All Eyes on Me

I cast Brockhurst last night with Bernie. It was not quite as smooth as I thought it would be, and Bernie's participation caused things to fall out very differently than I expected. While more people will likely be happier with with their roles due to his insistence, I must confess fewer people will be in the roles I would like to see them in. Of course my happiness with casting as the GM is immaterial; it's much more important that the players are happy, and I think his contribution enabled that.

Will cast Break a Leg next week. That at least will be easy, and I think people are more flexible for silly games than they are for serious ones.

The Watch City Festival has not posted its performer applications on March 30th as planned. This makes me nervous. I wonder if the next step is hunting people down. I've sent a number of queries to various people who seem associated, but nothing's panned out yet, which is extremely disappointing. I'm really invested in exploring this performance opportunity, so I may need to overcome my natural dislike of bothering people I don't know to badger someone into giving me answer. I really want to make this happen, so if I can find out people who might be appropriate for this, I'm going to have to do it.

Troy and I are going to push to get our new musical drafted by April 17th, so we can have it read and hear how it sounds. That means pushing up the schedule a bit, which means more work, but there's only four more scenes to go. I can do two a week instead of one. And then I'd like to have enough time to clean it up a little once it's drafted. But I'm excited to hearing it. It's one step closer to it becoming real.

I am happy to report that at long last, GHOSTSHOW is done and to effect that we are pleased and proud to have delivered. We've been working on it for a long time, and ran into a lot of stumbling blocks, and yet it turned out tonight as something we can be proud of.

To be honest, we got probably to the point of over-rehearsing. We originally prepared to have the show ready to go for October, in order to have a Halloween performance, but our inability to find appropriate and affordable space for it pushed it back. By the time we found the Democracy Center and got a date, we'd been working on it for months. We didn't want to get out of practice, so we kept rehearsing the whole time, but I think it caused us to get kind of bored with the material. But getting through tech week and then finally putting it in front of an appreciative audience reinvigorated us, and that magical thing happened where the whole performance steps up to a new level when it's finally in front of people.

Our audience was lovely, too. The space that served as our house was not especially large but we did manage to fill it, and even better, they were beautifully responsive. They seemed to follow what we were trying to do, and laughed at all the jokes. That is just so gratifying, and as a performer gives you so much energy. And each and every one of us, Charlotte, Gigi, Eboracum, Frances, Lenny, and myself, did well.

The most difficult thing about all this was being responsible for ALL aspects of putting a show together. All producer, technical, creative, and publicity duties. It's a ton of work and not easy to accomplish with no established structures or resources behind you. But we accomplished a ton in the end and learned a lot, so I'm really proud of us for tackling those new challenges.

I also feel like I accomplished my personal artistic goal going into this. Since the format was many short pieces of different styles, that meant we each played a number of different roles. I, for example, was Barnardo from Hamlet, Rorcius from crearespero's Ghost of Wittenberg, Pompey in dendron_ges's At Phillipi, and Richard from Richard III. I endeavored to make each of my characters different from the others, and I think I succeeded, from vocal pattern to physicality. I was particularly pleased with my portrayal of Rorcius, who is supposed to be in danger of becoming like Hamlet due to his same potential for madness, who had a great trajectory of starting out arrogant and just out for a lark and really got to break loose when he realized he wouldn't get to speak to the ghost he had been chasing. I also was very happy with Richard, who I struggled to get a handle on. The levels were what was important to me with him, the shifts between rage and fear, the aggressive moments versus the vulnerable ones. But I think I did a pretty decent job in the performance.

I'm really proud of us. We did a lot of hard work, overcame a lot of challenges, and came out with a very good end product. I'm glad to have done it, and glad it's done now, as I can use one fewer obligation on my plate.