Continuing my updates from Acting update for January 2024, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby.
- I finished the run of 12 performances of The Artist. I got a video recording of one performance, but I don’t know whether I’m allowed to share it.
- I did not get cast in The Best of the Rest staged readings, but I did go to watch them. Overall, the scripts were not as good as the 16 shows that were selected for 8 tens @8, but they were not bad.
- I finished the 2024 Readers’ Theater staged readings with NextStage. I was in 9 performances of Check Please! (doing 2 or 3 scenes, depending who else was there) and 5 of Such a Good Listener. There were 3 public performances, but most of the performances were in retirement homes.
- I’ve posted readings of three of my niece Sari’s children’s books (all of the Robotastic! series) at https://tinyurl.com/Robotastic-books.
- I’ve been doing more reading on Discord with Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre, including a rehearsed Romeo and Juliet, where I read Abram and Paris (both off-camera—only a few of the youngsters were shown on camera). I also read Angelo and Abhorson in Measure for Measure, Dionysus in The Frogs, and Claudius and the Gravedigger in Hamlet.
- With Saturday Shakespeare, I read parts of Pericles, 1st sailor, 2nd sailor, 2nd gentleman, Cerimon, Boult, Helicanus, Gower in Pericles (we get different assignments each week).
- For the Santa Cruz Shakespeare fundraiser, I read 1.1 Oliver, 2.1 First Lord, 2.7(—line 80) Jaques, 4.2 First Lord, 4.3 Silvius, 5.4 Duke Senior in Hamlet.
- For my theater-design class I read Grigori Stepanovich Smirnov in Chekhov’s The Bear.
- I did watch the Santa Cruz Shakespeare and The Humanities Institute Undiscovered Shakespeare performance and lectures on Henry VIII.
- I also went to Under Ben Bulben at Jewel Theatre and White Sky, Falling Dragon at Actors’ Theatre. Both were good (though not quite great) plays, well produced. I think that White Sky, Falling Dragon has the potential to be great, if it were tightened to a one-act play—it is has a strong first act, but gets a little rambling and repetitive.
Coming up:
- This afternoon I’ll be doing a staged reading of a small skit for an environmental studies class at Cabrillo (not a class I’m in, but one of the theater students needed actors for it).
- We are about to enter tech (tomorrow) for Harmony in Hollywood, a jukebox musical written by one of the Cabrillo students (David Hamilton) using music that has come out of copyright. Performances are free in the Cabrillo Black Box theater, Thur May 9 through Sat May 11 at 8 p.m., with a closing matinee Sun May 12 at 2 p.m.
- Saturday Shakespeare has just started reading Hamlet, and I have some good parts (only the first 2 Saturdays have been cast so far).
- This weekend I’m going to take a voice class for old people, through NextStage. I don’t know whether it will help me any (my voice is strong enough), but I might learn something.
- Our improv class has their showcase Improv Follies on Wed May 15 at 7 p.m. in the Cabrillo Black Box theater. Although the class has been getting better, we are still pretty clearly an intro class and the improv is hit-and-miss.
After that, I don’t have any specific performances planned, but I’ll be going to see at least 10 fully staged performances (Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Santa Cruz Shakespeare) and at least 6 staged readings over the summer. I’ll also continue reading with the Shakespeare Online Repertory Theater group on Discord, though I may have to get a new computer, as Discord won’t run on my old iMac any more (Discord updates itself into incompatibility automatically, even if I load an older version) and I’ve not gotten the mic to work with the browser for doing Discord through the browser.