Tag: theater

Thanksgiving

Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I’m used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I’m actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven’t played the game since college, and I don’t remember being any good at it at the time.)

With the warm weather, I’d been joking that we should have a Thanksgiving barbecue. The first thing I saw when we got there: a barbecue. Okay, it was being used to cook a turkey, but still…

There was also the highest pie-to-person ratio I have seen in a long time. I think there must have been at least 10 pies, if not a dozen. Probably enough for everyone there to eat half a pie!

We stayed in on Friday, avoiding the insanity of Black Friday sales (though I did look through the 15 or so emails from various online stores whose lists I’m on), then drove up to Westwood in the evening to see Equivocation (Shakespeare gets caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot).

Current Music: Some video game from someone else in the waiting room at the car service dept

Drowsy

Finally started getting my sleep schedule adjusted, only to send it completely out of whack this weekend.

Friday I just took a break from everything and caught up on comics. I read the first issue of Madame Xanadu (looks promising), re-read the first volume of Welcome to Tranquility and finally read the second.

On Saturday, we went up to LA to see The Drowsy Chaperone. It was the first time in years that I’d gone to see a play knowing little to nothing about it. It was a send-up of 1920s musicals, structured as a fan sharing a favorite from his record collection. It was fun, but I don’t really have any desire to see it again.

We ate at a restaurant called Tesoro, which turned out to be at the base of that amphitheater-like area below the Omni Hotel. I got lost earlier trying to get to it, because I got off the parking lot — excuse me, the freeway — a couple of exits before Grand, and figured that if I took 3rd I’d be able to catch up with where the directions said to be. Somehow I’d never noticed that there were multiple levels of streets with the same names. So instead of catching up to 3rd and Grand, we ended up in a tunnel underneath where we were supposed to be…

Today we went out to see Hellboy II, which was quite good. One of the things that makes it work is that, like Iron Man, it takes itself just seriously enough…no more. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a scene near the middle of the film that is absolutely WTF-worthy and hilarious, but it works. Also dropped into Borders to pick up the new Temeraire novel, and walked out with 3 books…

I also finished a novel, Ringworld’s Children, the fourth volume in the Ringworld series. I think my favorite of the series was probably the second one, The Ringworld Engineers. This one looks structured to be a final book, but then I suppose the others were too. It’s a series in the “Hey, I have another idea for this concept!” sense (or, in some cases, “Hey, fans pointed out scientific implausibilities, let’s see if I can come up with a story that fixes that”), not an arc sense.

Current Music: Close To You (Mirrormask version)

Not Walking in LA

After Wayzgoose on Saturday afternoon (where we caught up with various fellow UCI alumni including wayens ), alenxa  and I went to see My Fair Lady that evening at the Ahmanson. It was a very enjoyable performance, though there were times when I couldn’t quite catch what people were singing — especially Higgins, in his sort of speak-singing numbers, and almost anything involving Eliza’s father. (Surprise casting: Marni Nixon as Mrs. Higgins.)

We finally decided to try having dinner in downtown LA instead of eating early or in the car. It turns out that a lot of downtown restaurants offer free shuttle service to the Music Center. The restaurant we picked was Cuidad, and was very good, though a bit pricey.

Comic Con ♥ Avenue Q

I’ve been checking weekly at the Ahmanson Theater website to find out when individual tickets go on sale for Avenue Q. (alenxa and I saw the abbreviated version in Las Vegas last year, and it was great.) They have season subscriptions open, but they’re in the form of shows A,B&C + your choice of shows D,E&F… and I’m only interested in shows A,D&E. (I forget which shows Katie wanted to see, but B&C weren’t on her list, either.)

Last night I decided to see what Ticketmaster said about when tickets would open. On searching for the show, I discovered that the tour stops in San Diego this month. All month. Downtown. Right next to a trolley stop, across the street from Horton Plaza, and within walking distance of the convention center.

So, bird in the hand and all that. After last year’s Wicked-at-OCPAC fiasco, I didn’t want to risk missing the show because the entire LA run sold out before I could get to it. I bought the tickets for San Diego, and we’re going to go Wednesday night after picking up our badges.

On a related note: They Might Be Giants tickets are on sale now for an LA concert on October 3, and they’re scheduled to be in Anaheim on October 5. Anyone interested?

Current Music: “Super Girl,” Gin Blossoms
Current Location: work

What a Wicked Thing to Do

Last week, the Orange County Performing Arts Center sent out a notice that tickets for Wicked would go on sale Monday at 10:00 AM. It noted that seating was limited due to “unexpected demand” and recommended using the website for orders:

The quickest way to acquire tickets will be ordering online at the link provided below, choosing your date, and then selecting the “Best Available” seating option, which allows the computer system to select the best seats.

So yesterday morning, I checked the website around 9:30… and the website was already down. I tried calling at 10:00 and couldn’t get through. By 11:00, the website was still down, the phones appeared to have been disconnected, and I decided to take an early lunch and drive up to the box office.

My first clue that something was wrong was that I had to park on the roof of the parking structure. There was no sign of a line from above, but as I approached the stairway leading down to the box office from the main entrance, I started to hear the commotion of lots and lots of voices.

I followed what looked like a loose line back toward the parking structure. As I reached what appeared to be the end of the line, I realized it was actually two lines — or, more accurately, one line making a U-turn at the entrance to the structure. I followed it back toward the box office, and got almost all the way up to the front before finding the end of the line.

There was no way I could get through that in an hour, or even two. I figured I didn’t need to see the show that badly, went to grab lunch and returned to work.

I kept trying both the phone and the website over the course of the day, occasionally able to get a list of showtimes and ticket prices, but not much else. And by the time I could get into the phones or website today, they had completely sold out.

OK, shows sell out. I can deal with that. But there are two things that particularly annoy me about this:

First, some genius planning the tour decided it would be perfectly OK to have a two-week run in Orange County and no stop in Los Angeles. That meant that in addition to everyone locally who wanted to see the show, everyone in LA who missed it last year or wanted to see it again was competing for the same tickets.

Second, OCPAC specifically suggested using the website, which turned out to be incapable of handling the demand even before tickets even went on sale. (This is one case where it would have been better if they’d used Ticketmaster, who would’ve been able to handle the traffic.)

Actor’s Nightmare

I haven’t done any acting in years, but I still occasionally get the Actor’s Nightmare. (When I saw the Buffy episode where Willow dreams she’s in the play that doesn’t quite make sense, I sat up and said, “I’ve had that dream!”)

Last night I dreamed I was in a community theater or children’s theater production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It seemed to be only the songs from the movie, not the entire play. It was opening night, and there was a certain lack of sufficient rehearsal.

The canonical actor’s nightmare is like the clasic final exam nightmare—the final exam in the class you never actually attended, for instance. The play makes no sense, you don’t know your lines, you’re not even sure how the scenes go together, but everyone else knows what they’re doing. (I never did figure out what the tanks were doing in Oklahoma in one of my dreams.) This was different: I hadn’t just missed rehearsals, there hadn’t been enough rehearsal. There were scenes we hadn’t even blocked, never mind actually practiced.

So it’s opening night, it’s a makeshift theater (basically a conference room with a pair of doors near one end, one going to the descignated green room and the other outside), and the audience is arriving. We’re all “backstage” (i.e. in the next room), I’m running through songs (OK, we havent rehearsed this part, but I know most of the song anyway…), and for some inexplicable reason I’ve been cast as Gaston (it didn’t make sense in the dream, either), and I’m running through the song, when I realize… who’s playing LeFou? I start asking the other actors, and nobody knows. I ask the stage manager, and he doesn’t know.

Did I mention I have the vague sense throughout that this is the theater troupe from Something Positive?

So the audience is here, the lights (room lights, we don’t have any actual stage lighting) are up, and people are out there starting to sing, and we don’t even have the entire show cast yet, never mind rehearsed! I’m trying to figure out just how much I can muddle through the opening scene without someone to play off of, and I’m not even certain we have anyone playing Belle out on stage…

…and then I woke up with “Going Through the Motions” running through my head.

Current Mood: 🙁restless
Current Music: Going Through the Motions