film

There’s a hole in the world like a big black pit

Saw SWEENEY TODD last night with some of the actors from LYDIA. It was decadent and lovely, and it made me want to slit someone’s throat. I do like how Tim Burton makes the camera move like a rollercoaster, or a video game.

My favorite performance was Anthony’s, (Jamie Campbell Bower) which surprised me, cause I’ve seen a lot of insipid Anthonys – but this one was nicely blood-spattered and tormented. Joanna drove him mad.

For what’s the sound of the world out there?
(What, Mr. Todd? What, Mr. Todd? What is that sound?)
Those crunching noises pervading the air!
(Yes, Mr. Todd! Yes, Mr. Todd! Yes, all around!)
It’s man devouring man, my dear!
And who are we to deny it in here?

Here’s a video of Angela and George tearing up that number, “A Little Priest.”

If the names “Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, and Dawn” bring back memories of hiding these books inside less trashy kid’s books in the bookstore…

“First of all, huh? Little cowboy shoes? I don’t know what those are. Also, anyone who can imagine wearing these outfits should be taken out back and beaten with their little cowboy shoes.”

from one of the posts at Claudia’s Room, where Tiff blogs her way through the Baby-Sitters Club books. It’s so much fun making fun of the writing. (One of the actors in the show got a BSC book for Christmas, as a joke present, and the name of the blog.)

Using “books” as a category tag for this is stretching it.

“Dawn actually says, “People in California don’t have yard sales.” MY ASS! Come on Cali readers, back me up on this one! I refuse to believe that nowhere in Southern California has there never been a yard sale (or a more convoluted sentence).”

workstyle, writing

Shared Studio for Writers?

I was emailing with a friend of mine in a Calarts MFA, and she talked about spending long nights “in studio.” MFA students in art and design work together in a shared lab space, working on their projects simultaneously at their desks. We’ve seen a dramatization of this in PROJECT RUNWAY, where all the designers are draping and cutting at the different tables, just a few feet away from each other.

I wonder what it would be like to try the same thing with writers, or with directors. There are three new plays simultaneously being put up at the DCTC now, and I wonder if anyone has gotten the 3 directors together.

I suppose the Internet is the writers’ shared studio, of sorts.

When Meredith and I were working on our theses, senior year, we would go together to coffeehouses with our laptops and write at the same time. That was one of the most productive writing experiences I’ve ever had. If I had a bad sentence, or a tough transition – just like if I was having trouble draping a sleeve, I don’t know – Mere could help me.

And Sari has a kind of shared studio environment in her paper, where all the reporters’ desks are right near each other.

politics, travel

In the continued series of blogging about the war on Iraq from the nation’s bars,

I was in Golden, Colorado over the Christmas break. Golden is the home of the Coors Brewery, and also the home of Kersti, a friend from Ashland. We were at the Buffalo Rose – a biker bar with dollar bills with tacks in them stuck all over the ceiling – if you throw the dollar up and it sticks, you get a free drink.

And I talked to a veteran of the first Iraq war. He enlisted to get an education and to travel, and served for two years. His politics had now shifted to the point of being against this conflict.

We talked about union politics in the merger between Coors and Miller – Miller is unionized, apparently, but Coors isn’t, and the Coors employees don’t want the union because their benefits already exceed what the union guarantees – and then we talked about Iraq.

I told him that wherever I had gone in the US for the past six months, people started talking about the war, and he agreed that it was on everyone’s mind. His perspective was that the only people who weren’t willing to consider that the war might be a mistake, or its continuation might be a mistake, were those whose conviction in it came from religious beliefs.

The next day, as Kersti and I were driving back to Denver to have breakfast with the Millans, under falling snow, we heard the news about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and mourned the death of another moderate political leader.

Lydia

LYDIA, Week 3, Days 1 & 2

Back from Xmas, and we’re working through the second act of the play, for the second time. Tomorrow we’ll run Act 2.

Yesterday, going into a playful, childlike scene where 4 of the characters flash back to childhood, the director had the actors play Zip, Zap, Zop (an energy-trading circle game) and another game where everyone on the outside of the circle imitates the sound and movement of the person on the inside.

After this went on for awhile, she removed the 3 actors who weren’t in the scene and had the game continue with only the 4 characters in the childhood flashback.

Then they improvised the scene.

This seems like such an obvious thing to do, to let an exercise evolve into scene work by reducing the exercise to the characters in question, but I have never, ever seen anyone do it before. It worked well.

And today the director used a very simple exercise to work lines in a scene with physical tension, initiated by one of the actors. The two actors in question arm-wrestled while they ran the lines.

This allowed them to work the lines of the scene without having to trip up over the dynamics of the fight, but while keeping contact and energy between them.

directing, film

The Ladies’ Choice

“Hey little girl looking for a sale,
Test drive this American male…”

I was watching HAIRSPRAY again to get inspiration for the Convergence chorus project. I want the final mash-up of the Wasps and Persians choruses to be a full-out musical chorus number, at least before it all goes terribly wrong.

“Hey little girl on a spending spree,
I don’t come cheap but the kisses come free…”

Wikipedia on director Adam Shankman: “Prior to directing Hairspray, Shankman was known in Hollywood primarily as a fixer of lowbrow films—a director who could take charge of lackluster productions that were expected to flop and turn them into box-office hits. “I’ve done so many things I’m not super-proud of,” he admitted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

I think it is something to be proud of – one of the marks of a great director is being able to make good theater, or film, out of almost any script imaginable. But I’m glad he finally got material this good.

a propos of nothing, poetry

White Christmas, Indeed

It started snowing at about 1 am last night like it was making up for the week of clear skies. Outside, it looks like a sideways salt shaker.

I was trying to find a nice Charles Bukowski poem to put up here for Christmas – Death Wants More Death, for example – but I stumbled on this old article instead – about a guy who found some of his poems in the street in my old neighborhood in LA –

“…In any event, just weeks after Bukowski’s death, Stella came upon an important piece of the poet’s life in a heap of trash on a Los Feliz curb.”

As long as we can still discover poetry in the Los Angeles garbage, there’s hope – for both poetry and my city. (And for garbage.) I wish I was at home, especially over the holidays, careening down Franklin towards the Valley, but Charles’s ghost is doing a great job of holding down the fort. If you’re in LA, do me a favor – check your trash for poems tonight. And your poems for trash.

I have two Christmas parties tonight, one with little kids. I bought one of them a box of 64 Crayolas. She’s probably too young for it, but I want to give it to her anyway. I remember my 64-crayon box very well.

And then rehearsals resume tomorrow.

“….
and I run child-like
with God’s anger a step behind,
back to simple sunlight,
wondering
as the world goes by
with curled smile
if anyone else
saw or sensed my crime”

poetry

My Uncle Travelin’ Sonnet

This sonnet, 109, seems very appropriate to me for someone who’s on the road a lot. From Shakespeare Sonnet-A-Day.

CIX.

O, never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie:
That is my home of love: if I have ranged,
Like him that travels I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reign’d
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stain’d,
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.

I find myself reassured by Shakespeare using the same rhyme-word twice in different forms – stain and stain’d. It seems fine. In fact, it seems done on purpose.

I was thinking I would like to make a poetry mix of sort for people at some point, but I wish there was a better way to do it. I could xerox them by hand, or email them as an attachment or as text, but I really wish there was a way to have poems on your IPod. Maybe it has to do with getting actors to read them out loud, recording them. But then I also wish that you could simultaneously see the lyrics on the screen as you listened.

acting, criticism, writing

“Acting — good, bad and indifferent — can lead you down some strange and regrettable byways of opinion.”

Charles McNulty writes for the LA Times about whether the merit of a performance is found in its acting or its script, particularly in reference to the Ahmanson-based productions of DOUBT and HISTORY BOYS.

“Separating the player from the play, to paraphrase Yeats, is never easy. And critics themselves aren’t always adept at distinguishing where fault and virtue lie. An ambitious drama given an uneven premiere is flicked away like a piece of lint while a mesmerizing performance in a silly trifle can translate, as it did for Douglas Carter Beane’s giggly 2006 comedy “The Little Dog Laughed,” into not just raves but a Tony nomination for best play.”

music

8 Quickies And 1 Fantasia – A Mellow/Weird Cast Holiday Mix

So, one night in my past I was driving around LA, sick of KROQ and Indie and even sick of NPR and I put on the classical station and heard this crazy piece of music, “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” and it was the most incredible thing I’d ever heard, and I went to Amoeba and bought it right then and there, even before going home, and I didn’t know exactly how to put it on a mix tape, but hopefully starting out with eight short songs is the way to do it.

So I sorted my playlist by length and picked short weird stuff that I thought would somehow prepare the way for the Greatest Fantasia Ever. This is far and away the most mellow mix I’ve ever made. The fantasia made me do it. Gave it to the departing cast for their plane journeys.

The whole thing runs only about half an hour.

1. don’t know what this is. Someone gave it to me. (1.31)
2. intro -manau (1.41)
3.de la mata (anon.) – terra nova consort (1.14)
4. entre o rio e a razao – mariza ( 1.58)
5. territory – amy raasch (1.23)
6. hold on – dashboard confessional (2.13)
7. tomorrow – sean lennon (2.05)
8. a widow’s toast – neko case (1.37)
9. fantasia on a theme by thomas tallis – neville marriner, academy of st-martin-in-the-fields.( 14.19)

Dara Weinberg

writer // teacher // director // los angeles

Monthly Archives: December 2007