62 Days

In a side note to my comments yesterday about my audience, I’ve further been told that one of the things people find interesting about this here blog is all the food I’ve been eating at the restaurants I’ve been going to. With that in mind, I will endeavor to keep describing them. On to Saturday. We were again doing staggered calls, so I wasn’t called until 1:30. We were back at the Flea in TriBeCa, and since my call was late, I decided to walk to the theatre. It’s just a little less than two miles, and since the weather has apparently decided to stay nice (currently 68 with 63 percent humidity), it felt like a perfect day to do it. I had my choice of two routes; one would have taken me east on Houston, then south on Broadway, but I opted for the southern route, down Avenue B (which becomes Clinton on the other side of Houston) to E. Broadway, then Worth to Broadway. It promised to be a more interesting route, and (as I learned) since it went right through Chinatown, it was. Wh...

Something that was mentioned in passing at rehearsal kind of gave me pause. Even though I know from looking at my dashboard that people are, if not reading these, at least are clicking on them, it tends to make me self-conscious that I have an audience of some kind. (That that audience is international makes no sense to me. The U.S. I get, but [according to Google], I have page views from Czechia, Germany, India, Spain, the UAE, Brazil, Canada, Ukraine, and “Unknown Region” [which, I suppose, could be the extreme west side of midtown].) Anyway, with that in mind, let me plunge in to Friday. Since we bid a fond adieu to the 29 th Street studios on Thursday, we were back in the bar for a farewell session there. We had a staggered call, which meant that not everyone was called the whole rehearsal. Things began with Gabriel (or “GG,” as I guess he’s going to be called) being called first for some solo work. Since he plays Howard W. Campbell, Jr., he’s got the heaviest line- and work...

If I thought yesterday’s post was lacking in content, today’s will make that look like War and Peace . Before I get to that lack of content, though, a word of explanation on our title. Back in 1977, David Mamet wrote A Life in the Theatre , which was a marvelous play about two actors, one older and one younger, working in a regional theatre somewhere. (Remember when Mamet wrote marvelous plays? Remember when he wrote good plays?) I don’t know if it’s aged that well, if only because so much of the repertory system it deals with isn’t around anymore, but I saw the original production with Ellis Rabb and Peter Evans. (It may have been the first off-Broadway show I ever saw.) The scenes with the two actors in their real lives alternate with on-stage scenes parodying various types of shows, including a Chekhovian thing with the older actor, bearded and sitting in a wheelchair, looks out a window before emitting—with a melancholy sigh—“Oh, the autumn …” In the 40 years since I saw t...