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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.

They told me I could buy a car with a pair of Levi's jeans but no one's selling!

For those of you in my small but loyal group of fans who may not know, I am currently in Praque, Czech Republic at the American Yaro Music Festival. Arrived with six vocalists from Texas on May 24th and we'll be here until June 6th performing a cpncert version of an obscure Viennese operetta called Polenblut and giving a duo recital of Classic American Theater Songs. The operetta performances will be in various cities around the Czech Republic and we are based in Prague. We were met at the airport on monday by one of the Festival's accompanists. She took us by taxi to the church hostel where we're staying. It's very spartan with simple furniture and very, hard, army-cot-like beds. The day we arrived the hot water stopped flowing but that was fixed within 24 hours and all is well now. We have full kitchen privledges and there is a very nice grocery store nearby which happens to be in the same building as the metro stop.

The hostel doesn't have internet service but we were told by our Fearful Leader that "there are internet cafes on every corner.

HA! SHE LIED!!!!

Yesterday my colleague and I wandered around the Old Town look for these seeminly ubiquitous (sp?) internet cafes. There were none to be found! ANYWHERE! We searched high! we searched low! Finally, we spied one across the street from the Estates Theater where Don Giovanni was premiered in 1787. The front half is, indeed, a cafe but the decore is about two or three decades old and clearly hasn't been refurbished since. The computers are housed in a harshly lit back room. It is "no frills" written all over it and the faint smell of B.O. makes my eyes water but what can you do? I'm convinced this place is one of the last vestiges of communist Czechoslovakia. I'm sure it's riddled with hidden microphones and cameras! If I say or do the wrong thing I'll be whisked away and never seen again!

By the looks of things western capitolism is alive and well as represented by MacDonalds, KFC and Starbucks. The buildings and streets are beautiful in spite of western popular culture. Prague wasn't bombed during World War II so all the art nouveax buildings survived, but just barely. I have read that pre-1989, large beams were wedged between the buildings to keep them from falling in on one another. The buildings were black with soot and the general mood was very dark and depressing. Not so today! Everything has been cleaned up and repaired and the tourist industry appears to be booming.

There are a few buildings that give an idea of what things looked like before the Velvet Revolution. The National Museum is still rather black and you can see where the plaster has crumbled away and the National Theater is also black with soot. I hazzard to guess that it is also very run down inside. It presents Operas, ballet and plays and has the largest state subsidy of all the Nationally supported arts organizations. (Interesting side note: I noticed that Tracy Letts' play August: Osage County is playing right now...in Czech!)

In my wanderings I happened across the Czech State Opera House so I bought a ticket for about 35 dollars for Tosca tonight night. The exchange rate is amazing. About 19 or 20 crowns for every dollar so a 700 crown ticket is about 35 dollars for a really good seat. (I assume since it's the National Opera the singers will be Czech and I wouldn't be surprised if the opera is sung in Czech.) The exchange rate also makes food very inexpensive. a 200 crown bill is, what, 10 dollars? Not bad!

Yesterday, we had our first rehearsal with the conductor in a church in central Prague. I can't figure out what kind of church it is. Something about the Sacred Brethren? from what I can gather the Catholic faith has had a hard time here so it may be protestant. The sanctuary is square with a wrap around balcony and an organ on the second level. it is painted in shades of yellow and white and is equipped with very old wooden pews that are all scratched up and even have initials carved in them. The rehearsal went well. The conductor played the piano for the rehearsal and knows the Viennese operetta style very well. It's hard to explain what he was doing. Basically he was swinging the waltz beat, shortening the first beat of the measure and adding time to the second. We would probably refer to it as a jazz rhythm but I'm sure it's typical to the Viennese operetta style. this method gave the music a lilt and an elegance they don't even begin to teach us about in the States. I suspect our Flerdermaus's and Merry Widows are pretty sub-standard.

Today we rehearsed for our duo recital. Our accompanist met us at the hostel, she is a very attractive brunette who speaks very good english, and she took us to the appartment of a pianist friend of hers. It was located in a typical modern neighborhood off of a main street with a street car line. We went up a very dark, very institutional-looking stairway to the second floor and I'm not lying when I say I wondered if we'd been lead astray and were about ot be sold into white slavery! We were shown into what seemed to be a two room flat with a central vestibule. I wasn't sure where the kitchen was but it seemed the vestibule might also be the kitchen although I didn't see a refridgerator or a stove. There were shelves on two walls that heald dishes, a tea service dish towels. The piano was a very old Steinway that hadn't been tuned in donkey's years. In general the decor was VERY spartan and the whole place smelled very musty and old.

After the rehearsal I had intended to go tour Prague Castel but owing to my lingering jet lag and a blistering headache I got on the wrong tram! It was some time before I realized I was going AWAY from the castle and not TOWARD it. I finally change trams and came back down into old town but at that point I was EXTRA tired and my feet hurt so I found a starbucks and drank a latte. Sidebar: the barista give me a hard time because I gave her a thousand crown note which was all I had after my visit to the bankomat. Cashiers are famous here for giving you a hard time about almost everything. I just smiled great big and said, "SORRY!" I got a dirty look.

I'm going to try for the castle again tomorrow and also the Jewish Quarter which is on the north side of the Old Town. That's a saga unto itself so I'm sure I'll have lots to write about.

Talk to you, my small but loyal followers, soon!

P.S. I'm posting this without editing it. My appologies for typos and odd sentence structure.

so my trip to the Czech Republic is closing in on me VERY FAST. We are in rehearsals for the operetta we'll be doing there and the memorization is freaking me out. I can't hurry it along, I know that, but it's hard to be patient with myself and not stress. It will all get tucked away in my head when it's good and ready and it will all come out of my head when it's good and ready. In the meantime, I'm going to carry my book around in rehearsals and if the other's don't like it then too bad. I need to stop stressing about it. Nothing is going to get accomplished by it. I just need to get over it.

We're in the midst of auditions for Title of Show. I think we have some options for guys and girls. I have never really been on this side of the table and I worry that I will upset my friends if I don't cast them. James goes through this all the time and I now know what it feels like up close and personal. I will say that I'm very happy that we have options as far as casting goes. We weren't sure going into the auditions how the chips would fall. I'm happy to say that I think we're going to have a wonderful cast regardless of who's in it, it's going to be great fun!

This is the first "show" I've directed. I've done the Crested Butte shows but those were musical reviews. This is my first "book" show. I'm not totally sure what I'm going to do with it yet. For me it's a matter of just studying the script and seeing where my creative juices send me. I don't want to copy the broadway production but certain elements were so brilliant that I can't imagine not incorporating some version of them into our show. We're definitely going to do a series of projections for Monkeys and Playbills. I think we can use powerpoint, easy. My dear, funny friend Marianne Galloway has a collection of playbills numbering into the thousands that her grandparents bequeathed to her. She will let me borrow them so we can scan them and use the images for the projection sequence. YAY!!!!

There are several things I could rant about but it's late as I'm writing this and I want to go to bed. I'll start making a list and then I can address each point.

Just as a teaser, some of them are:

"What's up with girly gay men on stage, especially in Dallas?"
"The lack of customer service at any Wendy's drive thru."
"University music programs in general."
"the classical music 'business' and the disfunctional people who work within it. (I think I have to include myself in that group.)" "Am I the only one who didn't like both Next to Normal and Spring Awakening?"

Am I getting old?

I was looking at the NY Times on line (It's only a matter of time before they will be charging us for looking at their website! It's horrifying, and probably true. But that's another blog). I flipped over to the theater section and read the review for American Idiot, the new "Green Day" musical that just opened on The Broadway and is based on their album of the same name. As I read, I found myself rolling my eyes and "tsk tsk"-ing.

It got a rave from Charles Isherwood ensuring a healthy run but I must admit, whole thing seems so silly, doesn't it? All the photos and videos I've seen reveal a group of very young, very hip actors with piercings, tattoos and pre-determined bedhead jumping around in a very angry, disenfranchised way on what seems to be a very edgy, modernistic set dotted with flat screen tv's and lots of psychedelic lighting. It looks to me like a very fast moving, fast cutting MTV music video. (Is MTV still on? Do they still make music videos? Whatever happened to Martha Quinn and Nina Blackwood? Sigh... quietly sings, "video killed the radio star!")

At first glance it seems like a terrible idea. Who would be interested in a musical based on Green Day? It's rock music! Not Elvis or Frankie Valli or Buddy Holly. CONTEMPORARY ROCK MUSIC! I'm sure it's very loud and very in your face and probably expresses themes that would make our parents very uncomfortable!

But then I remembered going to see Hair in NYC over New Years weekend this past year. I LOVED IT! It was all about being yourself, standing up for what you believe, challenging the status quo, and it was all filtered through rock music and a non-linear story line before the musical Company came along and claimed the non-linear story line for itself. That show made our grandparents VERY uncomfortable. It brought up themes that no one wanted to deal with even though they were staring everyone in the face. Hair seems tame in comparison to American Idiot but is it really all that different?

I brought this up to Jamie the other day and he said, "Well, you are very conservative when it comes to musicals."

"What do you mean!?" I replied.

"You have very specific opinions about musicals and how they should be written and directed and all that. You're always saying how badly some of these new shows are written and constructed."

But, I don't want to be conservative! I don't want to be an old curmudgeon! I'm too young to be an old curmudgeon! I'm hip! I'm with it! For god's sake, I even voted democrat!!!!!

So, in the interest of NOT turning into a fuddy duddy, I am going to go see American Idiot when I go to NYC in early May. I may complain that it's too loud and I may tell anyone who'll listen that it's assaulting my eyes with it's multimedia extravaganza of color, light and video BUT, I will be there. And I will NOT be a curmudgeon!

XANADU!!!!! XANADU!!!!! NOW WE ARE HERE IN XANADU!!!!

James and I went to see the national tour of Xanadu:the Musical playing at the Music Hall at Fair Park through April 18th.

"What!?" Xanadu? The MUSICAL!? Wasn't that a really awful movie back in the early 80's starring Olivia Newton-John? Why, in God's name, would they make a stage musical of THAT!!!???"

Good question but not to fear! Book writer Douglas Carter Beane, Director Christopher Ashley and choreographer Dan Knechtges have retained the songs written by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar and opted for a tongue in cheek, wink, wink, nudge, nudge adaptation. Set in 1980 in Venice, California rather than 1580 in Venice, Italy, the muses, lead by Kira, come together to help mere mortal Sunny Malone realize his dream of owning a space where art, music, theater and dance can be created and performed. In other words, a roller disco! Conflict is introduced when the muses Melpomene and Coliope become, quite frankly, pissed off that Kira seems to be getting all of Zues's attention and they hatch a plan to thwart her plans to help Sonny achieve his dream. (The funniest line in the show is uttered by Coliope during a particularly evil moment: "This is fun! It's like doing children's theater for 40 year-old gay men!" BLACKOUT!!!)

The show is ultimately about holding onto your dreams and working to reach your goals in spite of the obstacles. the message is stated without seeming too earnest. In fact, you may find your self getting a little teary. The set echo's that of a roman temple and the muses wear togas, sandals and more body glitter than you can shake a stick at! And yes, there are roller skates!!! The entire production was conceived on an intimate scale for a cast of only 10 actors who do double and triple duty as muses, mythic monsters and fan dancers to name just a few.

Those of you who know James and me know that we can turn ANYTHING into an adventure and this show is no exception! Not content to just sit out in the audience and watch the show from afar, we opted for the ON STAGE SEATING!!! Yes! Xanadu has about 20 on stage seats that surround the main playing area in two semi-circular rows. We were told to "keep your hands inside the ride at all times and don't activate your glow sticks until the end of the show". (YES!!! They gave us glow sticks to brandish in the finale!) Thus prepared we settled in for a fun ride!

Indeed, Xanadu IS a lot of fun! The hard-working cast was excellent. They were all on stage most of the evening and the four person ensemble worked their mucho talented butts off singing and dancing almost non-stop. The jokes ranged from jabs at Greek mythology, tragedy and comedy to comments on current events. Nothing is sacred but at the same time nothing is taken seriously. The actors are clear that it's all a big joke and we are invited to be in on it.

BUT, the best part of the evening was getting to sit on stage. As a member of the Dallas Opera chorus I have been on stage many times at the Music Hall so for me that was nothing new. What was exciting was getting to see the performers and watch the show up close and personal. Something one NEVER gets to do at he Music Hall! We sat on the stage right side and all the actors' exits and entrances happened just inches from us. It was not unusual for them to make comments to us as they passed by. At one point, Kira grabbed on to my arm for dear life as Sonny tried to drag her to center stage by her be-skated foot!!!!

All told, Xanadu is an intimate, extremely funny show performed by freakishly talented cast. Run, don't walk to see it before it moves on to Sarasota, Florida!!! AND MAKE SURE YOU SIT ON STAGE!!!!

Be Vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits!

Thursday was an exciting day. James was in Arizona with the Three Redneck Tenors show and I had to teach a lesson thursday afternoon so I suggested I meet my student and Jamie's mom's house. So I go toolin' over to Plano. Jamie's mom and aunt (visiting from Oklahoma City) were out so Gus (Jamie's Aunt's beagle. I realize this is getting complicated.) accompanied me in the backyard while I checked on the progress of the herbs, grapes and blackberry bushes we planted early in the week.

WELL, I was leaning over one of the containers in which we'd planted lettuce when I noticed a hole that an animal had clearly dug in the dirt under the lettuce plants. I peered in and saw a rabbit!!!!!!!! We see rabbits in the neighborhood all the time but it was exciting to discover that we were already having wildlife encounters when we'd barely even begun creating our urban farm! Of course, I left the rabbit where it was, Gus sniffed at it but didn't really react, and we went back in the house. When Jamie's mom and aunt came home I told them about the rabbits which they found interesting and suprising. A few minutes later Jamie's aunt took Gus out in the backyard and the next thing I know I'm hearing Gus barking up a storm and Jamie's aunt chasing after Gus, grabbing him and carrying him to the back door with Gus doing his best to free himself from her arms. I ran and opened the door for her. She set Gus down inside the house and told me that there were four rabbits in the yard and Gus got hold of one in his mouth. Alice got Gus to drop the rabbit. It escaped with one of the others but two of the four ended up crouched in a corner on the patio. There was no more Gus drama and eventually the rabbits hopped away. Clearly we're going to have to do something about keeping Peter out of Mr. Mcgregor's garden!

FYI

FYI,

There is an excellent article in the current Classical Singer Magazine about classically trained singers singing musical theater, jazz, cabaret etc. I guess you could call it "crossover", a word I hate. Anyway, the author, who I happened to have gone to grad school with, interviews composer and teacher Craig Carnelia and teacher and performer Sylvia McNair on the doe's and don't's of crossover. Great article and a must read for classical singers of all ages!!!