A show is born!

As previously mentioned, I currently have no life of my own. What I do have is a ridiculously fun part in a great play with a wonderful theater group! Here's some photographic evidence of what I've been up to. Four days before opening night, we moved into the Audimax and spent all day building the set. The stage pictures start with building the scaffolding at 10am and show the process through the next ten hours.





Set? Check. Lights? Check. Sleep deprivation? Check. A vast variety of baked goods from my kitchen? Check. Now back to endless hours of rehearsing! Nora, the director, instructs the Mollie, Giles, and Chris characters in the art of rocking out.


Miss Casewell drives Mrs. Boyle out of the comfy chair with loud music and dancing above and I amuse myself by observing Matthias/Chris go about his make-up business before one of our three dress rehearsals below.

Lottie, the make-up designer, makes all the boys look pretty.

Chris and Paravinova before a dress rehearsal. One of those precious moments in life.

Here are some shots I took during a dress rehearsal. (Except when I had someone else take the pictures that I'm in..) Mollie and Giles toast to new endeavors.

Chris Wren energetically philosophizes, much to the bafflement of his hosts.

Mrs. Boyle arrives most disagreeably. BOOOOOOOOO!

The unexpected guest dramatically rushes in out of the storm. BWAHAHAHA!

"Perhaps, I think to myself, I shall freeze to the DEATH! And then I take my little bag, I stagger through the snow... I see before me - big! iron! gates! A habitation! I AM SAVED!"

DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD!

Sargeant Trotter reveals something scandalous.

All the shows have gone wonderfully so far. In fact, each performance has been better than the one before it. Including dress rehearsals, we've had a full show every night for the last week. Today is our day off, but I have to go to see a play in another theater with a class, so it's not actually much of a break at all. I don't mind. It's been so, so, so much fun and I can't wait to do it again every night next week. (The 45 or so minutes of my hair getting curled and face getting painted each night is even starting to feel more relaxing than painful!) Having to be focused in this other world from 5-10pm every day has been a really nice escape from stressful school things, even if it just makes the rest of the hours in the day more difficult.

We've been getting great reviews and publicity in magazines, newspapers, and radio stations; we were even asked to do the weather forecast in character on the big public television station on the night of our premiere. The audiences have been great. Everything is great. Great, great, great. Three Smithies came to the show on Thursday and I enjoyed hearing them laughing in the audience. They even brought me flowers, which made me feel very special particularly because the Germans don't typically do the flower thing. Two more Smithies came lastnight and another big group is going next Friday. All my friends and professors have been so wonderful and supportive, which has really helped me out. (THANK YOU!!!!) How interesting that the first half of my German year was taken over by english theater. That certainly wasn't something I'd imagined happening, but I am happy for it.

Here's a view of the premiere party we had after opening night. Woohoo!

The amount of things I'm actually supposed to accomplish today is a little terrifying, so I'm going to go back to the real world now. Cheers!

Verschiedene Sache, usw.

My days are slowly becoming ensconced by theater. As of yesterday, I've got rehearsal every day until the end of time (...or February, whichever comes first). Tomorrow we move in at 9am and spend all day building the set. The different parts of it already look great, so I'm pretty excited. We had a costumed run-through on Sunday and there was an odd moment where the director and costume designers lined up all the actors on stage and openly critiqued our clothes like we were mannequins of some sort, having us take off jackets, try new hats, etc. It was quite a strange moment. Our rehearsals have generally been going super well, so I'm excited for what a few more run-throughs will do before our premiere on the 19th. We're also now getting our fabulous posters up around campus and the city, which adds to the excitement. Excited. Excited. Excited.

And, of course, there's also class and homework still to be done. I've already been assigned three essays and lots o' readings, which I'm trying to get done pronto before my being gets completely devoured by thespianism.

In my Smith theater class, we just read Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) by Goethe in preparation for a one-man performance we went to see on Tuesday night. I'd found the book itself to be a somewhat excruciating read due to the combination of old German syntax and whining, so in all honesty I wasn't particularly looking forward to the play. Therefore what a wonderful surprise it was to have my mind blown by its awesomeness! It just goes to show that you should never judge a play by its book.

On a more serious note, the news from Haiti is absolutely horrendous. Heartbreaking. Heartbreaking.

The world is a strange place. Thousands of people are dying on one side while I'm just sitting around on the other, trying not to feel guilty while I watch the beautiful snow come down and eat borscht. Ahhgf.

Beautiful, beautiful borscht, curtosy of Liz Chase.
Now back to that silly homework.

Frohes Neues!

I'm quite certain that 2010 was the most explosive neues Jahr I have ever celebrated. Stores in Germany are only allowed to sell fireworks a few days before New Year's Eve and, once legal, sell them they do. At first I was confused when I started hearing explosions early in the morning of the 31st, but the surprise soon exploded as the BANG BOOM KERBLAMing became more and more steady as the day went along. We started off the evening at a potluck party at a friend of Kassia's where American and Mexican made up the cultural ratio pretty evenly. It was quite fun to meet new people, share a meal, and celebrate with them. As the year dwindled down to its last hour, we joined the hundreds of hundreds of people at the harbor to await the new year. The journey there was wrought with ice, alcohol, and explosives, which... kept everything interesting.
The harbor was just as we had been warned - a massive hoard of cold, yet happy drunk people setting off fireworks wherever they felt like it. Joshua ended up throwing himself in front of Kassia and I a couple times to protect us from things that were about to explode in the crowd. What a hero.
Once my cell told me it was 00:00, the real chaos began. The sky was packed with color and fire and smoke and the sounds of people cheering and horns from all the boats in the harbor being blown at full force. It was dangerous, fo' sho', but the atmosphere was so joyful that you couldn't care too much about the negatives. It was really and truly a blast. (Har har har.) The best part is that now I don't ever have to go again. : ) I took the first picture and stole second and third from a Hamburg newspaper website. The panoramas give you a better view of what the harbor looked like for hours and hours that night.
The days since the new year arrived have been pretty relaxed with little excursions here and there. One of us has spent a good chunk of time sleeping in while the other has been in class and rehearsal and doing homework. (I'll let you guess who is who.) It's been unnaturally cold here in Hamburg and we've seen snow pretty much every day. The Alster (lake) has also frozen over, which it apparently hasn't done in years. Yesterday we visited the St. Nikolaikirche (the bombed out church/memorial) and I snapped a few pictures of beautiful beautiful Hamburg in the snow. If you click on the Rathaus picture below (city hall), you can see the big Christmas tree that's still glowing in the middle of the smaller section of the Alster.


Lastnight before rehearsal, I went for a solo stroll around the Alster to take pictures of my favorite city view. Try as one might, there is no possible way to capture the real beauty of this scene. Oh, Hamburg, how I love you!

Speaking of rehearsals, the play is going well well well! We've been having at least one full run-through a week for the last three weeks and, as anticipated, they keep getting better and better. That's a good thing for sure, as we open in (EEK!) just under two weeks. At this point I'm not too nervous about it. I've just about mastered strutting around in heels, which was my biggest personal concern. Everything else is easy. (I kid.) Hopefully I'll keep having good things to report - Oh! Such as the fact that the police finally came and kicked the last few squatters out of our performance space during the break. Yesssssss.

And, of course, here's the traditional baked good photo, this time taken by Joshua as I was clearly hard at work. Pumpkin raisin chocolate chunk cookies. Nom nom nom.