Musings contributed by Garry Williams
The October Café – the DaSpookFest specials –... and a return to a more anarchic, chaotic and celebratory Café style. Friends, family, colleagues, strangers (to us), regulars: our audience, as diverse as the spectrum of material they ordered. Tables watching other tables watching; performers witnessing peer performances; content married with form emerged as discussion this month. Rehearsals at Menz Bar helped us focus and prepare (with a special preview of some material for chef Jason).
Another flash: in the Café, the audience is your scene partner. The stage doesn't exist, or perhaps it is everywhere. You sing a Cole Porter song into the neck of an actress at the bar; you encourage your audience to wear costumes; you shake the hands of people at two tables while decrying the hypocrisies of recent Canadian history in an excerpt from Cloutier's The Modern World; you lead the audience into another space; using the outdoors: a urine-drenched barrel for Macbeth's weird sisters; the street side glass window as a frame for a silent film rendition of the closing scene from Wedekinds' Lulu.
I feel a continuum, spanning the ten Café nights since January. The vocabulary we've sought is in place: orders came in for a "happy poem"; an "up-beat Broadway song by Paul"; "can we add art to that?"; 'intimate' versus 'concert style'; a classical scene 'with cross-dressing'; "one DaPoorMan's combo, please." A stylistic plurality reigned, allowing Sondheim's "A Little Priest" to follow Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Simultaneity of performances, overlapping. The bizarre rendition of "Auld Lang Syne" in four-part harmony with fangs in our mouths, Pete's dinner music (which we affectionately call Ninja Jam) at the keyboard, and Bonnie's new and improved Sock-Puppetz singing Schumann, Weill...
Glad to be involved with this one. Thursday was a long day for me, coming from PPTP in the morning, rehearsal for OneLight's The Veil (http://www.onelighttheatre.com/) the afternoon and Musical Theatre class in the evening. I was fully rejuvenated by midnight when we reached Freeman's – sans Sher –, where I shared a bottle of red with Eric and delightful conversation with Keelin, Chris and Ivan. Planning began for November's Anti-Christ-Mas Café.
