Acting update for May 2024

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.
  

  Click on the picture for a full-size version of the poster.

• 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.

(Not) fixing my Apple Pro keyboard

I have been using an old M7803 Pro keyboard on my iMacs for quite some time—it has ©2000 on the label. I liked it much better than the newer keyboards.

Unfortunately during the table read for As You Like It on 2024 March 13, as I was reading for First Lord, I spilled some port into the keyboard. I rinsed out the keyboard as soon as possible afterwards, but even after it was dry, there were still some non-functional keys. I substituted a Windows keyboard the next day, and I got a used Macally keyboard for about $5 at the Grey Bears thrift store within a week to replace it, and that seems to be working ok.

I had heard that it is sometimes possible to clean a keyboard by disassembling it, and I thought I would try that. I even got myself some new Allen wrenches, because I did not have a set of tiny ones and the Pro keyboard requires a 0.05″ (1.27mm) Allen wrench.

I found instructions on doing the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly at https://web.archive.org/web/20160307171517/https://www.technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/bgracey/prokeyboardrepair.html and started following the instructions.

I got the case off, took off all the keycaps (removing a dustpan full of cat fur and human hair), and removed the PC board. At that point, I looked at the next step, which involved removing the decorative glued-on cardboard panel and taking out 39 screws, and decided that I had had enough—there wasn’t any guarantee that I’d be able to rescue the keyboard, and that many teeny-tiny screws to lose was just too daunting.

So I started putting the keyboard back together. Needless to say, I dropped one of the screws (the grounding screw) in doing the assembly, and I couldn’t find it on the floor. I ended up spending 20 minutes or more sweeping about half the breakfast room, a third of the dining room, and half the kitchen, running a magnet through the dustpan looking for the screw. I finally found it about 10′ (3m) from where I had been working.

The keyboard is back together again, with all the keypads back in place and looking a little cleaner, but still only about half the keys actually work.

A wasted evening, but I suspect that if I had tried to do the full cleaning, it would have been even more time wasted.

Broke bike seat again

Long-time readers may remember that I had to fix my bike seat due to metal fatigue at the clamp that holds it back in 2016 (see Bike seat fixed, Broken bike seat and Flexible adhesives).

I wrote then “I was going to sand the rust spots, prime with metal primer, and repaint the spots, but my metal primer was no longer any good, so I just did some light sanding and coated all the rusty spots with oil. I will have to buy some more metal primer and repaint in a couple of weeks when I next have time to work on the bike.”  Of course, I never did get the primer and do the repainting.

I also wrote, “I’m hopeful that this fix, which cost under $50, will let the bike seat be usable for the next 15 years.”  Well it lasted less than 8 years. Yesterday, just as I arrived at Dominican Oaks for a NextStage Readers’ Theater performance, my bike seat failed again.  The bike had been creaking when I pedaled hard for the past several months, and I was worried about there being a crack somewhere, but I could never see one (hidden by the powdercoat paint, no doubt).

The failure was on the side of the seat, near a bend in the tubing. I would not have expected this to be a high-stress location.

The previous epoxy join did fail on short joint, though the tubing stayed on the rod—it just rotated freely on the rod.

Here is the seat off of the bicycle, showing the two parts that need to be glued back together.

I’m getting a slightly larger aluminum rod to put in the slightly larger tubing on the side. I won’t be able to put the aluminum rod very far into the tubing on one side, as it will be stopped by the bend in the tubing. I think I really want 17mm or 17.5mm diameter rod, but that seems to be an extremely expensive specialty product, so I’m going with a 16mm (5/8″) high-strength 2024 aluminum rod instead. The high-strength part probably makes no difference, given that there will be a lot of epoxy filling the gap and the epoxy is what will fail, but the difference in cost between the 2024 aluminum and cheaper aluminum was trivial.

If the seat fails again (as it probably will), I’ll have to get a new seat, which will probably be several hundred dollars (if available at all).

Costume design for The Bear

Our second costume-design assignment was to design costumes for the 3 characters in Chekhov’s The Bear (МЕДВЕДЬ). We were to do it as a historical-dress piece, to be compatible with the box set that we designed in a previous assignment (see Maquette for theater-design class for pictures of that design). Our designs were to be presented as the three renderings plus a slide show of the research we had done, the costume plot, and pictures of the renderings.  My slid show is available at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GWnBhgX1u5SL7oUrGtxZgJnBU1-9gPKdUK4i3Hxmb4c

In the slide show, you can see not only the watercolors I drew, but also what Freepik’s Sketch-to-Image tool did with them.  The quality of Freepik’s redrawings was certainly much higher than what I can draw, but it was not able to capture some aspects of the costume design that I wanted.  I’ll put the images here also, but leave the historical research and explanation to the slide show.

Luka, the servant, is imagined as a footman in livery, despite his comment that the mice ate the livery—I’m assuming that is the other servants’ livery, not his own meticulously maintained livery.

Elena Popova is in full Victorian mourning, with a lace mourning veil down her back. I envision her taking off the veil when she fetches the pistols, so this conflates the two looks.

Grigoriy Smirnov is angry for most of the play, so should be a bit red-faced. The stripes on the trousers should probably be narrower, but I can’t draw that well.

Luka’s costume is roughly right, but the AI added an unwanted tie and undid the fastening of the tailcoat. It also reduced the number of buttons.

Smirnov was aged excessively (he should around 40, not 60) and the vest is a bit too plain—it should have a more tweedy texture. Also the collar should be a simple band collar, but otherwise this is a pretty good rendition of my intent. (Again the stripes should be narrower, but the AI had no way to know that.)

Elena is beautified nicely and the mourning veil is well done. The embroidery on the skirt is suitable, but the bugle beads and black buttons were lost, and the jacket was unsuitably transformed into a see-through black lace blouse!

Fantasy costume renderings +AI

In Fantasy costume renderings, I showed my first assignment in costume design.  I tried this week (during our Spring break) improving the renditions by running them through an AI program—specifically Freepik Sketch.  The AI drawing program mangled the annotation, so I removed the “writing” and did a little cleanup and resizing in Photoshop Elements. Here are the before and after images:

The pregnant soprano is the lead here.

The AI did a pretty good job of capturing the essence of the costume, while making the drawing much more realistic than I could manage. The silver came out looking more like lace, but was otherwise reasonable.

The tenor has a tight-fitting satin outfit—superhero style.

The tenor also came out fairly well.

The baritone has a formal, almost military cut, but in the same satin as the the tenor, though with darker satin for the lapels and a sash of the silver grey, rather than just trim.

The baritone is ok, but not as much of an improvement. I had a hard time getting the look right—the AI wanted to make too many changes, so I had to turn “imagination” way down, making it look closer to my sketch. I don’t like that the spats have a zipper rather than buttons.

The bass has a pleated jacket and spirally pieced trousers of satin. The intent is to be flamboyant, and maybe a bit clownish.

The pleated jacket was too weird for the AI, so I had to turn “imagination” way down, which again resulted in something too close to my sketch.

Despite the limitations of the AI, I think I will use it for my homework assignment, turning in both my own sketches and the “improved” sketches.  In order to keep within the 20-per-day limit of the free server, I’ll be writing up the description of the drawing to cut and paste into the tool before uploading the scan of the sketch.