Swoon

MCC Company Manager Kristina Bramhall was at the Tony Awards ceremony last month to support our Broadway production of reasons to be pretty (nominated for three awards). But, apparently there was also some swooning going on and the LA Times was there to catch it. Sadly, she wasn't credited. (Although in fairness, Susan Sarandon, who sat next to her, wasn't credited either.)

Click here to read the LA Times'
feature on Hair's Gavin Creel.

Rehearsal, Technically Speaking

Posted by January LaVoy, actor--

Whew! We've just completed the first 40-some-odd hours of Coraline tech rehearsals (with a few more to come). It's left me feeling simultaneously exhausted and compelled to blog a bit about the experience. 

I've been doing theatre for some time now, and have been fortunate enough to act in a number of new plays.  But I've never felt the type of creative energy and commitment that I feel from our Coraline tech and design crew. Each day of tech rehearsal has brought new delights - incredible and intricate set dressing, unbelievably gorgeous and inventive props, mind-blowingly beautiful lighting effects, fabulous and innovative costume designs... I could go on and on!  But I won't, because you simply must see it for yourself! 

I also wanted to send out some mighty props (not the stage kind) to the folks who are helping us put it all together backstage - our wardrobe crew, dressers, deck carpenters, ASM, PA's, et al... There is a huge group of people putting this show together, and they are doing it with amazing generosity and good humor. I'm so grateful to everyone involved.  Every night this week, as I fell into bed, thoroughly exhausted, I thought about how lucky I feel to be a part of this show, at this moment in my life.

Onward, now, to our first public performance tomorrow night...

PlayLabs Go Public

Posted by Jaime Green, Literary Associate--

Phew! Last night was the final reading of our first-ever fall PlayLabs series, and several months of preparation and craziness just came to a close!

Opening up the PlayLab reading series to the public was a new thing for us. For the past seven years, we’ve held monthly PlayLab readings, one Sunday afternoon a month, for an invited audience of theatre professionals and friends. These readings are for writers from our Playwrights’ Coalition, a chance for them to hear what they’re working on in front of an audience, and to celebrate.

But, this year we changed things up! We’re doing two series (four Monday evenings in a row) – one in the fall and one in the spring. And now they’re open to our subscribers and to the general public. We even designed a sweet little postcard for advertising:

Click here for play info!

In preparation, we solicited scripts from our Playwrights’ Coalition writers, programmed the series, found directors, cast the readings, printed up programs, and on each of the four Monday afternoons, we got to work! The cast and playwright, and director (if there was one) met up to read through the script and talk about it. These are new plays, not even finished yet, just at a point where the writer wants to hear it out loud, and hear how an audience takes it in. (At least two of the plays had never been read before an audience at all.) After a couple of hours of rehearsal, the (brave, brave) actors got onstage and read the play.

We had no way of knowing what the response would be – we’ve never done this before, so … Would anyone even come? Would the wine and food we schlepped down to the Baruch Performing Arts Center each day go uneaten and undrunk? Well we were blown away! Each reading had a full audience of sixty or seventy people - a mix of MCC subscribers, theatre artists, and the occasional random person off the street (or off the halls of Baruch, looking for Tovah Feldshuh in Irena’s Vow). Afterwards, the artists and audience gathered to mingle and swap thoughts. It was so exciting to see that this new program was filling a need people already had, giving them something they were really excited about. Can’t wait till April to (muster up my strength and) do it all over again…

(Top photo, L-R: Lucas Papaelias, Ari Graynor, and Eddie Kaye Thomas in Brooke Berman's The Jesus Year. Bottom photo, L-R: Mark Schultz, Ryan O'Nan, Patch Darragh, Laura Heisler, Matthew Stadelmann, and Jamie Klassel in Ashlin Halfnight's Second Life.)