uart

So, much to say, so little time!

We have been very busy here in Prague. Jennifer and I had our first rehearsal for our due recital with our accompanist which went well. All musical theater so, of course, I'm going to have a blast. That day and the next were officially days off so I tried to fit in as many sights as I could see through the haze of jet lag. I've never been one to get over jet lag easily so I just suffer through until I can sleep through the night and feel rested.

I visited the Jewish Quarter just north of the Old Town. VERY interesting. The Jewish Museum is actually a series of six sites all visitable on the same entrance fee. Four synagogs and two aditional buildings. The Jewish quarter was, of course, wehre the Czech jews settled and eventually became a walled in Ghetto. When the Nazi's occupied the city it was where the jews were imprisoned. Hitler allowed the Jews to collect Jewish artwork and documents with a plan of creating a Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race once the war was over. Eventually, these scholars were killed along with 90 percent of the Jewish population of Czecholslovakia but the work they did lives on today and is there for everyone to see. It goes without saying that the exhibits are fascinating and very moving.

I visited Praque Castle which contains St. Vitus Cathedral with in it's walls. Both are very impressive. The cathedral is famous for it's Hapsburg tombs and the famous Mucha Window. Mucha was one of the pioneers of the Art Nuveau movement. His work is very famous and we've all seen it without realizing it is him. Think Maxfield Parrish and you'll get an idea of what his work looks like. His themes are VERY nationalistic and dramatic. There is a museum in Prague dedicated to his work which I'm hoping to visit soon.

I discovered a fantastic vegitarian restaurant in the Old Town. YUM!

The Little Town which is at the bottom of the hill on which the castle sits is a beautiful neighborhood with lots of wonderful shops and picturesque architecture. It has been fun just to walk around and look at the streets and buildings and the people. Everything is clean and the streets are well kept. I wonder what it all must have been like before the fall of Communism. From what I've read, it was a very different place and I would be having a very different expereince if I were here before 1989. Tomorrow I am going to the Museum of Communism which should be interesting and will shed more light on what Prague was like at that time.

I have been obssessively studying my Polenblut score. Really we all have. We're all trying to get our words into our tiny Singer Brains and trying to remember the running order of the show and all our spoken dialogue. On friday, one of our Minders, Petr, (Very nice pianist who has been very patient with us crazy singers.) drove us to the venue in a 9 seater van in the town of Ceske Budejovice. Lovely, clean streets and beautiful, large town square.

The theater was an experience! The entire building smelled of cigarettes and body odor which made me feel queezy when we first walked through the stage door. The auditorium was TINY. It maybe sat 300 with one balcony and some very odd side balconies. The stage was very narrow but as deep, if not deeper than the auditorium itself. There was NO backstage space at all although, there was a large scene storage room off stage right. It was clearly a Soviet Era building. Utilitarian, ugly, and nothing artistically pleasing about it. We have an orchestra of eight FANTASTIC musicians (They are all very stocky, very Slavic looking gents who look like they'd be more at home driving a cab than playing in an orchestra. I would love to hear them play some Bohemian or Slavic folk music! I bet it would be fantastic!) including our Czech conductor who conducts from the piano and is a rock. He is the calm in the storm which is exactly what any good conductor must be. We were really struggling with words and staging throughout our orchestra run through but thank god we had time to study before the beformance the next day. The town is a three hour drive from Prague so it was there and back on friday and there and back on saturday for the performance.

The performace, by the way went well baring a few memory slips more in the spoken dialogue than in the music. You just have to see the humor in such mishaps and laugh about it. By our last performance, we are giving four in various cities, we should be AMAZING. We had a small audience and they seemed to like it. We are told that the audiences might be small, they might be huge, you just never know.

This particular theater seems to be very fond of contemporary foreign plays in Czech translations. In our dressing room I found a script for a play by Neil LaBute, probably one of his cycle of three Beauty Plays. I saw from the posters back stage that they have done works by Christopher Hampton, Martin McDonough and are currently diong a production of God of Carnage that is, apparently, a huge hit.

We had dinner after the concert, I had a fabulous lamb with mashed potatoes (very typically Czech.) and toasted our opening night with a VERY strong plum vodka. It really knocked our heads off! I can home and started having an allergy attack, the first real attack I've had since I got here, and took two Zyrtek and went to bed. They knocked my out and woke up at 115 this afternoon feeling better and more rested than I have since I got here! We had another rehearsal for our duo recital and I sang my best since we arrived so lets hear it for sleep!

We're all having dinner together tonight and then it's off to our next venue in Pisek with the orchestra for Polenblut tomorrow. Say a prayer for me and all my lengthy speeches! AAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!

Jay in Prague

P.S. More to come about the quirky hostel where we're staying.