Alice Through the Subway System Premiere

Well. That was just...amazing!

Oddly enough, although relieved to not be so busy, I mostly feel vaguely sad that it's all over and done with. I should feel enormously accomplished - we were turning away people at the door, and cramming those that got in into every crevice of that tiny little lounge. By the time I went to call places, I had to pick my way through a sea of bodies - many of which were nestled together in clumps, sitting on the floor. Athen, my amazing bouncer, found a way to get all the parents into proper chairs, and all the necessary friends and fam in the door, calling to me:

"Hey Mag. This list you gave me! Has nothing to do with what's going on! That cool?"

I called back to him: "Chuck it!"

He grinned and threw it in the trash, weeding through the crowd and doing hands-on audience organization.

-----------

But let's take it back a bit, shall we?

4:45 PM: Maggie Moon's Apartment. I have the Dormouse, Daisy D., the Cheshire Rat (otherwise known as The Beaux), MC Hare, & Alice gathered in my apartment. Everyone is on the floor, painting last minute subway signs for our "set," and I am shoving faux flowers into Daisy's hair. Mama Moon calls - she is supposed to chaffeur us down to the venue right about...now. She's just gotten out of the shower. I take a deep breath and control the volcano I can feel in my gut ("WE'RE GONNA BE LATE!") and start delegating. I send the whole crew, minus the Rat, down on the F train. Get there, pick up the stuff, and get ready.

5:00 PM: Parking Garage. The Rat, my younger sister and I stand by the elevators. We have assorted costumes and items for the show in our hands. I place a large pasta pot (a prop) filled with my heels for later, and a clip light, on top of a phone booth. Mama Moon arrives and we split for car. I forget aforementioned pot.

5:30 PM: Second Avenue. We are in traffic, nowhere near the East Village. Rat and I bid goodbye to Mama Moon and younger sister, then leap from the SUV to the 6 train and book it downtown. On the train Rat looks at my curiously serene face and asks me what's up. I'm not going to freak out. Because once I freak, I'll just spiral into extreme freakage.

6:00 PM: We arrive at the venue at the same time as the SUV. Oops.

7:00 PM: We have dug the clock prop from underneath the stage. We have rehung lights that the idiot manager of the venue took down after our dress rehearsal. The Garden Girls are made up, and the animals are in progress. Everyone is costumed and it's already hot in the room. Audience begins arriving and I realize how amazingly well promoted this show is - major props to Tigerlily, who, after years of only wanting to act...now seems to want to promote shows for a living as well.

7:30 PM: The place is jammin'. My friend Frankie, of Frankie and His Fingers, shows up and gives me the biggest hug. "Are you so excited?" I screech back something like a yes. Every time I cross the path of the stage to change the song that's playing, someone cheers. I run backstage to check on my cast. They are jamming out to their iPods, practicing dances, getting pumped. Anna Rexia, the notorious club debutante, otherwise known as My Costume Designer Since Forever is doing final touches on the White Rabbit, who is weeping slightly from his eyeliner experience. "Donde la cocaine?" (pronounced "co-kai-een-a"), he says to me, for the 30th time. I produce a vial filled with Bisquik - his prop cocaine that he inadvisably really snorts during the performance. I hug my brother - MC Hare - and everyone, with a special hug for the Mad Rapper (who gives me that tweaky grin that makes him the ladies man that he is), and a kiss for my Cheshire Beaux.

8:15 PM: I stand in the sound area - it's definitely not a booth, just a corner of the stage. I survey the audience. I would say I recognize about a quarter of those present. I have shifted a few people I know out of seats, and onto floorspace. I have crammed the Beaux's Jersey pals practically on the stage so he can make special faces at them, should he so desire. I have greeted all manner of friends and neighbors, and people I recognize from myspace (horrors). I do one more sweep into the crammed storage room we're calling a dressing room: This is places. Watch for lights. I love you guys!

I run up to the stage and take a stance. In my boots and tiny skirt, I feel powerful as hell.

I begin my opening announcement.

I nod to Beth Lipton, my theatrical mentor, who's sitting crouched in the corner in order to 'run the lights'...running on extension cords and plugs, but no board. This is Real Theater, alright! Really Making Do in a Really Tiny Space. But there's mad love in this room and I am mad psyched...

The lights dim. I hit play. And they go. And they go go go. The beauty of directing is just like the beauty of parenting and gardening. You put work and love and wisdom and wildness into this thing, this creation and then it grows into something quite unexpected. And drop dead gorgeous.


More later.

the bass the rock the mic the treble

If this had been a normal week, I would be geeking the heck out right now. Because tonight is...

Final Dress!

That's right! We pile our crazy Lewis Carroll parade into the basement of Lucky Cheng's (otherwise known as Waikiki Wally's Tiki Lounge), we hang lights, I rush around like a chicken with my head cut off and get everyone's sweaty bodies into their costumes, and we go go go. Goal is 2 runs tonight. We had our first full cast, altogether now run through last night and I shudder to say...it went very very well.

We also got amazing free press in Backstage magazine (a feature on their calendar - gah!), and the reservations are pouring in. I recommend to all attendees - show up freakishly early. Show up in the morning. Camp out. Seats are gonna go FAST.

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For a drama-oriented gal, I don't actually go to see much theatre. But I do see movies, cabarets, and concerts. This summer has been particularly grand in the concert department, because The Beaux, being Oh So Much More Hardcore than I has inspired me to seek out tickets to some rougher fare than my typical piano-rock. In the fall, I was fortunate enough to catch an AMAZING Dresden Dolls gig at Webster Hall, and an equally gorgeous Rufus Wainwright show at a big theater uptown (whose name escapes me). But this summer, I have caught the Reznor (see earlier entry) and his Nine Inch Nails, and Mindless Self Indulgence and their foxy foxy bassist, Miss Lyn-Z.



Amazing.

Seeing their show Friday pumped life back into my depressed body (although Tom is still very much on my mind) and gave me the strength, I think, to carry on with my own production. The day that Tom died, all of us - my family, the parts of the cast that had been at the hospital with me, the rest who met us there - came together at the venue and miraculously rehearsed the show through pain and shock. Tom was the makeup artist on the original production back in 02, when our Alice was some 12 years old, and our Caterpillar was 15. And me. I was 17. But the rehearsal with Tom's soul still hanging between worlds...it was so surreal. The work got done but it left me wasted. So to gear up in shredded jeans, jump around and scream out absolute ridiculousness:

I definitely give myself props
And that way I always get what I want
(muthafucker)
I'm struggling try to keep my edge
With 2 hookers and an 8 ball
nigga for all the stolen goodz
As I rock that nigga to get
Freaky deaky with a front row ticket
For all a my bitches

...was so theraputic. And what quality silliness. Especially from a twiggy gay man with a mohawk, who EATS $20 BILLS, jumps about on a Dance-Dance-Revolution pad, creates a giant audience orgy out of vocal assignments (one half of the room was "oooh," the other, "aaah!" and one corner "who's your daddy!"), and offers a free t-shirt in exchange for shaving someone's head (almost everyone volunteered - the boy that won walked away giddy, with a big bald stripe through his thick pretty hair).


But this was exactly what I needed to see. "Alice" is a party show, in the vein of the now-forgotten "Donkey Show," and ever-popular "Awesome 80s Prom." We are a get-in-the-audience's-face type deal, with lots of kitsch and lots of cheap laughs. But we also ROCK HARD. MSI manages their childishness by packaging it up with heavy beats and killer tunes. If my dear "Alice" has a kindred band, they are most certainly it.



And with that, I shall leave you, excitedly, for my last hour of work before Dress n Tech, and the Day Of.

COME ON DOWN!

The Real Theater Company & Gotham Rock Star present...

Alice Through the Subway System
Written & Directed by Maggie Levin
Friday, July 28 8:30pm
at Lucky Cheng's
24 First Avenue (Downstairs)
F to 2nd Ave
Admission is free! RSVP to AliceRSVP@gmail.com

When Alice Liddells commute takes a turn into Wonderland, she finds herself confronted by strangely familiar and peculiar characters. From the Cheshire Rat to the Mad Rapper, witness a trip through the New York City underground that rocks and rolls. "Alice Through the Subway System" is a fresh, urban twist on Lewis Carroll's classic tales.

This interactive performance will be followed by London Calling: The 80's Dance Party with DJs spinning 80's, Brit Pop, and New Wave. With the help of the gracious bartenders at Waikiki Wallys, audience members are encouraged to drink and dance themselves mad with the cast - to complete the evenings trip down the rabbit hole.

gone

I have profound ways to say it. I have crude ways. I am sometimes poetic and sometimes ugly in my thinking about what has gone down since this Thursday past.

At 5 PM on the 20th, my family and I gathered around the hospital bed of Tom Brumberger and one by one, bid him our goodbyes. He was then disconnected from life support, machine by machine, and laid in my mother's arms, where he died within minutes. Tom was my stepfather...but that's not really it...that sounds so removed. He was family. He was my Dad. He introduced me as his daughter, and by God, I was. From the time he got in a fist fight over my Carvel cake when I turned seventeen until always, I will be his daughter by spirit and because we are family.

'i'd really rather hang out in your lobby'

Something I am coming to understand more and more during the course of directing this one-night-only extravaganza is working with your friends and ex-friends is a bad idea. My previous shows have been populated by people I am friendly with, but not necessarily "Friends With."

Of course, certain collaborations have already proved fruitful and excellent, and the world will see these marvelous results in neigh less than a fortnight. Other combos have been altogether strange.

There was the knock down drag out fight over a script change. Then there was this.

This girl, let's call her Karen. She's had some trouble in the past. Some drug trouble. Some train-hopping and squatting around the U.S. trouble. I was pretty sure in a few years I'd get a phone call something along the lines of: 'We found Karen's body in a ditch this morning.' So needless to say, I am VERY relieved that she is okay. She's moved to Queens, lives with her boyfriend in a warehouse - slightly legally, I think. And she wants to act. So she calls me, and I say hey, as a sign of my good faith in you, please be in my play.

She has been on the flakey side. She has no phone. She rarely can check her email. She calls me from pay phones, and since I screen my calls, I rarely pick these up, and she doesn't often leave a call back number. There is a major...how shall I say...body odor issue with this girl as well. Not one that she can't control, I don't think, but how do you tell someone to shower more often without coming off like...well, an asshole?

So why is she still in the play? Because I love her, and I believe very much in her. So today, I had planned to muster my strength of being, and tell her (lovingly) that she needs to bathe, for the sake of the production and the other actors' poor olfactoral senses. And then I pick up a sketchola number I see on my phone, because I'm pretty sure it's her.

Karen: Um, I've stayed at work as long as I can. Can I go to your place for rehearsal now?
Me: Karen, no one's there yet, I'm sorry.
Karen: Oh. Well can I go wait in your lobby?
Me: You can't kill an hour? Someone will be there at six.
Karen: No, I have no money.
Me: Well, you know, there's parks and stuff.
Karen: I'd really rather hang out in your lobby.
Me: I don't know Karen, someone will be there at six.
Karen: Fine, I'll figure something out.

End transmission.

Is that not a bit odd?
This is New York. I know there are places to go, even if you don't have money. Given it is 10 million degrees out (which I'm sure will not assist her in the scent-improvement department), but...huh?

the bane of our directorial existence

Actors not showing up sucks.
Actors deciding not to show up at the very last minute is even worse.
Apparently, I am not the only director with this issue:

Sean: don't you hate it when people at the very last minute tell you they can't make it to rehearsal?
Maggie: ugh, yes. like it's 10 of and they call and say: "Oh, I forgot, I can't come."
Sean: yeah...RIDICULOUS
Sean: what's wrong with these people?!
Maggie: And you're left going BUT BUT BUT...You forgot?!!?!
Sean: they think it's not gonna affect us?
Maggie: How could you forget you couldn't come?
Sean: Yeah
Maggie: But what can ya do? You're not paying anyone so you can't make too much of a fuss. Ultimately you need them, you're like fucking...indebted. I can't wait until I'm directing equity shows. And no one can miss a single rehearsal.

------

Sean Whiteford is directing a production (a revival production, if you will) of "The Rocky Horror Show" in Woodstock, NY this August. A good friend of mine and the most amazing singer I've ever heard - no joke - if you're in the upstate area, his show is worth checking out. Especially because he'll be in it.

Of his show, he says: "We're The Castaway Players Theatre Group, The Rocky Horror Show, Colony Cafe, $12 at the door, directed by Sean Whiteford & Trevor Eaton, sponsored by WDST. Callouts, Dress-up, and plenty of red bull before the show is encouraged.

for fuller Maggie Moon flavoring

Since my profile is rather sparse, and I feel I have been updating profiles since I first logged on to livejournal in 2001, here are a few samplings from my photobucket of things that occupy my mindspace.



The Play!



The Beaux! (featured here in Pirate garb)



The Reznor! (a recent addiction I blame on The Beaux)