Chronicles Continued

The most wonderful play.  The situation is placed in the city of Jerusalem around 1167 when the three major religions lived together in relative harmony.  The casting and acting were superb, but the real meat was the parable told in the latter part of the play.  Truths are easily conveyed when the middle eastern story form is employed. The question put to ‘Nathan the Wise’ [who is a Jew]  by the Muslim Sultan was: of the three ‘gods’ which is the true God? The answer was in parable form and brilliant!

The lights that are at the top of the Empire State Building are on different days different colors.   In the event you were wondering what they were: for the month of March:

6- white, orange-  5th anniversary book of morman

8- magenta- united nations-women and heforsheartsweek

9- blue, white- north shore animal league of america

10- orange- national kidney foundation and world kidney day

11- orange- cycle for survival from memorial sloan kettering

12- blue, red- big east conference and men’s basketball tournament

16- blue, green, orange, red, white- 10th anniversary of SportsNewsY.

17- orange, white, green- st pat’s day

18- blue, purple, green- 10th annual gala of  jonas center for nursing & veterans healthcare.

19- faint sparkle [8:30-9:30]- world wildlife foundation & earth hour [they don’t say what happens at 9:31]

 

Long before I began acting, I believed that Opera was the ultimate form of stage art. Now that I understand the craft of acting, I am even more convinced.

Here in the City it has been years, maybe decades since I last attended.  It has been a choice due to price; one can feed a family of four for a week for the price of one ticket.

One day a couple of months ago,  I sponsored a fellow actor for a role in a play.  As a thank you, as he is an opera supernumerary, he offered me one of his discount tickets.  I accepted.  This evening, when I appeared at the box office to collect my ticket for Don Pasquale, I had been assigned a low letter, center orchestra seat.  The Metropolitan Opera house seats in 5 tiers, I was on the floor with the wealth who shell out the big bucks for season tickets and I LOVED IT.  More than that, I was transported.  The casting was divine the voices, the likes of which I have not heard in years.  There were two! encores — that I have never experienced and at the curtain, with the audience all on their feet, the curtain calls were many and long.  I want to go again!!!!

The exterior of the Lincoln Center Opera House

The Stage – height is at least 100 feet [could not find exact number]

This is one side of the house, five tiers and seating capacity for 3,788 bodies.

Oh, and these.  it used to be – truly in the olden days t- that the super titles were above the stage, now they are more explicit and on the seat back right in front of each person.
The choice of language is English, German, Spanish, Italian….It had been a loooong time!

In my effusive thank you to Matthew, I asked him if I could go again!  He is going to see if there are any more tickets for this season.  I can now leave this life in peace…..

Joe, a fellow actor and my current scene partner and I are in my apartment, as of 5;30 pm today, rehearsing Act 3 scene 1 of ‘All My Sons’ by Arthur Miller.  There are lines in the script where Joe, as husband to my Kate, yells at me. In the script, I call him on the act of yelling at me.  Joe and I run it and run it, with different emotions, takes, feelings, but consistently he has a place or two where he raises his voice at me.  [In our building we have an illegal Airbnb in apartment #1 and as we go through these paces I wondered if anyone is hearing this, as Joe’s voice carries and I hear doors closing.  In a hotel you might report it to the front desk.  Here there is no one ‘in charge’]  We finish up at 6:45 and just before he leaves, I offer to make a photocopy of some information for him.  While waiting for the copy,  I check my phone, which has neither rung with a call nor buzzed with a message.  I see a message from my upstairs neighbor – of whom I have written before, posted at 6:34 -it reads ” Max, let me know, at any hour, if you ever need help at home.”  Immediately i realize that he was hearing us through the floor and he thought I was being abused.  I write him back – “Hi James, we are rehearing All My Sons and I wondered if any of the neighbors heard.  You are so thoughtful!”, but realize that is not enough of an answer.  I show the message to Joe as he leaves and say, I must go upstairs and make contact so James knows that I am really acting and not in trouble.  James next text says” Oh well I guess that counts as an affirming if layman scoring of “Well Done on the acting.”  Joe leaves and I run up the stairs.  James upon seeing me at the door accepts my invite to come down and have a glass and for the next 2.5 hours we chat.  To put the event behind us, I show him it is a script, and confirm that there is a performance date.  He confides that he came down the stairs and stood outside my door listening.  Not knowing it was a script, he said he was just waiting to see if it escalated to another level and if it had, he was going to bang on the door, call 911 and then break in.  He also said that the ‘cryptic message’ was because he didn’t know but that the ‘person in my apartment might read it.”   My choice had been to be whispering and so he said he didn’t hear my voice except for the line : You stop that”, which I say when the husband threatens to shoot himself.   How deeply touched and reassured I was that a neighbor with whom I have such minimal contact would go out of his way to secure my safely.  {I am now curious as to his history to be so attentive to such an event}.  And they say you have no human-ness in a big City.  What reassurance.  For our next rehearsal, I’ll hang a sign on my door.  [James is an airline pilot and often away, so he didn’t know what I ‘do’ here in the City.]

and perhaps the reason is, she is such a convincing and complete actor, they did not recognize her.  Lupita Nyong’O leads with two other actors in Eclipsed.  Tremendous casting, directing and the weakness in the writing was over ridden by the forces on stage.  This might tour.  Keep a lookout.

Bedlam’s sold-out, critically acclaimed production of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, adapted for the stage by Kate Hamill, returns to New York under the direction of Eric Tucker. This highly theatrical, immersive production is presented by one of downtown’s most innovative theatre companies.

“Critic’s Pick: Gossip gallops in Bedlam’s invigorating stage version of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’…The would-be and might-have-been lovers in this enchantingly athletic take on the perils of Austen-style courtship, adapted by Kate Hamill and directed by Eric Tucker, find themselves pushed and pulled by the forces of speculation run rampant. Why, a young woman can’t take tea with a friend without feeling that prying eyes and ears are pressed against the walls and windows, a sentiment to which the ensemble gives literal and very funny life. An ever-rising Babel of voices sometimes overrides the dialogue. And the scenery, which turns out to be highly mobile, has been mounted on casters, since it takes a well-oiled set of wheels to keep up with the velocity of rumor. And you thought Jane Austen was all sedentary sitting around and sewing. No troupe in New York these days rides the storytelling momentum of theater more resourcefully or enthusiastically than Bedlam.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times