Last night we struck the set for West Side Story and loaded in the set for Gondoliers, a musical which I still don’t totally know what its about. I saw part of the first act on a DVD recorded at the Sydney Opera house but I don’t know who becomes king at the end.
Being up here is sort of what I imagine living at some kind of medieval manor or villa having been like. There’s a big fancy hall by the theatre where they constantly put on weddings and other celebrations. The theatre used to be an old barn. The tech crew hangs out behind and underneath it and everyone’s efforts are bent all day every day towards putting on a good show for wealthy nobles. We eat in a big room all together after a bell rings and everyone is broken up into work crews and companies, depending on what your specialty. We work late into the night and sometimes when there’s a show going on, you can hear the music wafting down from above with dancing and revelry and you can almost envision women in fancy dresses and men with coiffed hair clinking glasses in congratulations of one another.
It’s not a bad life by any means though. Everyone is very focused - all working towards the same basic goals after all. We operate as a group, as a single unit towards the on-going completion of one solid quantifiable task - which is more than I can say for ordinary life outside of this place. We’re five minutes from the beach, but I’ve only been a couple times at night. Free time is few and far between and I’ve already forgotten to seek it out the way I did before I got here. Being in a situation like this, you simply adapt to what’s going on; you have no other option.
Have had a never-ending string of strange dreams since I’ve gotten here. This morning, the song of a bird in real life found its way into my dream as a character uttering words which I was easily able to interpret in that setting, but less so on waking. I dreamt the devil (in a stereotypical red costume with fake horns and all) was taking me under some hidden staircase where someone kept their dead mother whose eyes moved to focus on me and head bobbed up when I walked in. I dreamt of being able to transfer some kind of consciousness from person-to-person, body-to-body, simply by looking into someone else’s eyes. The moment itself becomes an entity. The trees here all seem old and wise, the kind with eyes and arms - and, to me, they seem to be the ones in charge, creating under their aegis, maybe, the space for these human players to come together to entertain them.
- END -
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2 Comments
> Gondoliers
Not one I know, but having been recently involved with a G&S production I’m beginning to suspect they were On To Something… beneath the apparently pointless plots is Something More that keeps people coming back.
Sounds like you’re having fun…
I’m starting to hear something in their, I don’t know what the word is, pentameter? Just the way the words fit to the timing whether or not there’s music. Starting to hear something in it that seems very old and worth learning. I only slip into it once in a while, sort of an epic poetry trance. We have a great actor playing the Duke, and he’s spot on in his delivery. More on this later.