pedanther

1. The season of one-act plays opens tomorrow, and my first attempt at directing will be exposed to a paying audience. I'm not worried; the play's come together really well, it got a good response from the people who saw it at the dress rehearsals, and in the unlikely event that the proper audience is less appreciative I have Oscar Wilde's bon mot ready to hand.

The fact that I'm not worried didn't stop me having the usual between-final-rehearsal-and-opening-night-mare last night. Interestingly, it was the usual "on stage and forgotten my part" version, even though I'm directing and not acting this time; I suppose since I've never directed before, my unconscious doesn't have any raw material to craft an appropriate horror out of.


2. The annual performing arts festival was last weekend. (The music section; the drama section will be in a few weeks, after the one-acts are done with.) What with one thing and another, including rehearsals for the one-acts, I didn't make it to any of the sessions except the one in which I played in the brass band. I didn't even stick around long enough after we played to find out the results, but I expect we did as well as we usually do. I completely missed the Character Vocal section, which is the bit I look forward to all year. According to the programme, that means I missed out on someone in the under-14 division attempting my solo number from Chicago; I have no idea whether that's something to regret or be thankful for. I also note the unusual fact that nobody sang "A Whole New World", "Beauty and the Beast", or "Colors of the Wind" this year. I've always suspected there was a particular singing teacher with a partiality; I wonder if somebody's left town?


3. I have seen the new Doctor Who episode. The gap between a new Doctor Who episode airing in Britain and in Australia has been gradually decreasing: at first, the ABC wouldn't begin running a new season until the whole thing had run on the BBC, then they started airing new episodes with only a few weeks delay, then it got down to one week. It's probably stuck at one week as long as the BBC and ABC both prefer showing Doctor Who on Saturday evenings (the ABC can't show it on the same Saturday as the BBC because Saturday evening in Australia is Saturday morning in Britain, so Australia would be getting it first) - but this year, new episodes are being made available for viewing on the ABC's web site less than 24 hours after they debut in Britain. So I have seen the new episode, even though it hasn't actually aired in Australia yet.

I'm not going to do a reaction thingy, partly out of respect for lost_spook's expressed intention not to read such things. (Probably a sensible attitude. Certainly some of the reactions I've been reading have made me wish I'd adopted a similar resolution.)


4. I assume everybody on my friendslist who's interested in the Liaden novels already knows that the latest one just came out in hardcover (and has probably already read the e-book), and that all the novels - including the latest one - have just been released as Audible.com audiobooks. Just in case, though, details are available here.


5. I've occasionally pondered the idea of an alarm clock that matches itself to your sleep cycles, so that the alarm goes off when you're in a position to wake up easily, and not when you're in the middle of a deep sleep. I'd always assumed that this would require being wired to the clock with some kind of complicated and impractical sensor to detect out where in the cycle you were. Apparently I was wrong: a lot of people can get by with assuming an average sleep cycle duration, and get the same effect with a normal alarm clock and a bit of mental arithmetic. Somebody recently pointed me to http://sleepyti.me/, which has an explanation of the math, and automatic calculators for both directions (one suggests good times to go to bed, given what time your alarm's set for, the other good times to set your alarm for, given when you plan to go to bed). I've been using the system for nearly a week, and getting good results. (Especially considering that I'd previously been giving serious thought to giving up on the alarm clock entirely because I slept through it so often.)

Chicago opened last night.

It's going well so far. I didn't forget any props this time. A few people dropped lines (including me, fortunately in the middle of a monologue where it didn't inconvenience anyone), but there were no disasters.

People continue to be appreciative of my efforts in the role of Amos. This is something of a mixed blessing, because it can be quite difficult to be mournful and forlorn in the face of all that appreciation, but on the whole I think I'll take it as long as it keeps coming.

Fiction books
Paul Cornell, et al. Superman: The Black Ring volume 1
Paul Cornell, et al. Superman: The Black Ring volume 2
Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse. Chicago
Kim Newman. Bad Dreams

In progress
Kim Newman. The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

Non-fiction books
Kari Maund, Phil Nanson. The Four Musketeers: The True Story of D'Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis & Athos

In progress
(collection). Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Kim Newman. Jago

In the end, I did audition for Chicago. So did my sister-in-law, and my brother is going to be working backstage (on the understanding that, no matter how many actors the production loses during rehearsals, there is no way he is going to be sweet-talked into doing a walk-on).

My sister-in-law is hoping for a particular role. I generally don't do that - it saves on disappointment, and in any case I believe that if a play is any good every role has something to recommend it - but ever since the production was announced, I've had a strong suspicion about which role I'd be most likely to be given.

(I'll give you three guesses. That's more than generous: I'll be greatly impressed if you can even name three male roles in Chicago.)

I didn't mention it when it happened, but the final performance of Cabaret has been and gone.

Gone, too, is the beard -- I decided I needed an appropriate ceremony to mark the end of the production, so when I changed out of my costume for the last time, I shaved the beard off. Reactions were mixed: some people took a few minutes to notice the beard was gone, and some people took a few minutes to figure out who this beardless stranger was that was suddenly about the place. (I don't blame them. There were times, for the next few days, when I looked in the mirror and wasn't sure I recognised me.)

I got to keep the coat, though.

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Another thing that's been and gone without me mentioning it is the first half of the annual Toastmasters speech contest. That is, as you may recall, the Table Topic (1-2 minute extempore speech on a given topic) and the Humorous Speech (5-7 minutes, prepared in advance) competitions.

As always, I entered the Table Topic competition, on the grounds that the only way to get better at extempore speaking is to keep trying. I came second out of a field of two, but the important thing is that I bettered my own performance from last year. I had to keep padding the first half of the speech until I could think of something to say for the second half, but I did actually manage it, unlike last year, when the second half of the speech didn't come to me until five minutes after I sat down.

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Coincidentally, this post makes an interesting matching set with the last "Things I forgot to mention when they happened" post I did.

Opening night went well. A couple of lines got dropped, but nothing significant, and somebody (*cough* *eyedart*) went out for his first scene without his props in his jacket pockets, but managed to bluff his way through. The audience was appreciative, laughed and applauded in appropriate places, and gave a very satisfying collective gasp at my favourite plot twist. (That was reassuring; I'd been kind of worried that they'd see it coming.)

One of the other cast members is a subeditor at the local newspaper, and was dropping hints in various directions, including mine, about the desirability of reading the review in this morning's edition (which was already written, the final dress rehearsal having also been a press preview). The review turns out to be complimentary all around, and indeed even has a couple of nice words to say about me. It also, I was relieved to find, avoids plot spoilers; perhaps that's untrusting, but after the audience's reaction to my favourite plot twist I'd started worrying that the reviewer would blow it and all the rest of our audiences would know it coming in.

I don't think I've mentioned before, but for the last few years, whenever I've been in a stage production, I've always had the same nightmare on the night before we open. Apparently, it's now so familiar that I immediately recognise it, and spend the entire thing standing on the sidelines tapping my foot and muttering "I know what this is, I've seen it before, hurry up and be done so I can get some proper sleep. I have a performance tomorrow, you know."

And why is it that whenever I'm in a play set in a historical period where left-handedness was frowned upon, I'm always cast as the character who spends the most time writing?

Rehearsals for Cabaret continue. Consequent of people dropping out and various other rearrangements, I am now playing a single role with enough lines that it would be churlish of me to insist on knowing the exact number. (By which you can tell it's not any of the four I used to be doing.)

Casting for Cabaret has been announced. I'm as far down the cast list as a person can be and still be playing a character with an actual name, which is about what I expected.

(To be precise, I'm playing four roles, of which only one, "Max", has a name. Unless the others were actually christened "First Waiter", etc.)