A Christmas Carol Rehearsal Journal 6

Kyrstyn-lee- Fourth Week of Rehearsal

Hi my name is Kyrstyn-lee and I am 14.  I play the part of Martha Cratchit and Fan (Scrooge’s sister).  It has been a pleasure to be working with professional actors.  I have been in many plays but this is my first BTE production.  It is a cool experience to have a counterpart.  Whenever I forget something the director Richie has told me, I can ask my counterpart Katy  instead of bugging Richie!  It is interesting playing two parts and trying to put two different characteristics into the parts.  It is fun trying to speak in a British accent.  I keep getting good tips from Richie on how specific words are spoken with the correct accent.

I am trying to take as much away from this experience as possible and hope to be in many more plays at BTE!  Looking forward to seeing you all at the show!

Kyrstyn-lee plays the piano, rides horses, and hopes to be in many more BTE productions.   She can be seen as Martha Cratchit in A Christmas Carol at BTE, November 23 through December 29.

A Christmas Carol Rehearsal Journal 5

Mandee- Third Week of Rehearsal

Hi my name is Mandee and being in A Christmas Carol is such a blast! I’m playing the part of the Ghost of Christmas Past. Being with professional actors and directors is such a privilege. I’m learning so much like how to show expressions and really how BTE works, and it’s really cool. Richie the director is awesome, and everyone there is so kind. I would like to audition for upcoming shows. I think it is a great opportunity.

Mandee is a 5^th grader and loves to jump rope, draw, and help others.  She can be seen as the Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol at BTE, November 23 through December 29.

A Christmas Carol Rehearsal Journal 4

Jessica- Third Week of Rehearsal

Hey, Jess again I’m counting down the days till’ showtime (I’m just in the preview BUT that doesn’t mean I’m any less excited!) 12 days left including today and opening night!!!!!!!!!

Jessica is a 5^th grader and loves to read, swim, and play soccer.  She can be seen as Rebecca Cratchit in A Christmas Carol at BTE, November 23 through December 29.

A Christmas Carol Rehearsal Journal 3

Jessica- First Week of Rehearsal

Hello, I’m Jessica, I’m 11 years old. I play Rebecca Cratchit and many other random parts. I’ve been trying out for BTE (summer and winter) since I was in 1st grade! I love working with all the other actors (kids and adults) they’re so much fun! I hope you come and see the show, it’s going to be great!

Jessica is a 5^th grader and loves to read, swim, and play soccer.  She can be seen as Rebecca Cratchit in A Christmas Carol at BTE, November 23 through December 29.

A Christmas Carol Rehearsal Journal 2

Lily- First Week of Rehearsal

Hi, my name is Lily. I play Belinda Cratchit in the 2012 BTE production of A Christmas Carol. I think that in general, the rehearsals are fun because I love acting and everybody is so nice and funny. They’re sometimes really loud, but I like it even more because my friends, like Ruby, are there.  Also I’ve made new friends, like my counterpart, Emma, and Jessica, who plays Rebecca Cratchit. Whoever is reading this and who likes acting, should first go see A Christmas Carol, and then I would suggest trying out for the next BTE play.

Lily is a 4^th grader and has been active in BTE Workshops and Odyssey of the Mind. A Christmas Carol is her first on-stage production. Lily also takes dance classes and piano lessons. She can be seen as Belinda Cratchit in A Christmas Carol at BTE, November 23 through December 29.

A Christmas Carol Rehearsal Journal 1

Ruby – First Week of Rehearsal

Hi, I’m Ruby! I play the Ghost of Christmas Past.  I’ve seen a lot of BTE shows and I’m excited to be in one.  It feels really nice to get advice from real actors and directors, and I think it’s going to help me with my acting.  I am already thinking about trying out for the summer play.  I think it’s going to be a great show!

Ruby is a 3rd grader and has many interests, including (but not limited to) playing piano, pick up basketball, costume and fashion design, art, and doodling, and can be seen as The Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol at BTE, November 23 through December 29.

Intern Spotlight: McCambridge Dowd-Whipple

McCambridge Dowd-Whipple is a 2012/2013 Ensemble Intern.  Look for her in  A Christmas Carol,  As You Like It, Flood Stories, Too., TIC Tour 2013 Patchworks, and the 2013 Intern Project.

BTE bio time? Alright, a history of Mac:

A typical night at home.

Unlike many of BTE’s interns, I don’t hail from strange and distant lands. I was born and bred in Bloomsburg, twice baptized by the sewage-ridden flood waters of the Susquehanna, and here I remained throughout my childhood. We moved once, about 5 blocks east, and it was traumatizing.

I have an amazing family. Most aspiring young actors have to fight the good fight to convince their parents that getting a B.A. in theatre isn’t a slow death sentence of sorts, but mine have not only been endlessly supportive of my questionable life choices (this silly dance back and forth between Chicago and Bloomsburg being one of them), they have also served as shining examples of the kind of thinker, learner, and artist I want to be, and have reached out to incorporate me and my brother in their art-making. I acted in plays at BTE as a child and toured with my dad in a Bunraku-inspired puppet version of Peter Pan, where I learned that tickling is an undervalued battle tactic, and the importance of a well-placed raspberry. My younger brother, Walker, who went to college this year just to avoid having to live with me again, and I have more in common with each other than I will ever privately or publicly admit in person, and I fear that if both of us aren’t careful, we may end up being really good friends. Other character-building, spirit-strengthening, life-enriching, just all-around-good things that happened to me were Greenwood Friends School and the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. Do you have kids? Send them to Greenwood. They will not only learn to sing Boom De Yada, they will learn to be good people and good, self-driven learners and thinkers.

 

Me in my first college show, Marat/Sade.

I traveled north to the Hudson Valley to attend Bard College, which is a strange hybrid of Williamsburg and Eden. I entered hoping to be swept away by some obscure and thrilling subject as yet a secret even to me! It didn’t happen. Instead I rode the theatre train into the strange and compelling world of experimental theatre, from which my love of the musical and the bedroom farce are still recovering. (What is postdramatic theatre and do I even want it?!).

I studied with some amazing professors, my mind was blown without the aid of mind-altering drugs, I began to find cat sweaters attractive; in short, college was great. I emerged with few facts, some not terribly marketable skills, a theatre degree, a fierce love for the Hudson River, and a burgeoning interest in physical theatre. Also, my junior year I studied abroad in London at the British American Dramatic Academy because I thought maybe I should learn to act or something.

My lovely housemates y yo.

Since graduating I’ve been living in Chicago, where I moved to live and work with friends that I met while abroad. It also seemed like the logical next step in my pursuit of ever-bigger bodies of water. I could not ask for cooler cats to live with, a better city to explore, or a better lake to live by. I’m grateful for the year I’ve had here, during which time I explored both the disheartening and thrilling aspects of post-college theatre. Money is real and it changes things! It’s cool when you have it, but mainly you don’t. Now I’m excited and grateful to be back at BTE where business is secondary to art-making, and where silliness and wisdom go hand-in-hand. I got a lot of learning to do, and I’m ready to begin.

 

 

 

Me in Redmoon Theatre’s Dis/Replacement.

Moon Over Buffalo Rehearsal Journal 9

A show goes through a lot of transition going from a rehearsal space to the performance space and through tech. With Moon Over Buffalo, we’re adding tons of elements. The set has different elevations, we have actual doors to run through now, costumes to quickly change out of, sound, and scored elements that can completely change the tone and pace of a scene. For me personally, the big transitions are consistent with every production plus a few added complications with this one in particular. My performance always grows the minute I get a costume on.

A costume really informs your posture, walk, stage business, and the information is it incumbent on you to convey for the purpose of the story. At best, a costume always makes you feel more like the character and you actually can work a little less hard to tell the audience their story and behavior. I have a few quick changes in the show that will also make a huge difference in staying calm and focused throughout a performance.

One interesting adjustment for me is the size of the theater. Most of the theaters I have worked in when performing in Philadelphia are smaller, more intimate spaces. Many of them are performed extremely close to the audience and sometimes in seating configurations that allow them to see the show from multiple angles. At the Alvina Krause Theater, we are in a large proscenium with a pretty big, raked house. I have had to learn throughout the course of the process to really give a lot of my reactions out to the audience and keep my head up so that everyone can see my expressions. The director, Andy, has done a terrific job of staying on me about that. The whole cast and crew is really working super hard to make this show everything it can be. I am super optimistic about going into performance.

Eric Wunsch is the 2012/2013 Ensemble Intern and plays Howard in Moon Over Buffalo, October 4 – 21 at BTE.

Moon Over Buffalo Rehearsal Journal 8

Moon over Buffalo is moving into its technical rehearsals, an exciting but tender time when we adjust staging from the rehearsal room to the main stage, Andy gets to see and hear the actors from the back of the theatre instead of four feet away, lights and music are added and then costumes and wigs, and we find out how loud the blank gun sounds. If you’ve been reading the rehearsal blog, you’ve a pretty good ides of the fun we’ve having and the hard work it takes to make a farce come alive with silliness and precision.

Take a second to look back over Cassandra’s blog entry. I’d like to reflect in this entry about something that she mentioned in hers: the moment in Moon over Buffalo when six characters are onstage talking about the future of their theatre. When we were first staging this, we had a moment when we realized that it was the six ensemble members in the scene, with the seventh directing. We allowed the synchronicity of this to settle, then got back to work.

It reminded me of a couple of similar moments in our history, worth noting as we open our 35^th Season.

It was during the run of Bus Stop in February, 1986; perhaps even in the opening weekend. The cast was a mix of ensemble members and guest actors. Backstage during the first act, I was awaiting my entrance, listening with fellow actors to the onstage dialogue. Cherie: “I’m bein’ abducted”…. Elma: “You’re safe with Will. He’s never lost a fight” ….Will: “A good fighter has gotta know what it is to get licked.” It dawned on us that we listeners were the ensemble members in the cast; onstage were the guests. In our memory it was the first time in a BTE show that there was not at least one ensemble member on stage. This moment probably went unnoticed by the audience but for us it was a right of passage, as if we had gone through some sort of growth portal. It was a good feeling. We could relax, welcome, and trust the contributions of our guests. We enjoy having guest actors with us, and we know audiences appreciate the new faces, too.

Especially our interns; we know you’re going to love Eric in Moon over Buffalo, who as Howard gets a solo moment onstage.

More recently, during Much Ado About Nothing, we were rehearsing the scene when the idea is hatched to pretend that Hero has died so she can recover from a devastating bit of news, and later come back “revived” for a happy conclusion. I was directing the scene, which included only six ensemble members, no guests. We ourselves had just gotten some devastating news about BTE’s dire financial situation. The outcome looked very uncertain. There were meetings about the theatre’s future going on as we rehearsed.

Our collective imagination grasped the immediacy of Shakespeare’s text: a miracle could happen only on the foundation of bold action sparked by outside-the-box thinking and sticking together. Like Hero, BTE would come back “apparell’d in more precious habit, more moving-delicate and full of life”.

So watch for the moment Cassandra describes in the last scene of Moon over Buffalo. You’ll see a lot of our history dance across the stage, not just the ones I mentioned above but some that you’ll recall, too.

 James Goode plays Richard in Moon Over Buffalo, October 4 – 21 at BTE.

Moon Over Buffalo Rehearsal Journal 7

So this is the point in rehearsals where we are running the whole play in order to understand how all the smaller scenes fit together and how the play is paced – where the heightened energy must drop so it can slowly rebuild to a new frenzy – that is farce. If it stayed at “frenzy” all the time, the audience would grow weary – but all plays are a kind of musical score. By this I mean that you learn not only your lines but the rise and fall of the melody of the dialogue. Once everyone is humming the same tune, it becomes great fun to play because we are all working together towards the crescendos and decrescendos and all the other musical possibilities . And of course, following this musical metaphor, Andrew is our conductor. We all play our individual instruments but he sees the big picture and finds the balance that lets the music sing.

So today we were rehearsing with the windows open (we get pretty warm with all the running around we do in this play) and we’d reach the part where my character,Charlotte, wants to throttle her mother. In a strangled voice I yell, MOTHER! WE’RE DOING Private Lives, PRIVATE LIVES, PRIVATE LIVES!!!!!!” This hysterical ranting is followed by a long silence as my mother (played by the comic master Laurie McCants) indignantly crosses the stage and exits. All the rest of us are frozen, watching her. But unexpectedly, the silence is broken by a piping voice from a little girl outside who has heard all this shouting. “Must be teenagers…” We try to hold it together, but can’t help ourselves and dissolve into laughter. I take my cue from her and shout “TEENAGERS???” at which point, her father steps into the rehearsal room with his wide-eyed daughter and her skooter behind him, and politely asks, “Is everyone all right in here?”  He is quietly told by the actor nearest him that this seeming madhouse is in fact a workplace and that all the yelling they are hearing out of context is a play – a comedy no less!

I love my job.

 Elizabeth Dowd plays Charlotte in Moon Over Buffalo, October 4 – 21 at BTE.