potd

Barack & Bo ready to go go go

stage

Director Brenna Geffers may admit to being a research geek, but she doesn’t quite look the part in her tight red-velvet jacket lacey black skirt ensem, but can certainly prove it.

Last fall, Geffers’ tight, stylish production Georg Bruchner’s Wozzeck at the German Society Library as part of EgPo Productions German expressionism series illuminated the work‘s darker chambers, now she is seeing what lurks in Kander and Ebb‘s Cabaret.

The Prince Music Theatre’s cabaret space has been transformed into period tableau of a Weimar era with a 3 stage club. Geffers not only was fluent in each incarnation of Cabaret as a musical and film, she was familiar with all things Isherwood.

Even though she is directing seeming much lighter fare her attention is on the history of the people and their time on the eve of pre-Nazi Berlin. “We’re taking it very period. This architecture that we built are Victorian style theater that may have been redone as the Kit Kat Club in the 20s.

“We approach with a sense of why these characters are so raw. How do you achieve the debauchery without being camp. These character are fighting to survive. So I think in this production they are even darker.”

l(s)otd or Showdown at the old Perkins place

On CNN, Anderson Cooper was discussing the religious right’s antigay agenda. Out Reverend Mel White responded to Tony Perkins of “The Family Research Council.”

White, exasperated in the face of Perkins usual fundamentalist dogma-

“Dobson, Robertson, Fawell, they have been misleading the public for so many years…to see through their half truths and hyperbole.”

Perkins told him that he, as a Christian, loves him.

“Tony, Don’t say that. The things you say about gay people leads to destruction. I’ve read your literature. I’ve been monitoring you for ten years. You’ve got to get off this antigay…stuff.”

Unlocking Hamlet

Part of interview with actor Geoff Sobelle about his gritty performance as Hamlet
(photo Jeffrey Stockbridge)
Geoff : It really felt like the whole thing has been a mad dash to the finish. We had four weeks, which is much quicker for me. But, I had been doing research, sort of, about how one performs Hamlet, in my mind a long time, though. I don’t do Shakespeare a lot, and I hadn’t done classical theater in 5 years, since I was in As You Like It at the Lantern. (The director) Charles McMahon approached me a year and a half ago about doing it.

Most of my work is in the experimental or avant garde genre. When Charles and I first got together after talking, talking, talking…we attempted to do the play with no words. I did Hamlet’s experience as a series of physical impulses. We didn’t know what that would be I just thought I need to get in there someway.

Hamlet exists as a whole, really, so it is difficult to jump in with a microscope and look at bits and pieces without feeling the whole arc. So we spent days doing that.

When I work with Pig Iron we always talk about what is ‘the world of the show’; What are the rules in this world? I tried to come to it thinking about the ways the character can reveal himself. It was actually good to let this go in a way. All of these suppositions and what people hang onto about the play, we put all that aside.

potd by Jan Carroll

‘Fungusface’

I love that. Fungusface. I’ve felt like fungusface before, but I’ve never been called that. My friend Billy Swope called me batface once when I had a darker goatee going and a pinched expression, that was fun. Course at the time I think he provoked me with his toxic mouth so I called him a boiled pig, I think it was. We knew how to have fun in those days.

bloglog

Bit creepy that, but quite a fungal colony in fab muted colors. Wondering maybe if they were moon fungus, under this great rotation of bright moons this week. Last night walking home around 10:30 on Spruce the moonlight was casting cobalt shadows through clouds which parted suddenly. The only thing that was missing was Lon Chaney lurching in the bushes.

potn by Jan Carroll

‘Whiskered’

Stage

Geoff Sobelle’s electrifying ‘Hamlet’ at Lantern Theatre is among other things a completely physical performance. He vaults around scaffolding and expertly brandishes foil, tongue and stiletto. His physicality expodes. He is brutally poetic, at one point spitting out the lines as he catapults off the stage. The production design looks like the Blitzkrieg and otherwise frames Geoff’s sarcastic and seething vocal performance. Far from ponderous, his Hamlet is hot on the trail to solve his father’s murder, and expose familial corruption using all of his roiling tricks dramatic and comedic. The famous soliloquies played mostly in dissonant keys, part of his forward moving narrative.

Rainbows in Vermont

Gay activist Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign commenting on today’s vote on same=sex marriage-

“This historic vote in the Vermont legislature reminds us of the incredible progress being made toward equality. Less than five years ago, lesbian and gay couples began marrying in Massachusetts. Now, with the Iowa court decision last Friday and today’s vote in Vermont, there will be four states recognizing the right to marry for loving, committed lesbian and gay couples,” he said.

potd by Jan Carroll

from ‘Days of Mercury’

An infinite dimension
waiting to be filled
with ideas and peace
waiting to be filled
by havoc and adornment
waiting to be filled and
this is the water music
Narcissus doesn’t bother to
seek his image here
its real vector
in acts of light.