"I need some serious touchin' up!"

What a show day.

When we finally got into our performance space, for the first time the whole week, we're shown our dressing rooms. They're antique, and we can only allow 10 people in them at a time.

This made changing into our costumes quite a drag. It took a very long time. So long in fact, that our dress rehearsal...our first on this stage mind-you was cut short. Not to mention the fact that because they're a union house, they had to open the house a half-hour earlier than we're used to. They didn't tell us that until it was time to open the house.

Well, if anyone can handle it, these kids can....Well, maybe. Our afternoon show at the downtown Paramount Theatre in Austin was our worst show of the season. They needed a rehearsal, so they took it. They took their chance to make mistakes, miss cues, and drop lines...it was just unfortunate that their happened to be an audience there. There were so many little things, the biggest of which being that one character didn't come out at all during a three person scene between he, myself, and one of our leading ladies. I did my best to cover for him, but his absence really confused both the girl and myself, and we stumbled over the scene, ruining the pace of the show to such an extent that it never really picked back up. (They audience stopped clapping after songs after that scene.)

This was the most talented group of kids we worked with yet, and they handled the issues well. It was really too bad that they didn't get the chance to rehearse in the space until the day of the performance. If they were rehearsing in the space all week...my goodness, I can't even imagine how incredible the performance would've been. I described the situation like this: In some celestial universe controlling room, my boss tapped on the shoulder of God, who sits at my boss's right hand mind you and proclaimed, Jake and Casey are mere rookies on their first tours, they don't deserve the best show in our company's history. We must throw them a wrench. If it weren't for that wrench, what a show we could've had.

And the evening performance was almost there. It went smashingly. As our lead girl put it "well, that one was really like a rehearsal." Apparently the kids needed to get it out of their system. The kids were incredible in the evening for, thankfully, a much larger audience. What lines they missed earlier were back, where we stumbled previously, we now soared. I was very proud of them, and they were very excited to have put on a great performance...but there is one priceless story from the second performance that must be heard.

So, the busy bees, our youngest group, wear these large pillowly "bee bodies" complete with stingers which are worn in the back. Well, after about a verse and a half into their song, the audience just slowly starts giggling, louder and louder, and I'm unsure what's going on as I'm singing. I turn around and look at the bee next to me, and I notice one of her arms is tucked into her body and she's working on tucking the other. As the giggles build, my eyebrows clearly question her. Seeing this, she holds up the front of her bee body...her stinger hanging between her legs. Then, she tugs on the stinger, holding it up for me to see...which the audience of course roars at. I just turned out, my face slightly more cherry tinted and laugh my way through the rest of the song before sending them off. I'm glad our summer tour didn't end without a blatant phallic reference from a 6 year old.

At this point, knowing I have a few other things to talk about, I'll warn you that this is a longer post than usual. Maybe that can make-up for my lack of posts the last couple of weeks.

It was a terrific experience working with the Union technical crew at the Paramount. They were so efficient, polite, and friendly with us as they helped us set up and tear down. Tearing down was especially funny. I explained to them, as I always do the helpers that we don't pack our steel base plates into our boxes before we put the boxes in the truck because they're too heavy to carry. They scoffed at that idea, and explained, "See, when that happens to us, we have two people carry it." The enjoyed joking about how heavy the remaining items were for the rest of the load-out. It was actually a lot of fun. I always think Techies are a lot more fun than most of the artistic types.

Last night, we rushed over to Coldtowne, an improv theatre in Austin. We got to see a couple of their teams, one of them a group of students, the other one of their house teams, and the artistic director of Coldtowne's favorite improv group. I could see why. They were an excellent team. What stood out to me first was their patience: their form was very loose, they had one main scene that their other scene ideas drew from. They started as a group of four roadies working for the band "skeetercat" and for, what was probably 20 minutes or so stayed in that scene before jumping into anything else...simply because the scne was producing some great watchable moments as it was, and nothing had jumped out to go to a different scene. Never once did it feel slow, old, or like they were rushing to find something. The show kept going that way, they'd jump to a scene based on the main framing scene and when they were doesn't, they'd just go back to the main scene. Plus, they were so incredibly smart, remembering and incorporating comments made form each scene, peppering them throughout the evening. They even managed to work a drunken heckler's additions in the show.

What was even more inspiring to me, was the theater itself. It was a very small building...the lobby area of which was being built to be a bar, it was a large area, with a nice bar in the corner. The theatre's fairly new, and their application to vend alcohol was hanging in the window. The charge for tickets was "$7-$10" $7 gets you in, but if you have it and wanted to give more, we'd be happy to take $10. I'm sure they wouldn't object to a bigger donation. They also said, its BYOB, so feel free to pick up something at the gas station next door and bring it over. The stage was made out of four 4x8 platforms, their seats were folding chairs and couches. They had a projector, a screen, and a desktop computer that served as both the projection system and the sound system. They lit the stage with 5 lights, and lit the house with 3 others.

So basically, they built an improv theatre for under 1,000 dollars. Under 500 if they didn't have to buy those lights. I can't wait to do that myself somewhere. It was great.

I probably had more to say in this post, but i don't remember. I started writing it on Saturday, and then kept closing the browser. Good thing blogger keeps things. Lucky for you.