Quandry

It's Star Wars night for the Harrisburg Senators, so I'm sporting Princess Leia hair.
Except it looks like Mrs Lovett hair.
Except that I asked Earl, and his concept of Mrs Lovett is Bellatrix rather than Murder She Wrote.
I would never get mistaken for Helena Bonham Carter.
Actually, I'd never get mistaken for Angela Lansbury either.
Or Carrie Fisher.
But I'm sporting Princess Leia hair.  And I'm going to the game.

(The more I type, the more I'm reminded of Shel Silverstein -- "This started out as a jumping rope..."  Wouldn't get mistaken for him, either.)

Busby Berkley was nuts.

I am writing this on March 13, 2014.
The more I write, the more I realize I can't publish it until after the Spring Show, May 31, 2014.
But initial impressions are powerful, and I sure hope I'll be a lot more comfortable with this dance with 10 more weeks of practice on it!

---

"In the Round" means the whole audience can see you but you can't see any of the other dancers.
As of today, my already-high-level respect for all the awesome people who routinely choreograph and act and dance in the round at Toby's Dinner Theatre moved to stratospheric admiration-bordering-on-reverence because of a tiny dose of experiential knowledge.

At church we say "Circles are better than rows", with the implication that community is build in small groups and supplemented with corporate worship. But in those circles, we all face IN.

In the round is TOUGH! The dance is suddenly a whole new monster! It's harder than "OK, this time with backs to the mirror." It's even harder than the learning curve of "same thing, opposite foot". And line dancing, with the same feet and the same arms but facing a different wall, is looking much easier than it was yesterday.
Another hundred reps. Practice-practice-practice! Another hundred reps and I'll have this down cold. Unless, of course, it changes next week.

---

AFTER-SHOW addendum, June 1, 2014: 
The choreography changed.  Of course it changed.  And Call Me ended up entering via what I call the "Union Jack" ("Get in your X-es!"), but instead of dancing to each corner as it was once projected, we did shift back into lines.  But still, mad props to Toby and her actor-waiters!

Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Segel Sing "Confrontation" from Les Miserables

Musicals take weeks of practice to come together.

But once they're in you, they're always in you.

Many many moons ago (7 years at least), this same pair were prompted by Megan Mulally on her short-lived talk show to sing as they sang just for fun backstage of How I Met Your Mother. A personal favorite of both Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Segel, and, since terping Javert, one of mine too.

Live theater

You know you're a theater lover in a theater-loving town when the final announcement before the start of Les Mis, on closing night, in a sold out, absolutely packed house is,

"Please refrain from singing along.
We know you have the score memorized
and you sing it all the time
at home, in the car, and in the shower,
but you did not practice with us."

Without caveats like the one above, I have no doubt things like THIS AWESOMENESS would happen.

Kudos to Toby's for a fabulous, beyond fabulous run.
(Javert still had the Best. Death. Scene. Ever.)

---

Interviews "Beyond the Barricade at Toby's" from DC Metro Theater Arts. Links to the full series
I particularly commend to you Part 4: The Boys of the Barricade and Part 8: Javert, played by Larry Munsey

'Tis the Season!

Faire season, that is! Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire is upon us and I want to see everything! And everyone! And with this year's theme pirate-y, and with the different themed weekends...

There are so many Faire-vorite things, as sung by Rowan and the Rose (who are engaged to be married sometime during the season!).

Our favorite performers of all Her Majesty's entertainment is Barely Balanced, comedy - acrobat - jugglers. They're amazing and we love them and they haven't been at PARF for a couple years now, but they will be BACK for one weekend only, Sept 7-8.

We also love love love The Mad Mechanicals, who "put the shake in Shakespeare". They can sum up any of Shakespeare's plays improvisationally, and they are not afraid to lay their bodies on the line to further the humor. (Thanks, Jill! Stay dry!) Aaaand they won't be at PARF until the latter half of the season.

So we'll see Rowan and the Rose, and Empty Hats, and Circus Vagabonds this weekend, and we'll see which pirates win, and a first for us, we'll be there on Time Travelers weekend.

God save the Queen!

---

PS Once again, Wil Wheaton has managed to encapsulate, succinctly and from the heart, the merits of embracing geekdom in whatever form it takes. Love what you love and welcome others who love it, too.

The difference between "in the round" and "proscenium stage"

Things you never think of when you go to a show (until now):

Gosh, I'm glad to be on this side of the barricade.

---

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT! I am assuming you know the story of Les Mis. My intention in this post is to marvel at the execution of the show.

---

(Show photos from Toby's Dinner Theater Les Mis FB photo set)



This is why I love tech theater.

Even though the "same two questions"¹ are 1) If you had the ability and the inclination to, who would you want to play in this show? and 2) Why?, as much as I watch the actors, I really do watch the techs. But that's on the back end of, "Wow, I love how they did this," not the creative end of "so, the dude jumps off a bridge, which rises behind him as he lands in a river. So how are we doing this without actually offing our leads every night but Monday?"

I was wondering how they'd build a barricade at Toby's Columbia for Les Misérables, seeing as it's in the round. And they certainly pulled it off to astonishing effect.

Prior the show, I figured they'd create the kids-in-a-snow-fort effect, with dense low stuff, tables and barrels, surrounding the stage, and they'd hole themselves "safely"² inside. I am so glad they did not because, watching the show, what struck me was:

I am glad to be on the behind-the barricade side. (50-50 shot!)
If I were on the "outside" of the barricade, I would be very defensive.
Rifles pointing at me?
I would be using my fingers as guns to defend my table.
And, knowing me, I would mime along with the offstage voice as though it were an onstage voice played by me: "You at the barricade listen to this!"³

¹ Oops. The "same two questions" are 1) What was most impactful? and 2) What are you going to do about it? I guess that makes these the "different two questions...?"
² Have you seen the show? Yeah. "Safely" is kind of a relative term. Plot-wise, of course. This is no Spider-Man: Turning off the Dark. All due tech safety precautions have been taken.
³ This is when it's good that I have the ASL of the show pretty well internalized from terping it at CVHS. When I sing along it's not auditory, and if the theater is dark enough, no one can see me.

Loved loved loved the show shirts: Keep calm and build a barricade.

The barricade set was rather industrial but visually open the whole width across the center of the stage. Scaffolding and trapdoors and ladders and stockroom-style rolling stairs, relying on the audience's mind's eye. I was surprised at how much verticality the show used, with permanent-for-this-show balconies on each of the four aisles. If the actors were any taller, people at center stage would have been braining themselves on lighting elements. This in addition to all the ladders and posts I was constantly watching people to jump off of safely and not spin someone else (or themselves) into, especially when carrying a corpse⁴. And massive set pieces coming in and out all the aisles, at high speeds, in the dark.



⁴ Mad props to Dan Felton (Valjean) for hefting and carrying Jeff Shankle (Marius) through the sewer set. Some serious weight training there, as well as sense of placement to not take Jeff's head off on a vertical post during a pivot.


The most dramatic bit of all was what I am deeming "Best. Death. Ever." was Larry Munsey (Javert) stalking the full width of the theater on a scaffolding bridge. Then, tethered to the ceiling, a thin cord holding him from a straight-up plummet, Larry jumped as the techs pulled the bridge out from under his feet. That, plus the lighting, plus the musical cue... W-O-W.



So. Guess I gotta see it again.

P.S. Kudos also to the pit orchestra -- all FOUR of them in a given performance -- who pull off the whole score as though they were each a dozen musicians. And to the conductor/keyboardist, who is also the ~Valjean~ understudy!

What show would you like to do?

If you had the skill, the time, the inclination, the resources, and the venue... in short, if all the stars aligned, what show would you like to act in, in what role (male or female; remember, all the stars are aligned)? Is it a different show from what you would direct if everything lined up?

When terping, the choices you can make are different. For example, even though we've asked and been turned down by CVHS, Elton John's Aida would be amazing! With three terps, my male co-terp could be Adam Pascal (Radames), I could be Heather Headley (Aida), and my female co-terp could be Sherie Rene Scott (Amneris). Easy. So much fun! And Elton! Unfortunately for us, CVHS intentionally chooses shows with a massive cast and lots of leads and named characters.

My female co-terp and I also had a long FB chat on Sweeney Todd. Which, in a post-Tim-Burton-version world, when she called Mrs Lovitt right off the bat, she was really calling dibs on Helena Bonham Carter. Because, after all, who wouldn't love to sing Bellatrix? Shepherd's pie peppered with actual shepherd, am I right? But if she's Helena Bonham Carter, and the default assumption is that of course our male co-terp would get Johnny Depp, I *still* win, big time! Because if I get all the bit parts, that means I get Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, and Sasha Baron Cohen! Alan Rickman, y'all! Win upon win upon win. Always.

And with my particular penchant for tech theater, here's a special feature from the movie about making blood for film<sup>1 2  

1</sup> And just how crazy-much you need for effects, compared to the mere pints an actual human has flowing at a given moment.
² If you're squeamish about blood, please realize that movie blood is primarily high-fructose corn syrup.

At Toby's, the stage is in the round, which is amazing for closeness to the stage, as the worst seat in the house is a whopping 30' from the stage, and those in the front need to be cautioned to keep their toes tucked in lest they become part of the action. But it makes eliminating corpses interesting. What they did was create a platform filling half the floor at the center of the stage. When Pierelli died, his actor, the amazing Larry Munsey, tumbled thru a trapdoor and spent the balance of Act 1 inside the platform, on a camping mattress, with his ipod. As for the victims during "God, That's Good", there are four aisles for the stage. With Sweeney's barber chair installed in the middle of the platform, a body sling was ziplined from the balcony above one aisle down to Sweeney's chair, where he strapped in a victim and, with a tip of the chair, sent him whizzing down and out the opposite aisle. It was a wonder of tech theater. And kind of creepy. But that's Grand Guignol for you.

But my male co-terp doesn't want to do Sweeney Todd. He's not a Sondheim fan. And I can see how being Johnny Depp would have less appeal than being Alan Rickman³. Instead, his preference is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat⁴, in which he actually played⁵ Joseph in a local-to-him production. Or he would like Jekyll and Hyde, which I actually have not yet seen.

³ Alan Rickman!
⁴Joseph is Big Frog's preference, too. Big Frog would be Reuben, who sings the Country song "One More Angel in Heaven".
⁵ Acted, not terped.

Once Upon a Mattress might be fun too. Or Guys and Dolls. Or Lion King⁶. Or Billy Elliot... and now we're back on an Elton kick⁷, there's always Aida...

⁶ Costuming would be a bigger challenge there than terping, although CVHS has a custom couturier who makes up their costumes.
⁷ Or were we never off one?

Poodle skirt and saddle shoes

We terp in character.  And, when we can, in costume.  Ryan got a leather jacket and rolled up his jeans ("Why was this ever considered cool?")  I borrowed a poodle skirt (from a Tap Pup, from the Jailhouse Rock number) and wore my black and whites.  Don't we look suitably fifties?

CVHS puts on a show that is beyond high school level.  It is beyond community theater level.  It is literally professional-grade theater.  And these kids are... well, kids!  For example, Stockard Channing was 33 when she was Rizzo in the John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John movie version.  The CVHS Rizzo was a freshman, which means she's, what, 13?  14?  And she was Rizzo.   (Fwiw, I had the thought this week that I should stop introducing myself as Lisa and be Mrs Swope when I'm at CV.)  You have to really plan ahead to get tickets to a CV musical.  The community knows they're phenomenal.  This year the tickets went on sale in 2 1/2 months ago and were sold out in two days.  TWO DAYS.  Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday matinee.  That's two more shows than they did the first year I terped the musical.  It's a blessing that they open up their final dress rehearsal to the senior centers in the area and let us bring our Deaf and Hard of Hearing friends, and those who support interpreted theater.

Here's some poorly taped rehearsal video of my favorite piece, Greased Lightning.  It's video of onstage, not of us.  And it can't hope to capture the energy and excitement of the song.  But let me point out that the coolest moves were the chain pushups (2:02) (in the interpreted show they got mid-song applause) and the running lights (2:22).  They unfortunately don't display well from this angle but they were utterly amazing live.


Every year I'm overwhelmed by the response from the audience, both those who come specifically to support interpreted theater, and also from those who don't know in advance that we'll be interpreting but get so sucked in that they specifically come up to us afterwards and say that they were watching us too.  This year even some of the kids said that when they were in the wings they would watch us.  I invited them to ASL social. 

One piece of note: 
We talked to the head usher and communicated with the JROTC ushering crew so they would be aware of the Deaf section.  Most of the first and last rows of seats were pulled out to accomodate wheelchairs.  Between the pit and the front row was walker parking.  But by the time the walkers were parked two deep the whole width of the theater the head usher was stressing.  "Can I park more walkers here?"  "Can I seat wheelchairs in the spaces in front of your section?"  We kept pushing back.  "They need sight line!"  "That's where we're standing to interpret!"  She even asked us if they could see us if we stood in the aisle to terp instead of where we had staked out.  Ummm... no.  The lighting crew had established that for us.  We'd asked for a slightly wider lit area, knowing that we sign BIG when we get into it.  And it's kind of important to see the terp.  Ryan laughingly said that if we stood in the aisle we could do hands-on-hands deaf-blind interpreting.  That's challenging on the best of days, in the best of times. 

Eventually, there were three full rows of walkers parked up front.  It was kind of ridiculous.  I compared it to visiting an Asian home: whoever goes home first has their pick of "Which shoes do I like best and want to go home with?", regardless of what shoes they came in wearing.  (Not really.  But I still think it.  And for whatever reason, I love taking photos of foyers filled with guests' shoes.)  Every single wheelchair space was filled, including three in front of our Deaf, albeit the far end of the row so they weren't obscuring anyone's view.  Although we told them that we would be obstructing theirs.  (By the end of the show they were enjoying watching us!) 

And the head usher's parting words to me were, "I didn't get to see the whole show.  But I saw the end of it.  And I understand why you needed light." 

Well, if every day you learn something, it's a great day.

ASL-interpreted theater, part 4 - "I'd like to" vs "I'll work my butt off to make this happen"

There's a big gap between "I'd like to" and "I'm willing to put in the work to".

When I started interpreting it wasn't so much interpreting as signing, located in the hot seat.

Prior to that, I took classes and was "signing along" from my seat in church. There were a few times when I was asked to sign to music for a worship service, but on the whole that was performance sign. Like a dance I could choreograph in advance and rehearse until I was ready. With a CD it was easy. Even working with live music it was reasonably simple. Also I could set limitations as to what I was willing to do and how the group needed to flex to accomodate me. After all, they had asked me to do a particular service to enhance their performance¹. And in all things, it was to benefit the hearies who thought sign was pretty. No shame in that. It's how I got started learning sign.

¹ The one time that really fell through was when I was making visual something that, within a drama, was voiced offstage by a deceased character. I didn't memorize my piece because I would be signing a poem that was, again, voiced offstage. It worked perfectly well in rehearsal. During the performance the mic was either off or not receiving or not broadcasting to the monitor near me. So I tried to listen to the unamplified voice and remember my part. It was ugly. But the audience wasn't expected to read me either; they were supposed to be listening to the voice also. Oh well.

But as I took classes and met Deaf² people, I came to learn that, like in all foreign language classes, learning about the culture was far more important than mere vocabulary. When I moved to PA for college and began attending the church at which I still interpret, it was about the same time a deaf couple, who up to that point had been wholly reliant on lipreading, were losing hearing with age and were looking into learning ASL. That was the start of our church's Deaf fellowship.

² Deaf and deaf are different things. Those who cannot hear are deaf, with a lower-case "d". That has to do with the auditory processing. An audiologist can tell you how deaf you are by the way you respond to and the way your brain processes sound. For example, as an individual ages, their odds of losing hearing and becoming deaf increase. By contrast, Deaf, with a capital "D", are a people-group, or nation if you will, who use sign³. Some but not all deaf are Deaf. Some Deaf have perfectly good hearing, such as CODAs (children of Deaf adults) and interpreters, among others.
³ ASL is not the only sign language. Virtually every spoken language has a sign language, but ASL is predominant in the same way English is predominant. Also, British sign is also different from ASL, most notably in that British fingerspelling uses a two-handed alphabet, whereas ASL is a one-handed alphabet. One mainstream example of British sign is in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.
British fingerspelling. source: Elduaien academia

ASL fingerspelling. source: lifeprint.com

I reached a point where signing in my own seat wasn't pushing me. If I fell behind, it didn't matter. If I didn't know a word, I had no feedback to provide it. If I did something exceptionally well, no one noticed or cared.

Now I won't say I was signing well. But I asked the deaf couple (who were increasingly Deaf) and another ASL student who was similarly signing in her own seat, if they could help push me to learn. If I sat facing them, could they help correct me as I got things wrong? Or fill in words if I missed them, whether auditorily or vocabulary?

They said yes.

ASL-interpreted Theater, part 2 - Idioms and translating

Many moons ago, I watched the movie Cats while hanging out at a friend's house. Kind of. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of the first act and made my excuses to go home at intermission. As I recall, my general impression was that James Earl Jones¹ dressed up as a fat cat² and all the cats sang about themselves. And the one song I'd heard of before, Memory, was evidently in the second act because I didn't get that far.

¹ It wasn't James Earl Jones.
² Not rich, just literally fat. And a cat. A really big, fat cat.

So, not my favorite musical.

But I only get asked to interpret one musical per year.
And I don't get to choose what show they do at CVHS, although I keep dropping suggestions³.
Thing is, I'm not actually an interpreter by trade. I'm a church terp, which is to say, I'm a hack. I'm not state-certified. But when you're doing the terping as a labour of love⁵ and not for pay, even a hack can get in on the action. My co-terp graciously says I'm a very gifted hack. And I like doing the theater pieces.

³ Aida! Elton John's Aida! But as passionate as I am about that show⁴, the CVHS director has told me every year that they intentionally choose shows with big casts and lots of leads. And Aida has... three.
⁴ And about Elton.
⁵ I put the "u" in labour because I felt British. More about that later.

But whereas I knew Les Mis going into that show, I did not know Cats at all. So my co-terp and I started with the soundtrack. Get it into your head⁶. For those that didn't know, the entire plot of Cats is that this group of cats⁸ hang out together and sing-act-perform-show off in hopes of being chosen the one cat per year who gets to go to the Heavyside Layer, which ostensibly is Cat Heaven. The source material is a book of poetry by TS Eliot; each poem describes one cat.

⁶ Apologies to Big Frog, who also got Cats into his head. Three years later, he still occasionally breaks into "I have a gumby cat in mind/her name is JennyAnyDots. He, like I, has always been succeptible to Broadway Tourettes.^7
7 Thanks to Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion, and Guy Noir for that diagnosis. Full transcript and audio available here.
⁸ Is there a collective noun for cats?

So the translation work was tougher than expected because there were far more steps than usual. From Poetry to Prose, but it was in British. Then from British to American, from American to ASL. Wiki is your friend. Wiki is your friend. Wiki is your friend.

Here are several unexpecteds we found:
1) Beau Brummell was an arbiter of fashion in 19th century England. The cat Bustopher Jones was "this Brummell of cats" because his markings looked like a suit with spats. Fortunately we knew what spats were in a wearable sense, as opposed to in a catfight sense, because Bustopher Jones certainly wouldn't stoop to that.
2) The cat Gus's real name is "Asparagus, but that's such a fuss to pronounce" translated remarkably simply to A-S-P-A-R-A-G-U-S FINGERSPELL (stare at hand, hit hand to show misspell, look perplexed).
3) Strasburg pie goes straight into the category of "don't eat British foods". According to The Ad-dressing of Cats, like caviar, one would use it to tempt a cat. But it's duck foie gras, wrapped in bacon, wrapped in puff pastry, served on a bed of pickles.

Ewwwwwwwwwww.
4) Know your audience. We made the decision to do a "Vanna White" for when Old Deuteronomy progressed up the opposite-side aisle because the lyrics were the same thing about 20x: murmurs of disbelief and "I believe it is Old Deuteronomy." He moved slowly and had a lot of cats delighted to see him. But our Deaf wanted to know what was being said. Our decision was to not sign the same thing over and over. But we should have at least indicated that the same words were being repeated ad nauseum.
5) Mind your edges. Cats is an all-aisles-used show. Actors in full cat mode were prowling up center aisles, side aisles, dancing their way into the audience. If they were human characters, the actors would have walked up the middle of the aisle. But cats slink around edges and between seats. And they demand attention. They want to be petted behind the ears. But only with their timing. And if you pull their tails, nothing good can come of it.


PS In personal growth, I've learned html for italics and superscript. So hopefully this makes my ramblings easier to track out of and back into the text.

ASL-interpreted Theater, part 3 - Sharing the words or sharing the experience?

The music is iconic.



What's Phantom without that pipe organ?

But what if you can't hear the music? If you are, in fact, Deaf or hard of hearing and attending interpreted theater?

So how can the interpreters translate that theme music into something tactile?

It's not in ASL.
There's no sign for pipe organ that shows the intensity of that music.
Even facial expressions can't convey it.
So what to do?

Wait for it...

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.



Hasn't everyone, at some point, hummed into a balloon just to feel the vibrations against their hands?
Like sitting on an amplifier, holding the black balloons translated the music into something tactile.

It's not all signs, it's communicating what's happening.

What prep goes into ASL-interpreted theater?

Five years ago at Christmastime, I got a slightly random email from "your friendly neighborhood interpreter", asking me if I wanted to do Les Misérables with him.

If anyone asks you if you want to do Les Mis, DO IT! How often does an opportunity like that roll around?

My love of Les Mis began in San Francisco when I was 8 years old. While my parents and brother and I were on our triennial* visit to the Left Coast, my uncle had a surprise for the whole extended family. He had a friend who had connections, and a group of about 30 of us, family and work friends and neighborhood friends, had tickets to see a (traveling?) production. Evidently he had been prepping his kids for this for awhile; my cousins already could sing several key numbers, and who spent the intervening week trying to teach me On My Own**.

*Triennial: every three years. Not to be confused with triannual, which is three times per year.

** Which is still my favorite Les Mis song.

I think it might have been the first professional production I ever saw -- my family had yet to go to Toby's***, even. Our seats were in the second balcony of a theater that (to an 8yo) looked like it seated thousands, possibly the entire local population. I wanted to rent opera glasses, for no reason other than they were strapped to the back of the seat in front of me, available for rent for "one silver quarter".

*** For those that don't know, my parents have volunteered for years at Toby's, the Dinner Theatre of Columbia, processing door prizes. They've also taken countless groups to shows. And lest you disparage it as "just" dinner theater, Toby's actors have gone into Broadway, the Capitol Steps, Nashville, etc. And there are few youth in Howard County who haven't been impacted by their training programs for teens. Also, Toby's is nominated for nine Helen Hayes Awards**** this year, eight of which are for The Color Purple.

**** The regional version of the Tony's.

The show overwhelmed me. I was most impacted by (SPOILER ALERT) the rotating stage, the emergence of the barricade, and the visual of the bridge rising as Javert jumped into the river. I guess that was an early hint that my future was in tech theater, not on the acting end of things. But coming out of the show, and remember I was only eight, I told my parents that I wanted to be the child Cosette and the adult Eponine.

Fast forward twenty years to my co-terp's email.

As an interpreter, I don't have to choose Cosette or Eponine. I get to be BOTH.

With one guy and one girl interpreting, I got to be not only child Cosette and adult Eponine, but also Fantine, Mme Thenardier, adult Cosette, basically every female onstage. Really, half the characters in total, including Javert. So cool! If you're keeping track and you know your Les Mis, you may have noticed that this means also (SPOILERS) three BIG death scenes. THREE. In one show. And not just in a Mad Mechanicals "Act 3: Everyone Dies" simplification, either. THREE. DEATHS. Big ole drama. I Dreamed a Dream, A Little Drop of Rain, and Javert's Suicide. Soooooo COOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL! Let me tell you, that would never happen if I were an actor.

But I didn't know that yet. I had one email at Christmastime saying "are you interested?" And then silence as my co-terp left after Christmas break to go to Tennesee. Where he lives. And I live in Pennsylvania. And the high school we were interpreting for is also in PA. Further complicating things, he's an alumnus of the school, and I had no contacts at all there. And he's not exactly the most plan-ahead-ish kind of guy. So after months of silence, I got a phonecall on a Monday saying, "So, are you still interested in terping Les Mis? If so, I'm in town and if you can join me at the high school tonight we can start practicing. Our show is Thursday."

To quote Papa Bear in The Bike Lesson, "This is what you should not do. Let that be a lesson to you."

Fortunately, I knew Les Mis inside and outside and upside down. Well, I could sing all the alto parts anyways. Four years of high school choir will do that to you. Oh, and Madame taught us "J'Avais Rêve"*****, the French version of "I Dreamed a Dream". Which is not a word for word translation. Remember this concept when we get to talking about ASL interpreting.

***** Oh so much darker in French! The English is "I dreamed a dream in time gone by/When hope was high and life worth living/I dreamed that love would never die/I dreamed that God would be forgiving." The French translates back to English as "I dreamed of another life/But life killed my dreams/As one snuffs out the cries/Of an animal one's killing..."

The interpreted show went off remarkably well on three days' rehearsal. On such a timeframe, the biggest part was get the soundtrack into my head. CDs in the car, scripts with me everywhere I went, and just go for it! Again, good thing I knew the story and the characters and was emotionally connected with them going into things.

The main thing I had to keep in mind was that I was communicating what was going on onstage. Once the words were reinforced in my head, I worked on getting my hands to keep pace with the phrasing (but not the words! English to ASL is never word for word!). It was freeing for me to remember to get ahead sometimes and simply "Vanna White"****** at the stage. For example (SPOILERS), at those most-impactful pieces for me: the revolving stage, the emergence of the barricade, and the jump off the bridge. Also, counterpoint. With four hands, we mostly picked up all that was going on onstage. But at the close of Act 1, One Day More has six different stories going on. Not six voices, six stories. Every single character is onstage singing their heart out. There's Marius/Cosette, Eponine, Valjean, Javert, M/Mme Thenardier, and the students. But what's being expressed is that change is on the way. The hearing audience ******* doesn't pick up every single word, either, just an impression of everyone singing about tomorrow and what will happen to them. So as terps, we caught what we could and left what we couldn't get to... and kept shoulder-shifting.

****** Flourish. C'mon, if you didn't know what I meant, you need to watch more TV.

******* "Hearies"

Wait, "What's shoulder-shifting?", you ask? Picture a comic strip. You have a character in each corner in the first panel, but in the second panel there's just words. Who's saying it? All you need is the barest indication of the direction from which the words come. You don't need to draw the character again. Or in a list of pros and cons, or any comparison sheet. You don't need to label every single statement, just indicate which side it's on. That's as simple as shoulder shifting is. You create characters near and far, left and right, and suddenly you can have a dialogue that expresses clearly who says what.

Of course, it's easier if you know your source material going into things like we did with Les Mis. This clearly is going to become a multipart post, but just a heads-up, this year's interpreted show is Grease, at CVHS, 1p on Tues 4/9. Our matinee is technically the final dress rehearsal, so it is unticketed, but if you come we expect you to sit in the Deaf section, towards the front, to SUPPORT INTERPRETED THEATER. Donations accepted, and support the CVHS music department. Let me go a step beyond that. Donations are encouraged, even expected. At CV, the show always sells out, and tickets go for $12 adults/$10 seniors/students.