I went to see a production of a musical written by two of my friends, Mark LaPierre and Jodi Eichelberger.  I’d seen it nine years ago in Portland, but this was it’s NYC debut and very exciting. It was as wonderful and witty as I remembered.  Very clever lyrics and an accapela score that’s witty and engaging as well as being hauntingly beautiful.

Unfortunately, it was in the wrong festival. See, it was in the Bad Musical Festival. The other two pieces on the program took bad to mean, “Deliberately awful,” and succeeded at that goal. I mean, the actors worked their tails off, but there’s not much you can do when your show is a musical version of “a guy walks into a bar…”

Grimm Late Night on the other hand took bad to mean “naughty” which it is.  It was the second show of the evening and when it began the audience clearly didn’t know what to think. They’d just seen a show that was trying to be bad and seemed a little lost at something that was funny because it was well-crafted.  And then, they got it and loved the show from there on out.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner at a restaurant that seemed to be trying to emulate the other two plays.  The drink specials listed a cosmopolitan as one of their “special” drinks.  I mocked that, until I realized that it probably was special since they didn’t know how to make a Sidecar, a Tom Collins or a Gin and Tonic. The first two I tried to order, but the bartender didn’t know what they were. I ordered the G&T which was actively bad.  How the heck do you screw up a gin and tonic?

We did the benefit performance of Peter and the Wolf yesterday. I’d spent the week in rehearsals and intended to blog about them, but I kept dropping into bed instead. I know, I know. Picking sleep instead of you guys. Clearly, my priorities need work.

So, we’ll catch up today.

The puppeteer who played the narrator/Grandfather role could not be with us this time, so we substituted Jodi Eichelberger instead. Jodi and I have worked together for years, but haven’t performed opposite each other in ages. While I was looking forward to that, the thing that I loved was that we took the time to really work the scenes between Peter and the Grandfather, something that we’d not had time to do with the other puppeteer.

As a result, those scenes were clearly tied to the music and had a specificity that was lacking before. Funny what a little rehearsal will do, eh? It also helped that Jodi and I have performed so much together (years touring) that we can anticipate the other one.

I also got to see the video of the show for the first time. In the last performance, we had no mirror in the rehearsal room and so I had to rely on other people and what little I could see of the puppet myself. I mean, I could only really see the top of Peter’s head. Parts of the video made me happy, but great swathes of it made me go, “Gah! People were letting me get away with that?”

I think the first rehearsal that Jodi and I did largely focused on getting the puppets to walk without looking like they were being prodded with sharp sticks in the rear at every step.

The stage we were on was significantly smaller this time. So there were places where I simply didn’t have enough action and no amount of scenery chewing was going to fill it out. So I asked if they could speed that passage up. Lo! I still had to chew the scenery, but not as much.

Other than that, it was easy to pick the show back up again. I wish we did more than one performance though. As frustrating as the puppet is, I like the show a lot. Or maybe it’s just that I like the music and the live musicians. What a joy!