2012 - The end is just the beginning!

Happy New Year! Managing and Co-Artistic Director Chas LiBretto here! 2012 is here at last – will it bring the apocalypse or hover-boards? When will we take jetpacks to work? While we mull these questions over, I’d like to reiterate what Louis said in the previous post that a number of exciting things are in the works over here at Psittacus Productions. More news as it comes, but the new year will bring:

- a CYCLOPS studio album this year (click here and here for the two singles we recorded last fall)

- a few concert-appearances in anticipation of the next New York City run. We did two concert appearances last fall (one at the Tea Lounge in Brooklyn and one at The Falcon in Marlboro, NY), and they were more fun than a sharp stick in the eye (Polyphemus would know)!

- and, just in time for what’s sure to be a positive and uplifting election season: a brand new take on Shakespeare’s Richard III, in the spirit of 2010’s award-winning “A Tale Told By An Idiot.”

I write this post from New York City. I’m back here for a number reasons, foremost among them because I missed New York. I had a great time working on CYCLOPS here, and felt like Psittacus had come home. There’s a ton of amazing work happening here, and it’s hard not to feel inspired to up one’s own game. Don Shirley’s LA Stage Times post criticizing the Charles McNulty’s LA Times “End of the Year List” notwithstanding (not to toot our own horn, but we’re on it. Then again, this is our blog, after all, so if we won’t toot our own horn, who will?), some of the best work is happening here, and if you throw a rock you’re likely to hit a non-profit theater. I don’t necessarily advocate throwing rocks at theaters, though.

In the meantime, I’m spending my days as a reader at the Vineyard Theater. The Vineyard is an Obie and Drama Desk award-winning Off-Broadway, non-profit theatre located just east of Union Square. Since 1981, they’ve been dedicated to producing bold, new work, including the first productions of Avenue Q, How I learned to Drive, The Scottsboro Boys, and [title of show]. Their production of Zayd Dohrn’s Outside People opens on Tuesday, so get your tickets – it’s sure to be great!

I hope 2012 finds you well, and be sure to watch this space in the coming months for news about what's next for Psittacus Productions!

It's A Brand New Year!

Hello and Happy New Year from Louis Butelli! I’m currently in Montgomery, Alabama (affectionately known to locals as “The Gump”) where rehearsals are underway for “The 39 Steps,” beginning January 27^th at Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Planning a trip this winter? Come on down to The Gump, and pick up your tickets now.

Today, I’m going to tell you a little bit about ASF and talk a bit about the play.

But first, here are a couple of juicy tidbits about “CYCLOPS: A Rock Opera,” the show that consumed us at Psittacus Productions for the whole of 2011. Plans for a studio recording of our cast album are underway, and negotiations for brand new gigs in the fall have begun. In the meantime, the New Year is traditionally the time when critics put out their “Best Of” lists. We’re honored to have made it on to a few of these. Here are some links:

Los Angeles Times - Chief critic Charles McNulty says that "adventurous" audiences were "galvanized" by "Psittacus Productions' electrically flamboyant 'Cyclops: A Rock Opera.'"

Bitter Lemons - Tastemaker and provocateur Colin Mitchell makes us his top pick for 2011 and says that Cyclops was "hands down the most original show of the year."

Compositions on Theater - Critic, composer, dramaturg, and self-professed Cyclops superfan Sarah Ellis also makes us her top pick for the year and says that she "loved being a friend and advocate for such a smart and sexy new work."

So. “The 39 Steps.” What on earth is it?

Here’s the blurb from the ASF website:

“Four actors play 140 roles in this Tony award-winning Broadway smash that is a combination of Alfred Hitchcock, James Bond and Monty Python. Richard Hannay’s dull life is transformed by a meeting with a mysterious female spy. When she is murdered in his home, he is forced to become a fugitive. But who really done it? And what are the 39 steps? Don’t miss the chase of a lifetime and a death-defying finale!”

Essentially, the play is a physical, minimalist, and highly theatricalized stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film – which, if you haven’t, see it!

In the first three days of rehearsal, we laid down some basic blocking for the first act of the show. In that time alone I play, among other things, the star of a vaudeville “memory” act, an underwear salesman, a policeman, a Scottish farmer with a sexy wife, a paper boy, a Cockney landlady, and a posh housewife.

For those last two, I was fortunate enough to head to the costume shop for “boob fittings.” I won’t say too much about that except to say that one pair is pendulous, one pair is perky, the entire staff of the costume shop came to watch me try them on and, most worryingly, once they’re on, it’s almost impossible not to touch them constantly. Not quite sure just what that says about me.

While it’s probably too soon in the rehearsal process to know exactly how everything is going to play out, I will say that we four actors have already staged an epic chase on a moving train, a death-defying climb across a bridge, and a stealth mission in a fighter plane. And all of it done with simple props – hats, chairs, ladders, etc. – and the imagination of the audience. This is what the theatrical art form is all about. It’s gonna be a hoot.

So far, ASF is awesome. The staff are friendly, hard-working, and very much on the ball. The facilities, which include the 750-seat Festival Mainstage (where “39 Steps” will play), and the 225-seat Octogon Second Stage, are impeccable. The theater is on the grounds of a gorgeous 250-acre park, and it is an absolute delight to go to work there every day.

There will be lots more to come about the play and about ASF – in the meantime, check out their website for more info.

OK. Psittacus Productions is getting ready to roar into 2012, and we wish you all of the very best for a Happy, Healthy New Year.

Cheers!

Welcome!

Hi there. My name is Louis Butelli, and I'm the Executive Director of Psittacus Productions, a 501c3 nonprofit theater company. We specialize in classical plays mashed-up with 21st century formats and technologies. Thanks for stopping by!

From this past September until just now, I wrote a Production Diary for the Folger Theatre's production of Shakespeare's Othello, directed by Robert Richmond. It was pretty decently read, and I thought it might be nice to continue on blogging regularly, and to invite some of those readers to come on over here.

Sooo....

If you are joining us from the Folger, welcome! This blog goes back to March, 2010, so there's plenty of stuff to sniff around. Click here for one of our very first posts about the name Psittacus (SIT-ih-kuss), and why we chose it.

If you didn't catch it, definitely check out some of the entries in the Folger blog. Click here for a post on how Shakespeare Changes Your Brain.

Here's a few words about what's ahead for this blog...

1. Alabama. I'm heading down to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery to do Henry VIII, a re-mount of the production Robert Richmond and I did last year, The Merry Wives Of Windsor, and The 39 Steps. I have a feeling there'll be a fair amount to talk about on that subject.

2. CYCLOPS: A Rock Opera. This is our original musical, based on Euripides' Satyr Play of the same name, which we presented as a live rock concert in Los Angeles and New York City. Comprised of 24 brand new tunes - which you can listen to here - CYCLOPS won the New York Musical Theatre Festival Award for Excellence, and sold out it's run at 47th Street Theatre. Plans for a studio recording and future gigs are underway. Click here to see a trailer.

3. Folger Theatre. After collaborating on two shows with the Folger Theatre, myself and Robert Richmond hope to continue the relationship in the New Year. We have pitched a fascinating project combining research and staging - more news on that as it becomes available.

4. Considering Richard. We are now in the early stages of research and development on our next project. Much as we did with our A Tale Told By An Idiot - ie a comic book flavored deconstruction of Macbeth - we now plan to take on the character and story of Shakespeare's Richard III. We'll keep you abreast of how that goes here.

If you'd like to be on our email list, drop us a line at psittacusco@gmail.com

Finally, we'd love for you to get involved and join us. Here are some easy ways...

Join us on Facebook.
Follow us on Twitter.
Watch our vids on YouTube.

And, if you're feeling generous, click the orange "Donate" button at the top right corner of this screen. We are a 501c3 nonprofit, and need your help in creating this year's programming. All contributions are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.

It would make a nice holiday treat - and year-end tax deduction!

OK. Thanks again for swinging by. More very soon!

Cheers,
Louis

CYCLOPS Opens at NYMF

Some thoughts from Director Louis Butelli

As I write this, the cast and crew of CYCLOPS: A Rock Opera are just beginning a break-neck sprint to the finish line – Opening Night at the 2011 New York Musical Theatre Festival.

We open on Thursday, September 29 at 8pm. There is a sick afterparty later that night. Let me tell you a little about what our day leading up to that party will be like.

7:30am – Full Company meets at Starbucks, 47^th Street and 8^th Avenue. We drink coffee and tea and coconut water, and generally fuel ourselves for the day ahead.

8:00am – We arrive at the 47^th Street Theatre to start a day of utter madness. We load in all of our instruments, amps, cables, our scrim, our costumes, props, assorted bins of extra bits and pieces, lots of gaffer tape – all of the necessaries.

We hang the scrim, we get the stage set-up organized, then we cable, patch, and test the 12 vocal mics, the four guitar amps, the two mics for the drum kit, etc. Meanwhile, front of house team starts assembling the programs for that evening’s patrons, the cast find their costume pieces and set their props, stage management and LX department fire up the light board and start to run through the preliminary cues the designer has programmed.

9:00am – Tech begins. We work our way through the show to finalize all of the looks for the lighting design. This can be tedious and long. The cast hit all of their marks so that the final design can make them look their absolute best. We’re also adding a follow spot, and the operator needs to know where everyone moves so they can catch them with the light. Basically, we do this for every single look in the show. We’re a rock show – so we have a lot of looks.

1:00pm – Having moved technically through the show, we now re-set to the top of the show, fix any glitches, work out any spacing issues (obviously, the dimensions of the stage are different from the dimensions in the rehearsal hall – so some things will have to change), and run any complicated sequences for human traffic patterns.

Then, we sound check. Sound is the number one component of our show. The lifeblood of CYCLOPS is the music, and the spirit of CYCLOPS is in the Sound. We absolutely MUST get this right. Our TD (and lead guitarist) Ben Sherman and a number of staffers from our team and the 47^th Street Theatre will go to work to be certain that the monitor mix on stage is perfect for each musician, that the vocals are crisp and clean, that the tones of each guitar are correct and in harmony with each other, that this vital “additional character” in the show, the Sound, is perfect.

Then…

We do it all again! Only, this time, it is a Dress Rehearsal – performances at full show levels, all of the lights and sound as they will be in performance, essentially, it’s a run with every element in place…except for the audience. This is pretty much the last chance we get to perform the show before inviting people to come and watch it. Adrenaline levels will be high.

Between the Tech, the Sound check, and the Final Dress, we’re probably at around 5:30pm by now.

At this time, we’ve got one hour for anybody in any department to address any major issue they’ve got left to fix.

At 6:30pm, the cast takes a dinner break for an hour, and the director, the producers, technicians, and front of house staff have a meeting – we’ve got to be sure all of the technical components are completely flawless and ready to go, we’ve got to be sure box office count and guest list are in place, and we’ve got to set the tone for an amazing evening. We get an hour to do this.

At 7:30pm, the cast returns for their half hour call. We go backstage to get into costume and makeup, perhaps to say a few prayers. At 7:55pm, “places” is called. We get in a circle, we stand shoulder to shoulder, we take a few deep breaths, we bleat like goats and stamp our feet and then…

…well, what happens next is up to you. Hopefully, you get swept up, transported, moved, made to laugh, to smile, to think, and, it’s not a stretch to say that, by the end of the night, you might sing along.

As the Executive Director of Psittacus Productions, the producing entity of CYCLOPS, and one of the people who commissioned and assembled this amazing team, as the Director of CYCLOPS, and, most preciously, as a fellow performer in this amazing evening of music and theater, it has been my great honor to watch this project grow and evolve.

This extraordinary group of artists has been working on CYCLOPS for just over a year. It’s been amazing to watch them grow and evolve as well.

There are performers in CYCLOPS who have never been in a piece of theater before. There are people who have been asked to step far outside of their comfort zones, in some cases to transform into Goat Men, in others to become spectral Demon Women, and in three very unique cases, to embody the God of Wine, the hero Odysseus, and the complex and intriguing Polyphemus, the Cyclops himself.

I have been astonished regularly by the bravery shown by these performers. With their hard work, their passion, their dedication, and their immense talent, they will work magic at the 47^th Street Theatre…and beyond. To say that I am proud of them would be an enormous understatement. To tell you of my love and respect for each and every one of them would not be enough. They are family.

Come and see our show…

You’ll be dazzled by the sexy Maenads, Nicole Flannigan, Madeleine Hamer, and Lauren Augarten.

You will fall in love with the nerdy and endearing, yet strong, savage, and rocking Satyrs Benjamin Sherman, Paul Corning, Jim Bertini, and Chris St. Hilaire.

You will fall through the looking glass, and share with Odysseus, Chas LiBretto, an immense sense of wonder at this strange new world.

Your face might melt off hearing the voice of Our Lord Dionysus, Korie Blossey.

Finally, don’t be surprised if you shed a tear at the fate of Polyphemus, Jayson Landon Marcus, who is also the show's Composer and Musical Director. He loves, he rages, he loses, he strives, he fails, he is duped, he is blinded, and, finally, he just accepts himself. It is the hardest thing to do, be you man or monster.

“He’s a Cyclops, baby. Isn’t he a bit like you?”

8:00pm – House lights dim and go out. The sound of water flowing through a cave swells. We notice shadowy figures on the stage, and then, “it’s time.” We begin. Come and join us.

Thank you to my Satyr Family, the entire cast and crew of CYCLOPS: A Rock Opera. I love you guys. Be brave. Be bold. Be confident.

Happy Opening.

Louis

The Cyclops Heads East

The Cyclops Heads East

Check out this awesome article in "Bitter Lemons!!"

Big thanks to our pal, Colin Mitchell.

Help bring CYCLOPS: A ROCK OPERA to NYMF!

CYCLOPS: From the Getty Villa, to Pasadena Playhouse, to the NEW YORK MUSICAL THEATRE FESTIVAL (NYMF)!

by Chas LiBretto

CYCLOPS: A ROCK OPERA at the NEW YORK MUSICAL THEATRE FESTIVAL (NYMF)!

Seriously! How did we get here?!

I will quickly go through just how this all happened, month by month (and hopefully not bore you all stupid).

August ’10: “A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT” closes. No next project in sight, though we're invited to present a new work at a festival scheduled for January. Louis and I attend a new version of Sophocles’ Elektra at the Getty Villa, directed by Carey Perloff and starring our very own Advisory Board Member (and Academy Award winner) Olympia Dukakis. Floored by it.

September ’10: Advisory Board member Homa Nasab gets Louis and me a gig interviewing Getty Villa Curator of Antiquities Mary Louise Hart for her blog MuseumViews about her brand new exhibit, “The Art of Ancient Greek Theatre,” the largest assembly of Greek Vases relating to theater ever assembled. We are particularly moved and startled by:

- A fragment of Sophocles’ incomplete Satyr Play “The Trackers,” discovered in a garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus in the 1907.

- The prominently displayed Pronomos Vase, depicting the God Dionysus (of wine, theatre, and epiphany) and attendant actors, celebrating what appears to be a cast party, following the successful run of a Satyr Play.

We are invited to a Symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibit, and a luncheon gathering scholars and theater people, whose purpose is to discuss, what else, the Satyr Play in contemporary performance.

By this time we’d settled on a next project: something Greek. A few false starts (an adaptation of a Tom Holt novel about a rival of Aristophanes even ending up on our website) lead us to decide the next project might want to actually be a Satyr Play. We soon discover that only one exists in its entirety: Cyclops, by Euripides, a strange adaptation of Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus from Homer’s Odyssey.

Turns out Satyr Plays were burlesque style deconstructions of famous stories, starring not a chorus of city elders or attendants, but hairy, horny, drunken goat people, or Satyrs. The idea of mixing a Satyr Play with a rock concert comes fairly early on.

October ’10: I’ve now read through more than a few translations, none of which do a whole lot for me. I finally pick up Percy Byyshe Shelley’s 1819 verse translation, and respond very favorably to the wit, language, and over-the-top epic style of the piece. I start talking to Jayson Landon Marcus and Benjamin Sherman (who’d worked as Technical Director and Sound Technician on our previous show) about the idea of scoring the piece. I hand a short passage to them that becomes “For Your Gaping Gulf” and we are off and running.

The rest of the month is spent picking Shelley’s adaptation apart:

1. I We Identify verse passages that can be easily put to music. These end up being:

- “O Dionysus”

- “Stophe/Epode”

- “Cyclops Suite”

- “Soon a Crab”

- “Hasten and Thrust”.

2. - We write songs that help beef up the non-entity that is Odysseus, or Ulysses as he’s called in our translation (Shelley calling everyone by their Latinized names, for some reason). These are:

- “Siren Song”

- “An End to the Sea”.

November ’10: With demos for these tracks recorded, we begin the process of figuring out major plot and character moments in the text that simply should be songs. These are:

- “Put Your Elbow Right”

- “More for the Whore”

- “Here Comes the Cyclops”

- “Nobody, Nowhere”

- “I’m a Cyclops”

- “There Goes the Cyclops.”

Katharine LiBretto provides the poster for Cyclops: A Rock Opera at the 2011 SOSE Company Creation Festival!

We also begin fundraising for the project (click the orange "DONATE" button below please!)

December ’10: Louis returns to LA, following his Helen Hayes Award winning performance as Will Sommers in Henry VIII at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC. We slowly begin to rehearse the piece, assembling the music and the remainder of the band, now called “The Satyrs”. Paul Corning joins as bassist, and Stephen Edelstein joins on drums. I begin learning the ukulele.

In adapting the script, we decide there’s room for some characters who don’t appear in the Euripides: the God Dionysus and his Maenad attendants. Casey Brown is cast as the God, while Liz Saydah, Madeleine Hamer, and Nicole Flannigan join the cast as Maenad backup singers.

A promo trailer is cut together, and causes a happy accident. YouTube suggests we look at another video, a recording of Handel’s “Acis and Galatea,” an opera adapting a story from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, about Polyphemus’ lost love Galatea. “Bloodier than the Cherry” is written as a better (more glam) introduction for the Cyclops in our piece, adapted and inspired by Handel’s “Ruddier than the Cherry.” We figure if Shelley can mix his Greek and Roman influences, so can we.

We all go home for the holidays and get trapped on the east coast by a blizzard. Luckily, I’ve a ukulele to learn as I watch the falling snow.

January ’11: We all eventually make it back to LA and begin feverishly rehearsing again, with stage manager extraordinaire Ashley Koenig. A final song is added, “Put Your Elbow Left” and "director-in-residence" Robert Richmond arrives to put some finishing touches on the project. Meanwhile, the glam aesthetic, which had for so long been discussed, is realized by our costume designer, and we open January 22^nd. Steven Leigh Morris at LA WEEKLY calls it “scintillating,” while NPR affiliate KCRW says that “the concept is genius.”

February ’11: The show continues to play in rep with several other shows at the “Company Creation Festival” at Son of Semele Ensemble Theatre in Echo Park. We begin to think about life after SOSE, and begin discussions with Pasadena Playhouse, who have plans for their upstairs space. We also submit the show for consideration at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. We play on the sidewalk at Downtown LA Art Walk, a once-a-month event that draws close to 10,000 young people.

March ’11: The show sells out its final weekend and an extension is added at SOSE. It is officially added to Pasadena Playhouse’s calendar. We lose Dionysus due to a scheduling conflict, but the show, always organic, grows by three songs: “Wine Conquers All,” “Beside You” (which introduces the Goddess Athena), and “Galatea,” drawing further dramaturgical links to Ovid’s story from the Metamorphosis. Ian Vargo joins the crew as a sound engineer.

A new trailer is released… as is a new poster.

April ’11: The show opens at the Carrie Hamilton Theatre at Pasadena Playhouse on April 7^th. Charles McNulty, head theatre critic at the LA Times gives a rave review and calls it “a thrilling freak show,” and “a musical for people too cool for musicals.” We are given two cases of wine to sell by a new label called "a-non-ah-mus," created by Ron Hill at Babcock Winery in Santa Barbara County. Drummer Jim Bertini and actress Lauren Augarten fill-in for two weekends. We also receive a special guest on Easter Sunday.

May ’11: The show closes May 8^th, and Sarah Ellis, a writer who'd seen the show 8 times during its LA run, produces an "imaginary overture," and does so by ear. Two days later we learn we’ve been accepted to the New York Musical Theatre Festival.

June ’11: Rewrites of the script continue, and several new songs are added (“Sing Muse” and “Voice from a Beast”), with the promise of two others.

And that’s how we got here! Stay tuned to this space for new developments, as we move into this new exciting phase in the life of CYCLOPS: the New York Musical Theatre Festival!