The h2m crack team of Marc & Alex did some beautiful work with rehearsal footage and an iPhone camera to make this little gem. It makes me want to see the show, and then I remember: oh yeah, I'm in the show!
Friday, January 20, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
WHAT ABOUT LOVE?
So, yes, we are deep in the creation process for our new show, Something's Got Ahold of My Heart.
We're putting together a rough order for the showing we're doing at the mOuth Jan 27-29 as part of Fertile Ground. It's especially complicated since we've divided the show into four parts. Each part is stylistically and thematically distinct, but the throughline, the theme that haunts each part of the show is LOVE. Which, despite what this Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty duet would have you believe, is NOT so easy.
If you're me you can spend HOURS going down a youtube rabbit hole, watching them perform "Silver Spring" over the years, always staged the same, and usually ending with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham facing each other, singing/shouting with varying degrees of intensity. As you can see from this relatively staid version from 1997, or this crazy one that culminates in Lindsey chasing Stevie into a corner, or this one from 2004 with less drama (though they still end the song screaming at each other), or this one from 2009.
What's amazing to me is -- one, how palpable it is in each case, but also how calculated. They are playing it up and performing their drama, milking it, maybe sometimes faking it -- and yet they also seem to get caught up in it every time. It's fascinating.
One more inspiration!
I was doing the dishes yesterday and suddenly "What About Love" by Heart popped into my head. God, isn't that a great song? Such a great shouting rock anthem, and yet it's basically a plea to not let something delicate slip away: "What about love? Don't you want someone to care about you?" Such a plaintive question, and yet when it's screamed alongside wailing guitars and shooting FLAMES and fog and chains and ... hey guys, you know what, I never realized that Ann and Nancy Wilson were drag queens!
So now seems like a good time to give the DISCLAIMER: our January showing will NOT involve shooting flames, or live tigers, or an army of backup dancers (or hair stylists).
That's because we're trying our ideas out while they're fresh, before we spend our hard earned cash on leather corsets. And we will continue to test out our ideas through the spring and summer before we premiere the show for real next fall. We do this with all our shows. We never know which ideas are working and which aren't until we try them out on an audience.
But what this means is, if you play your cards right, I think we can work some shooting flames into the show somewhere down the line. If every single person who comes to the showings says the one thing the show needs is SHOOTING FLAMES, what choice do we have?!
WHAT ABOUT LOVE? WHAT ABOUT SHOOTING FLAMES??? DON'T LET IT SLIP AWAY!
We're putting together a rough order for the showing we're doing at the mOuth Jan 27-29 as part of Fertile Ground. It's especially complicated since we've divided the show into four parts. Each part is stylistically and thematically distinct, but the throughline, the theme that haunts each part of the show is LOVE. Which, despite what this Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty duet would have you believe, is NOT so easy.
And who better to turn to for inspiration on this theme than Fleetwood Mac?
If you're me you can spend HOURS going down a youtube rabbit hole, watching them perform "Silver Spring" over the years, always staged the same, and usually ending with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham facing each other, singing/shouting with varying degrees of intensity. As you can see from this relatively staid version from 1997, or this crazy one that culminates in Lindsey chasing Stevie into a corner, or this one from 2004 with less drama (though they still end the song screaming at each other), or this one from 2009.
What's amazing to me is -- one, how palpable it is in each case, but also how calculated. They are playing it up and performing their drama, milking it, maybe sometimes faking it -- and yet they also seem to get caught up in it every time. It's fascinating.
One more inspiration!
I was doing the dishes yesterday and suddenly "What About Love" by Heart popped into my head. God, isn't that a great song? Such a great shouting rock anthem, and yet it's basically a plea to not let something delicate slip away: "What about love? Don't you want someone to care about you?" Such a plaintive question, and yet when it's screamed alongside wailing guitars and shooting FLAMES and fog and chains and ... hey guys, you know what, I never realized that Ann and Nancy Wilson were drag queens!
So now seems like a good time to give the DISCLAIMER: our January showing will NOT involve shooting flames, or live tigers, or an army of backup dancers (or hair stylists).
That's because we're trying our ideas out while they're fresh, before we spend our hard earned cash on leather corsets. And we will continue to test out our ideas through the spring and summer before we premiere the show for real next fall. We do this with all our shows. We never know which ideas are working and which aren't until we try them out on an audience.
But what this means is, if you play your cards right, I think we can work some shooting flames into the show somewhere down the line. If every single person who comes to the showings says the one thing the show needs is SHOOTING FLAMES, what choice do we have?!
WHAT ABOUT LOVE? WHAT ABOUT SHOOTING FLAMES??? DON'T LET IT SLIP AWAY!
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