Confessions of a Theater Geek...
May. 30th, 2025 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatHalf watching the West End Revival of Kiss Me Kate on Great Performances, and it's not very good. The one on National Theater Streaming is far better. Although the singer performing Lois Lane/Bianca is wonderful. And I like the intergrated casting. The difficulty with Kiss Me Kate is the misogynistic source material, and some of the Cole Porter songs do not date well, while others work quite well. Although the performances are quite good in places. And the guy who did the dance sequence for Too Darn Hot was a showstopper.
Yes, I am theater geek or a theater buff. Ask me about theater, and I can go on and on and on at length, with an almost encyclopedic knowledge. Same is true about television and film.
I fell in love with the theater in the fifth grade - when two tall black boys in a mostly white grade school in the 1970s put together a play as an alternative to playing baseball at recess. It was cold, and we had access to the gym. The play was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (actually twelve dwarves, we had a lot of folks involved). I was cast as one of the dwarves. I was a tall dwarf, but not that tall - since I was after all only eleven or twelve at the time. My first theater role was a dwarf. To understand how amusing that is? You need to know I was taller than everyone but the two kids directing the play. I think one of their names was DJ or TJ, can't remember. They were wonderful. Kind, smart, and a nice barrier against bullying. No one dared bully or tease me when they were present.
I knew them for such a short period of time, but I still, over forty years later, remember them with fondness. The school year was 1977-78. It was an odd year in my life, a year of lots of changes or what I like to call a watershed year. One of the biggest years. I saw Star Wars, which changed my life (we were among the first in my area to see it), I discovered theater, and we moved half way across the country, from a rural suburb, to an actual one.
I switched schools twice in one year - and in the fifth grade no less. Talk about traumatic. My brother, three years younger, went through a similar trauma, although as a natural athlete, he had an easier time adjusting. Al The first switch in schools was due to "desegregation" or redistricting due to desegregation. (Although I didn't understand that at the time, just that we'd been redistricted.) So, instead of spending twenty minutes on the bus each day, it was about an hour. I didn't care, I loved the new grade school - and the new folks at it. No bullying. Diversity. And THEATER. It was fun.
But alas, it was short lived and we moved from Pennsylvania to Kansas, which was a long long ways away from Pennsylvania. I lost my friends. My school chums. It took us five days to drive there, stopping along the way in the middle of Winter. With a scared Siamese cat making the journey with us, and climbing all over the car. We had to go South, because of blizzards. 1978 had a lot of snow storms. It's about five to six States away. We'd gone from wooded horse country, with lots of trees, the Amish, Philadelphia and a stone's throw from NYC, not to mention closer to the ocean, all the way to the god-forsaken Midwest, with it's trees, houses, streets, shopping malls, and as you drove further west wide open areas with barely a tree in sight (at least we had trees). We were in Eastern Kansas, not Western, which is miles of open prarie. Everything was different.
But?
I still had the theater. I started taking classes at The Theater for Young America in Overland Park, Kansas. They had classes during the school year, all grades, and plays for children. And during the summers? A summer long theater seminar, where we put on a play for about a month or two months. In the sixth grade? I played the Great Goblin in the Hobbit. We also got to write a play during it, and the selected play would be performed. Along with individual monologues. I played various roles, and for a little while I could escape into a story or another character in front of a paying audience or a non-paying one, it varied. I took theater from the sixth grade pretty much all the way through high school, and into college. Then eventually gave up, tired of the stage fright and the criticism.
I preferred writing and drawing to being on the stage, less anxiety. But I did give it the good old college try And I'll say this much for the theater classes - it helped me get rid of my lisp.
I loved the theater, I still love the theater, I just didn't necessarily want to make a career out of it. Also, I'm not an entertainer - I prefer to watch in the dark, unseen. I do however understand actors who live to be on the stage, who love to entertain. And in the theater? You can be anything, including yourself. It's the one place you can be fully yourself. It doesn't care if you are gay, white, black, or trans, or anything else. It's the theater.
And there's nothing I love more than to listen to actors/directors/folks in the theater/film/television talk about their craft, art, perform their craft, and tell stories visually. It's my happy place. I feel safe watching and listening to that. It takes my blood pressure down, and comforts me. And it has a lot to do with that all too brief experience in the fifth grade.
I went from a desegregated school that was wonderfully diverse to a school that was heavily segregated in a segregated area, where everyone was white. I think we had maybe three POC in the entire area? None went to my new grade school. I noticed. The new school had bullying, teasing, and was mean. The only diversity was religious, gender politics, and class. I retreated into books, theater, and art.
Diversity - I've discovered makes people kinder. When everyone looks alike, they are mean and exclusive, and it brings out the worst in people.
It's why I love New York City - it's so wonderfully diverse in every way imaginable and I've found the people to be kinder than elsewhere. I feel safer here, somehow.
Sorry for the tangent. Long way of explaining why I enjoy listening to actor podcasts.
Speaking of?
Schmactors is back - basically it's two character actors (James Marsters and his buddy, Mark Devine) from theater, television, voice, and film discussing you guessed it, theater, film, television and everything in between.
I have a fondness for character actors, I seldom love the leads. It's a problem, since it's hard to find anything that they are in. I think the reason is - that I was a character actor. I'm always crushing on actors that seem to only get a few roles, and everything else is hard to find.
I started watching Buffy because of Anthony Head, who I followed there from his previous role on VR5. I'd fallen in love with him - in the stage musical Chess, when he briefly took over his brother's role in the London run of the musical way back in 1988. I'd seen him perform it live - three rows from the stage, or maybe four rows. He blew me away when he sang Pity the Child in that run, and I was in love. (I took a course in London for two months - where we read plays, wrote reviews on the stage productions that we saw performed, and discussed them in detail.)
At any rate, it's getting late...so here's a picture that I painted of people I've seen on the subway, from memory, proof that the subway is perfectly safe. They are. Don't believe the idiots who say otherwise, they clearly don't live in New York.
[Note it won't last forever, because FB is quirky about its links.]
Yes, I am theater geek or a theater buff. Ask me about theater, and I can go on and on and on at length, with an almost encyclopedic knowledge. Same is true about television and film.
I fell in love with the theater in the fifth grade - when two tall black boys in a mostly white grade school in the 1970s put together a play as an alternative to playing baseball at recess. It was cold, and we had access to the gym. The play was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (actually twelve dwarves, we had a lot of folks involved). I was cast as one of the dwarves. I was a tall dwarf, but not that tall - since I was after all only eleven or twelve at the time. My first theater role was a dwarf. To understand how amusing that is? You need to know I was taller than everyone but the two kids directing the play. I think one of their names was DJ or TJ, can't remember. They were wonderful. Kind, smart, and a nice barrier against bullying. No one dared bully or tease me when they were present.
I knew them for such a short period of time, but I still, over forty years later, remember them with fondness. The school year was 1977-78. It was an odd year in my life, a year of lots of changes or what I like to call a watershed year. One of the biggest years. I saw Star Wars, which changed my life (we were among the first in my area to see it), I discovered theater, and we moved half way across the country, from a rural suburb, to an actual one.
I switched schools twice in one year - and in the fifth grade no less. Talk about traumatic. My brother, three years younger, went through a similar trauma, although as a natural athlete, he had an easier time adjusting. Al The first switch in schools was due to "desegregation" or redistricting due to desegregation. (Although I didn't understand that at the time, just that we'd been redistricted.) So, instead of spending twenty minutes on the bus each day, it was about an hour. I didn't care, I loved the new grade school - and the new folks at it. No bullying. Diversity. And THEATER. It was fun.
But alas, it was short lived and we moved from Pennsylvania to Kansas, which was a long long ways away from Pennsylvania. I lost my friends. My school chums. It took us five days to drive there, stopping along the way in the middle of Winter. With a scared Siamese cat making the journey with us, and climbing all over the car. We had to go South, because of blizzards. 1978 had a lot of snow storms. It's about five to six States away. We'd gone from wooded horse country, with lots of trees, the Amish, Philadelphia and a stone's throw from NYC, not to mention closer to the ocean, all the way to the god-forsaken Midwest, with it's trees, houses, streets, shopping malls, and as you drove further west wide open areas with barely a tree in sight (at least we had trees). We were in Eastern Kansas, not Western, which is miles of open prarie. Everything was different.
But?
I still had the theater. I started taking classes at The Theater for Young America in Overland Park, Kansas. They had classes during the school year, all grades, and plays for children. And during the summers? A summer long theater seminar, where we put on a play for about a month or two months. In the sixth grade? I played the Great Goblin in the Hobbit. We also got to write a play during it, and the selected play would be performed. Along with individual monologues. I played various roles, and for a little while I could escape into a story or another character in front of a paying audience or a non-paying one, it varied. I took theater from the sixth grade pretty much all the way through high school, and into college. Then eventually gave up, tired of the stage fright and the criticism.
I preferred writing and drawing to being on the stage, less anxiety. But I did give it the good old college try And I'll say this much for the theater classes - it helped me get rid of my lisp.
I loved the theater, I still love the theater, I just didn't necessarily want to make a career out of it. Also, I'm not an entertainer - I prefer to watch in the dark, unseen. I do however understand actors who live to be on the stage, who love to entertain. And in the theater? You can be anything, including yourself. It's the one place you can be fully yourself. It doesn't care if you are gay, white, black, or trans, or anything else. It's the theater.
And there's nothing I love more than to listen to actors/directors/folks in the theater/film/television talk about their craft, art, perform their craft, and tell stories visually. It's my happy place. I feel safe watching and listening to that. It takes my blood pressure down, and comforts me. And it has a lot to do with that all too brief experience in the fifth grade.
I went from a desegregated school that was wonderfully diverse to a school that was heavily segregated in a segregated area, where everyone was white. I think we had maybe three POC in the entire area? None went to my new grade school. I noticed. The new school had bullying, teasing, and was mean. The only diversity was religious, gender politics, and class. I retreated into books, theater, and art.
Diversity - I've discovered makes people kinder. When everyone looks alike, they are mean and exclusive, and it brings out the worst in people.
It's why I love New York City - it's so wonderfully diverse in every way imaginable and I've found the people to be kinder than elsewhere. I feel safer here, somehow.
Sorry for the tangent. Long way of explaining why I enjoy listening to actor podcasts.
Speaking of?
Schmactors is back - basically it's two character actors (James Marsters and his buddy, Mark Devine) from theater, television, voice, and film discussing you guessed it, theater, film, television and everything in between.
I have a fondness for character actors, I seldom love the leads. It's a problem, since it's hard to find anything that they are in. I think the reason is - that I was a character actor. I'm always crushing on actors that seem to only get a few roles, and everything else is hard to find.
I started watching Buffy because of Anthony Head, who I followed there from his previous role on VR5. I'd fallen in love with him - in the stage musical Chess, when he briefly took over his brother's role in the London run of the musical way back in 1988. I'd seen him perform it live - three rows from the stage, or maybe four rows. He blew me away when he sang Pity the Child in that run, and I was in love. (I took a course in London for two months - where we read plays, wrote reviews on the stage productions that we saw performed, and discussed them in detail.)
At any rate, it's getting late...so here's a picture that I painted of people I've seen on the subway, from memory, proof that the subway is perfectly safe. They are. Don't believe the idiots who say otherwise, they clearly don't live in New York.
[Note it won't last forever, because FB is quirky about its links.]