Digital Notes

No updates in awhile — life was abnormally busy the last few weeks!

The It Girl closed and was a great show; too bad nobody came to see it. Ticket sales were slow — it was a relatively new and unknown show and people generally don’t go to see musicals they’re not familiar with. Adding to that was the media’s hysterics about the New Depression, so people simply weren’t spending money during that show’s run.

After the close, we started rehearsals for The Pirates of Penzance and opened last weekend.  Ticket sales have been good for this show; the old guard of Lyric audiences, combined with the show’s name have been good for drawing people in to see the show.  It has been a LOT of work — the principals are excellent, and the chorus is made up largely of college kids who are learning how to sing that British faux-operatic style for the first time, as well as putting some classical stylings into the dynamics.  But they have all worked extremely hard and bought in from the start, so the show has really become very impressive.  Even the old-school Lyric people have been amazed at the production, so we’re taking that as high praise indeed.

For Pirates I also had to arrange a piece from Ruddigore that the director wanted to insert; apparently putting “The Matter Trio” into Pirates is a longtime G&S tradition; who knew?  Anyway, the arrangement has received kudos from all, most importantly the orchestra, so that’s a good feeling — nice to see that the orchestration classes paid off!

Pirates runs for 2 more weekends, and ticket sales are brisk — be sure to get your tickets early at the Lyric website.

In other news, the day job has become more, shall we say, intrusive into the artistic life, but seeing as how it pays the bills there’s not much to be done about it.

Also, a very dear friend of mine chose to end his life a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately I was unable to make it back for the funeral, but there is a benefit concert for his children being planned, and I will be going back to Kansas in late May or early June to participate in that.

After Pirates finishes its run, we start in on Cabaret rehearsals; it will run in June — same link above for tickets.

The Lyric has also announced its 2009-2010 season:

• The Will Rogers Follies
• Cinderella
• Little Shop of Horrors
• The All-Night Strut
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Aaaaannnnnd……we have just been granted exclusive rights to produce the hit musical Hairspray!  This is outside of the normal season and will run in summer 2010.  It’s such a great show and is a lot of fun to play — I got to be in the orchestra when the touring production came through Atlanta a few years ago, and it was such an electrifying experience……great music, great book, amazing choreography, and funfunfun every step of the way.  In case you can’t tell, I’m pretty excited about this one! 

Last night we opened The It Girl.  It was highly successful — everything really came together and we have an excellent show.  The cast has been working their tails off to integrate the music, choreography, and dramatic stylizing.  In addition, the orchestra has also begun to integrate my tendencies into their playing, so they are getting better at anticipating my tempo changes, vamp breakouts, and jump with me when actors jump.

One incredibly cool thing about last night was that the composer, Paul McKibbins, was there.  He was very impressed with our production as a whole and took the time to explain to each of us in the cast and production crew about what we “got right”.  He was very enthusiastic about me as well, and was highly complimentary about my playing and the fact that I was able to pull off the very demanding score and keep the orchestra with the actors at all times.

As always, this show will run for 3 weeks, so be sure to get your tickets at www.atlantalyrictheatre.com.

Next:  Pirates of Penzance! After The It Girl closes we’ll begin rehearsals and put the show up in April.

Things are rolling along nicely at rehearsals — the cast is dealing with some very demanding choreography while also doing highly-stylized scene work.  And the music is incredibly wordy, so there is a LOT for them to put together.  It is coming together very well, and I think by opening we’ll have a wonderful show that is definitely worth coming out to see.

The major development that is driving this post is a fundamental change in presentation.  Originally the plan was to produce tracks (I know, I know….) for performance in lieu of a band, in order to save precious budget.  That has since been scrapped, so we will be performing live after all, and I will be running the show.  I’m very excited about this — not only is it just an absolutely fun score to play, but it’s also been awhile since I’ve gotten to be The Man. 

As always, please go to the Atlanta Lyric Theatre’s website to get tickets!

I’m working on learning the music for the next Lyric show, The It Girl.  It’s pretty heinous — the music is a lot of fun to play, but since it is in the style of the 20′s (ragtime, charleston, cakewalk, moviehouse piano), there are tons of tempo changes, syncopation, and a LOT of black ink on the page!

I’ll be  glad when we get to the point of bringing the rest of the band in.  I can cover enough of the score for rehearsal, but this sort of music really needs to be filled out with some pals on bass, drums, clarinet, violin, etc.

We start rehearsal on Monday evening, doing music for a couple of days before moving on to choreography on Wednesday evening.  I gotta get this stuff down quick!

Smokey Joe’s Cafe ended up as a huge hit that got lots of well-deserved attention and praise.  Sadly, as all shows must, it has ended.   I’ve been piecing my studio back together since I had to raid it for the band in SJC.  And the Hammond R-O-C-K-E-D!!!!

Now we are getting ready to go into rehearsal for the next Lyric show, The It Girl.  It’s another high-energy show that will be incredibly funny as well as showing off some fabulous music and dancing.

As always, it’s gonna be a great show — be sure to get your tickets early by visiting the Atlanta Lyric Theatre website!

I got a phone call this afternoon from Shane Patterson, lead singer of The Differents. I hadn’t talked to him (or any of the guys) since moving to Atlanta 10 years ago.

What was amazing was how it was as if time hadn’t passed; we could just as easily have been hanging out on the couch at the old practice space.  We caught up on what had been going on for each other, he gave me some news about the other guys, and we talked about doing some remixes of existing songs and working on some new ones.  He also has some videos of gigs that he’s sending me, which will be fun and strange to watch again after all this time.

It was a great conversation, and I really enjoyed being back in touch with a part of my past that was very special — The Differents was an amazing band and that was an incredibly good time in my life.  Ya never know, maybe we’ll try to get back together for a gig sometime, just for old time’s sake!

The current run of Smokey Joe’s Cafe at the Atlanta Lyric Theatre is a huge success!  The band is incredible, the cast amazing, and the production really sends it all over the top.  We received a great review in the AJC, too!

Crowds have been great, and now we’re getting near-capacity with each show.  The buzz is building, and we have only 1 week of shows left, so go to the Lyric’s website and get tickets while you can!

Welcome to the new blog!  The process of upgrading WordPress was too annoying to spend much time on, so I didn’t mess around with trying to import the old stuff into the new blog.  It’s just as well; there wasn’t much there anyway.

Originally I kept it up but now I have deleted the old blog site; my ISP sent me nastygrams about upgrading (including threatening to shut my domain down) and my version was so old that it was way too much hassle.  The only reason to leave it up was the existing link for the Macbook firewire nonsense, but I really don’t care about that anymore, and there are plenty of other places to get the info for the poor suckers who are encountering it now.  So it’s gone for good.

If you have bookmarked the old blog, please update the link to http://www.bj-brown.com/digitalnotes