Danny's Blog

Blog Blame

2007-05-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

This blog is here because last summer California Shakespeare Theater asked me to keep a blog about rehearsals for their website. Usually they have their officially coronated company members do it, but they asked me as I guess a sort of special guest blog star slash garruloquacious substitute teacher. Then they asked me to do it for another play. Then they started griping it was too dirty and went into my blog and exised the word "douche" which is, as you know, French for shower. I thought it would die when their season ended, and indeed, its not on their website anymore. So people who google me, may they get a life, find this blog and wonder what its about and why somebody as hip as me would be so pathetic and lonely as to have a blog. Although the only people who seem to be reading it are spelling-challenged pharmacists and hot teen pussy. Hi Dr. Rx! Hi Brianne! Bye! Gotta douche!

Golden Age Must

2007-05-11T01:36:00.000-07:00

As an extremely camp apertif to the San Francisco Ballet's necrophiliac Don Quixote, I watched the Sophia Loren Peter O'Toole Man of La Mancha. It is so bad and boring it deserved no mention, except that Peter O'Toole is a great actor and so once in a while, onc cares about the title character, gets his deal, and is breifly moved. Not so with Helgi Tomasson's ballet. The Russian "dancer" playing Don Quixote looks like a high school basketball player forced to play the spaniard as detention. I have never seen any profesional actor or dancer move so woodenly. I have never seen pieces of wood so wooden. Presumably he is recreating some original "choreography" from nineteenth cetnury Russia, badly, by the number, so who cares? Archeology is rarely stageworthy entertainment. This is the problem with the company. Acting is not only given a backseat to technique; it is ignored. In a Ballanchine abstraction, it doesn't matter, although it might be welcome. In a story ballet it is a bit of a sine qua non, especially in a story argued to be the best in Western Art whose attendant dancing is plotless and admittedly, I assume, an embellishment alone. It makes for an ugly, embarassing evening. The San Francisco Ballet company are excellent dancers and artists. When they play roles, they seem like embarassed amateurs.

The Grapes of Roth

2006-08-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Several of the Ebmud Venetians have been reading Philip Roth's Operation Shylock. When the Harvey Milk Public Library sent me an overdue notice, I stayed up late and finished it. Its a brave, chicken soup of a book. And its great to be in such a brave prouduction. And very weird, too. Since this play began, Israel went to war, so all that stuff is in the air everywhere everyday we go to Orinda, California to do a four hundred year old "Jew-play." The act of saying Shakespeare's lines makes it impossible to be lazy, intellectually and morally, about fascism and prejudice and race-based hatred and hate-based fear and hypocrisy and paranoia and Victimhood and revenge, which makes the play a great work of art and why it must be done, and done anew, again and again. Sometimes it makes one long for the naiiv pleasure of slapping on a liberal swath of Secret Garden eye shadow.

A Venetian Haiku

2006-08-14T18:32:00.000-07:00

For the opening of Merchant of Venice I wrote an haiku for everyone in the cast and Daniel Fish the Genius. Here is my haiku for Shylock:

Dumpster Daddy barks
In clouds of dust off Ashby
Dead frozen chicken

The rest of them are not approved for blogs where puppets post.

Lancelot Loves Jessica

2006-08-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

Elvy Jost accosted me after the curtain call of the first preview of The Merchant of Venice in a rage that I had not blogged about how much I love her. Well, here it is. I love Elvy. Elvy, roses are red, violets are blue, some blog poetry rhymes, but this doesn't.

Secrets Can Be Fun

2006-08-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

There was a nasty error in my last blog concerning the nomenclature of my favorite eyeshadow. "Spring Garden" should have read "Secret Garden," which Daniel Fish, on a break from directing Merchant of Venice, said sounded like a "shower in Franconia." Or something like that. Perhaps I misquote, but these are dangerous times. Farewell Fatgoose, Avanti Venezia. Ice cream has no bones.

Color Me Green

2006-07-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

Once I was a green puppet. By day I bait the circumsized from variable social strata. But tonight my green eyeshadow is perfection. I have tried to wear green eyeshadow in several plays. Once I nearly came to blows with a cantonese directorix named Pang Yuan Yuan in a production of Lysistrata; she had a nine-and-a-half-foot spandex vagina onstage and yet I was forbidden from sporting green eyeshadow. But, victory is mine: thank you, Lord, for amy, sharon, anna, sage, moss, and spring garden.

Casket Cattle Call

2006-07-18T17:36:00.000-07:00

I was tickled to see shoeboxes being used for the gold, silver, and lead caskets in rehearsal two days ago. This morning they were cake boxes. This afternoon they resembled an installation from The International Museum of Occidental Briefcases.

There are only two people in the world who are to be trusted with directing The Merchant of Venice, and one of them is Daniel Fish. The Other? NOYB.

Fun Fact: Susannah Schulman, last season's Kate Nickleby and Rosalind later this summer in Moscone's As You Like It, once played a Human Gold Casket in Merchant of Venice twelve summers ago in another Shakespeare festival far far away. She wore a laundry basket and sang a la mode of Dame Julie Andrews (circa pre-op).

I honestly believe the recipe for World Peace is more productions of The Merchant of Venice.

The quality of today's blog is brought to you courtesy of Sean "Nag Nicely" Daniels.

Twenty One Inch Salute

2006-07-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

I love Daniel Fish. He is brave. I think he's a genius. I wonder if he has the same waist size as Marcia Pizzo.

Aloha Means Wig

2006-07-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

Restoration Comedy opened and its too glorious to blog about. Now I'm in Merchant of Venice with Daniel Fish directing. He's horrifyingly smart and right-on with that play, which I have to say, is one of my top five favorites ever, the oevure of Amy Freed naturally excepted. Andy Murray (Graziano) called me a "poof" within fifteen seconds of the first rehearsal, emblemizing the whirligig of tolerance found within the world of the piece itself. Delia Mac Dougall (Nerissa) tromped on my favorite line of the play during the read-through. I had neither the heart nor the nerve to tell her that this play was called The Merchant, and not the Merry Wives, of Venice. The Oxford Shakespeare footnoted "bosom lover" as "close friend," overlaying the problems of the play by continuing five centuries of tight-bunned scholarship (as in "Gosh, that librarian's bun of hair must hurt" rather than "Work those glutes, girl!"). The cast is awesome. David Chandler and Jenny Bacon who play Shylock and Portia are so good the Simon Wiesenthal Center'll send 'em a plaque before its over; I'd bet on it, if Lutherans were any good at betting.

Beneath the Planet of the Batons

2006-06-25T14:33:00.000-07:00

I think the baton twirling is only the half of it in Sharon Ott's past. When she got up to help us stage the "fashion show" in Act Two, I was sure that she had runway experience as a girl. I want to start an irresponsible blog rumor that she was a former Miss Teen Milwaukee who twirled during the talent segment of the pageant.

My costume fittings are almost too fantastic to blog, as I'm afraid they are a dream and if I acknowledge them in print, I will be punished and what was real will have ben but fantasy: la vida es suena, you know? When I go into the costume shop for fittings, everywhere I look are pieces of Foppington's costumes. Its like they've sent all the other characters' frocks off to Saipan. Its Novelty Fashion Heaven.

The Twirling Pisces

2006-06-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

Sharon Ott can twirl batons! Who knew? A majorette with the same birthday as Liz Taylor. How fabulous is that? She's so smart, describing the play as living somewhere between light opera and opera buffo. But more urgently: my costume: Anna Oliver came running through the green room with some fabric that triggered a Proustian moment wherein I remembered the upholostery on an Arctic Cat snowmobile, Fargo, North Dakota, circa 1969. And then you should see the fabric for my cuffs in Act One: butterflies: in my stomach and on the sleeves. I looked up and saw Elijah Alexander who plays Loveless tied down with big thick ropes to the four posters of a bed while Ron Campbell read really flowery heterosexual porn to him. What a killer gig.

The Butt Balloon Talks

2006-06-10T00:40:00.000-07:00

Today we read through the play and Sharon Ott talked about everything. I love her. When I was a little boy in phd school I was playing Bentley Summerhays in Misalliance directed by our costume designer Anna Oliver's dad and then Sharon came to town before bringing Berkeley Rep to the Tony Awards and cast Anna Oliver's mom in Misalliance at the Rep, so its like a big whirlpool of schoolday memories coalescing on Heinz Street. And then Amy Freed talked and she is the totallest genius working in the theater today and I shall fall in love with her presently and the other actors are GORGEOUS and FUNNY and GOOD. When I went back to Windsor that night to do the puppets Ron Campbell and I had to tell everyone how GORGEOUS the cast was and they wanted to kick us out of Windsor and throw us into Datchet Mead. But tonight I was a puppet. Some of the puppets are eating smores and drinking martinis with the wild turkeys tonight. Especially Sean Daniels who is such a stud as Associate Artistic Director while Moscone's schmoozing the Twin Cities.

I did! I did get fitted for a muslin butt-balloon!

2006-06-08T18:53:00.000-07:00

I had a 95 minute costume fitting today. I tried on a mauve wig. The small one. The big one was in a refrigerator box in the corner. I got fitted for a codfish codpiece. They tried to get me into a corset; I held onto the filing cabinet as if it were a four-poster, but I must have had too much at the barbeque. Tonight I am a puppet.

Tomorrow I get fitted for a muslin mockup of a butt-balloon, I hope.

2006-06-08T00:54:00.000-07:00

Today I am a Puppet

2006-06-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

testing, sweet testing

2006-06-07T11:12:00.000-07:00