April 15, 2005
It's been two months since I left home and it'll be another before I can go back to visit. Now for some Americans, such as those committed to twelve-month tours of duty overseas, that's not a long time. But for me it's an eternity. So this week is a rare treat as, by both design and coincidence, home comes to me! Trish and Mom came earlier and stayed for three days. Right after they left, Bob Schneider came through town on a west coast tour with his band, who are all good friends of mine. Rafael Gayol, Billy Harvey, Bruce Hughes and Derek Morris, all of whom I've worked with on several projects, were all in town and I had a chance to hang with them briefly and catch up. I also managed to drag the other swings from the cast along and they loved the show enough to take home recordings of it on CD. So did I.
The sweetest of all things is reuniting with Sasha and Dexter, who arrived this morning. It's so nice to be a real family man again. I was afraid Dexter might not be that interested in me from the way the videochats have been going lately. But I've figured out that he sometimes equates the video sessions with plain old phone conversations, in which case he sees me as the rival for his mother's attention. Up close and in the flesh, however, it's a completely different thing, and we connect as though we've never missed a beat. Sasha is visiting San Francisco for the first time, and after a day of mostly travel and rest, she's eager to hit the town. Her folks Bill and Marsha are also here to hang out and catch the show, both of them being huge Lennon fans. Don Scardino's eyes lit up when I told him about the John and Yoko autographs from the Amsterdam Bed-In that Marsha has at home!
The show they will see on Sunday is ever so slightly different from the one the others saw on Tuesday. A bit of old deleted text was put back in, and a couple of new lines have been added. The opening has been slightly altered, just a couple of players repositioned, but it makes a world of difference. Best of all changes, though, was a fresh cut of the film footage Don was having trouble with last week during the dress rehearsals. Although the old print got the point across, the restored print looks infinitely better, and the show's original ending is allowed to remain intact.
During the tech rehearsal phase of the show, the main seating area had been made into a command center that looked a lot like NASA Mission Control. In a show that's as technically elaborate as this one, as on a space mission, any number of things can go wrong and often do. That's when fast thinking and resourcefulness are required, and there is no aborting. Thursday night, for example, Chuck's headset mic stopped working in the middle of the first act, just as he was starting his big solo number. His unplugged voice was all but drowned out by the loud band. That's when Will moved quickly downstage, put his face up against Chuck's and used his own headpiece as a lifeboat. They finished out the number moving from one side of the stage to the other like Siamese twins joined at the mic. The crowd ate it up.
If there's one thing audiences love, it's recovery. That's what makes live theatre so much fun!