And I Am Telling You.

None of us, not one, will ever be able to create theater this vital and affecting.

I've watched this video several times a week for several months now and it never gets old.

Super Cool Musician's Tour Diary: Day 3 -- Modesto, CA

About mid-way through our four-and-a-half hour drive to Modesto this morning, I tried to explain the premise of these posts to our stage manager Rachel. We had just passed a prison, and I was feeling pretty awesome about myself for being on the outside. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: ...I decided to call it "Super Cool Musician's Tour Diary." Which is really funny.
Rachel: Sure.
Me: Yeah, I know. Anyway, it's about how we perform in all of these regional theaters and what they're like and how big they are and what other kind of shows they do and who comes to see them. It's funny and insightful and wry without being cynical. Like David Foster Wallace, probably.
Rachel: You realize that we're not performing in regional theaters, right?
Me: Wait, what?
Rachel: These are performing arts centers. Regional theaters are a different, very specific thing.
Me: Are you serious?
Rachel: Yeah. A regional theater is a self-sustaining entity that has an artistic director who programs a whole season. They hire directors, actors, and a technical staff and mount shows that run for an extended period of time. They don't import one-off shows like ours.
Me: But technically speaking, they are theaters in a region that's not New York. That makes them "regional theaters," right?
Rachel: No. Not really. Places like the La Jolla Playhouse, the Signature, those are regional theaters. Places like the Clark Center and the Gallo Center don't really count.

At this point, one of the actors chimed in from the back seat:

Debbie: Your blog posts are probably still worthwhile!

Faced with this, I did what I always do when I realize I'm wrong about something. First, I sulked for about 20 minutes. Then I insulted The Beatles. Then I decided to make lemons into limon-flavored* potato chips:

...and eat half a bag of limon-flavored potato chips. Then I decided to change the subject.

Yesterday, I mentioned I might talk some about what we actually do on stage as a group. A good, comprehensive explanation would take more than I feel like I can give at 1:30 a.m., so I'm just gonna write about one thing. But it's probably the most interesting thing to write about on a blog about a plays and the people that write them.

One of the games we play in our show is called "Rewind." It involves two to three actors, a host and a pianist. Before the game begins, the host sources the audience for a song title. The actors then improvise a short, underscored scene based on the suggestion. At the first logical break, the host freezes the scene and asks the actors and pianist to repeat it beat for beat in a variety of different styles of entertainment, solicited from the audience. The suggestions he/she asks for are typically some combination of the following:

1) A famous playwright or style of theater
2) A style of movie or film director
3) Your favorite TV network
4) A style of music

We tend to get a lot of the same suggestions show to show. This is particularly true when we ask for playwrights, because everyone knows the same five or six. Here's a short list of who those playwrights are, and what about percentage of the time we get them:

Shakespeare - 90%
Tennessee Williams - 5%
David Mamet - 2%
Neil Simon - 2%
Eugene O'Neil, Brecht, Kabuki, Theater of the Absurd, Rogers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller - <1%>

These, however, are big ol' estimates, and I've always wanted to collect some raw data. Below I've transcribed the actual Rewind suggestions from the first three shows of this tour:

Show #1: Arroyo Grande, CA
Playwright 1: Shakespeare
Playwright 2: Eugene O'Neil
TV Network: Logo
Musical Style: Opera

Show #2: Modesto, CA
Playwright 1: Shakespeare
Playwright 2: David Mamet
Movie Director 1: Michael Bay
Movie Director 2: Tim Burton
Musical Style: Rap

Show #3: Modesto, CA
Playwright 1: Oscar Wilde
Playwright 2: Shakespeare
TV Network: MTV
Musical Style: Screamo

As usual, everyone wants to see Shakespeare, and Mamet and O'Neil both made their customary side show appearance. But there were a few surprises in there. Oscar Wilde, I discovered, translates in my brain to "play something staid, Britishy and classical sounding. Unfortunately, so does Shakespeare. If anyone in the audience had really been paying attention to the underscoring at that point in the show, they would have been underwhelmed with me. More than they should be for my sloppy dress and poor frizz control, anyway.

The only suggestion we get more frequently than Shakespeare is rap. I have two guesses as to why this might be:

1) Our audiences tend to be predominantly elderly, and elderly folks have a hard time taking rap seriously.
2) They've all seen the episode of Whose Line is it Anyway where Wayne Brady and Stephen Colbert rap dying in an avalanche, over a beat that sounds suspiciously like The Doors' "Touch Me."

Above: The thing I was just talking about.

Oh, also, Modesto was not nearly as awful as everyone says it is, the folks at the theatre were absurdly kind to us, and it was nice to have high school students in the audience, because they engage better than the older folks. They also forced me to figure out what "Screamo" was on the fly, which I appreciated. I think I got it about 80% right.

Tomorrow: I either explain what it was like to perform as part of the annual Fallon, NV Migratory Bird Festival, or ramble on about something completely different.

*Totally lime-flavored, actually.

Super Cool Musician's Tour Journal: Day 2 -- Arroyo Grande, CA

Usually when we travel, we arrive at our destination the morning of our show. But because trying to fly all the way across the country day-of and expecting nothing to go wrong is about as silly as writing a blog post at 2 a.m. the night before you wake up at the crack of dawn to drive five hours on unfamiliar roads, we arrived in Arroyo Grande last night, which meant that we were able to wake up today and visit the town's famous swinging bridge:

(WOW, a picture would be so great here!)

...Doc Burnstein's Ice Cream Parlor:

(Imagine if I were able to post a picture of it and you could see just how charming it is. You would lose your shit).

...and the soon-to-be world famous Sweet Shop Named Desire:



(Artists rendition)

Our show was on the 617-seat main stage in the Clark Center, which was both beautiful and brand new. When professional photographers take pictures of it at sunset, it looks like this:



It was built entirely with donor money and used by several local high schools for their stage productions. They also program their own season, mostly music, dance and comedy from the looks of it. Some of what came before us this spring, in no particular order:

- The Peking Acrobats
- Yesterday, A Tribute to The Beatles
- The Best of San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition
- Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra
- The Guthrie Family Rides Again With Arlo Guthrie

I wouldn't say our show was quite Peking Acrobats good, but it was definitely Guthrie Family good. Part of that had to do with the amazing parmesan-crusted bread we were given to eat before the show. It was truly the kind of bread you tear in half, only to realize you really want the whole piece, and no matter that it's over on the counter in a Ziploc bag and you're already sitting down.

About 250 people came out to see us. It's weird for a 250-person crowd to feel small, and in a house that size it definitely does, but the audience at the Clark Center more than made up for it be being one of the most focused and energetic we've ever performed for. They even laughed their heads off at our opening blues game*, which last got a laugh in St. Cloud, MN in October, 2009.

As a result, the show was one of the better shows we've done as a group in a long time. We improvised a musical about a couple in the audience that met on MySpace and was married by Elvis. We invented a story about a coroner cursed with incredible longevity, doomed to embalm and plaster makeup on the faces of each of his friends and loved ones, one by one. And we closed with a scene about bong juice, in which I tried and failed to make generic reggae sound convincing on a grand piano.

I wish we could stay here for an extended run, but tomorrow we're off to Modesto, which seems to be a dirty word out here, for some reason. Whatever. I have a feeling I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Tomorrow: I give the Gallo Center in Modesto, CA the Youngblog treatment.

Hey look, I found a picture of the swinging bridge!



*More on this tomorrow, and the other improv games we play, including a very special discussion of playwrights.

Super Cool Musician's Tour Journal: Day 1 -- Newark, NJ to San Luis Obispo, CA

I've spent the last seven months trying to convince the rest of Youngblood that I'm really, really good at playing the piano. I'm not sure how well I've succeeded, but it at least seems like when I say things like "modulation" and "mixolydian scale" in group, they tend to believe that I a) know what I'm talking about and b) have a good reason for bringing it up, other than an aggressive need to be listened to. In reality, my piano skills aren't all that great. But they're good enough that, occasionally, I get to go places and use them.

One of the groups I use them with is a short-form musical improv company called Chicago City Limits, which as its name implies, is based in New York -- nearish EST. In addition to our New York show, we perform on the road about twice a month. And when I'm trying to delay working on my Bloodworks piece, I blog about it.

When we travel, we wind up in a whole bunch regional theaters in a whole bunch of places. Many are brand new, built mid-last decade as part of their home city's downtown rehabilitation effort. Some are beautifully restored old vaudeville houses. But almost all of them put shows on stage, and most of them put bodies in the seats way better than we do in New York.

Since we're about to start a four day swing through California and Nevada, I figured I'd try and find out what business is like at the theaters we perform in, who their audiences are and what sorts of shows they have going on when we're not around. But since I’m a shitty journalist who will probably fail to ask the right person to answer those questions for me, I'll probably fill in with details of what it was like to perform there, and whether or not they had pepperoni sticks waiting for us when we arrived.

I wish I could start on this now, but as I write this, I'm on an airplane about midway between Newark and San Francisco, eating a turkey dog in a crescent roll. "Oh, you must have bought that turkey dog at the gate," you say. Nope. They were giving them out on the plane. FOR FREE. On an airplane in 2010. That doesn't happen.

Also:

1) Two Southwest Airlines 757s just flew by going the opposite way. If you ever doubted how fast planes go, wait 'till you see one fly by you in midair. They go FAST.
2) Three and a half hours into the flight I have yet to see ground. Apparently it was a cloudy afternoon basically everywhere in America today.
3) Listening to Semisonic at 30,000 feet is about the same as listening to Semisonic at sea level. Pretty good.

Tomorrow: I try my best to describe the Clark Center in Arroyo Grande, CA.

Because I left my camera at home, I will leave you with a file photo of a jet plane.