Final Show & Cast Party

Good lord I'm behind on my posting. This was almost a month ago. Here goes.

Take comes to Tokushima and then we head off to Claire's house for a low key night of watching Clueless. The following morning is it... the final musical! We thought the day would never come.

The next morning we wake and head out for the 30 minute drive to the last musical venue. On the way we stop for Chinese food breakfast and run into James and Sean. They were at a video game party the night before and were headed in the wrong direction, so it was fortunate that they spotted us. Drive continues and we make it to the venue.

Its in such a lovely section of town. Stone road, charming stream, hanging trees. The weather is beautiful and everyone wants to spend the day with a picnic rather than doing a musical. Sigh. I know too well what that is like during my times at Bard. Well all said and done, we get the musical up and running. But not without a stop to the shop for me to buy makeup remover for the show, Take to buy glitter for the cast party, and a lovely lunch with James and Amy.

Great show. Loads of people, great reaction, all in all, amazing time. As tradition of the final show, the gags came out. People changing their lines or their actions slightly to amuse each other without destroying the integrity of the play. Bessie gets on the god-mic from the lighting booth during one of the sections to pretend to be a voice on the telephone. Jeff does his role in short shorts rather than trousers. James brings out the relationship guidance dolphin to act as a creepy hand puppet when hes visiting the zoo with his daughter. At the scene where the monkey throws the banana at the zookeeper when we come to rescue them, I decide spur of the moment that I want to walk over and eat the banana. The audience finds this funny that a bent-over old lady goes and eats the banana off the floor after a monkey threw it out. Then I proceed (fueled by improvisation) to eat the peel of the banana as people stand aghast. It was a bad idea in hindsight as the peel of a banana is DISGUSTING but at least they laughed.

Cleanup was even more fun. We could tear things down and stomp things up, because we no longer needed to preserve them. Then all of it into a caravan of cars, and off to Gilly's house to be stored. After Gilly's a car went out to pick up the pizza, and the rest of us waited in the parking lot of the supermarket. If ever there was a suspicious looking lineup of cars in a parking lot, we were it. Gilly got back in Casey's car with the pizza and we followed them to the after party!!! We swore that every time an oncoming car lit up their windows we saw Gilly take another box of pizza and we were convinced she was eating them all.. grrr. Turns out she was looking for her slice of ham pineapple and had to sort through a mound of non-ham-pineapple boxes to find it.

The cast party was atop a mountain in Mino, where Brian lives. We had a 30 minute car journey to it mostly up steep windy roads. At the top of the mountain, overlooking the scene below, there were bungalows and a castle playground!!! Everyone devoured their pizza (overpriced. about $40 for a pie... yikes) and we started handing out awards to best monkey, or sexiest granny and things like that. Then we went upstairs and got glitter and stars put on our faces by Take. In total the glitter crew was Janet, Christine, Terrina, Take and I. Chris Pickles wanted to do it but didn't want to wait in line. Glittered and alcoholed up, we went to the playground!

The lovely playground is a beautiful castle sitting at the edge of a merciless drop. God help the children. There are rope climbs, fun fun slides (more danger), and strangely enough a collection of green rubber rods with funny tops on them that look like a odd field of penises... Perfect for a child's park... Also, all this danger, the PERFECT place for some drunk people to play on. We climbed and slit and played around, but opted out of the game of nighttime tag.

It was a great deal of fun and a nice way to end the musical. The following morning, with nothing to do, Louise Take and I went to breakfast at a place near her, where we met Julie, and then we started the long trip back home, sans Louise. With the musical over, what do we do with all our free time?!?! The lot of us truly had forgotten what a rehearsal-less weekend was like.

PICTURES!!!
and there is a video of a clip of this show
apologies to those who cant see it due to facebook. I don't own it to get a copy on my youtube account.

I'm making a slide show of beautiful black and white photos taken by our director Andrew Dahms
keep on the lookout for it :)

posted by Living and Teaching in Tokushima @ 8:32 PM Comments: 0