So, at work we just finished a run of A Chorus Line, which is a hugely popular and iconic musical theater classic. That should be in quotes or something: "Hugely Popular and Iconic Musical Theater Classic! (tm)" Anyway, I had never seen it before, but there was no way I was going to miss the fleeting 50 seconds or so that the horrifying taupe satin tuxedo I labored over for three full days was going to be on stage.
You have probably all seen it already, so this was only news to me, but...
It is wildly depressing. It's all about dysfunctional people who dance for a living. Which is probably very intimate and slice-of-life but as a theater person AND a person who sorta-dances it is just DEPRESSING.
Dee. Press. ING.
The dancing was fun, though. Even if it was accompanied by 70s porn guitar riffs (is that just what music sounded like in the 70s? How did anyone survive?)
I continually have nightmares about having to perform in a recital. I used to have nightmares about plays, because I was a drama nerd in high school and was in a lot of them. So, I would dream that here I was, 15 years later, and I had to perform one of those plays on the spur of the moment. That is pretty nerve wracking, right? Having to try desperately to dredge up old dialogue that you thought you would never have to say again? And then I have the nightmares about having to costume an entire production that opens in an hour, and that is totally a work thing. But these ballet recital dreams have been edging both of my old standards out on an increasingly frequent basis. They generally go something like this: it is the night of the recital and I haven't rehearsed in the last month. I try to stand behind the other girls and fake it as well as I can... until we get to my solo! And then I just have to make it up from scratch on the spot. I shall throw this leg in to front attitude and affect a haughty facial expression so that no one notices!
Sheesh.
The theater where I work recently (like a week ago) staged the King and I. I think I saw the movie once when I was 17 and staying at someone's house to watch their cat while they were out of town. That was back when I was terribly industrious and used to get house sitting jobs to earn extra cash. At night I would sit around with the cat and watch my employer's video collection (remember when we all watched videos?) or read their books (Memoirs of a Geisha SUCKED, by the way) . Anyway. So, I saw it ages ago and aside from "Shall We Dance" (buh-dum-dum-dum) and the king dropping dead at the end the only part I really remembered was the ballet version of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the middle. Because it is SO freakin' weird, yo.
So. I went to see the dress rehearsal and found to my surprise that the crazy ballet is actually the best part of the entire show. Maybe I just have a greater appreciation for the dancers and details now, or maybe the antiquated /romanticized/borderline racisty stuff is just more glaring at 32 than it was at 17.
There is a bit when Eliza and the angel are walking across the frozen lake that involves all these little scootchy foot movements across the stage. As I watched all I could think was "I bet people think that is easy, but that shit looks HARDCORE to me". I totally had to try it when I got home. It TOTALLY IS hard! Dang!
This isn't us, but it's the best production I could find on Youtube. The scootchy feet are about halfway through.
PS: am I the only one who really only knows the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin through this movie? Sure, we talked about it in history classes when I was in school, but it's not like people actually READ the darn thing these days.
So, last week at work we were working on tutus and leotards for a play that opened over the weekend. The tutus started life as very generic and plain little white classical rehearsal tutus that we added trim to and fitted with pockets (for holding the confetti. They were snowflakes, you dig?). What we ran out of time for before dress rehearsal was tacking the layers of netting together (because for some reason the shop doesn't have a tacking gun? Really? How hard is that?). I sincerely hope the other people in the shop managed to get them tacked properly before the show opened because at rehearsal they were causing a serious case of "chicken butt".
You know. Chicken butt. Where an untacked tutu flips up instead of standing straight out from the hips and makes you look like you have a little birdy bottom. I searched on Google for hours trying to find a photo of this phenomenon, but to no avail. For some reason the search term "chicken butt tutu" simply does NOT bring you the kind of images I was looking for.
It was with some amusement, then, that I saw the incomparable folks at tutu.com post this photo over the weekend, of a person wearing an untacked tutu and suffering from chicken butt syndrome:
Chicken butt.
Maybe you need to have seen a lot of chicken's butts for this description to make sense.
Funnily enough, though, I was just searching for a picture of a plain white rehearsal tutu to link to above when I came across this photo on Ebay of a model trying desperately to pretend that her tutu hasn't got a case of the chicken butt. But we aren't fooled:
