28,000 people saw this show last season! And the team is back to do it again!
A view from the lighting table in the back of the house.
Stage Manager Megan Buckley and Sound Designer Steve Shannon!
Lighting Designer Dan Walker
Actors TJ Corbett and Will Young!
Somehow I missed getting Tech Day photos of two amazing people, Assistant Stage Manager Andrea Kannon and Projections Designer Alison Dobbins, but they were there too and helped make the day go perfectly!
When I looked at my calendar in December and predicted “Man, April and May are going to be a nightmare!”, well… it turns out my predictive powers are dead-on accurate! That’s a good thing, right?! #HappyToBeworking #CoffeeIsMyFriend
The phones are ringing off the hook for the last two weeks of The Usual at Williamston Theatre!
Rehearsals for Ernie are going well!
The Detroit Tigers are 4-1 so far this season. I like it!
This video definitely counts as a good thing. Reminds me of my son!
Random pics from a Dad, director, baseball fan, celebrating some good things on this beautiful Sunday!
Today, we had a great Easter! The kids had a great time hunting baskets and eggs this morning, the Easter Bunny did a nice job hiding things this year!
Speaking of Easter – Maggie and I spent Easter afternoon at the ballpark! 🙂
And… speaking of baseball…
I’m happy to be in rehearsals for the remount of Ernie at the City Theatre in Detroit.
This weekend, we had a great time visiting our friends Crystal and Steve, and I had to take a picture of these desserts that we made. Crystal did all the prep, making the mousse and homemade whipped cream and slicing the fruit, but Steve and I were given the task of putting them together – and this is what they looked like! Chocolate coffee mousse, lots of fresh fruit, shaved chocolate… oh man, now I want another one. Or 7.
Lastly… I worked with a great stage manager, Sam, this weekend on a project in NYC, and she came in with this shirt that made us all laugh, and I had to share it. (Warning – yes, this is a little risque. Skip it if that’s not your thing, but this type of humor is exactly my thing… and I suppose if you’re a regular reader of this journal, you already know that!)
Have a great week, folks, and whatever you’re doing this week, have fun doing it.
Listen up, young up-and-coming directors:
You will inevitably, when watching the final preview and your rehearsal hours are over, figure out a way to fix that moment/scene/beat change/transition that’s been bugging you for weeks. And then, as you watch the show, celebrating the fact that you’ve figured it out, you’ll realize that all you need is another few hours of rehearsal and one costume change… neither of which you’ll get. So you watch the show, and when that moment comes, you just imagine your improved version in place of what’s happening… and file it away to use at a later date.
Theatre: Art with a deadline. And that deadline can be pretty firm.
It’s time to share some more photos in this Commonplace Journal! Wednesday Pic Post, here we come! (Well, it’s after midnight, so it’s technically “Thursday Pic Post”, but who wants to be technical after midnight?)
We open “The Usual” on Friday. Previews have gone well, the rehearsals this week have been a fun process of polishing, trimming, and a little adding (like a newly minted dream sequence). We also made some small adjustments to the set, and some prop tweaks. Here’s an example of the kind of props we were playing with:
(This sticker and more like it can be found here!)
Why would we be using that? Come see the show and find out! If you come see the show, you may see this:
Until then, think about this…
If you’d like something else to think about, spend some time trying to figure out why THIS exists:
(Okay, truthfully – I really want to try it, just because I’m impressed that someone actually said “You know what my bologna needs? Mac and Cheese” convincingly enough for Koegel’s to say “Hey… Yeah, that IS what your bologna needs!”)
Instead of buying Mac and Cheese Loaf for my family last week, though, I set up a crockpot of yummy goodness to cook while they were all at school and work, so when they got home they found this sign:
(Since I’ve been making these crockpot meals more often, I have a feeling that “Songs From Inside A Crockpot” could become a recurring literary & musical theme in our house…)
And another Wednesday has come and gone. Now… sleep!
It’s been a long week, but a good one. I’m getting closer to being healthy again, which is nice, and we just finished tech week for The Usual: A Musical Love Story, which is a lot of fun! (And despite the fact that I keep calling it a sweet, quirky little musical , it’s pretty BIG in a lot of ways, which meant that tech week was a busy, challenging, fun and rewarding process!)
It’s interesting though, I was asked a couple different versions of the question “You’re really doing a musical comedy about a romance between nerds?”… And my answer, of course, was YES! I think folks are thinking pocket-protector-wearing tape-on-glasses and pants-hiked-up-to-waist nerds, in a very typical “Revenge of the Nerds” fashion – and I can see where they’d get that, but it’s the 21st century! Nerds are in! Geek is chic! The old definition has gone out the window, and those nerds of the past have grown into adults with real world lives and problems! I mean, it’s a musical with songs about computers from the 80’s, sex toys, being a geek and Switzerland! What’s not to love about that?! But sometimes folks want to hear WHY? It sounds SILLY – Isn’t it theatre? Art? Where’s The Message?! (Capital M, trademark, glowy halo around the word, and a gentle rolling timpani playing as you say it – “The Message!?”)
So, I often find myself struggling to give a good explanation about the “Why” when it comes to “Why did you pick this play over that?” or “Why on Earth would you do THAT one?”. Often, the answer that I really want to give is simply “It spoke to me”.
I avoid that answer more often than I should, I think, and I think it’s because it’s a more “touchy feely” answer, and less quantifiable to many people, but the truth is that it’s often the biggest, simplest reason. I don’t often refer to myself as an “artist”, but I am one. The people I work with are artists, what we make is art, and there’s an art to doing it well. And, I think, one of the constant truths of art is that when it works it DOES speak to you, and often in ways that are hard to define. (One of the big challenges of what we do is to MAKE ourselves define it, through the process, as clearly as possible, so that we can excavate it off the page and breathe life into it on the stage. Sometimes, though, it’s just a gut feeling: “This moment works better like this” or “That moved me. The other way didn’t”.) And, of course, there’s no way of knowing if the fact that something spoke to ME is enough to make it speak to others, but you take the risk and you build it and share it because, well, that’s what artists do.
It’s late. I’m rambling, and I’m sleepy, but from a great week of working with great people on something I love. I never know if a show is going to please audiences as much as it pleases me, or if every experiment is going to turn out to be a giant success or an exercise in weathering public disapproval. What I do know, is that when I read something, if it speaks to me, I have to pursue it, and then I always hope to share both the creation of it AND the final product with people who I HOPE get as excited about it as me! On the way home tonight I was thinking about that, and realized that I needed some quotes about it!
Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.
-Henry A. Kissinger
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.
-Gian Carlo Menotti
The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Art is what’s left over after you’ve defined everything else.
Michael Vitale
The final voyage of the (real) U.S.S. Enterprise
Hey, Doctor Who fans! If you haven’t seen the online game, prepare to waste a lot of time with your favorite Gallifrean, exploring the “big ball of wibbly wobbly timely wimey…stuff!”
Doctor Who: Worlds In Time
Um… Living in the future is cool, but… Didn’t we learn ANYTHING from Jurassic Park?!
Extinct Wooly Mammoth To Be Cloned
This is a neat resource – the top 50 Drama Games. Possibly useful for workshops with young people, rehearsals, classroom settings? Worth checking out: Drama Games
My friend Dawn just recently introduced me to the Commonplace Book, which is a thing I immediately fell in love with and, as much as I wonder what exactly this online journal that I keep should be, this concept spoke to me very much. Filling pages with a variety of things related to the individual goals of the writer: things they want to share, to learn about, to remember, to ponder… I like this idea very much. It, for whatever reason, speaks to me more than “keep a blog about theatre” does. Maybe it’s because, in some ways, it’s what I do already – I write about the theatre, my family, baseball, sci-fi, news articles that move me, a whole hodge-podge of things. Often I’ve thought that maybe that’s not a good idea, because I see so many specialized blogs and online journalists that adhere to the “focus on a topic or you’ll lose your core readers” philosophy. Well, I don’t know that I have “core readers”, to start with, and I’d much rather share things that move me in one way or another and, hopefully, get feedback from folks who read it about what THEY think.
So, who knows, maybe the idea of a commonplace journal is just me giving myself permission to explore what I want this to be! If so, I’m going to start with this quote, which I just read recently and loved, because it’s about being in charge – as someone who helps run and guide a company, it’s a topic that I think about often.
When in Charge, Be in Charge (Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., US Army)
While Patton certainly championed it, the concept was not unique to his mind, nor to the military. If you have the honor and burden of being in charge – of a family, a team, a business unit or serving coffee, do so. Don’t waste people’s time and your life with milquetoast behavior. You are going to take the hit for outcomes, good or bad. This does not endorse domineering abusive behavior, however. Step up, be authentic and responsible – to yourself and to the forces of the universe that put you there.
That section came from David Kanigan’s blog, Lead.Learn.Live. – which is definitely worth reading if you’re interested in that stuff.
I’ve come down with an illness that’s sort of knocked me flat, making rehearsals for the last few days a very large challenge. Still, nothing to worry about, and it’ll all be fine, but the thing that I’ve been the most grateful for (aside from my wonderful wife and kids being awesome), is that the cast and company of The Usual have responded in a tremendously positive way.
This had me thinking about how, with the wrong reaction, a minor crisis could easily turn into a major one that really wreaks havoc on a project. On the flip side of that, a good team can take the moment and soar. I’m blessed to be working with such a good team.
When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters – one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.
– John F. Kennedy
Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.
– Henry Kaiser (although, I always think of my friend Dana White, who lives by this motto, introduced me to it, and brings it to every lighting design he does!)
Try to relax and enjoy the crisis.
– Ashleigh Brilliant
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
– Winston Churchill
Remember, the storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength and their stability.
– Ho Chi Minh
There are many thoughts on what Regional Theatre should be. Regional Theatres are tasked with providing entertainment, enlightenment and value to a community, all while adding to the growth of the industry as a whole. Employment for artists and administrators should come with affordability and a diverse mix of challenges and experiences for audiences, artists and administrators alike. On and on it goes, there are as many “shoulds” as there are theatres. And yet, the challenge that connects the theatres is this: paying your bills while following your mission. This article is an interesting read about that topic.
“Two Major Regional Theatres Struggle With Change”
This whole “Spider Man on Broadway” debacle has been amazing to watch. Now there’s a big lawsuit coming (or a big out-of-court settlement), but what’s interesting is the apparent power struggle and lack of leadership this production suffered from. Or maybe it was too much leadership? I don’t know, but this article is interesting, and as a producer AND a director, I can’t wait to see how it all turns out!
“Reputations Could Be Tarnished In Broadway Lawsuit”
Lastly….
Today –
A great, productive rehearsal with an incredibly fun, professional cast and crew that make coming to to work a joy.
Over lunch, listening to the first Detroit Tigers Spring Training game of the season.
Tonight, seeing my kids Fiddle Club concert, followed by family time for the rest of the evening.
Perfect. Thanks, Universe, I couldn’t have scripted it better!
Tony Caselli 