Three Shows, One Me.

I am now certainly in the thick of it. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

When I first signed on to be the Production Stage Manager and Production Designer of Clemenza and Tessio Are Dead I was mortified I wouldn't have enough time to commit to fulfilling both roles. That is still a small concern, but not nearly as much as I originally thought. Things are coming together with C&T and its not nearly as complex as I was expecting it to be. It's very straight forward. Simple costumes, (relatively) simple props, simple set. The lights and sound will have to pick up the slack, but I've already selected some gobos that I like, and I'm working on recreating the sound effects from The Godfather on my own so we can use them for the key moments. I have to record one of the actors performing nearly every single line he has because most of them are offstage. Rehearsal props are due next week, so I'll be shopping for them most likely this weekend or early next week to pull together all we need. Other than that, C&T load in is still decently far away that I'm not too concerned.

The land of Godlight is much much different. After attending rehearsals for a week, we have settled on me fulfilling the Production Manager role. So I am the Production Manager of the Drama Desk award winning Godlight Theatre Company! Yahoo! Nothing honestly changes, I'm still doing lots of the stuff I was helping Joe with, I just have a different title this time.

Things are moving forward quickly though. We have had to split the company up into two different productions. I'm now getting a chance to work with the people I didn't get to on some of the older Godlight productions (those who came before I moved to NYC in 2007), and some of those who came after I turned Equity (casts of 1984, In the Heat of the Night). And then there's Lawrence who was in theory around for Slaughterhouse-Five but I never worked with him because he had to drop out. It didn't occur to me until recently that as often as my path with Lawrence has crossed, we actually haven't worked together.

An Impending Rupture of the Belly is different from what we normally do with Godlight in that Rupture isn't actually a novel. It's an actual, real life, normal, no related novel play. Matt Pelfrey, who wrote our adaptation of The Basketball Diaries, also wrote this play about a man who is determined to defend his family against any threat: Thermo-nuclear war, dirty bombs, or his neighbor and his dog. The show opens really quickly. Rehearsals have only been going on for a week or week and a half tops and we open on November 17th (Previews before that I believe).

I've been getting in touch with our Production Designer Maruti Evans (which is no simple task because he is constantly busy) and we've been ironing out some of the details about rentals and things like that with Theatre Row (we requested a bunch of stuff they don't have right now because other shows have claimed the equipment) and on our other production as well...

...which is Grand Central Winter by Sean Tyler (adapted by the memoir by Lee Stringer) moves into the Emelin Theater (OOOO! New Theater Stats to be had next week! YAY!). Lee is a pretty amazing guy. I met him this summer when Sean was in from the UK to work on the show with the company. He has some unbelievable stories to tell about his time living as a homeless crack addict, and apparently he even showed Sean where his old home used to be under the platform on track 109 of Grand Central station (it has since been boarded over). Sean has done a great job taking the story fragments from the memoir and creating one hell of a streamlined story which was so much fun to listen to the other day.

The cast will move go to the Emelin next Thursday (the 11th) and we'll spend the day teching the show, having a dress rehearsal and just hanging out in Mamaroneck. We perform at 8pm and then have a Q&A session with Lee and the company afterwards, and Lee will also do a book signing. I've seen the plans for the Emelin and it looks nice. I haven't done much more research yet, but that is one of my projects in the next couple of days is figure out what's near by the theater so the cast can know what's going to be around there (at least according to google).