Opera a Capella

I ran the light board this morning for a school matinee performance of the world premiere production of A Midsummer Night's Dream: Opera A Capella. The show is a joint venture of POTS & Opera Memphis, & has just been an absolute extravaganza of... stuff. Basically it's an opera version of Midsummer, using Shakespeare's text (no supertitles), and with all the accompaniment performed by a "voicestra" of a capella groups, with no orchestra.

It got an EXCELLENT review in The Wall Street Journal. Yeah, the actual Wall Street Journal.

Here are my thoughts:

I really enjoyed it. Like, I legitimately enjoyed watching the show, and I had fully expected to hate it.

Visually, it was gorgeous, the lights especially. I mean really, some of the best lighting design I've seen ever. The set was great, the costumes were great, the lights were fabulous.

I thought that it was blatantly obvious which cast members were used to standing still & singing without having the expectation the audience would actually understand what they were saying. By that I mean singing in German or Italian with English supertitles is very different from singing in Shakespearean verse. People have to understand what you're saying, or they won't be able to follow the plot. Not to say that any of it sounded bad, because it didn't- gorgeous sounds coming from all of them, just hard to make out what they're saying.

I found the voicestra to be very distracting for the first five minutes or so of the show, especially since the first few minutes was Theseus & Hippolyta, who were two of the most opera-y (read: difficult to understand) of the cast. I knew that I needed to pay attention to the actors onstage so that I could follow the plot, but all I wanted to listen to was the CRAZY AWESOME A CAPELLA MUSIC EXPLOSION coming from the pit. After a few minutes, the newness of the voicestra (I hate that word, but I feel like typing 'a capella singers' or 'vocal instrumentalists' or something is just lame) wore off, and I made a conscious decision to stop paying attention to them as more than just accompaniment. After that it was a lot easier to focus on the action and to follow what was happening.

Apparently the voicestra couldn't be there for the matinee, because this morning's performance was instead accompanied by a piano & the beatboxer. So, not so much a capella as... opera with weird accompaniment.

Watching the opera's SM call the show was fascinating. I've been reading a lot on SMNet about the differences between SMing for opera & theatre, but watching it was something else. The paging was... intense. I can't imagine paging actors for every entrance. Overwhelming.

One day, I am going to go into the scene shop when there is nobody there and take all of their drill guns, hide them in various places around the building, and then promptly forget where I left them.

Yesterday, I had a push broom, a regular broom, 2 dustpans, & a foxtail in the green room, all labeled CIRCUIT SM ONLY.

Today, when I needed to sweep before our first rehearsal onstage, I instead spent 15 minutes looking for those items.

Here's my tally:

• Push broom: UNDER THE ROCK WALL. Really? It's under the wall. You need to sweep under the wall?
• Regular broom: MIA
• Big dustpan: Under a trashcan backstage
• Small dustpan: On the tablesaw in the scene shop
• Foxtail: MIA.

Really I just want my foxtail back. Is that so hard?

Peter

Peter is our Assistant Technical Director. Peter is 6'8". Peter's nickname is Gorilla. Today Peter bent a metal rod into a U shape with his bare hands, & left me this note for rehearsal tonight.

If you can't read the note, it says-

"To Becky- The sink works now.
No leaks! Water can always be on.
No need to turn it on every time.
Note: -drain only works on SL side of sink
-Leave weight in SR side, it is necessary for the glue to set correctly. Tell Irene to think of it as a really heavy casserole dish in for a soak, it won't be there tomorrow.
-Peter"

Sister Myotis

Found out today via facebook that the guest lighting designer from NYC who designed Spelling Bee at Auburn (and Metamorphoses and Little Shop of Horrors) also designed the lights for Sister Myotis' Bible Camp. If you have never heard of Sister Myotis, she is a Memphis theatre tradition of loud, hilarious Southern church-lady-ness and she is played by the same actor who was Grown Ralph in A Christmas Story. Sister Myotis wroter herself a one-woman show that played in Memphis to great acclaim and actually moved to an off-Broadway run this past summer, and when Sister Myotis went to the Big Apple, Travis was the lighting designer.

SMALL WORLD. SO, SO SMALL.

Phantom Phish Pheeder

What kind of person takes it upon themselves to feed a fish that isn't theirs? I mean really. And they didn't just feed him, they dumped food into his tank. Sorry, Jessica! I'm tryin' to take care of ya, really!

J.Simps

We have a cast pet! The script calls for a betta fish onstage, and rather than have an empty bowl with some plants in the hopes that the audience doesn't realize there's no fish in it, we have an actual fish.

His name is Jessica Simpson (don't ask).

He lives in his bowl on my table in the rehearsal room and keeps me company during those long periods in rehearsal where the actors and the director are discussing silly things like "character" and "motivation" and I don't have anything to take notes about.

Most of the time he's pretty chill. Sometimes, though, with no warning, he will FLIP OUT and fan his fins out and start swimming around like crazy and bang into the glass.

Every cast should have a pet. It's nice.

Passive Aggressive Happiness

There are no perfect productions. No matter how much you love a show, it's going to have hiccups here and there. Conversely, every show, no matter how hated, has some redeeming quality about it.

Rather than dwell on the past or the negative, I want to blog about what is going well with my current show.

• There's no intermission. It runs under 1 1/2 hours.
• All of the cast is over the age of 18. Hell, they're over the age of 21.
• The script makes no attempt to replicate a film.
• The director has a very clear vision of what she wants and is able to communicate it with the actors and the production team.
• The director and the scenic designer do not hate each other.
• Production meetings consist of collaborative discussion and problem-solving. No one yells. No one dominates the conversation. No one dismisses suggestions off-hand.
• While the show mainly focuses on the arc of 2 characters, the fate of the production does not rest in the hands of one actor.

There are more reasons why I like this show, but I'm tired.