the theatre, and some of us were.
The crowd loved the show and it was almost a full house. I liked everyone in the cast very much and they seemed to be having a great time in the show. Skip and Fred should be very proud of their achievement!
