Feliz cumpleaños!!

Sunday September 29th. A day of great portent and importance. 

And not only because it's the date of my audition (may the Force be with me), but because it's the 466th birthday of our favorite author, Miguel de Cervantes, author of "Don Quixote".  

Happy Birthday, Miguel !!!  

Wikipedia portrait of Cervantes, seen here not blowing out the candles on his cake.

If that collar he's wearing reminds you of something, that may be because Cervantes is only seventeen years older than Shakespeare.  I wonder if they ever met.  ("Thou art a writer too, forsoothe? I shall buy for thee this ale, that we might bemoan our tragic fate as brothers.").

Cervantes is credited with inventing the modern novel, and while he was at it, he invented the sequel, too; the famous Don Quixote was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615 [an early George RR Martin, no doubt]. Among his other accomplishments:  Cervantes was a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada and a soldier in the Spanish Naval Marines. His left hand was permanently disabled in a naval battle, but he continued to serve in the military.  He was captured by Algerians and held as a slave for five years, but was eventually ransomed and rejoined his family in Madrid.

Cervantes was married - to a much younger woman - in 1584; an uncle of his wife is said to have served as something of a model for Don Quixote.  He actually did work for a while as a tax collector, and was in fact jailed more than once for 'irregularities' in his accounts and/or for bankruptcy; this is apparently the inspiration for the dungeon setting of our play.  

Most of the elements of "Man of La Mancha" are taken from the first section of the novel: fighting the windmills, the vigil in the courtyard of the inn, and the episode with the barber and the shaving basin.  In the novel, Don Quixote has never actually met Dulcinea, she is just a farm girl from a nearby town.  Happily for the mezzo-sopranos among us, Dulcinea in the play is a much more, er, colorful figure.

Cervantes lived much of his life, including his final years, in Madrid.  In Plaza Mayor, Madrid, is a large bronze statue of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; sorry for the poor quality of the photograph. Just ignore the stupid tourist climbing around up there.  

Is she really wearing a LOGON tee-shirt?

I went looking for Cervantes quotes on the intertubes, and found the following: 

One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this. 

(source: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/miguel_de_cervantes.html#g3lZq8WbhPza2GWP.99)

Sound familiar????  I wonder if his estate is still getting royalties.

AUDITIONS!

Well, good luck to everyone who is going to audition for Man of La Mancha!  Auditions are tomorrow, and Monday, with possible callbacks on Thursday.  

Attention families: be alert for signs of irrational behavior, panic attacks, ego deflation, and spontaneous instances of us talking to ourselves, or bursting into song.  This is a temporary condition, and it will pass.  Probably by Thursday night or Friday morning, at the latest.

Good luck to the audition panel, as well. Hope we don't bore you, or torment you, too much!

Lisa:  Another candidate for Dulcinea, guys
Panel:  [replies]

The audition forms we have been asked to fill out ask us to state the role for which we are auditioning, and then asks for another role we would consider. WHY SO CONSERVATIVE?  In some places, you can audition for ALL the roles.  At the same time.  And maybe get them, too. Now THAT would save on transportation costs, not to mention coffee and tea at rehearals.

You probably think that my cats have been sharing their catnip with me, but - no.  Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9IWAxSpgKA

Now go practice your audition.  Or Nick will get ALL the roles.

Break a leg, one and all.  Also, remember:  the chorus has more fun, and less tummy aches.  :)

You don't have to be crazy, but it helps

The first LOGON rehearsals, according to company lore, took place in Ed Spitz's living room.  It wasn't long, however, before the group outgrew that venue, and we eventually found a home: the Beer Sheva Mental Health Center, fondly known to locals as "the psychiatri". 

So yes, we rehearse in a psychiatric hospital.  It's a warm, homey, welcoming environment.

Come on in, pull up a plastic chair!

Well ok, maybe it's not.  But honestly, the MHC has been very good to LOGON, giving us researsal spaces in both a large and a small auditorium as well as storage space for costumes, scenery and props.  The security folks at the entrance get to know us ("Opera?") and so do some of the long term residents of the wards. Over the years we've had occasional "fans" from among the patients who would come and sit quietly, enjoying the rehearsals.  One gentleman in particular would always stop to thank me when we met on the walkways, and ask how the show is coming along.  

The real fun will come later, when we start rehearsing with bits and pieces of costumes.  You can picture the scene:  during our break, a small group of us heads up to the coffee machine in the front lobby. Depending on the year, we might be dressed as flappers.  Or cowboys & Native Americans.  Or turn-of-the-previous-century merchant marines.  Or silverware. [Seriously, last year I was a fork]. Bewildered visitors to the hospital can only stare and wonder if we've all escaped from the wards, not to mention that we're probably jabbering away in English, as if we were in Boise Idaho instead of Beer Sheva.    

Did you think i was kidding about the silverware?

People who hear about LOGON - how we rehearse two, three, four evenings per week; how we build and paint the scenery ourselves; how we all help to pack up the show and load the trucks at one am after performances across the country (and then get up the next morning to go to work)  - often ask us, "How much do you get paid for performing in the show"?  And then we tell them that we don't get paid, that in fact, we pay membership dues of 1000 NIS every year for the priviledge.  That's when they look at us, and we know they're thinking - 'these people are crazy'.  And THAT is when we know, deep in our hearts, that we have found the perfect place to rehearse.  We are home.  

An Ode to Auditions

I can hardly describe my condition
as i start to prepare my audition.

I've memorized pages and pages of text
but cannot remember what lines should come next.

I'm diligently working on singing the song
but somehow it always is coming out wrong.

First is a chorus and then comes the verse;
when singing with feeling i sound even worse.

I hate the composer, it's really his fault:
The role calls for mezzo and i'm a mere alt.

I'm acting with passion and dancing with flair
and living on lettuce and dying my hair.

The girl should be lovely, and I'm rather plain.
These awful auditions are always a pain.

There's drama and tension but still it should bore us.
The chances are high i'll end up in the chorus!

Shmattehs

The best moments on Monday night involved a white toga with gold trim, a box of moldy top hats, and a good looking not-so-young Prince in a variety of funny hats.  Yes, dear readers, we were raiding the LOGON costume room!  

High on the list of things most people never worry about is "what happens to the costumes when a show is over?".  Glad you asked!  After the last show, everything gets sorted into bags and boxes and carted off home for washing.  I wonder what the neighbors think when they see 30 pair of women's bloomers hanging on my line.  Anyway, after washing, pretty much everything gets stored away in our costume room - a black hole of boxes, cartons, and bags collected over 30+ years - upstairs of our rehearsal space in the Beer Sheva Mental Health Center.  Yes, a psychiatric hospital, but we'll talk about that some other day.

Anyway, budget constraints being what they are this year, it was decided that we'd go through all (!!!) the old costumes to see what could be 'recycled' for this year's show.  So Monday night, a couple dozen LOGON volunteers hauled a ton of stuff down from the storage area, unpacked it, and sorted it out.  In the process we discovered that at some point, there had been a leak.... someone picked up a cardboard box full of elegant black top hats (Oliver!) and black gooey water came streaming out..... yuck!  And you thought that show business was so glamorous. 

Some of those top hats, in better days.

 We waded through that mess and kept on hauling; pretty soon the large rehearsal space was full of piles, and three entire tables were just holding hats (which Mike, one of the producers this year, kept trying on as we worked.  I think he looked best in the pink cowboy hat [Annie Get Your Gun]).  

The white toga brought things to a crashing halt.  It's about knee length, and was worn - with a long blonde wig - by a skinny cross-dressed geezer with hairy legs and knobby knees, in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum".  His romantic pas de deux ("Lovely") with the hunky male lead reduced us to tears almost every rehearsal; knowing what a proper, dignified and reserved person Ed really is only made it funnier.  "Forum" was not our biggest hit, but it was one of the shows that the cast enjoyed the most.

 Here's the happy couple, but in a different scene.

We work with a professional costume designer, Melanie, and she prowled the hall all evening snatching up bits and pieces that will be transformed into costumes for "Man of La Mancha". She left with several huge bags and a gleam in her eye; the night we first get our costumes always stands out as one of the more exciting moments of the rehearsal period.  

We still have a long way to go before we get there this year!  Next stop:  the dreaded auditions. More about that next time; meanwhile, you can find photos of previous shows on the LOGON Facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/NegevLightOpera or on our website:  http://www.negevlightopera.com/past-shows/

Happy Sukkot, and don't worry if you hear a bunch of really strange noises coming from my sukkah.... the kids won't let me practice my audition piece in the house, and what's a girl to do?

And So It Begins

It's that time of year again.  The High Holidays arrive, the evenings get cooler, and LOGON rehearsals begin. 

We've just started rehearsals for this year's show, and it feels good to see the old gang (plus some new faces) together again.  Some of us have been doing this for over thirty years, for some this is the first time. Some of us are well past retirement, and some of us have yet to finish high school.  Some of us were born here, some of us live here, some of us are only passing through on our way to a medical degree and somewhere else. We have one thing in common:  we all want to be in the next production of the Light Opera Group of the Negev (call us LOGON for short).

We do musical theater. We do it all over Israel, we do one production per year, and we do it in English. With subtitles (in Hebrew and Russian). We start rehearsals in the fall, we have auditions (even the word makes my tummy hurt) for roles, we learn the music.  So it begins.  In a few months, good Lord willing and the crik don't rise, we'll have ourselves a show.  Would you like to come along for the ride?  Keep reading.

This year we'll be performing "Man of La Mancha", based on Miguel Cervantes' novel "Don Quixote".  You know the song "The Impossible Dream"?  That show.  Quite a change from last year's production of "Beauty & The Beast", and not exactly "My Fair Lady" or "Fiddler on the Roof", either (we've done those already).  But it's one hell of a play!

I'm going to try and tell the story of this year in LOGON.  I'll be talking about LOGON, about the play, about the production, about the people, and about the whole process of "hey guys let's put on a show in the old barn".   I'm also going to try to be funny (wish me luck), interesting, and informative.  This is my first try at blogging, so feel free to send feedback, questions, and comments.  See you again soon!  From beautiful downtown Beer Sheva,  bye for now.

yamima