Tag: theatre
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Casting: The Worst Job in Theatre
I direct plays at the high school level. Why I haven’t “hired” someone to do my casting for me I’ll never know. In this type of setting, there’s nothing worse. Pitting my own regular actor against my own regular actor. When we do large second semester productions, it’s like putting family member against family member…
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“Shear Madness” Malaysia in Penang
I had a fun time catching “Shear Madness” Malaysia at the Penang Performing Arts Centre last night. “Shear Madness” is the crowd-interactive, smash comedy-whodunit which has been performed in many countries around the world. Producers Gardner and Wife brought the piece to Malaysia, and they had two runs in KL before bringing it to Penang…
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Turn Off the TV and Check Out Some Live Theatre Instead
Here’s what someone said about the drama I wrote and produced last weekend: “I had never seen a drama or a play before in my life because I thought they would be boring and a waste of time. However, after watching the drama, I felt like watching dramas are much more worthwhile than watching TV…
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Wrapping Up an Amazing Week: Putting Everything in Perspective
Our four show run of our original production, “For All Generations”, finished last night to a full house. Actually, all four shows were packed, and we were greatly appreciative of the responsive and generous audiences. Here was one of my favorite compliments: “I had three generations of my family at the play yesterday, and we…
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Insight into Writing my New Show (3)
Only a couple more days until opening night of the new show I’ve written. I had previously highlighted the first 6 dramatic sketches and here are the other four. “A Woman at War” is a WWII historical mini-musical which focuses on a woman, Sarah, saying goodbye to her new husband on the home front, and…
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A Walk Through Our Final Rehearsal
8:30 Arrive. Set-up and arrange microphones, drama cubes, and props into their proper place. 9:00 The director (me) throws a curve at all the actors and redoes the last piece without warning. We relearn movement, pacing, and timing to match perfectly with the choreographed dancing and music. After about the 4th run-through, they get it.…
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Oops! My fault: A Director’s Mea Culpa
My new show opens in one week. It’s a series of 10 individual dramatic sketches. As I watched all ten performed as a whole on Monday, I realized that one of them was bad. Really bad. It’s not the script. Actually, it’s an award-winning script which will soon be performed in Sydney. No, it wasn’t…
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RLT – The Little Group Near to My Heart
I’ve teaching, directing, and writing drama for a number of years now. I guess it’s been seven and a half years. I’ve learned so much – mostly that I don’t know much about acting or directing. (On the writing part I think I’m okay.) I get to work with young high school actors – some…
Author Mark W Sasse 