February 7, 2012
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The Daily News
1 Sat in on call-backs for Grease yesterday.
2 I forgot what a HUGE show this one is.
3 Especially for a school that has never done a musical.
4 There were interesting things happening though.
5 First, I was able to sneak a bunch of paper grading in from 3:30 to almost 7 p.m. It was quite easy to do, and to be fairly discreet about doing. I would simply do it when kids weren't auditioning.
6 This cut my work load down considerably. I also was able to watch a show unfold. As in any audition, there were awesome performances, and there were mediocre performances.
7 I'm still not officially a director. I'm more of a support and a semi-team member. I have kept my presence really low key. But David (the director) and Rachel (the vocal director) and I are in a bit of a groove. The students are in excellent hands right now, and I'm really beginning to see that it is unfolding quite naturally.
8 My cough has almost vanished. That's pretty important as well, because while it seems unrelated, it was nice to sit in at an audition and not have coughing fits going on. I also will hopefully be able to see my Dad this week.
9 The lockdown two weeks ago changed me considerably. It might sound corny, but it certainly gave me a new lease on life. I've had time to practice guitar. I've cut my paperwork down almost fifty per cent. I've gotten involved in things I love to do. I'm eating better. And today I'm going to begin my fun stuff.
10 The California High School Exit Exam is today as well. We have three teachers monitoring my room. One of the three is David, ironically!
11 I gave a mock test yesterday and my students threw the kitchen sink at it. The only students who did poorly were the ones who added at the semester. We reviewed the "test" yesterday with shows of hands of how many people got each question correct. By and large, these guys scored exceedingly high. At one point, I blurted, "WHO is your TEACHER???"
12 It was actually a pretty easy question they all got right. I humbled it with, "I had nothing to do with that answer. You could have gotten that one right in third grade!"
13 I fully expect my students to do well today. Our class monitors are David, and another wonderful teacher, Melinda Panes, an English 4 teacher at the school.
14 I just like how that all came about. The odds of me getting to work the test with David are pretty high. I'm guessing at times we could trade notes on the auditions.
15 I saw a glaring error he made in casting yesterday. I kept quiet, because I don't know that I should have any say in casting. He and Rachel did a fantastic job of placing the exact people I would have in the parts. There was one exception, but he might have been too excited about almost having a cast to have noticed it.
16 Other than that, a lot of it was exactly the same. The immortally awesome Shawna Fleming used to give me a rating system on singers, along with a few notes. That helped immeasurably, because you definitely want powerful singers in the leads. Rachel does the same thing. It is really helpful.
17 My feeling always was that I can turn a singer into a good actor, but I can't turn a good actor into a singer.
18 One discovers this over the years. It also seems to be a common conclusion we all come to. Sad but true. When I was a senior in high school, I got beat out for a major lead in Finian's Rainbow because I had no real musical training in voice.
19 I was upset, because I knew that I could sing. My audition was with my friend Steve Banchero, and I thought we did an amazing job of acting together. Steve was and is an awesome person, as well as an incredible musician. The directors saw that instantly. I saw everything from the point of view of an actor. I honestly thought I had done the best job acting.
20 The directors didn't see that. They saw a guy who had no vocal training. I'm guessing now that I might have reached for notes that weren't there. I sang because my family sang. Music and singing were a natural part of my growing up. Dad used to play piano, and my sisters constantly played songs from musicals. We all enjoyed singing.
21 My older sister Linda brought a bunch of friends over to our house when they had auditions for Guys and Dolls. They sang and laughed at all those incredible songs. Linda directs for an elementary school up in the Sacramento area. We talk shop all the time when we get together at Dad's.
22 She never got a part either. My other sister Gayle got fun parts. She was Minnie Fay in Dolly! and Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, which was in her senior year. Gayle sings semi-professionally at all sorts of places in the Bay Area. She remains an awesome talent.
23 I became the Sheriff in Finian's, a part I absolutely loved. I was a villainous fellow, whose main thing was "Ain't no one gittin' marrid around here!" We sneaked Gayle's current husband Chris into the show by inventing a "Third Deputy" at auditions. His job was to be a "yes" man to me. He got the non-part. I don't think the directors ever knew that there was no "Third Deputy" in Finian's. We naturally laugh about that one to this day.
24 In my senior year, our director, Ric Nazarenus had been approached by a young guy named John Irvin to do the Who's Tommy. John went on to play the Daltrey part brilliantly.
Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend
perform Tommy.25 Tommy was THE album that put the Who over the top, and which identified Roger Daltrey as Tommy, and as one of the greatest rock icons in history. Have a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHTdrPL22-Y
26 It was an exciting time. Back then, Broadway hadn't yet gotten a hold of that masterpiece. Ric had written Glyn Johns to see if we could get the rights. We began rehearsals without them.
27 About a month into the Show, we gathered for a rehearsal. Something was amiss. Ric put the cast and crew in a circle at center stage, with lights dim. We crossed arms and held hands as he told us that we couldn't get the rights to do the show. The auditorium fell silent.
28 I brought up the fact that at school dances, rock bands used to play covers of all sorts of great rock songs, and that they don't have to get rights. "Why can't we just do a series of tunes that happen to be from Tommy? We could call it 'The Amazing Journey!' Who'd know?"
29 That sort of idea, as ridiculous as it might sound, always comes up in situations like this. I know a local school that did Grease year after year by simply re-naming it.
30 Dangerous stuff, if you consider lawsuits and all. Did we care?
31 Nah.
32 We went on to do Tommy. Someone suggested we change the name from The Amazing Journey to Our Amazing Journey so that it would be more special. I hated the idea, because I thought The Amazing Journey sounded tougher. Daltrey is a tough guy, so I didn't like the softening, but everyone else liked it. I kept that to myself.
33 I had the dubious pleasure of landing the role of Uncle Ernie, Tommy's abusive uncle. I naturally loved it, because I liked being stereotyped as a villainous sort. Chris, the Third Deputy, knew a lot about music at the time, and he tried to get me to match pitch on one song, Tommy's Holiday Camp. When Ernie would sing, "Camp with a difference, never mind the weather, when you come to Tommy's, the 'olladie's forever...," I was supposed to go down to a lower note on the word "camp". I didn't buy it. I wanted to sing it high, which probably sounded horrible now that I think about it. That was my lack of musical training. I didn't bother listening to a musician. What would a musician know about music?
34 It didn't matter. We had a blast on that show. The first time we heard the Overture, we all melted. The band was incredible. Most of them became good friends after the show.
35 Our closing night was our last show, an emotional draining. We brought the audience up on the stage, everyone singing "Listening to you, I get the music, gazing at you, I get the heat, following you, I'd climb a mountain; I get excitement at your feet!" We gave everyone in the audience daisies. It was an absolute love-fest. I used this device later in my first Godspell.
36 Flash forward to yesterday's auditions for Grease. At one point, the boys auditioning sang a tune called Those Magic Changes, an almost religious salute to the four greatest chord changes in music: C Am F G7. You hear those in a billion old rock songs, including Teenager in Love, Silhouette's, This Magic Moment, and of course We Go Together from Grease. They come in and out of the show throughout, a sort of statement and a salute to the purity of old Rock.
37 Here is a Godspell-like version from the Broadway revival of Grease. The actor is Sam Harris, and I absolutely love the staging. Simple and soul-wrenching.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3g9iTwftso
38 One problemetic sitch with Grease is that it is always remembered as a sort of disco-film with a bit of rock thrown in. The Broadway script is completely different. It keeps those magic changes, and salutes the era with almost religious fervor.
39 It was an era when kids were told that the world could blow up within minutes. Young people went loony. Rock 'n' Roll was arguably launched from the absolute fear of the end of the world.
40 A few years back <wink, wink> we had an identical situation take place at YB. Ponch had called Samuel French, the company that handles Grease, and asked if it was available in our area. The guy he talked to said something to the effect of "Well, I can't really tell you that it's okay, but if you have some of the music and a script, I'm not going to tell you not to go into rehearsal."
41 And so we did. About a month in, we were informed that some professional company was doing it in our area, and that we couldn't do it. I did a replay of Ric. I circled everyone at center stage and informed them that we couldn't do it, that I thought they were an awesome group, but that it was too late to start another show.
42 Shawna said, "Failure...is not an option." I looked at the faces of those amazing students, and said, "Let's do a rock 'n' roll show!" I quickly wrote a somewhat mediocre script that gave us excuses to do a bunch of songs from that era. We researched the history of rock 'n' roll, and brought in all of the great songs. I called the show Three Minutes to Midnight, a reference to the nuclear clock that moves the minute hand towards midnight or away from midnight, depending upon the world situation. Midnight is the end of the world.
43 We jammed for a couple of months, and did a bunch of dandy rock tunes: Chantilly Lace, At the Hop, Get a Job, Dancin' in the Streets, Donna, Cryin', and a ton of others. Buddy Holly became everybody's hero.
44 If memory serves, we ended with a children's piano version of Holly's Every Day.
45 Fun Show, although I was never too happy with the script. It never mattered; we had a fun time, and it remains a great memory.
46 We have acting call-backs today, and a read-around tomorrow. David must be sleepless tonight, if I know casting.
47 So Grease is officially about to launch, and I'm happy to be in on that one. I'm pretty excited to be a part of a show once more. I haven't committed to it yet, because I have to keep my schedule free, but I don't mind being a consultant, as well as a support for this massive project.
48 So it's moving again on the 4 a.m. so I'm about ready to re-tuck and cover.
49 More to come.
50 Peace.
~H~
Here's a 2007 GMA performance of We Go Together.
Fast Forward to 2:11.
Happy Memories.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=subZfwb3Gwg&feature=related
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