Cal Shakes Bullpen Blog

Monday miscellany -- with fashion shoots!

2007-10-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

Slow news day so far, which is not that unusual since Mondays tend to be my slow day, even during the season. Plus, we’re missing some key folks in the bullpen today, like our fearless Platoon Captain (whose daughter has a day off preschool today) and Beth, who often delights us with such tales as this one, which I wrote down but didn’t put in the blog last week because I thought it would work better with an illustration, which I never managed to produce:

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On Wednesday Beth got recognized by a subscriber while on line at the sandwich truck near our office. She has no idea how he recognized her, except for maybe from the curtain speeches she sometimes delivers before the show. (You know, the whole “turn off your cell phones, thanks to our sponsors” thing.)

And then this exchange occurred, right here in the bullpen:

Paul: You never know when you’re going to be recognized, when you’re gonna get …
Stefanie (in silly voice): A new fan.
Beth: (Spits Coca-Cola out of her nose.)

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So yeah … slow news day here in The Bullpen. I’ve been playing around with Twitter and Twittervision, trying to figure out What They Are, Exactly, and also What They Can Do For Me. But that’s not terribly exciting unless you’re actually ~~stalking~~ watching us on Twitter or Twittervision. So I’m going to go wander the building in search of a story for you. Ready ... GO!

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OK, I’m back. I asked what was going on in the Development honcho office, and just got a sigh, a “nose to the grindstone,” and a look of surprise when I mentioned I was “reporting for the blog.” (Oops – what, everyone doesn’t know about this?) Then I wandered into the back of the building, past the coffee machine, following the sound of a bandsaw toward the scene shop…

But wait.

What’s that open door?

The costume shop. With the light on … but nobody’s home. And what are these?

Costumes from King Lear, recently returned from the Bruns Amphitheater.

Like this one, a gorgeous dress worn by the scheming Goneril (Delia MacDougall) in Lear:

... and reinterpreted by me, as ...

... the ladies who yell at you about your alien aura when you walk through the Tenderloin on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Then there was this fantastic coat worn by the faithful Cordelia (Sarah Nealis) in the second act:

And reinterpreted by my accomplice, Paul (who really should have been working on his capital campaign reports) as ... well, I don't know.

Whoever he is, he's handy with a spray bottle, and (judging by the picture's datestamp) quite the time traveler.

And then there was the J-Lo brand jumpsuit.

The size XL, J-Lo brand jumpsuit that we found, mysteriously, hanging perilously close to the Lear costumes.

The time-traveling parrot was just as confused about it as we were.

Busy days aHEAD! Who knew?

2007-10-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

It's Tuesday afternoon, the first Tuesday after my first Cal Shakes season has ended. The rainy grey days have started, the executive types are planning their big vacations, and ... I'm busy as all get-out. Part of it has to do with the fact that I went on a little vacation of my own late last week, spending a few days in central and north Florida with friends and family types. So now I'm playing catch-up.

Or should I say, I'm struggling to get ahead.

Ahem. This is what greeted me when I opened my drawer to put my purse away Monday morning, after my vacation. If you saw the first play of the season at our theater this year, that head may look familiar. It's the head that Reg Rogers and his right-hand man tossed around like a ghastly football, and it's made from the face of the actor who portrayed the playboy Lord Hastings -- T. Edward Webster or, as we like to call him around here now, "T. Headdy Webster," ever since that head made its triumphant return to the Bruns Amphitheater as set dressing for our "Monster Mash" big shindig. (Not Mr. Webster, though -- he'd already been back in Man and Superman.)

Yesterday (Monday) I spent catching up on emails and tsk-tsking people for not getting their newsletter copy to me in time (much of it's in now, but I'm finding this blog a little more fun to work on). This morning, Marketing folks met at the Platoon Captain's house to eat brunch, do a little post-mortem on the season, and plan some for the months to come.

When I finally rolled in this afternoon at around 1:15, i found the bullpen in a fever. A tizzy, even. Three of the fair and true and pure Development folks -- Paul, Beth, and Dana -- were frantically putting papers in a fishbowl...

What? That doesn't seem exciting? Do you realize that the Grand Prize was a pair of first-class, round-trip tickets to anywhere in Europe? Sheesh, even the fourth prize was a year's supply of coffee.

Did I mention that employees are allowed to enter?

We repaired to the rehearsal hall for the big deal drawing ... only the abovementioned Devo folks were allowed to get near the bowl, because, as also mentioned above, they were fair and true and pure, meaning that not a one of them had purchased raffle tickets for either themselves or for someone else. So Paul and Dana and Beth were allowed in the "inner circle" while the rest of us had to sit or stand a few feet away.

Well, Dana and Beth stayed near the bowl, anyway.

Paul provided the ambience.

The bad news is, not a single Cal Shakes employee won. The good news is ... a whole passel of our patrons did -- and the lady who won the grand prize also won one of our giant puppets last year!! Maybe you should go ahead and sign up for that email newsletter I'm supposed to be writing right now ... then you can find out her name, and ask her to pick your lottery numbers.

Please allow me ... wait, no, that's been done before.

2007-10-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

Hello there! My name's Stefanie Kalem, and this silly blog is my idea. I started to title this first proper entry after the opening line of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," but stopped myself for fear of being unoriginal. Also, I'm not so sure how appropriate it is, though it comes quite natural to me to quote songs for titles to things, since, long ago and in a ~~galaxy~~ east-coast state far, far away, I was a professional music journalist. Since then, I've published calendar blurbs, cover stories, and ~~self-involved essays~~ creative nonfiction. But when I was younger, I was, you know ... "into" drama.

My debut role was as the first pig in a kindergarten production of The Three Little Pigs; from there, my career took a short dip (playing the corpse in the window seat in Arsenic and Old Lace) before soaring to such star turns as Anita in West Side Story and Domina in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, both summer camp productions.

But I grew up in suburban New York, where nearly every grade was lucky enough to have a kid among its ranks who'd appeared on Broadway (revivals of Annie, Oliver!, and The Sound of Music keep Long Island stage moms busy). So we did musicals, and nothing but. And as I got older, a shocking thing was discovered--guess who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket full of buckets?

Me.

So I was relegated to non-singing leads, like Cha-Cha in a high school production of Grease (which, having been mounted in 1987, featured a whole lot of terrifying, Dirty Dancing-inspired lifts and things). My senior year, my best friend and I tried to stage a guerilla production of Feiffer's People, but got shut down because of "adult content." It's no wonder that my interest shifted away from theater and toward writing and music -- the kind you listened to on vinyl and cassette, not the kind you sang with a handful of your classmates while dressed in period costume and dancing as one.

But now I find myself back in theater. But, thankfully not back in musical theater, although I eventually came around to rock operas and, actually, lots of folks down here in The Bullpen -- the downstairs area of Cal Shakes's West Berkeley office, which houses a mix of Marketing and Development folk -- really like musicals. And I'm sure that that will come up again on this blog in the future, either by my hand or theirs. They're going to pitch in, too, to give you a window into the off-season goings-on. Because, once the season ends, things change around here at Cal Shakes. There aren't a whole lot of actors running around, for one thing, and I don't have any glossy programs to produce (which takes up a large portion of my time between May and October). But our adult and youth classes our gearing up, as is our latest New Works/New Communities project, and planning for our big gala fundraiser in March, and a lot of other little things that are funny and fascinating and weird. As a bit of an outsider* in this world, I'm looking forward to finding out, along with you, how things run. And as a trained reporter, I'm also looking forward to bringing you juicy scoops from all over this company.

I can't promise highs and lows of Shakespearean (or even Rolling Stonesean) proportions. But I'm curious as to what happens, and I hope you are, too.

* I've actually done a dramatic thing or two in my adult life ... my friend Gabe and I wrote a play that was produced, twice, in the Cal Shakes rehearsal hall (quite coincidentally), and I occasionally narrate shadow puppet shows with Teatro Penumbra.

Testing the Bullpen blog.

2007-10-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Nothing exciting has happened yet.