Author: theactorvist

I love the Theatre. It's my church. It's my joy. I have been performing in plays and musicals for over half of my life, and I would be lost without it. Now more than ever, people are cutting back on everything that is too expensive or unimportant to their lives. As an actor, heck as a person, I don't know of anything that is more important than the arts. Art reflects history. It shows humanity at its worst but also its best. Every day some artistic program is getting cut from a school or a great show goes unseen. Maybe a talented singer isn't able to audition for American Idol. There are a ton of people who live in the South Bay Area of California, who go unseen or unheard. There are many production companies that are just bursting with talent, but people don't see the shows. I will do my best to bring you interviews with local artists of every kind, send out the call for local companies looking to cast people in productions, and much more. Stay tuned because this is only the beginning.

Humming along, singing a song…

Today’s rehearsal was supposed to be brief.

We were going to learn some of the songs that are being incorporated into the show during celebratory moments. ‘Cause you know Latin people love to sing!

I was looking forward to it when I woke up this morning, but once I got there, I knew this was going to be way, WAY different than what I was so used to, being a musical theatre performer.

When one works with a musical theatre company and the show has music that one must learn, it’s pretty standard that the singers are given copies of sheet music. This helps to teach the timing, the notes, and the words of the song. I was given words to the song, but these were ones I’d never heard before. Luckily one of my cast mates sent me an mp3 of two of the songs. So as I am listening to these quiet recordings, I begin to realize that the first song doesn’t have the traditional song set up of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge and chorus. It made my head spin! Also, I couldn’t pronounce some of the words. On top of that, the melody never actually repeats itself so I was feeling a little overwhelmed.

The second song is a little more standard in set up, but getting the timing on some of the held notes without the actual music was difficult. I was again given the words and an mp3, but not everyone sings the song the same way so there were some kinks that needed to be worked out.

The musician that helped out on this rehearsal, while super nice, wasn’t the greatest teacher. Some of the chords that he played on his guitar, didn’t sound like anything that I had ever heard before. I just told myself that it was because of the type of guitar.

I think what I was hoping for was to be told, okay this word right here is held for a count of 8 or each new phrase starts two beats after the last one (that wasn’t ever the case as it was all over the place). I think this was the first time during this process that I didn’t really have fun. But that’s okay. The great thing about this business is that there are a lot of people that are willing to help you if you just ask.

You can surely bet that I will be asking!

Keepin’ it brief…

Hey Kids,

WordPress has a challenge to either post every single day, or once a week.

I figure, I like a good challenge, so I am gonna try a post a day.

I don’t know how well it’ll work, but I think I may have enough thought in my melon to make it through.

There was no mention of winning a prize, so I don’t know what the incentive is.

Either way, send me your motivative thoughts and comments. Let’s do this!

Fight night at Teatro!

Ooohh, this gurl’s ’bout to git it!!!

Just joking. This is a picture of Carla our Fight Coordinator showing us how to pull hair.

On Tuesday night, Carla Pantoja, certified stage combat instructor with Dueling Arts of San Francisco, one of 6 instructors in the Bay Area if memory serves, stopped by rehearsal to teach the cast some of the basics of stage combat, and to work with the roles that have to actually use it in the show. There’s people being shot and kids fighting, so she gave us a lesson in how to not hurt yourself. Which of course, is a good thing. No one ever wants to get socked in the junk! I should know, speaking from experience. Ouch! Or punched in the head! Again, experience. But there’s something in that reckless abandon that I love. Carla would slap my face if she heard me say that! Luckily, all those years of watching wrestling with my little brother paid off.

The first thing that Carla showed us was how to fall. First there’s the Sit-Fall. For this you step back onto one foot and as you do, you lower your body like you are squatting backward. NOTE: Never place your hands behind you!!! You are only inviting injury to your wrists, hands, elbows or shoulders. Hold your hands out in front of you. (Don’t worry, the motion happens so fast no one really notices.) Once you are as low as you can get, shift so you can sit on the cheek that is on the same side as your extended leg. Next you roll your spine onto the floor with you head being the last thing to unroll. You have two options you can do with your hands and arms. Option one: spread them out like wings and let them fall with the palms facing the ground. Or option 2: After unrolling your head, swing your arms overhead making sure to keep your hands inline with your arms so that your wrist doesn’t slam into the ground and shatter into a buncha little pieces.

She switched it up so we learned to fall to the side and to fall forward as well. Those take a lot more description and have a little different technique, so I think it would be best not to try and write that out. Maybe, she’ll give us a refresher course when we get closer to show time, and I will take footage of some of that. If she lets me.

Next came a brief tutorial in punches. Thanks to my Tae-Bo type work out videos, I knew what the different punches were. Hey, hey!! What was getting me stuck was timing the slap to the punch for effect. There’s a little hit called a knap that an actor does to give the sound that the punch landed. The knap can be done by clapping one’s hands, slapping one’s chest or thigh, or anywhere else where the audience can’t see it happening.

I thought we would move on to kicking and then contracting your body to simulate impacts, but that would have taken another day’s worth of work, and we had some fight scenes to get blocked. She did speak to us about gun use, because several people get shot in the show, so that was really informative. I wish I would have known that for West Side Story! Luckily, Tony never actually got accidentally injured. In hindsight, that’s a pretty scary thing to consider.

We learned a heap load of stuff, like slapping someone in the back of the head, various pushes as well as what’s above, and in the video that follows. It was a great night!

I did take footage, and I hope no one in the video is either offended or angry about me using it. It isn’t with the intent to make a mockery of rehearsals, but to show what a great group of people I am honored to be working with. To laugh it up now, because as we get further in the play, we start to work with things like murder and hate which can take a lot out of someone. Especially if they have to stay in that mentality for long periods of time. Again it’s with respect for these people that I share with all of you this zany crew.

Yippee!! (insert bell-kick here)

The rehearsals for the show are going swimmingly! Most of Act 1 is staged and we are just building momentum. I can’t wait for the day when I can direct my own shows. Watching people like Katie O’Bryon and Elisa Alvarado adjust a scene with actors is so fascinating to me. Helping to create little moments within the scenes is a difficult job, but they make it seem so effortless and they include the actors when working the kinks out.

Elisa works with Ultima and the Marez familia

Tonight’s rehearsal was just me and the two that play my parents, Jay Vera and Melinna Bobadilla. While there were a lot of laughs, we quickly worked through one of the last scenes in Act 1, and talked through some of the counterintuitive moments that we were coming up against. One of the first things that we needed to address was that the size of the stage didn’t feel proportionate to the home setting. In normal circumstances, the solution would be to just move things around. Easy Peasy! Unfortunately, thanks to working on a raked stage, moving a set piece designed to stand on a slanted plain won’t stand the same way on a flat surface.

This is what the empty stage would look like. The Mexican Heritage Theatre is, from my understanding, HUGE! I get giddy just thinking about it. It is said to have incredible wing space and decent fly space. That’s a luxury that not many theatres have. But back to the work. After making some repositioning decisions, we charged into the scene. Our actor playing Young Tony, Lalo Lopez, was unavailable this evening, but it was a great challenge to try and feel out something for him for the scene. I don’t mean that in a mean or snarky way. I truly did enjoy the challenge of using sense memory to try and put some emotional weight in the lines while not having a partner to work off of during some of the scene sections. That in turn, gives something for the other actors to work with as well.

We worked all over the scene, and I was startled with the alarm went off saying that rehearsal time is over. I really wanted to at least run the ending of the scene and the exit at least one more time for the traffic pattern and for piece of mind knowing that I have it stuck in my noggin. Alas, with rehearsal over, we were dismissed. So after saying goodbyes and whatnot, I bounded out into the chilly night air with a lightness in my feet.

Tomorrow night is a stage combat or stage fighting workshop. Woo to the hoo! I am wicked excited for it. I love fight workshops! Love them. Of course, I’ve only taken the one with the karate teacher guy for West Side Story. That was awesome!!! Of course it didn’t hurt that I had the amazing Tony Dicorti as my fight partner. I am wondering how this is going to turn out. Only because the way I interpreted the script, there wasn’t a scene in it that called for much fighting. Maybe some shoving, but I don’t recall any fighting.

Until tomorrow…

Recovery…Can it do whatever a Spider can?

A few weeks ago, Backstage magazine did a huge article about safety issues. While it was a story in general about overall safety, a lot of the story focused on the highly anticipated production of “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.” I knew that there were issues with the show, and didn’t really expect them to have previews until, like, now. According to the safety board for AEA, there was a lot of stunts that weren’t even passing inspection at the time the article was written. So when my friend, Ben, had said tickets were selling for the previews, I just couldn’t believe it. I mean yay, for the gutsiness of showing so many people a show that has yet to get the stunts all worked out, but what if it wasn’t an injury inflicting accident that happened, but just bad workmanship or planning that made the whole thing a joke? Could the show have a $150 plus ticket price tag and still be awful? Apperantly, the answer is yes! A more important question that I don’t have an answer for is: How is this going to hurt or help Broadway if it fails? What are your thoughts on that?

This week’s Entertainment Weekly on a single page condensed 5 or 6 of the reviews that were published for “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.” I have to say that reading it was pretty, uh, harsh.

However, the show is still pulling in over a million dollars on average per week for the last few weeks. The price of the tickets which run as high as $150 or as low as $75. Let’s just say that most people will pay for the median ticket prices at $80. You only have to sell 12,500 tickets in a week at that price to make a million bucks. I think there are enough people that are interested in the spectacle to keep it in the $1,000,000 club for at least another 2 to 3 months.

I have a ton of respect for Julie Taymor, but maybe she focused too much on trying to be innovative. I think the costumes looked much better on paper than they do on the actor. The reviewers have all complained about the lack of a plot or story in the show. I really, really want to hear the music. It’s not getting better comments than the story.

I would eventually hope that everything gets figured out and turns the critics around. But I doubt that she’s planning on fixing the costumes. Still, I have my fingers crossed that I’ll have the chance to see the show. I hope that it isn’t one of those shows that closes right after the Tony Awards. Only time will tell.