Category: Theatre

Today, someone said something to me  that I've heard many times in the past, and today, I'm finally going to blog about it.

Pleasant Grove High School is currently putting on a production of Phantom of the Opera.  My sons went to see it last night and really enjoyed themselves.  One of them told me today that he's had the songs in his head all day.

A co-worker who knows that I'm into theater (or, at least used to be.  More on that in a future blog entry...maybe) asked me if I had seen it yet.  When I mentioned that I hadn't, he told me that I needed to make sure and go see it.  Then he said it:

I saw Phantom in Toronto, and those kids at Pleasant Grove High School did every bit as good as the professional group.

NO. THEY. DID. NOT!

I've heard this time and time again.  "I saw <insert show name here> in <insert city here>, but <insert local theater group here> did a production that was just as good."

I understand that you thoroughly enjoyed the local production.  I get that.  I enjoy theater as much, if not more, than the next guy.  But there's no way that the local theater group is even in the same league as the professional group.

I have only seen one show on Broadway.  I have seen several shows put on by Broadway touring groups.  I've been in and seen more amateur and semiprofessional theater productions than I can count.  I don't feel like I'm disrespecting the local theater groups by saying that even the very best local theater doesn't compare to the professional groups.

Does this mean that I didn't enjoy the local groups?  No.  Does this mean that the local groups didn't put on a good show?  Absolutely not.

What I'm saying is that with multi-million-dollar budgets and with a MUCH larger talent pool, the professional groups have a big advantage right from the start.  Local theaters will rehearse a musical for a month or two.  The length of a run for a local theater is anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.  Professional groups have a much longer rehearsal period followed by a much MUCH longer production period.  This also leads (generally) to a higher quality production.

Are there exceptions to this?  I'm sure there are.  I'm sure that there are bad performances by professional groups and exceptional performances by local groups that approach each other in quality.  But this is, by far, the exception, not the rule.  As often as I hear the superlative praise of local theater groups and its less-than-apt comparison to professional theater, I'm quite certain that there is a lot of exaggeration going on.

So please don't tell me that the production you saw at a local High School was as good as the production you saw on Broadway, because that's when I'm going to stop listening to you.  Instead, tell me how much you enjoyed the production.  Give me  details about what you liked and why.  That goes a LOT farther than an overly-gushing comparison that has an unbelievably slim chance of actually being true.

On Saturday night, I get to perform in the 2nd Annual Syd Riggs Scholarship Benefit Concert.  It's at Orem High at 6pm and 8:30pm.  It costs $15 for reserved seating and $10 for general admission seating.  It's going to be worth every penny you pay.

Don't come to see me.  I'm in the opener and closer with unpteen bizillion other performers and I'm also in another ensemble number.  It's a very small percentage of the whole.  A lot of great talent has been recruited for this event.

Mostly, come to support a scholarship in the name of an amazing educator and director that passed away too suddenly, too soon, and much too young.

I worked with Syd at Hale Center Theater in Orem.  She directed the productions of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Man of La Mancha, and Fiddler on the Roof that I performed in.  She taught me a lot about theater, about telling a story.  She taught me that when it comes to hobbies like theater, it's not worth doing if it's not fun.  She taught me that even when other important things are going on, it's important to take a minute to stop and watch a beautiful sunset.

I turned down an ensemble role in Brigadoon to be in a long-form improv. show elsewhere.  Although I think I grew more as an actor through the improvisation, I regret not being in Brigadoon, because that would have been my last opportunity to work with Syd, and I missed out.  On a Saturday night as Syd was getting ready to go to the theater to see her cast perform, she suddenly slumped over and was gone.  A pulmonary embolism had taken her life.

I still miss Syd, and probably will every time I think about theater.  I'm forever grateful to her for the things she taught me.  I'm thankful to be a part of the benefit concert on Saturday night, and I hope you will consider coming.

Someone just told me that I missed my true calling in life.  We were discussing church basketball.

I loathe the game.  I'll freely admit, that loathing is due, in great measure, to the fact that I suck at basketball.  Really.  I'm not good at all.  It's not something I've spent a lot of time doing.  However, that doesn't change the fact that church basketball (by which I mean basketball usually played in the meetinghouses of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) is partly to blame.

As a young man, I had "scouts" once a week at our church building.  More often than not, nothing substantial had been planned and we ended up spending at least half of the time shooting hoops in the "cultural hall."  (Cultural hall = a fancy LDS word for "gymnasium.")  For me, this usually meant running back and forth on the hardwood while the rest of the young men on my team ignored me and the young men on the other team tried to run me over.  I finally quit even walking out on the court in the first place.  This meant that the other young men had to feel the obligation to make me feel included, and they would harass me for not playing.

I gave it a shot (pun intended), I really did.  I remember one time (I must have been EXTREMELY bored) that I picked up a basketball, and due to some strange alignments of planets in several galaxies, I attempted and made several 3-point shots in a row.  This, of course, meant that the other young men started to harrass me for not playing on their team against the other wards.  I said something both dry and droll that they completely didn't get.  So they just started harassing me to make me feel included again.

The angriest that my wife has EVER seen me was after my last experience with church basketball.  My cousin's husband finally harrassed me long enough and assured me enough times that he would make sure I had a good time, so unwisely, I decided to give it one more try.  My cousin's husband then proceeded to do everything that had ever been done to me before in my entire life that made me hate church basketball.  I haven't played one minute of church basketball since.  I never will again.  Since that day, I tell people that "church ball is against my religion."  It is.  I'm a better person when I DON'T play.

What does this have to do with my true calling?  My friend is a basketball official.  He's headed out to officiate in a game this evening, and I told him to "have fun" and to "taunt the overly-competitive players" for me.  "Hey!  You sneezed in my direction?  Technical foul!!  What??  You're ARGUING with me?  EJECTED!!!"

That's when he told me that I've missed my true calling in life.

Which got me thinking...

Maybe I SHOULD become a basketball official.  Then I could make everyone else's experience as miserable as mine was.  Maybe I could end church ball as we know it.

If any of you know where I can get some basketball official's training, please let me know.  I already know where I can get my concealed carry permit, because if I put this plan into action, I'm going to need it.

The pareto principle, sometimes known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity, states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from about 20% of the causes.

It's a common rule of thumb in business...  80% of the sales come from 20% of your clients, for example.

The principle has its basis in economics.  Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.  It has also been noted that the richest 20% of the people in the world have about 80% of the world's income.

It seems to have application everywhere.  One might guess that they wear their favorite 20% of their clothing 80% of the time.  Microsoft noted that fixing 20% of the bugs in their software resulted in an 80% reduction in errors and crashes.  My favorite, late director, Syd Riggs, even applied this to stage combat.  The person giving the action was responsible for 20% and the person receiving the action was responsible for 80%, making stage combat much safer.  (Or did she say 90-10?  I wish she were still alive so I could ask her. )

The one that's bugging me today, though, is that, according to my dentist, they perform 80% of their work on 20% of their patients.  And yes, I'm in that wonderful 20%.

Ugh.

This very difficult week is finally over.

I've been under quite a bit of pressure at work. I mentioned in an earlier blog post that my product had gone Beta. Little did I know that there would be two more "refreshes" of this beta before it became official. So I was rushing to get a couple of features added during the last month. It went right down to the wire, but I actually got it done. This afternoon before I left work, I published all of the "beta" stuff and finally finished something that seems to have been hanging over my head for quite some time now. It's a good feeling.

Add to that the fact that tonight was opening night for the play that I'm in. That meant that this past week was "tech"week. We were in rehearsal every night from 6:30 until after 10:00. That left precious little time for anything other than sleep.

Most days this week consisted of:

• Waking up
• Getting my older son to school
• Going to work
• Teaching
• Picking my older son up at home and reheating some dinner
• Taking my dinner to rehearsal and eating it quickly before I went on stage
• Running through the play
• Getting notes from the director
• Going home and preparing my next lecture
• Crashing in bed without having practiced my guitar.

Add to all of this the fact that my younger son was sick and my older son had parent-teacher conferences. It was NOT a fun week.

But the release is out and the opening went very well. The audience was responsive, and I'm VERY proud of how well my son did for his first time on stage. Incredibly proud. We went out for ice cream with the cast after the show.

I'm glad it's over though. It's time to sleep now.

This past week, I attended auditions for the Pleasant Grove Players' upcoming production of On Golden Pond. My teen-aged son came with me and also auditioned. We've both been cast! I'm playing Bill, the fiance of Chelsea, the daughter of Norman and Ethel, the main characters in the play. It's a small part.  My son is going to play Bill's son, Billy. It's also a smaller part, but it's bigger than MY part!

We're going to be father and son on stage as well as father and son in real life. I'm pretty excited about the whole deal, as you can probably imagine!

Mark your calendars! Performances are March 7th through March 24th on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays. There are Saturday matinees on March 15th and March 22nd.

It never ceases to amaze me how inconsiderate some people can be.

I'm about halfway through the run of the play No Time For Sergeants at the Hale Center Theater in Orem. Before every performance, the stage manager announces that people should stay in their seats during the performance and that people should turn off any cellular phones, PDA's, and other noisemaking/glowing devices.

There are REASONS behind those announcements. The Hale is a theater in the round. All of the entrances and exits for patrons are also entrances and exits for actors. Thus, someone getting up to go to the bathroom during the middle of a performance may find themselves getting stepped on or otherwise injured by actors that have to make hasty entrances and exits.

But leaving a cellular phone on is very VERY inconsiderate. Even when it only vibrates, it still makes an annoying noise and can possibly interfere with the sound system in the theater. People pay around $15 per ticket to see the play, and when a ringing (or vibrating) cellular phone interrupts the performace, it shows that someone thinks that they're more important than anyone else in the theater. If you're a doctor and you're on call, find another night to attend the theater. People used to go to the theater before there were cellular phones.

On Broadway, the chirping and beeping of cellular phones has become such a nuisance that more than four years ago, the New York City Council passed an ordinance that makes it illegal to use a mobile telephone in a place where a public performance (live or film) or a public lecture is taking place. Unfortunately, it's notoriously hard to enforce such a law, and the pitiful fine of $50 is likely much less than the price of the ticket to the performance the cellular phone user is interrupting.

In France, they have taken it a step further by passing a law that allows active jamming of cellular phone signals in theaters, cinemas, and concert halls. The only proviso is that they have to allow emergency calls through. They're currently working on perfecting the jamming technology to make this a reality.

FCC regulations in the United States make any such jamming device illegal, though there are stories of producers smuggling jamming devices into theaters. Passive jamming (putting metal plates in the walls, for example) is NOT illegal, but because so many theaters on Broadway are landmarks, architectural changes are difficult, if not impossible. New paints and wallpapers exist that can at least partially block cellular signals and are a viable alternative for broadway houses.

But for now, the best we can do is ask people to turn their noisemaking devices off. The plea will be ignored by those who are so self-important that they think they are the exception to every rule. Hopefully, they'll listen closer when "Sergeant King" yells at them, telling them to turn that noisemaker off before he rips their arms off and beats them senseless with them.

It's inconsiderate, not only to other theater patrons, but even more so to the actors on stage who are trying to create an alternate reality through which their audience can temporarily escape their cares and spend an evening laughing and being entertained. The harsh ring of a cellular phone can cause this alternate reality to dissolve, bringing back all of the cares and woes that other audience members might be trying to escape.

So please, when you go to the theatre, TURN YOUR CELL PHONE OFF!

The Odd Couple is over. Closing night is done, the costumes have been turned back in, and the props (and garbage) have been put away.  The theater will again be dark.  It's the time that I spend looking back at the whole experience and see what I can learn.

First the bad: the director. I'm not going to mention her by name. The point of this isn't to humiliate her. It's simply to vent and get it over with.

I haven't ever worked with a less professional director. She very rarely showed up on time for rehearsals. It's a serious pet peeve of mine. When rehearsal is scheduled for a certain time, it shows a fundamental lack of respect when you show up late, especially when you're the person in charge. When she finally DID show up for rehearsal, we would spend the first 20 minutes to half hour "checking in," which basically meant that we would all answer some question that she would come up with, like "How did you get started in theatre," or "Tell us something good that's happening in your life right now. I'm all for getting to know fellow cast members, but that might be more bearable if it started when rehearsal was supposed to start. After a while, cast members started showing up later and later, because they knew that the director wasn't going to show up on time anyway.

The director spent lots and lots of time rehearsing with the Pigeon sisters and the poker players, but seemed to neglect Oscar and Felix. You know... the two people that made up the odd couple, the FOCUS OF THE FREAKING SHOW. Felix and Oscar got very little direction... little more than blocking. I'm used to getting MUCH more than that. I'm used to getting the kind of direction that the pigeon sisters were getting.

But worst of all, she seemed to take a disinterest in what was going on during rehearsals at time. When I looked out at her during the rehearsal and saw her talking on her cellular phone, playing with her computer, or doing sudoku puzzles (no, I am NOT making this up), it made me more than a little angry.

So when dress rehearsal came, we were definately NOT ready. We would have had the equivalent of another week of rehearsal if we would have actually started rehearsals on time. We would have been able to work much more on things other than where we belonged on stage if we would have actually started rehearsals on time. It would have been nice to get something more from a director.

Maybe I've been spoiled. Maybe the directors I've worked with have been the best of the best. But I KNOW my time could have been put to much MUCH better use. The audiences early-on that PAID to see the performances would have had a lot more fun. They would have had better shows to see.

The only other thing that was severely annoying was an actor that took thing more and more and more over the top every performance. I feared for Felix' safety on closing night. But that's why I hate closing nights. It seems that some people are predisposed to doing something out of the ordinary, just because it's closing night. But that was pretty minor compared to the level of unprofessionalism showed us by the director.

Of course, all through the run of the play, the director came to our cast meeting before each show and gave us notes on the previous performance. That's all well and good, but I'm used to a director letting the cast "own" the show after the rehearsal process is done. And to be fair, lots of the notes were really good, but I believe that these notes would have been given much MUCH earlier in the process IF WE WOULD HAVE STARTED OUR FREAKING REHEARSALS ON TIME! Did I mention that this is one of my pet peeves?

Now for the good.

Dennis Purdie, who played Felix in this production is a very fine character actor. It was a pleasure to spend so much time on stage with him every night. It was great to work extra time with him, trying to polish the scenes we had together. It was fun to feel his enthusiasm for his role, to feel his love for theatre and for the person whose memory we were honoring with this production. I consider Dennis to be a friend and I'm glad to know him.

The production team other than the director was WONDERFUL to work with. Two of them were in the play and the other was the production assistant who spent a lot of her time and energy making sure that the props (especially the food) was ready for each performance. One of them was able to calm me down on a couple of occaisions when I was more-than-normally angry at the unprofessionalism of the director.

The others in the cast were, for the most part, wonderful to work with. I had worked with some of them before, and it's always fun to strengthen old friendships. It's always fun to have more common experience that builds on the friendships that we have. A couple of people in the cast I met for the first time at auditions or at the first readthrough. I love getting to know new people. I'm SUCH a people person.

The performances were a blast! I love hearing people laugh. I love hearing people that have been able to forget their worries and cares and laugh at the story unfolding in front of them. I especially love it when people I know are in the audience. When I recognize the laugh of someone I care about, it means even more to me. It brings joy to me to now that I'm entertaining others.

I'm glad I did this show. it was a fun experience. It was a learning experience. It was difficult at times, even frustrating and maddening. But in the end, I think it was a good show and people were thoroughly entertained.

Now, on to bigger and better things. No Time For Sergeants at the Hale Center Theater in Orem has had a much better start. The directors are EXTREMELY prepared and are incredible at using time wisely, scheduling rehearsal time efficiently, and giving notes that help us develop the characters (yes, most of us are playing multiple characters) that will make the show a success. It's COMPLETELY different from the things that frustrated me with The Odd Couple. It's exactly the experience I NEEDED at this point.

It's opening night tonight.

Last night's dress rehearsal went pretty well. It could have gone a LOT worse. Tonight will be better than last night. And we'll have our first real audience. It will be interesting to have to pause for laughter now and again.

I also auditioned for No Time For Sargeants at the Hale Center Theater in Orem. Hopefully, I'll hear something back about that in the next few days.

Sometimes, I wonder why I do theatre at all. But when I'm actually performing in front of an audience and I hear their reactions, it makes it all worth it.

The guy that is playing Felix in The Odd Couple told me that he has three hundred seventy-something lines. That's a LOT of lines. So it made me curious. Yesterday, I decided to count my lines. I have 464. Whoa!

On Saturday morning, I met with Felix and we ran sections of lines together. We decided it would be good to continue working extra together since this is basically a two-man show with a few more people on the periphery. So if this show is to work well, we have to be in great form and know all of our lines and cues all the time.

Then on Saturday evening, we did our first full run-through of the show. It was slower than we would have liked it to be. It's still pretty rough in parts. But it was nice to run through the entire show.

We open on Friday. That means that this is the week that we iron out all of the problems. We have to make sure all of the props are there and all of the costumes are going to work. We have to make sure that the lights and sound cues are all in place.

I think it's going to come together. And whether it does or not, the curtain goes up on Friday.