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[bk]

Well, you've read the notes, you've sung along with the notes, you've tap-danced to the notes and now it is time for a plethora of posts on a plethora of topics.

[Jrand74]

First post ..... huzzah!

[George]

First post ..... huzzah!

Yea, and... ??
.
.
.

 

[bk]

Happy birthday to MillerTIV, whomever they may be.

[Tomovoz]

My Christmas in July report.

Christmas here in Oz is of course in the heat of mid summer and many families (European backgrounds being the norm) have traditional HOT lunches with Turkey etc. The main course is usually followed by HOT Christmas pudding with brandy sauce etc. All this heavy and hot food is so inappropriate when the temperature is quite likely to be around the century mark.

Restaurants a few years back started to offer "Christmas In July" luncheons as a novel way of sparking up the winter trade. They seems to have been quite successful.

Today 9 close family and friends gathered for our own "Christmas" luncheon. Not quite traditional but we did have a good and hearty three course meal. We stated with a soup, main course was pork, and beef plus cauliflower with cheese sauce, baked potatoes and pumplkn and green beans. This was followed by Christmas pudding (Traditiona English) with brandy sauce, cream and/or ice -cream.  
We even celebrated the day with Chistmas crackers (bonbons) and gift giving. My present was a Teddy Bear  - a cross dressing one at that!
We also played Christmas carols and songs - Jerry Vale and Andy Williams.

It was a special day for us all as it was also a rememberence celebration for my mother who would have been 88 this coming Tuesday. The last birthday she had with us all (three years ago) we went to a restaurant which had a Christmas in July lunch. The same group of people were there today - taking my Mother's place at the table was her great grandaughter who was born just a year after we lost our remarkable Mother.  
All in all a very happy day for us here in the land down under.

Thank you DRs for the interest.

[Ron Pulliam]

Very nicely stated, TomofOz!

[Ron Pulliam]

Has anyone here ever broken an arm and had to learn to do two-handed chores (driving, cooking, pepper grinding, etc.) as a solo act?

Took a serious spill on city sidewalk Friday morning.  Tried to break my fall with my right arm.

Broke my arm at the elbow.  I can still recall the feeling with nauseating clarity.

I was in surgery yesterday morning at 10, returned to my room at 2 p.m., and was discharged at 4:30 p.m.

I took a taxi to my parking garage and then drove myself home with a grocery stop en route.  It was all at a slow pace.  I'm due to have the full-arm splint removed in 11 days at which time I should at least have greater range of motion.  I shall have to undergo rehab, certainly, to maximize use of my elbow.  A plate and pins were used to reconnect  the bones.

Sigh.

Vicodin is my current friend!

Any tips on doing things will be greatly appreciated.

[DERBRUCER]

NOT-SINGING NOT-DANCING ANYMORE

Chris Kattan bares his sole



The LA Times reports, in part:

A frog among princes
Being the novice amid Broadway royalty is no fairy tale. Just ask Chris Kattan.
By Geraldine Baum
Times Staff Writer

Jul 18 2004

NEW YORK -- The cast of Stephen Sondheim's "The Frogs" has assembled at the edge of a Lincoln Center stage. They are preparing to rehearse a new song for the show's finale that Sondheim has just faxed over. The master himself is not in the theater, but his near-mystical authority is felt.

While the others, including the star of the show, Nathan Lane, anxiously mutter new verses to themselves, only funnyman Chris Kattan seems not to be paying attention. He should be figuring out how he'll crunch the word "con-sci-en-tious" into three notes during his solo. Instead he's fidgeting, looking around, pushing his cap back and forth — and chewing. In fact, he's been eating throughout the afternoon rehearsal, pulling pieces of a Power Bar out of his baggy pants pocket and popping them in his mouth, like a Pekingese dog gobbling treats.

Eventually, director-choreographer Susan Stroman calls to attention the cast of the musical, which is based on Aristophanes' classic. Even though they're performing before paid audiences in previews, the show is still undergoing major changes. But Stroman wants the new song performed that night. "We are not out of town in Philadelphia," she says, coolly.

For the next half-hour the cast struggles through it. Finally, there is a break, and out of nowhere Kattan, his legs dangling off the end of the stage, blurts out lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance."

"You know that?" Stroman says in a tone more surprised than condescending.

"Yeah," Kattan admits a little shyly. "I even know a bit from 'Oliver.' "

As it turns out Kattan, a comedic pinup in television and film, won't make it to Thursday's opening night on that stage at Lincoln Center. Last Sunday morning, he received a phone call from Stroman informing him that he was being replaced by Roger Bart, whom both she and Lane had worked with in "The Producers."

Kattan was told, he says, that his "articulation" on stage wasn't clear and, more importantly, that he "didn't speak the language of the theater."

By Monday morning, before he'd had a chance to retrieve his belongings, they were delivered to his apartment in a paper bag marked "Mr. Kattan." "At least when you leave prison," he says, "they give you your stuff in Ziploc bags."

[To Be Continued]

der Brucer (thinking the pic deserves a "smelly shoes" comment)

[DERBRUCER]

NOT-SINGING NOT-DANCING ANYMORE - PART 2


The LA Times continues, in part:

Caught off guard

The departure of Chris Kattan from "The Frogs" could be turned into a sort of morality tale — or fraught disaster movie.

After all, what could have been more promising and foolproof than to be summoned, as he was, from Hollywood to Broadway by some of its most dazzling citizenry — multi-Tony winners Stroman and Lane, not to mention Sondheim? They invited him to take his first role on the stage.

In a phone interview early last week, Kattan insisted he had no hint he was about to be dismissed nor that Bart had attended a preview to scope out whether he'd be interested in joining the show.

"Usually before you get the divorce papers you have a discussion about the problems of the relationship," Kattan says. "There was never a sit-down, let's-talk-about-it session. It was just over."

However, he acknowledges there were problems — in his performance, in his pairing with Lane and in the production overall. He simply didn't think it would come to an abrupt breakup.

In fact, his role had been continually reduced and marginalized during the weeks of rehearsals and previews, as the script was honed to keep the story line moving. Kattan was cast as Xanthias, the mutinous slave who is dragged along by his master, Dionysos, the god of drama and wine, on a perilous trip to Hades to bring back a dead writer who could save mankind.
...
Lane not only headlines the show as Dionysos, he also adapted the 1974 libretto, a first-time experience for the veteran Broadway actor. Many of the jokes Lane scripted for the slave-sidekick were well-received by preview audiences. (Example: "My parents sold me into slavery because they desperately needed the money. They opened the first adult novelty shop in [Athens]," Xanthias says. "Basically, they sold condoms to the Trojans.") But Kattan and Lane never seemed to establish an onstage chemistry. And the more Lane was focused on his role as writer — or relentless rewriter, as the case may be — the more Kattan "stopped having fun."

"I thought I was being invited to do a Crosby and Hope, road-to-Hades-type show with lots of playful back-and-forth bits," he says. "But by the end, it was more about Crosby than Hope."

Even after so many of the "bits" Kattan liked were dropped, he says, he didn't really complain. "This is not my world; this is Nathan's baby, his stuff .... Everybody was saying how good I was about not speaking my mind," he says. "Probably if I spoke up, I would have been gone sooner."

It had never been a dream of the 33-year-old actor to appear on Broadway. But he came, and he was unprepared, by his own admission, when he ran headlong into the routine practice of the theater in which scripts, songs, monologues and even characters are tampered with — often up to opening night. Though he was not in a position to challenge his more experienced colleagues, Kattan found the whole unremitting process, in his word, "unfair," and certainly not altogether rational.

"I didn't know this world, and now I do," he says. "I had a great experience, and it's not going to hurt my career. But to work in theater it helps to have been trained as a theater actor."
...
Over the last several years television audiences have gotten to know Kattan for his stint on "Saturday Night Live." ...And although Kattan did start in legit theater with the celebrated Los Angeles improvisational troupe the Groundlings, he made his name in front of a camera.

So it was difficult to understand what this recruit was doing on a Playbill with such Brahmans of Broadway as Sondheim, Stroman and Lane.
...
Indeed, Kattan seemed like an odd choice to put on a stage for two-plus hours, eight performances a week, in front of 1,200 people who, at least initially, would be quintessential high-culture New Yorkers — the Lincoln Center subscribers.

But in an interview before she took him out of the show, Stroman had defended the casting of the young comic, saying his contrasting style to Lane's and impressive improvisational skills, which come in handy in any comedic pairing, were exactly what made him perfect for the part.

Stroman and Lane had considered more-experienced New York comedians for the role. But at the suggestion of a casting director, Kattan was flown in from Los Angeles in December for a tryout. He sang the opening number (admittedly not very well), then read a scene with Lane. They did a wonderful job "tossing the lines back and forth," Stroman said.

"Chris' rough edges add to his character as the slave," she said. "Nathan performs with that upper-class English diction, and Chris has the flat American voice. This whole play is about the importance of language, of our leaders to understand the power of their words, and this contrast sets up the theme."

However, she also hinted that Kattan had been struggling, if not valiantly, to understand the culture of the theater. (She declined, through a spokesman, to be reinterviewed after she had dismissed Kattan. Lane also declined to be interviewed for the story.)

"He's like my Eliza Doolittle," she had said with a laugh. "He will now be able to apply 'the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain' to everything he does in the rest of his career."

Kattan admits the most difficult part of his learning curve was understanding how to broaden his performance to reach an audience spread around and above him.

"You have to connect to those people in the balcony and let them know you're performing for them," he says. "We have to let them eavesdrop on our scene. It can't be so intimate, the way it is with a camera."

[To be Continued]

[DERBRUCER]

NOT-SINGING NOT-DANCING ANYMORE - PART 3

The LA Times concludes, in part:

The urge to improvise

The uncertainties of performing on Broadway — and reinventing his image — were precisely what initially attracted Kattan to "The Frogs." "You can only do so many 'Wayne's Worlds' and Mangos," he says. After doing three-minute "SNL" skits, he had the time on stage to "breathe. And the audience can breathe with me," he said during rehearsals. "That's what I really love. This shows I really am a performer."

Still, the transition was trying, even for a physical comedian as skilled as Kattan. The role had forced him to enter the completely alien universe of musical theater. And not only couldn't he sing, he knew nothing of the etiquette of the stage — like the fact that nobody eats during rehearsals and that it was important to show up not a minute late. Early on, Stroman had advised him "to lay off the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" once previews started. It was a concern far from necessary, he said, but he understood why she had stereotyped him. "If anyone in this cast was going to be that guy, it was me," Kattan says.

Though his improvisational training distinguished him from the many Tony winners and Broadway traditionalists in the cast, his background also made sticking to the script a challenge. "I know my lines and I say them, but sometimes it's nice to put a little relish around the hot dog," he said. He seemed astounded that every time he forgot or changed a line, he had to rehearse the whole scene top to bottom the next day.

...

Not only did Kattan have to figure out how to get comfortable — really to fit in — with such an august audience and Broadway crew, he also had to take instructions from perhaps the most prized and analyzed composer of the 20th century. There was only so much guidance Sondheim could offer Kattan on how to carry a tune. "I sang one song and Sondheim turned to me and said, 'You know, just speak that part.' I said, 'Like Richard Burton in "Camelot?" ' He said 'No. Just speak it.' "

Moving on

Ultimately, Kattan seemed not only embarrassed by losing his role but upset about losing the opportunity to work around so many immensely talented people. And even though he was not happy with how Stroman dismissed him — by phone instead of in person — he talked about how "amazing" it was to observe the celebrated choreographer working, particularly with the show's dancers, and referred to her as a "sweetheart." He'd also someday like to join up again with Lane, he says.
..

Kattan's flameout on Broadway has clearly made him eager to get back to Hollywood. He has written a screenplay titled "El Romantico" with former "SNL" writer Matt Piedmont that has been bought by Fox Searchlight. He also has a deal with Fox to do a television series.

"I'm sad about leaving 'The Frogs' because of all the people," he says. "But I'm also kind of relieved. Who knows, this week I would have gotten another note saying something was cut again, that bit that got the laughs.

"Now I can go back to doing my stuff and being funny and physical and not have to speak the language of the theater."

[DearReaderLaura]

Oh my gosh, RLP!   Good healing vibes to you!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I broke my wrist many years ago, and yes, you do learn how to do things one-handed with time and practice (and necessity!).

[Panni]

Ouch, RLP! Sorry to hear of your accident. I have no advice on how to handle life with one hand, but I do send FAST HEALING VIBES your way.

[elmore3003]

Good morning, all!  I had a wonderful dinner with DRBen and Anthony last night.  The company was sparkling and the conversation bounced like buckshot from pillar to post.  Anthony is one amazingly talented person, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him.  I met DRBen, along with DRS PennyO and Jason around six (?) weeks ago, and he's become one of my favorite people.  I wandered home to find my dying television in major death throes, but this video demise his been going on longer than Sarah Bernhardt's final and absolutely final tours combined and I'm sick of it.

Circuit City promises to deliver the new tv on Tuesday, but I will miss the old Panasonic, which is 15 or 16 years old now.  I'm afraid this new one will last 15 to 16 months, so I'll be curious to see how Panasonic's manufacturing standards have declined since 1988.  Who knows?  This new tv may outlive me.

DRJay, your civilized evening sounds wonderful.  I'm a huge Isherwood fan, and I enjoyed reading his diaries:  Hollywood gossip on Betty Hutton, "she'd be a nymphomaniac if they could slow her down" is the one I remember.  I'll be curious as to what other composers they perform in the upcoming concerts.  There's sure to be some Britten?

DRRLP, best of luck with your arm.  Wasn't there someone to get you home from the surgery?  I can't believe you're that alone in the world (2 references here:  THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE and MR MAGOO'S CHRISTMAS CAROL).

DRTomovoz, I'm so embarassed!  I truly thought you celebrated Christmas on Dec. 25!  I also keep forgetting that you're in the winter seasonat the present?  I was always lousy at geometry.

[Matt H.]

The most telling bit from the article derBrucer quoted:

"his background also made sticking to the script a challenge. "I know my lines and I say them, but sometimes it's nice to put a little relish around the hot dog," he said. He seemed astounded that every time he forgot or changed a line, he had to rehearse the whole scene top to bottom the next day."


He sees nothing wrong with leaving an entire cast at sea on stage while he improvises to his heart's content? Thank god he's gone!

[Matt H.]

Really, really sorry about your accident, DR RLP. Hope recovery/rehab won't be too awful.


Now, which DRs have broken bones before? I have never broken a bone so I can't imagine what it's like.

[Michael]

Does anyone have any updates and/or gossip about The Frogs since Roger Bart came in?

[Michael]

OUCH!! DR RLP. Drink lots of milk and heal quickly

[Michael]

I broke my index finger twice in one months span. I forgot how I did it the first time. But it was the day after I got the splint off and I was fighting with my sister and I wagged my finger in front of her face and she punched it. Broke it again.

The plus side. It got me out of gym. But I also was taking a typing class amd it was very hard to type with a splint on your finger.

I think my mother was preparing me to become a secretary. It only took me 25 years or so later to become a somewhat good touch typist with my computer keyboard.

[DERBRUCER]

For PANNI - who likes things Canadian:

Canadian Turtle Soup

(The butchering instructions are a bit too graphic for a pet-friendly site)

der Brucer

[bk]

My goodness, for the second time in two days I log on in the morning to find no one here.  Skammen.  

I broke my arm once - hated every minute of it.  I was, I believe just eighteen and had to do two shows wearing the cast, which was an ordeal.  Also, there was the itching factor - that drove me totally nuts, the itching factor did.  I dealt with the itching factor by shoving anything up the cast that could squeeze under there, including butter knives, pens, pencils, spatulas.  When they finally took the cast off they found a blue pen cap by my elbow.  Also, as soon as the cast came off I must have sat in the doctor's office and scratched my arm for fifteen minutes straight.

[Matt H.]

I know lots of folks who had to endure broken arms, and my team leader broke her leg during my last year of teaching, and she was really miserable trying to get around her classroom (taught math/algebra) teaching. Very hard to teach if you aren't mobile.

[bk]

Speaking of breaking arms, where in tarnation IS everyone?  I must jump in the shower and then be off to a long rehearsal.  I do like jumping in the shower, it's ever so much fun.  Now, you all simply must keep the home fries burning, and I'll try to send live from location postings every now and then and even every then and now.

[Emily]

I want to be a production assistant!

But gosh knows how I'd get to LA

I have never broken an arm, a leg or a window.

[Jay]

DRJay, your civilized evening sounds wonderful.  I'm a huge Isherwood fan, and I enjoyed reading his diaries:  Hollywood gossip on Betty Hutton, "she'd be a nymphomaniac if they could slow her down" is the one I remember.  I'll be curious as to what other composers they perform in the upcoming concerts.  There's sure to be some Britten?

In one of the letters in the exhibit--to his mother, addressed "My darling mummy," by the way--Isherwood writes of how he dislikes being out and about with Greta Garbo, as she would cover her face any time they neared a stranger.  "It's like walking with someone wanted for murder," he says.

Bingo on the Britten.  They'll be doing his third quartet at the next concert, which uses themes from his opera Death in Venice.  Thomas Mann, of course, was part of the legendary artistic circle in Santa Monica that included Isherwood and others, so the piece will be doing double duty.

At the third concert there will be more Stravinsky and songs from The Three Penny Opera.  Isherwood was the first to translate Brecht's lyrics into English.

The last concert will include a performance of Holst's Savitri:  An Episode from the Mahabharata, which ties to Isherwood's involvement with Vedanta, a system of Hindu philosophy.

[Jay]

Good healing vibes to Dear Reader RLP!

[William E. Lurie]

I enjoyed "Die Mommy" for what iit was but agree with most of what you said BK.  Regarding Mr. Busch, I have seen him in several shows (including "Auntie Mame" and "Bell, Book and Candle") and find he is the exact same in every role he plays.  However I think that is because he feels that is what he is expected to be and he has a certain group of camp followers who laugh at his every (similar) move.  

I'm not seeing THE FROGS for a few weeks (if I have to pay full price for something I want the best possible seat and it took that long in the run until I got them) but I am glad they replaced Mr. Kattan with Mr. Bart.  I am not much of a fan of any post-1985-or-so SNL "comic".  Talk about a show that has way outlived its glory days...

[Matt H.]

I just read the VARIETY review of the remake of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. It was very, very positive.

[bk]

I've jumped in the shower (so much fun) and now I'm off to rehearsal.  Keep the home fries burning and I'll be checking in from the rehearsal studio.

[Panni]

It just took me half an hour to go through various procedures to post -- during which time I lost the post that I thought I had copied (well, I KNOW I copied) to post for when I could when I couldn't An exercise in frustration. Anyway, i've used up half an hour of energy that should have gone into my script. And that's a not a good thing (a Martha Stewart reference. -- Someone bake her a cake with a file in it.) So you'll never know about the bones I haven't broken, DRs. Skammen.

[Panni]

IMHO, too much jumping in and out of showers on this site. Make up your mind!