An action-packed couple of days! Off to New York on Friday AM to meet with the producer of the International Festival of Musical Theater in Cardiff, Wales, Joanne Benjamin. Plans for the University of the Arts to participate in the spring 2005 festival were enthusiastically discussed, along with options for hosting an IMTTS international meeting in conjunction with the Festival.
Then it was only a short hike up the street to Studio 54, where this sight greeted me:



I was ushered into the darkened theater by librettist John Weidman, where a tech rehearsal was in progress. At the lighting desk, Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer were feverishly working on lighting "Another National Anthem."



The stage set is a remarkable fabrication of timbers and lights that suggests the frame of a giant roller coaster. It's as if the action of the play takes place in a lost corner of an amusement park, down underneath the rides where the fairground flotsam accumulates. The stage is flanked by vivid collages comprised of images from American popular culture, wretched detritus from our civilization including images of Mickey Mouse, smiley faces, Marlboro boxes, Velveeta cheese logos, Fallout Shelter warning signs, and playbills announcing performances by John Wilkes Booth. A winding staircase wraps around the set, ascending to an impossible height and disappearing above the proscenium arch. At the front of the stage, a flight of steps make it possible for the actors to move easily into close proximity to the audience.

The rehearsal progressed very slowly - they only made it through about three minutes of the play during the several hours I watched. I was struck by the ubiquitous presence of laptop computers in the room. Obviously someone had set up a wireless base station, and cast and crew alike were using it. Neal Patrick Harris had his TiBook onstage, and opened it every time there was a pause in the proceedings - which was frequently. When the break came, other cast members gathered around laptops in the house. Email? IM's? Whatever their purpose, the collection of hardware was unprecendented in my experience - a sign of the times, I guess. (I was happy to note a preponderance of Macs.)

The cast showed itself to be first-rate even at Tech. Marc Kudish, as the Proprietor, has been given a role in "Another National Anthem," a song in which the Proprietor was not featured in the original production. He is a powerful stage presence, menacing, muscled and masculine, with a gleaming shaved pate. Weidman mentioned to me that he appears much less threatening at the beginning of the play - a sort of Harold Hill image complete with straw boater. Mario Cantone as Sam Byck is a wild bundle of raw energy, with an unforgettable shrill, raspy voice. Weidman mentioned to me that Mary Catherine Garrison, who plays Squeaky, had been corresponding with the real-life Squeaky in prison; he shook his head, clearly having a hard time reckoning with the fact that there was a real-world counterpart to the fictional character he had created in the the play. And when he mentioned that Michael Cerveris had told him he was roughly the same height and weight as John Wilkes Booth, the character he portrays, John wondered how Michael had been able to find that out.



After dinner, it was onto the C train for a quick ride to the Village, where I attended a reading of a new musical at the Manhattan Theater Source.



The evening was balmy, the streets lively, and the little theater upstairs at the Source was packed with curious friends and well-wishers who had come to see Andrew Frank and Doug Silver's Sidd, an adaptation of Hesse's Siddhartha. The crowd responded warmly to the talented cast and the moving finale of the show. The Manhattan Theatre Source is a remarkable operation, "a new not-for-profit arts service organization with a groundbreaking purpose: to organize and link the disparate communities within New York's vital off-off-Broadway movement, and to provide a "one-stop shop" resource center for independent theatre artists and audiences across the nation." More power to Andrew Frank and his fellow artists and volunteers!

Back in Philadelphia the next day, D and I found time for a brief wander around Queen Village; we'd gone to shop for fabric, but kept wandering into interesting little by-ways and finding sights like these:



Tomorrow: we attend Jersey Girl! I got an e-mail from Kevin McGuire, a student from years ago, who saw the film on opening day and wrote: "I saw Jersey Girl yesterday and what a great (albeit brief) Sweeney Todd you made! [Many of my students have had a gift for sucking up.] I found it a very "Kevin Smith" twist for a 6 year old Catholic school girl to pick a song from ST while everyone else was doing Memory. I wondered if Smith was aware of the old "Sondheim vs. ALW" thing that's existed for years among theatre enthusiasts. What a hoot to see Liv Tyler performing Toby to a diminutive Mrs. Lovett. The movie was pretty enjoyable as well. You must have had a hoot of a time putting all the musical stuff together." Kevin's right, a hoot it was, and a hoot it will be tomorrow. Meanwhile, e-online has an article in which it opines that Jersey Girl will definitely lose the Gigli curse. Google is full of Jersey Girl news right now.