Frozen

I'm the absolute worst at writing movie reviews. I love almost all of them. I'm just too big a fan of seeing big moving pictures up in front of me to look with a critical eye. For me to find fault, it's got to be pretty bad. I can rattle off a few I've disliked -- Avatar, Happy Feet, the newest Benji movie, but that's about it. And my excitement at it all leads me to fill any discussion with enough spoilers to ruin the experience for others. So be for-warned, if you want the surprises in Frozen to be a surprise, read AFTER seeing the movie.

One of the best things about Frozen is that there actually ARE surprises in store for you, even after a full-fledged Disney advertising blitz. That was one of the things that struck my friend who saw it before me, so I was looking out for it and she was completely right. I don't really recall seeing either of the male lead characters in the ads, nor Marshmellow, nor the trolls.

The trolls. I LOVED the trolls. I suppose you had to figure they'd be in a movie based in Scandinavian myth, and they didn't disappoint at all. They looked like trolls should, kinda like the little troll figures you might have seen on a desk in the 70's, I thought. It was somehow familiar and heartwarming and you trusted them, or at least I did. The trolls also triggered my budding theatrical imagination. It seems all Disney movies are destined for the stage nowadays, especially the animated features. I almost thought this one looked like it was designed to be adapted into a Broadway show. When watching the trolls, I immediately imagined what my director friend would do with them on stage. She's great at involving kids in her shows and I thought these little guys would give her a great opportunity for some child stage time with little ones in rock suits suddenly unfolding into little trolls and dancing and singing away. It may or my not ever happen, but thinking about it made the movie that much more fun for me.

I'll save you going into the whole plot, but just say the movie was familiar enough to be easy and fun and very Disney-like but new and modern enough to seem completely fresh. Disney has had a tendency to be very derivative the last couple decades and I am glad to see them doing new things.

The music was spectacular, from the opening men's number through the incredible "Let It Go" to the end of the film, the music really complimented the story and was performed with incredible beauty and talent. I'll be buying this soundtrack very soon.

Oh, and not to forget the Mickey short at the beginning! I don't know what to say that wouldn't give it away other than it is worth the price of admission itself. I thought Paperman was awesome, and this tops it.

All in all, this was Disney at its best. Mom, dad and teenage son got to share in complete enjoyment of a funny, touching, exciting and absolutely beautiful film. This is what Disney is all about. Walt would be pleased.

"Descendants" Coming To Disney Channel

So here's the plot outline from the D23 website:

In a present day idyllic kingdom, the benevolent teenaged son of the King and Queen (Beast and Belle from Disney’s iconic Beauty and the Beast) is poised to take the throne. His first proclamation: offer a chance at redemption to the trouble-making offspring of Cruella De Vil, Maleficent, the Evil Queen and Jafar who have been imprisoned on a forbidden island with all the other villains, sidekicks, evil step-mothers and step-sisters.  These villainous descendants (Carlos, Mal, Evvie and Jay, respectively) are allowed into the kingdom to attend prep school alongside the offspring of iconic Disney heroes including Fairy Godmother, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and Mulan.  However, the evil teens face a dilemma.  Should they follow in their nefarious parents’ footsteps and help all the villains regain power or embrace their innate goodness and save the kingdom?

This sounds is to be a movie produced by and for the Disney Channel and directed by the same guy who brought us High School Musical. It's billed as an adventure/comedy, but the director is also a choreographer, so I sort of expect some song and dance involved. I may be wrong, they don't say one way or the other, but it's Disney, there ought to be some breaking into song and dance. It's supposed to premier in 2015.

I was intrigued immediately by this idea and went to read the comments about it on Facebook. Wow. People are downright mean about this one. It may not have hit me so hard if not for the explosion of snark during the recent Sound of Music Live, but coming on those heels, it did. It's almost as if people WANT to be disappointed or upset or even angry. I just don't get it.

Sure, as Disney fans we all feel invested in the culture surrounding the whole Disney experience, from movies to television to theme parks to stage shows to computer games to books to merchandise and on and on. Disney relies on that emotional investment as one key to its success. A lot of that investment is based in nostalgia and fandom for the things Disney has produced in the past, so when Disney "messes" with our memories by removing a favorite ride or changing a menu or re-making or serializing a beloved story, we can get defensive.

But I think maybe we've gone a bit too far. Look at the Disney message boards lately and all you find is complaints. The biggest investment in a Disney Theme Park since Cars Land, the coming Avatarland at Animal Kingdom, was being roundly panned before the first design element was mentioned. The new MyMagic+/FastPass+ system is driving the vacation planning geeks bonkers. And now when a new TV movie is announced, it's pounced upon and torn apart within seconds.

Ok, maybe all the things Disney does aren't for everyone. Maybe they aren't for all the Disney fans, even. But maybe we could give these things a chance before we attack the very IDEAS?

Back to Descendants, I have some questions. I wonder where the heck the Villain children came from? I mean, the heroes often end up paired up, Princess/Prince-style, but not the villains. The image of Cruella De Ville pregnant is......odd. But awesome, in its oddity. I can't wait to see how that's handled. If it isn't handled, if it's glossed over and left for us to wonder who slept with Jafar, then I'll be disappointed. But I'm going to wait and give Disney a chance.

It's A Small World Animated Series

 I'm in geek heaven. I just watched a Mary Blair inspired, Richard Sherman scored, Walt Disney cartoon about the Rosetta Stone. Five times. Without stopping in between. It's that good. This episode isn't even counted as a "real" episode, i think. It's sort of a commercial for Rosetta Stone language software, but the best, most subtle and pleasant commercial in the world. And, I would venture to say, the best explanation of basic linguistics for children ever. My favorite class in four years of college was an Anthropological Linguistics class. Did I mention I was in heaven? Not to give the charm away here, but I'm loving the photo the kid takes of the Mexican kids after telling them to say "cheese" and they say "queso." Awesomeness.

This series is apparently planned for six episodes, one and two are available now, and takes children around the world to explore other cultures. It's so well done, I can't say enough about it. It's cute without being annoying, the It's A Small World tune shows up a lot but doesn't smack you over the head, it is understandable to kids without talking down to them. Walt would be very, very proud of this one, I think.

If you have kids, or, really to be honest if you have a heart and soul, you owe it to yourself to check this out!


It's A Small World Animated Series Pilot

It's A Small World--Rosetta Stone

Episode One--Jolly Holi Day

Episode Two--Bricht and Braw

All Episodes on One Page

Let's See The Good Done By The Sound of Music Live

My friend shared a blog post on FaceBook this morning defending the IDEA of NBC's recent The Sound Of Music Live. The blogger, and Jen, were calling out "theatre people" for the vitriol leveled at this performance all over social media. I'll take the liberty of quoting Jen:

I, for one, was really disappointed that the majority of the theater-lovers on my friends list couldn't find the positives in "The Sound of Music Live", and instead chose to post only negative remarks. If theater is going to survive, it has to reach and engage new audiences. As a long time community theater participant, I'm not ashamed to append "by any means necessary" to that sentiment.

And the blogger, Emerson Collins, hit the nail on the head describing the atmosphere on the live interwebs duing the show:

 It quite clearly became a competition to see how creatively each person could say they hated it more than the next person.  I find that disappointing and somewhat sad.

He's right. It WAS a competition to out-snark the other person. My wife and I watched it together and she was reading and sharing the FaceBook commentary as we went along. It was truly sad. And mean. And entirely missed the point.

 I'm going to restate a lot of what Emerson wrote in his blog here, but honestly, reading his post felt like he wrote it after listening in on  Lisa and I as we watched the show and observed the reaction. NBC went way out on a limb to do this show. Live TV just doesn't happen, and people expect perfection on the tube. Very few have ever seen a live theater performance, and they don't know what to expect from one, or how to judge it. This wasn't at all exactly like live theatre. It was certainly a hybrid of that and television, with cameras following the action rather than the scenes being changed in front of the audience. But even given that, it was very different from what the modern television audience has come to expect. It took courage to even attempt such a thing, and as someone involved in community theater myself, I really, really appreciate that.

Given the challenge of drawing an audience to something new, they needed an ace in the hole. They found Carrie Underwood. I'm no great fan myself, heck, I was calling her Trisha Yearwood up until I sat down to watch the show, but lots and lots of people love the woman. She has a built in following and a name recognition (I don't count) that brought an audience to this show that a Broadway actress never could have. Was she a great actress, or even a very good one? Nope. She acted like a pop singer. Because, well, it's what she is. It's fine to criticize her acting, to an extent, but not to criticize HER for her acting. She was giving her all in an effort to make a show come to life for people who may have never had that experience. When was the last time YOU tried to do that, or anything like it?  Carrie Underwood did more, I think, to ensure theater will hang on for a while than the collected casts of all those shows on Broadway that very few can afford to go see. Emerson points out the numbers:

 18.5 million people watched the show, the largest non-sports NBC Thursday night since the Frasier finale in 2004.  (For the record, it would take twenty 3000-seat theatres nearly a year of performing every night of the week to reach that many people.)

Believe me, I  am in a position to fret over the number of tickets sold to live community theatre shows, and those are some stellar numbers. People saw something very close to live theater. It may have made them consider seeing an actual live theatre show in their own communities. It may have made some want to see one in MY community. It made the idea more accessible, I think, and that is important.

It's also what "theater people" tend to be worst in the world at doing themselves. I believe the race to be snarkiest is rooted in the basic elitism of many involved in theater.  I am in the theater, I serve as a board member of Brunswick Little Theatre, actually I'm going to be president of the group in a few weeks, but I am not of the theater. I've been made aware of that in ways blatant and subtle, purposeful and accidental, many times over the last couple years, and particularly during my service on the board. I have definite opinions about the arts and their role in the human condition, but I am hesitant to share them too much for fear of looking like a fool in front of these people. I'm getting over that. 

But I'm not over it yet. This is the closest I'll come to sharing my opinions on this beyond Lisa and my close friends. Jen and Emerson shared their concern about all the negativity turning people off of theater in general, or turning entertainment companies like NBC away from attempting a similar project in the future, but it affected me as well. Despite being as free with my opinions as anyone you are likely to meet, I never once commented on The Sound Of Music the other night. My disgust at the hate-fest was shared with Lisa alone. I've not even commented on Jen's post sharing the blog I enjoyed so much beyond simply "like"ing it. And I won't.

See, because I'm on that board and I have and will in the future advocate for or against performing certain shows or presenting theater in a certain way, I'm paranoid about what my "theatre people" friends will think of my opinion. I didn't want to be the only one out there pointing out the positives of Sound of Music because I feared it would make my opinion even less valid to the board than it is now. I'm pretty sure my fellow board members all put me somewhere on the spectrum between blithering idiot and raving lunatic. Even the ones I consider friends. The condescension at those meetings has been unreal. I am a pretty confident guy, but it has even gotten to me. I mean, I do have very little experience in theater, but that doesn't mean I don't love it. It doesn't mean people that haven't had the chance to experience it couldn't or wouldn't love it.

There is this natural feeling among many theatre people that the "others" are incapable of appreciating a show that isn't as basic and simple and familiar as possible. I suspect these people don't want to challenge audiences, or bring new audiences into the more accessible shows, because they like being an elite, knowing about things others don't. I mean if the guy who framed their house can enjoy and discuss in detail a bare bones, avant-garde production of Beowulf, how does that Masters of Education hanging on their wall make them a better person than him? And yes, I had that discussion with a builder friend of mine.

Art is meant to be enjoyed. It lives more with each person it reaches. Theatre is meant to be seen, it can and should be enjoyed by anyone with a heart to touch. The Sound Of Music did that for some people. We should not only let them enjoy it, but celebrate their discovery of a new genre and invite them into our world.

So, thanks Jen and Emerson. Remember you two, for the same reason that it is particularity hurtful to a show for theater people to hate all over it, the positive opinions of people like yourself influence and encourage the rest of us just as strongly. And we need it.

Disney Monorail - The First Ride At Walt Disney World

We're Disney Transportation people. We leave the car keys in the room while we're at Disney. We take long,
convoluted routes between resorts and parks just so we can use the Disney transportation system. We love the boats and even the buses that move you around the World, but from my earliest Disney memories, I've been totally in love with the monorail.

I mean, if you can look upon that thing, futuristic even though it's as old as the park, and not get excited, you're wasting your money on a Disney vacation. If public transportation was like this, I'd support the heck out of it! I love waiting at the station, peering down the track to see if it will be Monorail Blue, or Monorail Orange, or maybe, just maybe, Monorail Red. I love the silly door warnings in English and Spanish. I love seeing the resorts as we slide past, especially getting to go inside a hotel! I love people watching and seeing what "types" seem to be staying at the different resorts. I don't mind standing at all but I love when we get a whole car to ourselves. I love the whole experience. It's the perfect introduction to the Magic Kingdom, a little magic outside the gates.

So here is a tour of the monorail loop, with stops at all three monorail resorts, the Transportation and Ticket Center and of course the Magic Kingdom. It's shot by my son at almost 13 years of age, so understand you're seeing what he is interested in. Watch for the Avengers Monorail, the docked Electrical Water Pageant and Mary Blair's awesome mosaic in the Contemporary. Enjoy the trees and the parking lots and the glimpses inside the Magic Kingdom. But most all, Please Stand Clear of the Doors.

A Teen's-Eye View of the Monorail Loop

39 Lessons

Well, not exactly that many, but I thought I'd finally put down a few of the things I took away from my experience stage managing The 39 Steps last month. This was a different experience. Not bad, it had many good moments and on balance I had a really good time, but it I didn't walk away with the same feeling I did from Wizard of Oz, or even Tuesdays with Morrie or the Talkin' 'Bout My Generation shows. I don't think anyone did. Truth be told, this is my second attempt at writing this. I wrote a post about a week ago with the same name, posted it one night and within about 12 hours I deleted it. It was honest and fair, I thought, but after a night sleeping on it and reading it again, I decided it wasn't what I wanted up here. That experience alone tells me volumes about my mixed feelings after this show. But I'm going to try again. Maybe sanitized isn't the right word, but this will be an easier thing for me to read in a few months, I think.

1. Playing It By Ear

39 Steps was my first foray into "calling a show." This is a stage manager duty that entails helping to let the tech people know when to execute a light change or play a sound effect. I was in communication with Gillian, our light tech, during this show using a set of headphones and a mic. This was cool in that I love gadgets and this totally played to my walkie-talkie nostalgia. It always seemed Gillian was asking me a question or telling me something at the most inopportune moments, but it wasn't her fault and it was more amusing than anything else. The tricky part of this was that I had to give Gillian cues based on the actors on stage being in place and ready when I had no way of actually SEEING the stage. I was behind a blackout curtain. This meant I learned to know the pace of the show and the actors and to use my ears to tell what was going on out on stage. Luckily, the hollow stage made every movement quite loud enough to hear, so it wasn't terribly challenging. It was just pretty funny to me that my introduction to this aspect of stage direction was done blind.

2. Community Theater Is Held Together With Duct Tape

Well, maybe not exactly, but it would be much harder without it. I started the show with four rolls of different colors of duct tape and finished with, I believe, seven. Black, white, glow-in-the-dark and my personal favorite, Liz-in-Winter all had uses that required that color and no other. Duct tape held the fog machine pipe in place, kept the knife in Annabelle's back, held the shadow puppets together, let us know where the curtain opening was and kept random wires from clotheslining actors. My stagehand used it in manner not appropriate to discuss on a family blog. Duct tape is my friend.

3. DIY

We had a troublesome prop on this show. A lamp we used in one scene started shocking me during tech week and continued to do so pretty regularly. The tech director and director weren't bothered by this, so I just let it be rather than looking closely at the lamp to see what the problem was and fix it my own bad self. It turned out to be just a matter of replacing the ludicrously tiny light bulb. Anyhow, I didn't and so the completely predictable happened and we ended up shorting out about a third of the building. We blew lots of fuses in control boxes and blew out several relatively expensive light bulbs. The second act of that show featured a rather improvised shadow puppet effect and no fog machine and a darkened stage right and actors had to navigate some very sketchy steps with only little flashlights to see by. I could have prevented this with a trip to Lowes. Next time I will.

4. Dealing With An Off Night

The night the fuse blew was just an off show. I suppose it was good, in a way, that the lamp snafu didn't happen during a good show, but still, having such an off night was troubling. It was awkward and negative from the very beginning, when we all arrived at the theater long before show time. The strange thing was that we were coming off the best show of our run as of that point and had every reason to be proud and happy with ourselves and each other, but it wasn't like that. Anyhow, the important part was that we all came back for the next show and shook everything off and put forth a great performance. That was an important lesson, nothing in live theater is lasting, neither the good nor the bad. A great show doesn't ensure the next will be even better, but by the same token, a poor one doesn't throw the train off the tracks. Every night is a fresh slate.

5. Be Part Of The Immune System, Not A Band-Aid

This is far and away my favorite, and I suspect time will prove it the most valuable, lesson. Director Jen was happy, she said, with my ability to see a problem and fix it quickly. She wants me to learn, however, to slow down sometimes and think of a solution that not only fixes the problem, but does so within the show. I was a band-aid, I need to be a white blood cell. This is tricky for me as this is NOT the way my mind works. I'm not theatrical, but I want to be and I am trying to learn to change the way I think. It's a challenge, but a really fun one. This is why I enjoy working with Brunswick Little Theatre, and one of the best parts of my friendship with Jen. Both push me to open those new doors. And I'm getting more and more comfortable doing so.

Hat-crobatics

Director Jen made up that word, hat-crobatics, to describe a part of The 39 Steps wherein two actors switch between six characters during one short scene mostly by changing accents and hats. The scene is a great representation of this show in particular. Four actors not only portray dozens of characters and undergo numerous costume changes, but they also often act as their own stage crew, clearing and setting sets during the show. That's not to say the stage hands themselves are sitting on their hands letting the actors do all the work. The three of us also set and clear most of the scenes while also performing shadow puppets and running a fog machine. This is a very small operation. It includes only Jen the director, four actors, three stage hands, a dresser, a light board operator and a sound board operator. That's ten people handling the show in total while it's in performance, not counting Jen in the audience taking notes on ways we can improve. We all wear a lot of hats, if the truth is to be told.

But it seems to me in my very limited experience that wearing lots of hats is the name of the game in community theater. Maybe it's not so usual to have the actors play multiple roles or participate so much in the handling of sets during the performance, but it certainly seems to always involve a lot of multitasking. My model for this is Jen. Watching her create a show, because that's what it is, creating, is a lesson on multitasking. I was amazed both during Wizard of Oz and this show at how much the woman manages to keep in her head. She knows the script frontwards and backwards, knows her blocking, develops a vision for a set and keeps track of prop needs all at once. At the same time she's thinking about rehearsal schedules and cast parties and publicity and sound and light cues and finding tech help and creating special effects. I've seen her keeping a notebook full of lists and things getting added and crossed off all the time, but ask her and usually she can pull any tidbit in those notes straight out of her head. I don't know how she does it.

My job on her shows has been as stage manager. I'll admit, when Jen asked me to help her on Wizard as one, I had to come home and Google it. This is what I found on the interwebs:

Stage managers typically provide practical and organizational support to the director, actors, designers, stage crew and technicians throughout the production process....... Once the show opens, the director's work is essentially complete. Now it's the stage manager's job to make sure that every aspect of the production runs just as the director intended time after time, until the production closes. 

There was a whole page of stuff in the middle that made little sense to me. Another website offered the advice that a stage manager shouldn't show too much cleavage. I got that one covered.  Basically, a stage manager wears lots of hats as well.

Jen is a very hands on director, she delegates as little as she has to, I think. Stage managing for another director might be different, but for Jen it's mostly being there when she needs a hand and helping make what she wants to happen happen. During Wizard, I was one of three stage managers. I didn't call the show (more on that later) and another guy was largely responsible for organizing the set changes. I was primarily there to fix problems that arose with the cast and help any way I could. It was a great learning experience as I got to participate in lots of stage manager things without having all of it on my shoulders. Almost like Jen planned it that way....

This time, I'm all she's got. But while it's a complicated show, it's a small cast and crew, so it works perfectly as another step up my learning ladder. I rarely see the cast during this show. The babysitting aspect of Wizard is almost completely absent this time. Now I'm focusing on the set changes and technical aspects of stage managing during the show. It's a challenge that I'll write about after the whole run is over. I'm sure I'll have more and better stories after another three more performances.

The two months of preparing this show saw me wearing a few hats as well. Jen told me at the outset that she'd be asking more from me in terms of time at rehearsals than she ever has of a stage manager before. I ended up at the majority of them doing something of varying usefulness. When an actor was missing, I read his lines, and once even tried acting his part, which in hindsight was probably a mistake. When everyone was there, I was "on book" which meant feeding lines to the actors when they couldn't bring one forth. That's not as easy as it would seem. It's hard unless an actor is well-trained and knows to ask for a line when he or she needs one. We only have one actor of that sort in this show. The others tended to stand there for varying amounts of time struggling until either they bust out with SOMETHING or someone fed the line to them. It was tricky finding a rhythm, jump in too early and you interrupt the flow and step in on the actor's character, but wait too long and it gets the actor frustrated and everyone else feels really awkward. I got better at it, I think, as I got some more practice.

Between rehearsals I got to play at set dresser and prop man. I spent a day searching through thrift stores and consignment shops for just the right armchair. I sent lots of pictures to Jen, anyone who looks at the photo gallery in my phone is going to wonder what the Hell I was doing.  I finally found a good one and talked the seller down a decent bit, which is totally out of character for me. I also created a small prop, a fake newspaper page. That was great fun as Jen only had a couple instructions and let me play with the rest. I helped with a few more things, acquiring a big piece of paper for a map prop and finding fake, throw-able snowflakes.

When we moved into the Amuzu theatre, I got to put my lighting tech hat on.  I had learned the basics of

Scary Ladder. This photo only shows the top half...

lighting during our rock and roll show in the park, so when lights needed to be hung (using the scariest ladder EVER) I was the guy. I got to change gels and hang and focus lights and string extension cords and such. It was fun. Everyone pitches in during load-in, so we all had lots of hats. We painted props and built a screen to project our shadow puppets and installed a curtain to create some small little "backstage" area to work the puppets and store props. We managed to work the wiring so there's been no blackouts and the building hasn't caught fire. As we moved into tech week, we sorted cues and the smoke machine and the puppets and figured out how to (and whether or not to in some cases) move props on and off stage

Aside from my various stage manager duties, I was busy at home between rehearsals with publicity and keeping up the website and managing ticket sales. This is the first show we've used PayPal to sell tickets on our own website, and there have been a few glitches and some second guessing that really annoyed me and complicated things needlessly. Before shows, I have been closing out that day's ticket sales online and printing the ticket buyer lists, contacting the local newspaper editor to beg for space, and stopping for last minute supplies of duct tape and glow rings and batteries and art supplies and such. Nights after rehearsals and shows, I'd find myself downloading and editing pictures, sending photos and writing cutlines to the same local paper and checking sales and putting buyers on lists for future shows.

It's a lot of hats for sure, but it's been fun. I can't wait to do it again.

Hat-crobat. Wonder if I can put that on a resume?