It’s less than two weeks since my last post, yet once again I see the theme emerging of “crap, things are happening too quickly for me to write anything insightful or perceptive about them, so I’ll just have to say they happened and leave it at that.”
That is in no way a complaint. Over the past few days I have spent nearly all my waking hours at Shakespeare Orange County, and it can get exhausting at times; but if you ever stopped me in a rough moment and asked me if there’s anywhere I’d rather be, I doubt I’d come up with anything. In the years when I was just acting with SOC, this would be the time of year when my work was just getting started; now it has been a persistent top priority for me since December, and I’m already feeling the mileage.
Last night was our 2nd Annual Season Kickoff Gala and Celebrity Radio Show; which we are hoping to turn into a cornerstone fundraising and media event for our season. The radio show is an easy pitch to get celebrities down to Garden Grove for the day – they arrive mid-afternoon, do one read-through, and then have a high-class dinner and a show in front of an enraptured (and lubricated) audience that does not expect deep character work. They get to play without any pressure and contribute to a theater in the process. Not only do they do it for free, one of them told me after that she wanted to give us money for the season ahead. This year we were gifted with the awesome likes of Robert Hays (Airplane!), JoBeth Williams (Poltergeist), Rene Auberjonois (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), John DeLancie (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Seamus Dever (Castle) and many more. Since I was performing in the Gala, it meant I got to be in the official Cast Photo, and to be standing in a Cast like this is one of those occasional communiques from the universe that I might be doing something right.
Of course, to make the time investment as minimal and painless as possible for them (and as joyful and smooth for the audience), a lot of preparation work has to go into it to reduce the bumps in advance. Which required long days from dozens of volunteers, and for several of us to work very late the night before running through the tech for the show.
In the middle of all this, we are rehearsing the largest cast we have ever assembled for our production of Romeo & Juliet. Part of our goal is to make the town of Verona come alive and for the brawls between the Montagues and Capulets to feel like genuinely dangerous riots – which means a lot of talented actors committing to Ensemble roles and painstaking fight rehearsals that take many long hours working outdoors.
I think we have something spectacular in the works, though. And despite that I was low on sleep (and probably a little hungover), this morning after the magical experience of the Gala, I was right back at the Amphitheater rehearsing with them.
Honestly, let’s just leave it at that for this round. Much more to talk about, but we’ll get there. The juggling balls are all still aloft.