Series: Ark 2008 « — Struts and Frets: Kris Joseph

The Ark, Day One: Having a Baal

November 11, 2008
This entry is part 1 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

Okay, don’t hit me.  The title I picked is terrible. I’d like to state up front that I plan to write daily about my experience with the National Arts Centre‘s Ark project, but I qualify that for this week, because I am also working on preparing for the next Zucchini Grotto cabaret.  It runs this [...]

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The Ark, Day Two: Refraction

November 12, 2008
This entry is part 2 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

With three days to go until the next Zucchini Grotto cabaret, things are feeling quite under control.  In spite of a full day and a rehearsal, I got the stage manager’s script and cue sheet finished, finished the program and sent it to print, and redid all the trivia questions that I lost last night.  [...]

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The Ark, Day Three: Mired In the Jungle

November 13, 2008
This entry is part 3 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

With the echoes of Remembrance Day still reverberating, it was great to start the day with a little music.  Our musical director, Allen Cole, spent the first part of this morning working us through a couple of songs from Happy End, and with a company of 40 artists in the room it felt almost like [...]

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The Ark, Days Four and Five: Brain full

November 15, 2008
This entry is part 4 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

On the heels of the first of two nights of the Zucchini Grotto 24 x 24 cabaret, I find myself home before midnight with no reason to be up terribly late.  This week of 2AM bedtimes has finally caught up to me, and I’m fighting a cold and the impact of having run into a [...]

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The Ark, Day Seven: Reinvention

November 18, 2008
This entry is part 5 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

First off, note that I didn’t write anything for Day Six.  That’s because we spent the entire day working on learning the score for “Threepenny Opera“, and aside from the fact that singing is fun and I love it, I don’t have much to say. Today was a very information-heavy day, though; we began with [...]

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The Ark, Day Eight: Reich

November 18, 2008
This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

The bulk of our day today in The Ark was spent looking at the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, and culminated with a reading of Brecht’s “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich“, which was first produced in 1938. What is fascinating to me is how a play that spoke so openly and [...]

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The Ark, Day Nine: the cart before the horse

November 19, 2008
This entry is part 7 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

Another script-heavy day at The Ark today, as the gang worked through three of Brecht’s Lehrstuck plays in the morning and the David Hare adaptation of “Mother Courage and Her Children” in the afternoon. The Lehrstuck plays — or “learning plays” — are a collection of scripts that are not intended for public performance (in [...]

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The Ark, Day 10: Tuning

November 20, 2008
This entry is part 8 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

We will be reading “Threepenny Opera” and “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” in the middle of next week, and so many days of The Ark begin with music rehearsal so that we’ll be prepared.  Today and tomorrow we are reviewing the score for “Threepenny”. Listen: Peter Hinton can be a lovely, [...]

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The Ark, Day Something-or-other: catch-up

November 26, 2008
This entry is part 9 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

My plans to write something about The Ark every day have begun to fall by the wayside, but in my defense I blame this on a combination of a lack of compelling new things to say AND a creeping sense of fatigue that comes from being steeped in so much new material. I think I [...]

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The Ark, Day 15: HUAC and Mahagonny

November 27, 2008
This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series Ark 2008

For the first part of the day at The Ark today, we listened to Brecht’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  It appears as though Brecht was called before the committee because of his perceived association with Gerhart Eisler (Hanns Eisler’s brother), who was an active member of the communist party in Germany during [...]

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