So, another long month with no BLANK to keep you warm. How will you cope? How do we?Brydie, Amanda and Benny are down in Melbourne, funnying it up in their respective shows (Dolls Cabaret and Alice; Beaconsfield the Musical; Axis of Awesome vs a Bee). No doubt some of you have received emails from the free wifi at the cubist paradise of Federation Square.
Tim is putting his voice to (good?) use hosting karaoke.
Jon is teaching kids. He is doing practical placement at a school near you, and also coaching a bunch of young improvisers who will soon be heading over to an improv competition in Canada. Exciting, eh?
Adam? I've not heard from Adam. He may have metamorphosised himself into a tiny insect during some (botched? deliberate?) science experiment and is unable to contact us except by landing on our phone keypads and tapping out a message. But the message would be lost, because Adam never did fully grasp predictive text.
Jason has been organising improv nights of his own, scoring Canadian improv duo Scratch for a charity fundraiser show. Nice work, Jase!
I'm currently in rehearsal mode for a production of Steve Martin's play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. It's a fantastic script, as you would imagine of Mr Martin, and full of history and wit. It is set in a little bar in Paris (called the Lapin Agile, where Picasso did actually hang out in the early 1900s), with Einstein, Picasso, Schmendimen, and other odd genii (plural of genius; not the magical djinn). Obviously there are a variety of accents, and if you've ever seen an improv scene with several accents in them you'll know how they can go awry. So it's practice practice practice and I'm watching lots of YouTube Antonio Banderas clips to get the accent right for Picasso.Oh yeah, I'm playing Picasso. Which is somewhat coincidental seeing as I fell in love with him when I went to MoMA in New York last year and saw his painting Les Demoiselles D'avignon. The process of painting it - of playing with different styles to create something shockingly new - floored me. Basically, the piece signalled the beginning - the invention? - of cubism. Now, a year later, I am playing the artist just before he paints that very picture.
Anyway, the show is playing from 28 April to 9 March, Tuesday to Saturday. Come along. It will be fun. Scripts are funny things...
