The Daily News
1 How is it that getting involved in after-school activities has spread the field and made me go vertical?
2 Football terms.
3 Translation: by adding things I want to do to my personal schedule, I have taken the offensive on a workload that has seemed indomitable.
4 Somehow, by singing tonight at our Red Cross talent show, and by working on Grease, I have actually lessened my workload. I stay longer at the school, but I also can sit in at the rehearsals and grade papers. If I were home I'd probably not be getting the grading done.
5 My students are officially in a drama/Shakespeare/poetry unit, each of which can last several weeks.
6 So they are working on skits and projects while I circulate, and then grade papers on the school's dime. They are finally having a little fun, and so am I. Skits generate less paperwork. And I was able to be at the very first rehearsal for Grease.
7 Yesterday David posted the cast. We wound up with over forty kids in the cast, and still had to turn some away just because of the numbers.
8 At the rehearsal, we had a read-around. While David, Rachel, and I sat on the stage, the students read from the seats in the audience. It was pure fun hearing that raunchy show come alive. David moved it pretty swiftly, leaving out the parentheticals, and playing each song perfectly on cue.
9 With an initial speech about the importance of the project, and how it wasn't about individuals, David set the tone: We Go Together. After a sincere buy-in speech, he went into brief introductions, beginning with me.
10 He told me to tell them my name, my year in school, and my role.
11 I told them my name, claimed to be a sixth-grader, and saw my role as a support person.
12 He said, "Tell them your role." I was confused, but I had forgotten that I will literally play a part in the show. I don't know if I'm supposed to tell people, or even if I have, but I have a role and a song in the production. SO fun!
13 After the intros, we did the readaround. Some REALLY talented actors began to gel. At one point, in the drive-in movie scene, David, Rachel and I played the three people in the movie. We rocked it. All three of us hammed it up, and the kids loved it.
14 The second part of the rehearsal saw the kids already grow, get louder, and get better. After Act One, we took a break. I enjoyed listening to the the cast trying to sing We Go Together, because they made up their own words to "rama lama lama kadinga da ding da dong." I politely corrected them, and they laughed that I knew it.
15 Grease has two things that slow it down: first, it has some really raunchy dialogue, much of which is hysterical, but a tad inappropriate. Most people who have ever watched the disco-soaked movie know this. The second thing that slows it down are some references so old as to be obscure to modern audiences. This issue did not go unnoticed in the 2007 Broadway revival, which changed a reference from Sal Mineo to Elvis.
16 Sal Mineo was a young Sicilian actor whose mom put him in acting and dancing school as a child. As a teenager, he landed a role in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tatoo, working alongside such theatrical luminaries as Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach. He went on to do some serious dramas.
17 In 1955, he played a young boy in Six Bridges to Cross opposite Tony curtis, leading him to the part of Plato alongside James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, where which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. In 1960, at the age of 21, he was again nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Otto Preminger's classic Exodus. He dabbled a bit in rock 'n' roll, and even had mild success with hits such as Start Movin' (In My Direction) and Part of a Fool, but his true calling was for theater
18 After a tremendous film career, Sal Mineo's career slowly declined. He had been stereotyped as a troubled teen, and as he got older, his market value slowly evanesced. With his career almost over at age 37, he joined a 1975 stage production of P.S. Your Cat is Dead in San Francisco. The show was well-received. Mineo received rave reviews as the show moved to Los Angeles.
19 Following a rehearsal on February 12, 1976, Mineo returned to his apartment in West Hollywood. As he passed a dark alley, he was attacked and stabbed to death. Differing witnesses reported differing stories. An arrest was made, but the proof wasn't there. A year later to the day, a similar crime was committed to an actress named Christa Helm.
20 Police immediately re-arrested a guy named Lional Ray Williams, a pizza delivery man who had been the initial suspect. After the death of Helm, Williams was sentenced to 57 years in prison for that crime, as well as for ten robberies. Although Williams claimed his innocence to his dying day, prison guards had heard him confess to the murder of Mineo.
21 There is much more to the story of Sal Mineo than I have room for here, but it illustrates a point about period pieces.
22 Sad story.
23 The fact that his brief mention in Grease was scratched with a pencil and replaced with Elvis demonstrates the difficulty of doing a period piece. Grease is filled with references to forgotten rock heroes, 50's idioms, and classic television shows.
24 I'm not that worried about those references. I know who Troy Donahue was, and I know who Sandra Dee was, for instance. The students likely don't.
25 The audience will be young and old. Grease has that power. It also has a couple of touching scenes at the end, when we finally begin to care about some of these characters.
26 The young people who come to the show are going to be there to see their friends, and to laugh at a lot of the raunch. They won't understand Fabian or Troy Donahue, but it probably isn't very important. I remember not knowing who Betty Grable was when we did See How They Run in my senior year of high school. I had heard of her, but when my friend Steve's Humphrey character looked at a magazine, he muttered, "So THAT'S Betty Grable," it was lost on much of the cast.
27 It made no difference to me, and it slipped past the younger audience. The older people laughed. They knew who Betty Grable was. All gams.
28 Well, it is getting to be the middle of four a.m. again, and I find myself in need of a little rest after chasing down the Sal Mineo story.
29 I have a long day ahead of me, with teaching, an IEP, a dress rehearsal for the Red Cross after school, and a performance that opens at six.
30 My cough feels almost gone, so wish me luck. I'm on early in the show if you want to come up and enjoy it. We're at Evergreen Valley High School. Google it and get directions.
31 I'm doing a Sinatra tune, and I'm dedicating it to my Dad.
32 So I do have to pull away here and get a little more shut-eye.
33 Have a great day, and if you're in the neighborhood, come on up to the Chill on the Hill and enjoy the evening. It's for a good cause.
34 See you soon.
35 Peace.
~H~
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