What the F**k Did You Say?

Let me just start off by saying this... Urinetown is brilliantly written and poetic in much of it's lyrics and dialogue. Now that I have prefaced...

...this shit is hard to say! Just memorizing lines becomes a chore for our midwest vocal chords. Mind you, most of us hail from or have been influenced heavily by the St. Louis area-- a metro known for its "unique" vernacular (highway Farty Far). So maybe it is just us. Maybe other companies don't have this problem... maybe they all pronounce it "yoorintown"... those bastards!

The other challenge is in creating character voices and still enunciating properly. The voice you pick and your delivery can be funny as hell but if they can't understand what you're saying, who cares. The worst feeling in the world is looking out and the audience has that "I don't understand" look - you know the look. It's the same one people surely got trying to understand Helen Keller at first. I am having that problem with Hot Blades Harry and I am sure others are struggling with it as well. There are a lot of parts in this show that rely on building believable characters and as that process goes along, I'm sure we are all hyper-aware of making sure the audience can understand us - at least I am trying to be. Maybe its just me! Maybe I am the only one worried about it! Maybe no one else cares and I am sweating over this little detail for nothing! OMG! Oh Wait! Scott Miller is concerned... thats right....PHEWW!!!!

And I haven't even mentioned the singing.... I am trying to approach this like when I was in madrigal choir where everything is over enunciated and exaggerated because once we start singing together, we don't want it to become a big ole' gob of yuck! There is this one line that goes "Cladwell's nuts, no ifs ands or buts". Easy to read but hard as hell to sing and get all the words in there. The problem for me is I tend to belt it out too loudly to over compensate and I got a note for it last night, so I need to pipe down... woops.

On a new note - we start blocking act 2 tonight. We ran act 1 last night in its entirety for the first time... and it wasn't too shabby. We'll get there! Oh yeah... we were off book for act 1 last night as well.... a little rough in spots but I have faith in us (myself anyway...screw the rest of those people... hee hee).

Enough blabbering by the guy none of you know and/or care what he says. Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH

We are all going to die!!!

For those that don't know-- Urinetown centers around the idea that the world's environment has gone to shit--at one point Lockstock even proclaims that our current way of life is unsustainable.

So today I saw a very disturbing article in the Times that says more than a quarter of the country's 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost. Worker bees are failing to return to their hives after setting out on their morning commutes. Scientists are so far at a loss, but theories range from genetically modified crops to cell phone signals, etc. (in other words.... HUMANS COULD BE TO BLAME!)

While the loss of some bugs may seem a minor problem, honeybees are arguably one of the most important insects for food production, the article says, since they're the principal pollinators of hundreds of types of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts.

HOW SCARY IS THIS? Think about it people!!! Even a Republican should be able to figure out that with no bees, no pollination. No pollination, no plants. No plants, no food for animals. No food for animals, and the future doesn't look so bright. We'll be required to subsist on a diet of ocean-water and margarine, if we're lucky.

It is time to panic! We can go on killing everything around us and destroying our environment, but some day, it is going to sting us in the ass. People need to know that our way of life IS unsustainable!!!


Read the Times article


Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH

Ouchy!

Yesterday Robin (our brilliant choreographer) taught us the routine for "Snuff That Girl". WOWSERS! It is great (really great) but as usual, she worked the crap out of my muscles. See, once you get over 30 (going on 33 this year) those muscles that you haven't used for years tend to protest such a vigorous workout. I feel it in every part of my body today (especially my back and arms) but in a way its a very satisfying feeling. Its the feeling of hard work and when the pain comes at the price of making the number great... IT'S TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Wait until you see it though... think West Side Story meets Chicago (with a little bit of tap thrown in for good measure). This is the most "dance dance" I have done in a Newline show... complete with kicks and turns and a great ending pose that gives a shout out to a classic TV show (hint: not demons but ______) And this cast is brilliant. We need some polishing but I'll be darned if we didn't get it right away. This is going to be a great show. Get your tickets now!

Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH

Backstory Part 2

Hot Blades Harry:

Let me just start off by sayin' that I ain't gonna get all sloppy, mushy and sentimintile on ya here. I just wanna get my story out there and sets the record straight. My real name is Harold Gigante. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, when it was still a great town - it ain't no more. I got kicked out of high school in the ninth grade for fightin' (The dink deserved it. He broke my pencil so I broke his face). So naturally I turned to boxin'. I won 21 of 25 light-weight bouts but by the time I was 17 I had to stop boxing 'cause the Doc told me that my noggin couldn't take any more beat-in's. So here I was, a fighter that couldn't fight. I went through what was left of my prize money pretty fast (hookers and booze wasn't in short supply in those days) so I had to get a job at the local slaughter house where I earned the name "Hot Blades Harry". You see, my job was to slit the pigs throats and drain the blood as it hung on a hook right above my head. You get used to the squealing, besides it stops as soon as you slice the little oinker... it becomes more a gurgle (the thought of that sound still makes me laugh to this day). Most of the people in the place didn't want my job, but I loved it! One day I thought that I could really increase my paycheck if I used two knives instead of just one, and since we got paid per pig, I doubled my pocket change. I got so into my job that one day I was slicin' and dicin' away when my boss comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder. I turned around and sliced his ear off... woops. So they started calling me "hot blades" - and it stuck. It was the best job - killin' them things. Sure, nobody was wantin' to sit by me on the bus because I reeked of dead pig after work and yeah, you never really get the smell of blood out of your nose, but who cares. I was livin' "high on the hog".

Then the stink years happened. These people thought I smelled bad? The worst part of it was that water was gettin' in short supply so everyones was saving up and hoarding. People stopped takin' baths as much and the smell just grew. The markets crashed and we was thrown into a depression like we ain't ever seen before. I lost my job 'cause people stopped buying pork and besides, the pigs were in short supply now that there wasn't much water round to give them. It was all about keepin' yourself alive, not some dumb animal. Thats kinda how I felt about those people that died durin' that time... they was no better than the stupid pigs. Shoulda tried harder you schmucks!

So I headed west to get away from the stink of the big city and I finally found a nice town that smelled a lot better than NYC. I got myself a room at the local boardin' house... it wasn't a bad deal - you got one square and a 1/2 cup of water a day. They didn't have no slaughter houses around so I started pickin' up odd jobs around town. I made just enough to scrape by until the fees came. "No more private toilets." Your only option was to go to a public toilet and pay to pee. At first it wasn't so bad, but then the government started contractin' out our bladders to private corporations and the UGC took over. Along with them came the sleaze bags... the cops were actually working for the UGC now and everyone up there in that little tower was gettin' their palms greased whilz us poor people were barely makin' it day to day. Then people started disappearin' and we started askin' questions. We was told that they violated the law so they were sent to Urinetown as punishment. I have my idea as to what Urinetown really is, but none of us knows for sure. All I knows is that one of these days, themz people is gonna pay for what they are doing to us. Now we're the pigs and they're just waitin' to hook us so they can slit our throats.



And that was Hot Blades Harry. Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH

I Love This Part...

...The Back story.

For those that don't know, a back story helps you in your performance by giving your character a past, some weight, some substance. Actually it not only helps your performance but helps your fellow cast mates know how to interact with you when on stage. I have two characters to worry about this time so I will tackle them both in separate postings (and may revise every now and then). Here we go:

OLD MAN STRONG -

My real name is Robert Strong III. I changed it to Joseph for reasons you'll learn later on in my story. Before the stink years and the proceeding depression, I was a somebody. Not a somebody like that famous actor that got the Lifetime Achievement Oscar the last year they held the Academy Awards - what was his name? Oh yeah, Will Farrell - but a somebody that was strong, walked with his head tall and everyone knew they could trust. I was a professor of Political Science and I loved my job. I first became a professor around the time George W. Bush was in his sixth "term" (more on that later). I was young and ambitious and we had plenty to talk about. After all, we now know that his administration is primarily to blame for the environmental disasters that led the world to where we are today - I mean, come on! What man in his right mind authorizes corporations to melt the glaciers because they wanted to bottle the water and sell it at exclusive retail outlets around the world? And then came the move to "heat up the waterways around Texas to discourage illegals from swimming across them to enter the country - STUPID ASS, but I digress.

I met Josephine my second year of teaching... she was a cafeteria lady and I had the hots for her taco (Literally. They were REALLY spicy). Everyday I would go in and order my lunch and everyday we would flirt back and forth (nothing big - just the tongue between the fingers and her asking me if I liked my wiener wet or dry, you know... innocent flirting). So one night I'm in my office grading essays debating the pros and cons of the Great Iraq War and I decided I strongly needed a snack. So I made my way towards the cafeteria and the line of vending machines that surround the main eating area. I was deciding between Nutter Butters or the Oreo flavored flavored Doritios, when I heard a crash come from kitchen. Naturally I got curious so I peeked my head in and saw Josephine standing in the middle of the room covered in some sort of red sauce from head to toe. I casually said, as I was laughing, "You look like a tampon on a really strong flow day" - let me explain, I tend to not sensor words well and it was the first thing that came to mind. We both started laughing hysterically and I grabbed a paper towel and started helping her clean up. As she was wiping her apron with a towel, it started clinging to her bosom and I was transfixed. She caught me watching and next thing I know, we are going at it on the floor and we were completely covered in her sauce. Hot, strong and tasty I must say

For awhile we kept our rendezvous' a secret - you see Josephine was supposed to be dating the meat delivery man and I couldn't afford for my reputation to be tarnished with such a torrid affair. Eventually it all came out in the open and I was threatened with my job if it continued so we organized students, teachers and janitors alike to protest the school's "class system" that had been in place since most of the "non-faculty jobs" were filled black people. Needless to say we won (after a few car bombings and a couple of broken knees that just coincidentally happened to all of the delivery men trying to enter the campus and some strong words finger painted on poster board).

Flash forward to our wedding... We were so happy. I had quit teaching because we both found such joy in organizing the protest at the college, and we became active members of QFUOE (Quit Fucking Up Our Environment). At first we started out like any peaceful organization did - PETA, Green Peace, The Church of Scientology - but like all those before us, we soon found ourselves in a war that strongly demanded violence and we were up for the challenge. I soon became the leader of our little organization (now 2 million strong) and we fought with all our might to stop the environmental policies that were quickly degrading our natural resources... especially the water. All this time Josephine and I were determined to bring a baby into this world (rule number one of the QFUOE was that we breed our own followers - much like the Catholic Church). Unfortunately, as hard as we tried, a baby was not in our future.

We had pretty much given up on the idea of a child until one day we got lucky; Bush had declared himself dictator of the U.S in 2008 (in the name of terrorism) and a few years after we made one of our strongest statements yet - damming Niagara Falls with the dead bodies of all the arctic animals that had died due to the change in their environment up north - he declared the QFUOE enemies of the state. We moved under ground and relied strongly on Guerrilla Warfare to affect change in our world. We were down in Texas, trying to strategically place explosives along its border so that if we blew them all at the right time, the state itself would break off from the US and float away, when we met Lashondra. She was a young black woman who had once been one of the strongest writers in Bush's Propaganda Core (formerly known as the Press Core) when she slept with a young, strong, black intern and got pregnant. Since Bush had outlawed all breeding of "brown skinned people" because he was convinced that excessive melanin in your body meant you were strongly predisposed to being a terrorist, she had to go on the lamb. She joined QFUOE and became one of our best members. Time came for her to have the baby and apparently word had spread that the first black child in several years was going to be born, so Bush ordered every baby darker than the Crayola color "peach" to be killed and he also offered a bounty of 500 gallons of fresh glacier water to the person or persons who brought the body of the baby to him. Lashondra gave birth to a strong, beautiful baby boy and just as the cord was being cut the perimeter alarms went off. Josephine rushed the baby to safety, at Lashondra's request, just in time. A scud hit the make-shift hospital tent and killed her instantly.

It was the happiest day of our lives! We had a baby! We named him Robert Strong IV and we were the first family of QFUOE. After a close call one day (we were playing softball in the QFUOE Inter-league and Josephine slid into home and was declared out), Josephine got fed up with QFUOE (she was very competitive) and demanded that we retire. That day all of the world markets crashed on the news that the ocean had dropped in level another 2.5 feet that year and that the Nile River was being renamed - the Nile Creek. The low water levels caused raw sewage to stay in the sewers undiluted and every town smelled like Bourbon Street in New Orleans after Mardi Gras.

Over the next years it got bad. Bush was eventually overthrown and a new "democracy" was sponsored by a big corporation - Microsoft. Senators were reinstated according to economic levels of their area and campaign finance reform was a thing of the past. He who raised the most money got the office. The QFUOE was disbanded because we had obviously failed and Josephine, Bobby (thats what we called our son) and I moved to a small town in one of the poorest neighborhoods. I changed my name at this point, but it didn't work. I was on the list - the same list all the Grateful Dead fans were on in the 1960's. One day the armed guard came to our house and ripped out all of our plumbing and bathroom fixtures because the world was running low on water... all except Sweden. I could only get the lowest paying jobs around because of my rebel past (in fact I was kept under watchful eye) and we barely scraped by, but we were happy. It was announced that we would have to pay usage fees for water, including going to the bathroom and at first the costs were strongly based on your income level. The government was soon overwhelmed and they decided to contract out the administration of the utilities to corporations and the bidding war began. Money exchanged hands. Promises were made and the "strong arms" came out on top. In our region it was Urine Good Company. I eventually got very ill (Nitrate-itus) and could no longer work and by this time Bobby was old enough to get a job and he luckily got on with UGC as a toilet attendant. Josephine and I still reminisce about our rebel days and by cracky if I were strong enough I would lead another revolution to stop this insanity.

By the way, if you see Bobby, don't tell him any of this. We haven't told him about his mom and her brave past... we said she was a hooker in a brothel down in Brazil (we thought it'd be easier on him that way). Just go along with whatever story he tells you. Viva La Urethra!

And that was Old Man Strong. Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH

I Ain't No Idiot

So here I am at home on a Friday (pathetic I know) and I've been studying my music for Urinetown (even more pathetic) and I'll be damned if this stuff started sinking in. I was listening to the opening number over and over and you guessed it, over again and I decided to give it a rest and smoke a cigarette (kidding... I actually ate some ice cream - I am sooo gonna gain weight again and if I do I'm buying a carton). So I'm walking around the house humming the opening song and all of the sudden I stop dead in my tracks. "I THINK I GOT IT! I ACTUALLY GOT IT!" So I ran and got my little digital recorder to verify my suspicion. HOT DAMN I GOT IT!

I am more excited than a heroin addict that just got a fresh needle. More excited than a porn star that is hung between two guys like a roll of paper towels (God I love that phrase... I had to use it). So now my outlook on this show is bright. It doesn't seem like the impossible task I thought it was just this past Monday. Of course that is only one song out of a trillion or so (I may be exaggerating a teeny tiny bit there).

So get your tickets now because this cast member will be ready!
De-Klined here we come!

Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH

The Privilege of the Poor

All I have to say today is this... I DON'T HAVE TO BE AT REHEARSAL TONIGHT! YAY! Not that I will be slacking. I am listening and learning this G.D. music. I am determined not to let it get the best of me.

And for those of you wondering (like there's a slew of people reading this...GOD I'm a narcissist)--the smoking (or not smoking) thing is terrible. If you've never been addicted to anything, you won't know the constant nagging ache in your gut. I have reasoned with my self every way possible... "Maybe I'll just smoke at home" or "maybe I'll just smoke at work" and to be honest I'm not too terribly sure that either of those aren't still options for me. I am going to stick it out as long as I can, but this morning at the gas station, I was tempted to just buy a pack and end this hell. Even as I type here this evening, I would love to be puffing on a nice, mentholated Marlboro.

First choreography rehearsal is Sunday. More then.

Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH