Lodestar preview performances

Feels like a good while since I've updated this, but naturally that only means that I've been too busy to sign in, rather than it being nothing interesting is happening. Generally, things are in okay shape I think - a lot of the releases I've been drumming on this year have stared to emerge - Under The Streetlamp's album is very exciting and will be released on November 13th, Ethan Ash's new material is also sounding decent and that will be released on the same day, and the Eureka Stockade album isn't far off either and what a treat that sounds - that's set for a 6th December release, so much musically about to erupt I think. That, and some nice gigs coming up too including playing for Jon Orchard at Lodestar Festival next weekend, a festival in Windsor with Eureka Stockade and High Barn with Flaming June, plus the London stuff with Lu, mustn't grumble. Will though, can always do with more of this...

Anyway, tonight was the Lodestar preview performance of the 2 plays I'm putting on at the festival next weekend. I really had no idea what to think ahead of today - the music for Clowns had been rehearsed twice but without all the actors apart from the brilliant Kimberly Dobson who very kindly stepped in to play Clown-ette Miranda to perfection. Our other show, The Year Of The Rat, hadn't been touched at all. I arrived at midday today, with the worst hangover in history courtesy of a party at Rob-Eureka-Stockade's house last night, and then spent five hours in awe of how good these actors are. I had a feeling for a while that The Year Of The Rat was a bit of a return to form on the writing side of things, because I've written a lot of shite this year, and even in it's loosest first draft sense I could see the ideas come to life. But it was the cast who made it - Marto, Heather, Colin, Vaughan - it's their energy and willingness to make the show work. It was always supposed to be a 'fun' show, and they just shared my vision completely - in many respects it's the silliest thing I've ever written, and there's no denying bits of it don't work (like the 'Short Horror Play') but when performed with so much wit and passion it was generally always going to be a good evening. Heather's performance of a character called Hitler ("Hi, I'm Hitler but you can call me Judy") is up there with some of my highlights of the year. After 5 hours of rehearsing that show, we moved onto Clowns in which Vaughan and Colin were joined by Kimberly and also the live backing band - Bryan, Marcus, Ali and myself. In what is an extremely ambitious project, we seemed to nail it in two quick run-throughs, I'm really relieved about this one and can sense the cast are too because spoken word musicals are a bit of a change of direction. Again, the energy was there, and although I'm not comfortable as the narrator (I have since made a move for another actor to do it), I'm pretty happy with how it all went tonight and am genuinely excited about Lodestar next weekend now. Tonight we barely promoted the show because I was a bit unsure of the material, we played to a small-ish audience (although always a pleasure to see those who come to every show I do support my work once again) in a venue which I love but we've worked at loads of times. It's not new territory, but my recent fatigue has gone straight out the window - creativity and the danger of live performance is a complex beast, but sometimes when it works it's a bit of a treat.