Blog Blame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.