I've gotten into far left field working on the script, sets and props for the performance, which is coming together well for a change. We like to keep it secret for maximum fun for the audience, so I'll be vague, but I just wanted to report how much fun it is.
Here's the set from last year. I had to promise everyone I would simplify greatly and I am trying, but I love making these things and it is so far from my usual art experience of production screenprinting that I'm loving the opportunity to let loose. This view is just one of several as we went through several "rooms" of this Mystery Dungeon trying to teach our two AI devices what Jell-O even was and why it was important.
Somehow we always land on a "Jell-O saves the world" narrative and this year will also follow that as this world needs a lot of saving right now. We are all reeling like much of the world at what is happening in the macrocosm so we plan to be extra ridiculous and hopefully provide some catharsis for our audience and ourselves. It has to be fun...and it isn't easy to find anything really funny about what is going on, without ignoring a lot of what isn't. But we are carefully navigating through all the things we want to say and a lot of things we can't say.
The video of last year isn't the greatest but we're lucky to have it, as this show happens briefly once and then it is a memory. There have been a few shows that were superb and videos that were not, and none of us really remember everything. I know for a long time I was stuck in the back with my shirt table and couldn't see or hear what was happening on stage, before I started performing in 2013. Now the problem is more that I get tunnel vision on stage and am concentrating so hard on my lines and keeping things organized that I don't even see other people's costumes or how things work on set. I do know that people take up a lot more room than I expect and that's a big reason why I have to scale back my set plans every year. It's a little bit funny. Last year I had to take quite a few items home at tech rehearsal.
But the years when it is more spare still work great if we maintain our cleverness throughout the collaborative writing part, where people write their parody songs and we attempt to fit them together in a coherent narrative that we can them build out as we go. I'm on script three this weekend and have outlined it, put in some lines, but plan to do a fully written version and then a streamlined one with the lyrics pulled out so everyone learns the sequence and we can identify hard cues.
Our band is amazing and packed with real musical expertise so our practices are lively, with the guitars noodling and people singing little bits out loud as we also try to go through the script and firm things up. People develop their characters over time and we are honing in on how they will interact and what will be funny or fall flat. There is pacing to consider...like you have to keep any slower music confined so that no one gets bored, and you have to remember things like we only have a couple of mics and if you want your lines to be heard, you have to speak into them correctly. Most of us are amateurs at this; I know I am.
But I do love this writing stage and it's fun letting my mind work out its ideas for the set pieces I am going to make. I love having a wide-ranging process for working on the production as well as the event, and I really love having this three-month (shorter now with the earlier show date of March 22) space to just enjoy it all. The only real rule we have is that is has to be fun.
Here's the video from last year. Sorry about losing my costume...it wasn't as well-thought out as I meant it to be. I thought the set changes worked out fairly well though, even though most of them weren't really necessary. The audience likes to use their imaginations too, so this year they will get to do that even more.
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