Farewell to Love Never Dies

Today is the last day of Love Never Dies in London.  This sequel to The Phantom of the Opera has had a bumpy ride since it opened in March 2010.   I’ve never seen the musical, and before last spring I wasn’t even aware of it, but my passion for Les Misérables brought lead actor Ramin Karimloo to my attention.  He played Enjolras in the 25th anniversary concert, and since seeing the US television broadcast of the concert, I have been following him on twitter and his facebook page. 

Because I haven’t seen Love Never Dies, I’m somewhat removed from the emotions surrounding today’s closing.   That’s not to say I’m completely unfamiliar with the musical.  I’ve watched official clips on YouTube, visited the official website, and a very generous friend sent me the cast recording.   These are not substitutes for sitting in the Adelphi Theatre and experiencing the actual musical.  I know that, and that makes me sad.   What I will miss after today, though, is following the news about Love Never Dies from Karimloo and his fans.  For the last six months, tracking this drama has been surprisingly interesting.  First Karimloo was leaving the cast after a year as The Phantom, then he stayed on.  Then he was leaving in September.  Then the news leaked to the press, before the cast was told, that the show itself would be closing today.  The emotions surrounding this closing have covered all the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and for some, acceptance.

A new production of Love Never Dies opened this summer in Melbourne, and a touring production is planned, so the show goes on.  The Melbourne production is reportedly being filmed for a DVD release, and fans have been vocal about wanting a recording of the London production.  I can’t say I’m too optimistic about that happening.  I have no doubt that some type of recording has been made, but that doesn’t mean it will ever be released to the public.   I have more optimism about the upcoming Phantom of the Opera 25th anniversary concert, also starring Ramin Karimloo.   I’m also feeling optimistic about Karimloo performing in other roles in the future where we can see his real face.  It’s a nice face, and I’d like to see more of it.

So, farewell, Love Never Dies.  My best to all the cast, and to the faithful fans who waited at the stage door while Karimloo got out of his Phantom makeup, who tweeted to pass the time, and who posted their stage door photos and shared their stories.  It’s been awfully good fun.

More Actors, More Lists

My last post listed my 100 favorite British actors.  It was fun but exhausting to compile, since I had to rack my brain to remember them all.  Here are more lists of favorites, sorted by country of birth.  After the British actresses, I combined the men and women into one list.  All the lists but the Canadians are in alphabetical order by first name.  Next to the actor’s name is the movie or show that first had me sit up and take notice of them.  You’ll see German-born Michael Fassbender with the Irish, and Iranian-born Ramin Karimloo with the Canadians, so I cheated a little bit.  (It’s been known to happen.)

So many Canadian actors have become very well known after working in US productions, like Michael Cera, Ryan Gosling and Taylor Kitsch.  I like these actors, but I left them off my list.  I’m concentrating here on actors who I know primarily from Canadian productions.  Mostly.  Not always.   It may not be fair, but it keeps my list from getting out of control!

A couple of these actors are no longer with us.  They are missed.

British Actresses:

1. Brenda Blethyn  (Saving Grace)
2. Carey Mulligan  (Dr Who: Blink)
3. Celia Imrie   (Kingdom)
4. Charlotte Coleman   (Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit)
5. Dawn French   (French & Saunders)
6. Emma Handy  (London play: Vincent in Brixton)
7. Emma Thompson  (Fortunes of War)
8. Felicity Kendall   (The Good Life)
9. Francesca Annis   (Reckless)
10. Gemma Jones   (Bridget Jones’ Diary)
11. Geraldine McEwan   (Henry V)
12. Gina McKee  (The Forsyte Saga)
13. Helen Mirren  (Prime Suspect)
14. Helena Bonham-Carter  (Lady Jane)
15. Honeysuckle Weeks   (Lorna Doone)
16. Jane Horrocks   (Absolutely Fabulous)
17. Janet McTeer   (Precious Bane)
18. Jennifer Ehle   (Pride & Prejudice)
19. Jennifer Saunders  (Absolutely Fabulous)
20. Joanna Lumley  (Absolutely Fabulous)
21. Judi Dench   (Henry V)
22. Julia Sawalha   (Absolutely Fabulous)
23. Julie Walters   (Educating Rita)
24. Juliet Stevenson   (Truly Madly Deeply)
25. Kate Winslet   (Sense & Sensibility)
26. Katherine Parkinson   (Doc Martin)
27. Keeley Hawes   (Spooks/MI-5)
28. Minnie Driver   (Circle of Friends)
29. Pauline Collins   (Shirley Valentine)
30. Prunella Scales   (Fawlty Towers)
31. Sophia Myles   (The Abduction Club)
32. Stephanie Cole   (Waiting for God)

Least favorite British actresses:  Keira Knightley and Saffron Burrows

Irish actors:

1. Aidan Turner   (Being Human)
2. Chris O’Dowd   (The IT Crowd)
3. Cillian Murphy   (The Wind That Shakes the Barley)
4. Colin Farrell   (Tigerland)
5. Daniel Day-Lewis   (My Left Foot)
6. Dylan Moran   (Black Books)
7. Gabriel Byrne   (Into the West)
8. John Lynch   (The Secret of Roan Inish)
9. Kenneth Branagh   (Henry V)
10. Liam Neeson   (Rob Roy)
11. Michael Fassbender   (X-Men: First Class)
12. Saoirse Ronan  (Atonement)

Least favorite Irish actor:  Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Australians and New Zealander actors:

1. Alex O’Loughlin   (Moonlight)
2. Barry Humphries   (Dame Edna)
3. Ben Mendelsohn   (Vertical Limit)
4. Cate Blanchett   (Elizabeth I)
5. Chris Hemsworth   (Star Trek)
6. Heath Ledger   (Roar)
7. Hugh Jackman   (Kate & Leopold)
8. Karl Urban   (Star Trek)
9. Melanie Lynskey   (Ever After)
10. Noah Taylor   (Almost Famous)
11. Simon Baker   (The Mentalist)

Canadian actors:

1. Adam Beach   (Smoke Signals)
2. Nicholas Campbell   (Da Vinci’s Inquest)
3. Wendy Crewson   (The Good Son)
4. Matthew Ferguson   (La Femme Nikita)
5. Matt Frewer   (Max Headroom)
6. Paul Gross   (due South)
7. Dave Foley   (The Kids In The Hall)
8. Ramin Karimloo   (Les Misérables concert)
9. Bruce McCulloch   (The Kids In The Hall)
10. Callum Keith Rennie   (due South)
11. Sebastian Spence   (First Wave)
12. Scott Thompson   (The Kids In The Hall)
13. Ian Tracey   (X-Files: The Walk)

Brit Actors: A List

Over at the BBC America blog, Anglophenia, there’s been an “Anglo Fan Favorite Tournament.”  It started with 32 guys, and now it’s down to four (Alan Rickman, David Tennant, Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth).  The problem with the list is that there are so many of my favorites missing.  They also mixed up Brits with Irish actors, even including Michael Fassbender, who was born in Germany.

I decided to make a list of my favorite British actors, categorized by where they were born.  I had to cheat a bit, though.  Even though Andrew Garfield was born in Los Angeles, I’ve included him with the English.  I stuck to the ones still living and mostly still working.  I considered putting them in some sort of order, but in the end, I just alphabetized by first name.  (It’s interesting how many Ruperts and Stephens there are.)  Next to the name of the actor is the movie or show that first brought them to my attention.  This isn’t always the first thing I saw the actor in, just the first time I thought, “Hey, I really like this guy.”  I plan to do a separate list of Irish actors later, as well as Aussies, Canadians, and even a list of actresses.  This list is long enough!

There are a lot of actors who almost made my list, but I just can’t bring myself to add their names.  For example, I love Orlando Bloom as Legolas, but he hasn’t sustained my interest in other roles.  Hugh Grant has entertained me for years, but…I don’t know.  I guess I’m still cringing over his quote in the July 22nd Entertainment Weekly, about his involvement in News of the World phone hacking: “…it was difficult to get the whole country outraged.  But now they are incandescent.”

Also left off my list are young up-and-comers who I know I will like, but I just haven’t seen enough of their work yet.  These includes Eddie Redmayne, Dominic Cooper, Charlie Cox, and Henry Cavill.  I’m sure they’ll be on future lists.

I’ll think of dozens to add later, but here it goes:

Ever After

It may be 2011, but it seems like almost everything I’m watching this summer is from 1998.  A few weeks ago, I bought a 99¢ video tape of Ever After at a thrift store.  I’m not sure how much life my VCR has left, but you can’t beat the price of used tapes these days.  I saw a matinee of Ever After on the day it opened, and I was charmed.  Watching it again after all these years, it still cheers me up.  Considering how dismal San Francisco is right now, this can’t be a bad thing.

Of all the fairy tales and princess stories, Cinderella resonates the most with me.  I’m not sure why, but it’s probably because I grew up watching the 1965 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical with Lesley Ann Warren and Stuart Damon.  It used to be shown on television every year.  The Disney cartoon had less of an impact, probably because animated faces have never appealed to me as much as the real thing.  Ever After gives the Cinderella story a feminist spin.  This girl is not passively waiting for her prince to come rescue her from drudgery.  When he comes to save her in the end, she’s already rescued herself.  There are no fairy godmothers or magic carriages made of pumpkins, although Leonardo da Vinci could be seen as a kind of fairy godfather.

One of my favorite characters in Ever After is Melanie Lynskey as stepsister Jacqueline.  It’s refreshing to see a stepsister who thinks for herself and shows some compassion, rather than being simply nasty and one-dimensional.  Lynskey’s expressions are delightful to watch throughout the film, especially because she seems to be having such a good time.

Dougray Scott is handsome and appealing as the prince, and his chemistry with Drew Barrymore makes the movie work.  For several years after Ever After, I searched out his films assuming he’d play a similar romantic lead.  I had high hopes for Enigma, but I didn’t like it very much.  Who knows what might have happened if he’d played Wolverine in X-Men, instead of dropping out when the filming of Mission Impossible II fell behind schedule.  I had a friend about ten years ago who simply adored him, and it was always “Doo-gray” this and “Doo-gray” that.   Or was it “Doog-ray”?  I couldn’t compete with her passion or her insistence on the correct pronunciation of his name. ( Here’s a video where Dougray Scott says his own name, and he should be the final authority.)  Like other Scottish actors I’ve blogged about, including Ewan McGregor and James McAvoy, I wish Scott was able to use his real accent more often.   Anyway, I have to mention his costuming in Ever After.   I found this quote at IMDb: “I had never worn a codpiece before and I don’t think I ever will again.”  It’s definitely a distraction!

Almost as entertaining as the movie is the page of “goofs” at IMDb.  I seriously doubt that anyone watching the film expects it to be historically accurate.  It is interesting to learn that there was a French king named Francis who had Leonardo da Vinci at court, but it’s not really crucial.  I do have to argue with the “goof” about the Prince being introduced to servants.  Marguerite points out the servants to boast about the family’s possessions, and the Prince says he’d like to meet them because of Danielle’s influence, since she keeps scolding him about his attitude toward the common people.  Marguerite probably should have sipped liquid chocolate instead of chewing a solid piece, but the moment wouldn’t have been as funny.  People love to debate the origins of Rock Paper Scissors, and scissors themselves, in various forms, have been around since ancient Egypt.

Ever After isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s perfect for the summer doldrums.  I’m perfectly happy with my VHS tape, too.  I may lose some beautiful scenery off the edges, but that’s okay.  For me, it’s all about those faces!

The Conspirator

Yesterday, The Conspirator was released on DVD, so I checked it out of the Redbox right away and watched it with a friend.  As much as I love James McAvoy, I didn’t make it out to see this film in the movie theatre. Now that I’ve seen it, I don’t regret waiting.  I do like the film, and McAvoy is fascinating to watch, as always.  It’s just that my friend and I had to stop the film often, trying to figure out what was happening.  Maybe we should have just watched it straight through to see if things became clearer, but that’s just not our style.

The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford, is about the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.  Most of us know that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at the Ford Theatre at the end of the Civil War.  I’ll confess right here that most of my knowledge of the affair comes from that list of similarities between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations, the one that comes with copper pennies attached.   Turns out there was a conspiracy to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward at the same time.  Eight conspirators were arrested, and one of them was a woman.  Mary Surratt owned the boardinghouse where the men met, and her son John was identified as a co-conspirator.  Because he escaped capture, Mary Surratt was arrested and tried by a military tribunal, even though she was a civilian.  The movie focuses on her trial and the young Northerner, Frederick Aiken, who reluctantly defends her.  He begins the trial convinced of her guilt, and while he’s never sure of her innocence, he becomes passionate about defending her rights as a citizen.  She is denied a regular trial, a jury of her peers, even the chance to testify on her own behalf.  According to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the war-torn country is divided and in chaos, and only a swift, harsh sentence for those involved in the conspiracy will restore order.

Robin Wright and James McAvoy in The Conspirator

The part of the movie that confused us was right at the beginning, so I’m confident that I’m not giving away any plot spoilers.  It was the sequence showing the assassination attempts.  Who is that twitchy fellow who goes inside—a club? a private home?—has a drink at the bar, hides the gun in his jacket, looks around, runs out and rides away?  Turns out he is George Atzerodt, who was supposed to kill Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood Hotel.  He lost his nerve.  My friend and I spent half the movie assuming that this fellow was John Surratt, since he ran away.  It wasn’t until the actor playing John finally appeared in a flashback that we realized it was a different fellow.  Sure, upon viewing the movie a second time with the audio commentary, I could see that this Atzerodt fellow was one of the conspirators who was arrested.  Let’s face it, men with beards and moustaches tend to look the same.

Then there was the stabbing of William Seward.  Why was he lying in a bed with a strange contraption on his head and mouth before he was attacked?  Turns out Seward was in a bad carriage accident and was suffering from a broken arm, a broken jaw, and a concussion.  The jaw splint he was wearing deflected the assassin’s knife from his jugular vein, and Seward survived his brutal attack by Lewis Payne.  (More confusion here, by the way, since Lewis Payne was born Lewis Powell, and that’s how he’s listed on wikipedia.)  The way The Conspirator intercuts the three assassination attempts, it’s hard to tell if the fellow being knocked out on top of the stairs is guarding Lincoln or Seward, if the conspirator who runs away was in the same building as the conspirator stabbing Seward…again, it would be much clearer if most of these guys didn’t have bushy moustaches.  Maybe on a big theatre screen, it would have been easier to tell them all apart, but this is a review of the DVD.

All this confusion happens in the first fifteen minutes of the film.  Once that’s over, the movie slows down and concentrates on Aiken, Mary Surratt, her daughter Anna, and a few other key figures.  There are some wonderful actors here, including a favorite of mine, John Cullum.  He’s best know for Northern Exposure, but I love him from my LP of the stage musical Shenandoah.  The only casting that I question is Justin Long.  You can put him in a bushy moustache, but you’ll never believe he’s from 1865.  A nice surprise is Jonathan Groff of Spring Awakening and Glee.  I didn’t recognize him with his hair tamped down, but he does very well in a small role.  Another excellent actor who is hard to recognize, until he speaks, is Kevin Kline as Stanton.

I complained to my friend at the beginning of the movie that not only is James McAvoy wearing a beard, he is using an American accent and his eyes are brown instead of blue.  Fortunately, the eyes look brown due to the lighting of that particular scene.  They are very blue throughout the rest of the film.  McAvoy is great here, but isn’t he always?   I listened to the first 38 minutes of Redford’s audio commentary, and it took 35 minutes for him to get around to discussing McAvoy.  He revealed that McAvoy is allergic to horses.  I guess we won’t be seeing him in many westerns!  Earlier, Redford mentioned rather pointedly that often filmmakers are forced to cast well-known faces instead of great actors.  Since he kept praising the other performers and not saying anything about McAvoy, I was getting pretty worried.  Redford was just taking his time.  It seems he likes McAvoy as much as the rest of us.  He had some interesting insights about directing him.  Redford said that McAvoy’s intense energy allows him to do almost nothing without being boring in a scene.  Redford wants McAvoy to trust that energy more.  It will be interesting to see if McAvoy takes that to heart in his future performances.

The Conspirator left me with more questions.  During the Civil War, was there a border between the North and the South that was patrolled or monitored?  Could civilians travel or move across it?  I wonder this because Mary Surratt and her family were southerners who moved to Washington DC during the war.  I suppose a lot of civilians were accused of spying for the other side.  I also wonder what happened to John Clampitt.  According to wikipedia (never the most reliable source!) Mary Surratt was defended by another fellow besides Aiken.  Now, this is not the Maryland Senator and Attorney General Reverdy Johnson, played by Tom Wilkinson in the movie.  It’s yet another lawyer.  Having too many lawyers must not have seemed dramatic enough for the movie.  Poor Clampitt, forgotten all over again!

Tracking Tracey

I’ve been busy this summer watching Canadian character actor Ian Tracey in his many television and movie roles, a daunting task when you consider that he’s been acting for 35 years.  You may not be familiar with the name, but you might recognize the face.  He’s very distinctive looking, with a wide weathered face, a furrowed brow, and a large gap in his front teeth.  He’s not very tall.  He reminds me of a pit bull, and I mean that in best possible way.   Tracey has a gruff voice and he’s not a classically trained actor, so he’s perfectly suited to play blue collar, regular-guy types.  He’s played cops, criminals, bar owners, fishermen, sociopaths, soldiers, homeless guys, and henchmen.  He is able to convey a dangerous menace, so it’s not ridiculous when he shoves around a guy who’s much bigger.

Tracey first came to my attention on The X-Files, when he guest starred in the episode The Walk.  He played a bitter vet in a VA hospital with no arms or legs.  If I hadn’t been so focused on Johnny Depp, I would have noticed him a decade earlier in his four appearances on 21 Jump Street.  Tracey is based in Vancouver, and both of these American television shows were filmed there.

Huck Finn

Ian Tracey began his career as a child actor.  I’ve already discussed Tracey’s first television series, Huckleberry Finn and His Friends.  I found this series on YouTube, where I also discovered his 1976 film Dreamspeaker, which is one of the most depressing movies I’ve ever watched.   I even found stills from Tracey’s first film, The Keeper with Christopher Lee.  Watching the YouTube trailer to the cheesy series Tropical Heat (a.k.a Sweating Bullets) led me to buy the third season on DVD at a bargain price, but it’s so bad I can’t bear to write about it.  I’ll just say that Tracey played bar owner Spider Garvin in seasons 2 and 3, and maybe he just needed the money.  Or, maybe he wanted to soak up some sun in South Africa, since this is one of his few shows that wasn’t filmed in Vancouver.

The Outer Limits: Judgment Day

Hulu.com is a good place to find more of Tracey’s work.  All the episodes of 21 Jump Street are here, as well as The X-Files (season 3, episode 7: The Walk), Highlander (season 5, episode 4: Glory Days), and The Dead Zone (season 2, episode 17: The Mountain).  Two episodes of The Outer Limits (season 2, episode 9: Trial by Fire; season 6, episode 1: Judgment Day) and one of Poltergeist: The Legacy (season 2, episode 13: The Devil’s Lighthouse) are also on hulu.  There’s the more recent series Rookie Blue (season 1, episode 10: Big Nickel) which is available with a paid hulu plus subscription.  (Sadly, it seems like every time I go back to hulu, something that was free before has now become part of the paid subscription.)  His six episodes of Sanctuary rotate in and out, so you just have to watch for those to stream.  The first two seasons of the Canadian series Da Vinci’s Inquest are also on hulu, and this is the show that kicked off my interest in Tracey.

Da Vinci’s Inquest ran for 7 seasons from 1998 through 2005, followed by one season of Da Vinci’s City Hall.  Dominic Da Vinci is a Vancouver coroner, played by the brilliant Nicholas Campbell, and he works with pathologists, forensic scientists, and Vancouver homicide detectives on cases of suspicious death.  What makes this show unique is the realistic depiction of police work.  More often than not, the bad guys aren’t caught, let alone identified.  Even when they are identified, many times a case can’t be made to convict.  There are even times when it can’t be determined if the cause of a death was accident or homicide.  The good guys don’t always win, if ever.  It often leaves me at the end of an episode feeling seriously blue.  What really depresses me, though, is that only the first three seasons are available on DVD or streaming.  Petitions, emails, and messages in fan forums have so far failed to get the rest of this excellent series released.  As the show reaches the end the third season on my local Retro TV station, I’m holding my breath to see if we go into season 4, or if they just start airing season 1 again.  My email inquiry to the station has received no answer.

Ian Tracey as Mick Leary in Da Vinci's Inquest

Ian Tracey plays detective Mick Leary, a younger cop who is usually paired up with old school veteran Leo Shannon, the wonderful actor Donnelly Rhodes.  Leary has a problem ex-wife, a problem brother, and a sweet romance with one of the pathologists.  One of Tracey’s best episodes in the season 1 finale, The Capture.  A traumatized victim leaves him in tears, and later he gets pissed off at a suspect and threatens to shoot her through a car trunk.  I love his range of emotion and his intensity.

Da Vinci’s Inquest was created and written by Chris Haddock.  Once it ended, Haddock cast Tracey as crime boss Jimmy Reardon in his CBC series Intelligence.  This show only lasted for two seasons, and I knew when I started watching that it ended abruptly with a cliffhanger that was never resolved.  I’ve read online debates over whether the story was veering too close to the truth about water rights and Canadian/US politics, leading to its cancellation.  Even knowing I wouldn’t get any resolution, I am still surprised about how emotionally invested I got in this show.  I’d love to know what was going to happen next.

Klea Scott and Ian Tracey in Intelligence

Intelligence is a complex drama about Mary Spalding, head of the Vancouver Organized Crime Unit, who’s fighting for a promotion to CSIS, a Canadian version of the CIA.  When a stolen briefcase containing informant files lands in Jimmy Reardon’s hands, she is forced to swap information with him.  Reardon is a third generation weed smuggler, who heads up the family business which includes legitimate operations like shipping.  He’s fighting his volatile ex-wife for custody of their 12-year-old daughter, and he’s also struggling to keep his loyal but undisciplined brother in line.  Reardon should be the bad guy, but he turns out to be the most moral, level-headed character in the show, and the most sympathetic.  Sure, he’s in the drug trade, but he won’t touch anything besides marijuana.  He’s fair to his business associates.  He obviously hates resorting to violence, and he just want to go about his business.  His long term goal is to become legitimate and move away from criminal activities.  The real bad guys here are the agents in the intelligence network, who are busy backstabbing their associates, when they’re not covertly recording them or lying to their faces.  They never arrest any bad guys, they just turn them into informants and let them continue their activities.  Matt Frewer plays one of the worst offenders, and he’s also a fascinating actor.  In the first season, his character Ted Altman is secretly working with the DEA to bring down Jimmy Reardon, threatening Mary Spalding’s career in the process.  This show has a bunch of other interesting characters, too many to describe here, and it helps to watch these episodes back to back to keep them all straight.  Chris Haddock uses many of the same actors who appear in Da Vinci’s Inquest, and it’s fun to see them playing different roles.

I’ve got many more films and television shows to watch before I’m finished with Ian Tracey’s body of work.  I won’t be able to watch everything, since so many series and seasons and TV movies are not available.  At least I can look forward to new roles in the future.  He’s appearing in the pilot of Alcatraz, a midseason drama series airing on Fox.  It’s set here in San Francisco.  Was he filming in my own backyard?  Possibly.  According to IMDb, filming locations included both San Francisco and Vancouver.

One of the things that surprises me about Ian Tracey is that he has almost no internet presence.  There is no facebook fan page, no twitter, no major fan site, not even an actor profile on the official Da Vinci’s Inquest website, at least not on the international version.  Here’s his profile from the US site.  He’s obviously a very private person.  Perhaps his brush with teen idol status during the Huckleberry Finn days makes him avoid the limelight, or perhaps he just wants to work as an actor without all the fuss of stardom.  I will respect his privacy and not make a fuss, but I will recommend that you watch some of his brilliant work.

Update:  Here’s an article about Tracey from 2006.   It gives more information about the missing Da Vinci’s Inquest seasons than I’ve found elsewhere, at least about Tracey’s character.

Happily, my Retro TV channel is showing season 4.  Tracey is brilliant, especially in the fifth episode, “Ugly Quick,” where his character is reeling over the shooting death of a fellow officer.

If you’re a fellow fan of Tracey’s work, be sure to leave a comment!  Also, let me know if you have seasons 5-7 of Da Vinci’s Inquest, or Da Vinci’s City Hall.

BATS Improv

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an improv show called Spontaneous Broadway, performed by the BATS Improv Main Stage Company.  I searched all over their website to find out what “BATS” means.  It was kind of buried, but it’s Bay Area Theatresports.  This improv troupe is based at Fort Mason, and they perform in the intimate Bayfront Theater.

BATS Improv at Fort Mason

When we arrived at the theatre, we were given golf pencils and slips of paper to write down our titles of “songs that have never been written.”  These were collected and placed in a bowl.  Six actors came onstage, three men and three women, with actor Ben Johnson playing host as the other five (Diane Rachel, Barbara Scott, Corey Rosen, Jenny Rosen, and John Remak) grabbed a handful of slips from the bowl.  They sorted through the titles and selected the ones they wanted to use to improvise a song.  The host explained that the audience members were theatre investors being presented with songs from musicals in development.  Then each actor was called up to sing their song and tell us the title of the musical it was from (also invented).  Sometimes the actors performed a solo, but they were also able to recruit as many other performers as they needed.  Even the host got to participate.  A drummer and a keyboard player accompanied the actors.  They went around twice, so most of the actors got to create two songs.  At the end of the first half, the audience members were asked to choose which song they wanted to see developed into a 40-minute improvised musical after the intermission.

I’m still not quite sure how they did it.  As I’ve said many times before, I’m not in the least bit musical, so I have no insight into how you make up a song on the spot.  The musicians may have had a preset list of tunes, known by the actors, because I don’t know how else they could have accompanied the songs.  The songs rhymed, and they were mostly very clever and funny.  Barbara Scott did one dripping with innuendo called “Toasters Are Better Than Toast” from the musical Stayin’ Single.   John Remak had us shaking with laughter singing “The US Geological Survey” from the show 9.6.  Journalists brainstormed stories in Newsroom with the song “A Pencil and A Prostitute.”  Diane Rachel railed against her ex’s new squeeze in the song “Wassup Motherf**ker.”  My favorite was “The Pub’s Closed, Get Out” from the musical Jolly Old England.  This was the song the audience chose for the second act musical.

Because I’m such an anglophile, I was delighted that they were doing a British musical.  The show that the actors improvised probably should have been called Fishy Old England.  It was set in a fish market and a fish restaurant, starring fish sellers and fish chefs.  The British accents were pretty inconsistent, but that just added to the humor.  Diane Rachel seemed to have the most fun stretching out her vowels.  I really liked Corey Rosen, because he had a mischievous twinkle in his eye, and he was so committed to holding his invisible basket of fish.   The show could have had a lot more English references and a lot less fish, but it’s easy to be an armchair critic, not to mention an armchair improviser.  It’s one thing to sit in the audience and think of things you would do, but a different story when you’re on the stage on the spot.

Last Saturday, I went back to the Bayfront Theater for another BATS Improv show called The Life Game.  I got to see things from a different perspective, because this time I was a volunteer.  It’s been years since I worked backstage as a techie, and it was so much fun to be running around a theatre again.  Visiting the lighting booth and going backstage brought back lots of memories.  Three of the actors from Spontaneous Broadway were back for The Life Game, plus another four from the Main Stage Company’s group of nineteen regulars.  Veteran actor Barbara Scott gave each of the volunteers a welcoming hug, and we were invited onstage for introductions with the actors.  I was assigned to concessions, where I sold bottled water, beer, wine, cookies, and candy.  I had a great time.  Not only did the volunteers get to see the performance, we also got a voucher to see another show for free.   This was a particularly good volunteer experience, so I’m doing the improvised Elvis Musical tomorrow, and I’ve also signed up for Warp Speed, an improvised Star Trek.  Sorry, BATS, it looks like your stuck with me now!

Fort Mason, San Francisco

The Guns of August

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”   Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary

Starry Night Over The Rhone, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Because my post on Armistice Day, the end of World War 1, got such a huge response, it seemed right to commemorate the beginning of the Great War.  Here’s the complicated timeline:

June 28, 1914  Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo.

July 28, 1914  Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

July 31, 1914  As an ally of Serbia, Russia announces full mobilization of her armed forces.

August 1, 1914  Germany mobilizes her armed forces and declares war on Russia.

August 3, 1914  Germany declares war on France.

August 4, 1914  Germany declares war on a neutral Belgium and invades in a move designed to defeat France quickly, causing Britain to declare war on Germany.

A Star Shell by C.R.W. Nevinson. 1916

References: The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman is a detailed account of the start of World War I.   The timeline of WWI came from this site.  Here is a poem based on Nevinson’s painting.