The Doom passed around 30 minutes after I made yesterdays post, mainly due to a fun game involving stickers, an apple, and Grim Fandango.

Today offers a much brighter outlook! I have a meeting at 1pm at a venue which looks very promising, I'll put a couple of pictures up when I get back.

The audition dates creep ever closer, and I'm a little nervous about them! No idea why though... I'm not the one auditioning! (To all those auditioning - I'll be gentle.) All the slots have gone now, except four in the afternoons, and a couple dotted very early in the a.m, but I doubt anyone from London is willing to hit York for 9:30 in the morning. I only live 20 or so miles away, and I'm going to struggle to get the for that time! :D

Anyway, I'm off now to do meetingy things, and secure a better future for our children.

Having one of those blue days today, and not the good kind of smutty, X-rated blue... but the fuggy blue that embodies the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

Surrounding this crazy ambition to quite simply create a little theatre company that can pay me a half decent salary (thus indulging my passion for theatre, food, AND paying rent on time!) are the things that I refer to as "The Ordinary Things."

As the weeks plough on, it's becoming clearer and clearer that I need a job to support myself. Jobseekers Allowance is nothing short of a joke (£52 a week? Insane!) and Beth's patience is wearing pretty thin. She's too lovely to say much about it, but I know it's there, and rightly so.

It's just... the thought of working 40 hours a week in somewhere like... gah... Morrisons... makes me feel violently ill. But what else is there for a graduate with a knowledge of theatre, theatre, and... theatre? It's I know, all I do, all I want to do.

"Work in a theatre" would probably be the best idea, but two months ago I sent out a CV and covering letter to every theatre in 50 miles. Only Hull Truck took the time and energy to acknowledge me, and even then it was a "thanks, but no thanks."

Days like this come and go. I have no doubt that in a couple of hours I'll be fresh as a fresh thing, but today has proved somewhat of an eye-opener. Not many people around me have faith that I'm going to make this thing work, and keep dropping hits like A-bombs that I should probably ditch the whole mission and work 9-5 in an office, feeling my soul drain away in a job I hate.

But hey... life revolves around metal discs and square green paper, so who am I to want a life I can look back on and smile? If I fail, so what. Like My Guru (Aidan) said a few weeks ago, at least I'm out here trying to do something.

Doooom.... GLOOOOOOOM.

In happier news, a really good venue confirmed us for "Bouncers" and "Shakers" today, which means that THREE THINGS have gone well in a row. Surely there's a pit ahead, filled with pointed bamboo shoots, vipers, and beartraps.

I can smell it...

Last night I topped up my theatrical campness level by watching the insanely good, the outrageously gay, the super loved up new version of "The Producers."

I'm a big fan of the original (having only discovered it recently I have formed a love of that film that few men will ever know) so I was a little wary that this new version that chose to put Will Ferrel and Uma Thurman in roles in what I thought to be a way of saying to general cinema audiences "I know Nathan Lane isn't commercially well known, and I know Matthew Broderick isn't a big hairy Hollywood sell-out, but hey, it's got WIll Ferrell in it!!"

But oh, how wrong I was. Ferrell almost stole the show, and would have done if any lesser actors were cast in the roles of Bloom and Bialystock! Nathan Lane was born to play that role. Broderick? Don't even get me started. He was amazing. I haven't laughed at a character that much... ever. I wish I could be half the actor that guy is, though not in height, for then I would be a midget.

Other films watched this week include "The Man" - AKA "The unfunniest comedy of the century" and...

"Doom". I loved this. It was silly, gory, loud, cheesy and fun. It was "Doom", and anyone that says stupid things like "it lacked intelligence" or "plotholes" need shoving through a portal to Mars.

In work news - I'm still battling through the CVs. My voice is on answerphone across the globe (or London... whatever) and I'm just waiting on a few people getting back to me.

This is just an RSS test, you should probably ignore it.

IGNORE IT.

Thanks.

Yesterday a massive, MASSIVE distraction came in the form of the ScummVM application.

For those of you that aren't huge, huge geeks like me (I am Geek, hear me roar) will probably not know the following...

In the olden days of computers, the time of 3.5 inch floppies (snigger) and tapes, yes tapes, there existed a series of games that could be described as the "point and click" adventure. Graphics weren't upto much those days, and 256 colours was a LOT, so these games relied heavily on humour in the form of basic graphics and text. I myself discovered this genre of game around the age of 12 or 13, and Monkey Island was the name. The adventures of young pirate wanna Guybrush Threepwood. It featured pirates, cannibals, ghosts, and rubber chickens.

I wanted to be Guybrush Threepwood.

So last night I was digging through an old pile of very sad looking, neglected CD cases, and I discovered a copy of the Monkey Island bounty pack. The first two Monkey Island games, plus the third one - the first Monkey Island game to use speech instead of text, it also had a massive graphical overhaul.


Looking something not unlike a Don Bluth cartoon, Guybrush had grown up, found a voice, and acquired a sidekick in the form of "Murray" the demonic all powerful uber skull. I don't need to say much more...

After installing ScummVM, a program which allowed me to emulate the surroundings of a very, very old PC, I started to play Monkey Island II, a game which took me months to complete in my early teens, probably due to the fact that is was spanned across 13 bloody discs, and they needed swapping every time the screen changed...

By 1am I had finished it, and LO, a warm glow filled my chilled heart. The ending sequence still confused my pants off though.

So if you rang me last night, or I rang you, or we had any form of telephonic communications between 5pm and 1am yesterday, chances are I was playing Monkey Island - the game that I hope to adapt into a family musical to be toured in 2007.

Doomsday.

Today is the day of heavy, serious phonecalls, answerphones, touchtone systems, and unreturned phonecalls.

Yes, today is "acquiring the rights" day.

In the past I have dealt with the rights for several shows. Hell, I remember when I was sixteen years old, studying theatre at college, and an old friend of mine informed me that "plays need to be bought, you can't just put on a writers work without paying for the right to do so, that's what copyright is all about."

My futile arguement from the perspective of an actor that would later evolve into a director/writer/ape-based organism was that "surely the joy of seing your work onstage would be payment enough?" How naive was I?

Several years later, in a very early incarnation of my theatre group, I published several of my playsripts online (they're still up there, the webhosting service has ignored my emails to take them down for five years!) and someone staged one of them without even notifying me. The news that someone had printed out my scripts, rehearsed, then ran the show for over a week made my blood boil! I wanted tickets, acknowledgement, and most of all... the cash!

Therefore, I understand why copyright should exist, and why performance fees are payable to the author. I just wish the people that governed these rights weren't so angry all the time! I don't think I can recall a single phone discussion regarding performance rights that has left me feling informed or elated. I always seem to feel slightly numb, a little unwashed, and very, very tired.

I'm currently waiting for my third call of the day to be returned. I've waited 45 minutes so far. I'm going outside to garden.

*update* I just had a very helpful, polite, and pleasant conversation with a member of the rights team at Joseph Weinberger! Not only did I find out pretty much everything I needed, I was also overjoyed at the price!

This tour may actually work...

I'm about halfway through the ridiculous amount of CV's I have to look over. Some people have sent photos that just leap out of the paper, some that are a bit... blah. I now understand the power of the headshot. Not the "brains all over the deck" headshot, but the actors headshot.

Some are just flat, dull, unremarkable... and when a director is faced with over a hundred of these things and has only 45 audition slots, just imagine if a director has 45 audition slots and a few hundred CV's. I'm quite glad I didn't bother advertising in the Stage now!

So far I've sorted out all of the male applicants, dropping only two or three out of the first round, all of them for the simple reason that they had a very modern look to them, and that's not what I'm looking for in these productions. (Obviously... it's Dracula and Christmas Carol...)

Beth will be looking over the female applicants later on tonight, and then early tomorrow afternoon we'll be making phonecalls to people to invite them upto York for the auditions.

But for now... it's all still phone calls and paperwork for me. Tomorrow brings a phonecall to a publishing house to discuss the way they'll want us to give them royalties for our forthcoming Bouncers / Shakers mini tour... I'm hoping that they'll be fairly relaxed about it, as the tour is going to be a bit whirlwind, a lot unorganised, and a lot... not rushed, but buzzing.

And by "buzzing" I mean "getting venues as we go along, selling tickets on the website and the door, screaming as we go and just generally hoping for the best."

P.s - Anyone want to go see Silent Hill with me? My girlfriend, as lovely and wise as she is, is a horror movie pansy.

Long day.

Mucho productivo.

Sleepo... now... oh.

Right now I am wearing a face coated with the emulsion of shock. Or in less weird times... "wow".

SO many cv's have arrived over the last three days that it has boggled my mind. The female to male ratio still stays heavily in favour of the ladies, why is that? I know more male actors than female, yet we must have had at least 80 actresses apply against maybe 20 actors. Weird.

I didn't sort through the cv's today... I know, I know, I said I was going to, but I've worked every day for the last month and I needed a break (not that I didn't do some work, I just didn't work a whole day!) to clear my head. So I went swimming for an hour, then came back and did some hardcore manly labour in the "garden". I use the word "garden" here rather loosely, as it's less like a garden, and more like a WWII blast site.



Jeebers.

I will prevail! In theatre news, our spiffing bow ties arrived from Ebay this morning (along with several more posted cv's!) and they're much better quality than I thought they would be for £1.78 each. Proper nylon, like! Woo!

Bow tie excitement aside, tomorrow brings a day of photoshoots with some cast members in Scarborough, where myself and Nathan "production hero" Bottomley will try to look... hard.

Ah hell... here are the bow ties. I know you were dying to see them!

Back in the olden days, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and primordial soup was bubbling away in a pool of goop, I ran an amateur group called "Purple Monkey". It was very silly, very fun, and just plain dumb. Then it became really time consuming... TOO time consuming, and suddenly it was a full time job. We had our own rehearsal studios, rent to pay, our shows started to appear in "real theatres" opposed to the damp corners of church basements. It was a hectic time, filled with twists, turns, surprises and shocks... and yet one thing always remained as a constant.

I never, EVER, had enough actors at the start of the play.

Sure, we'd get enough once word spread that we needed someone. A cast member would bring in a friend, or an old member of the group would return. Kidnapping and brain washing proved highly successful.

Last week I was talking to Aidan McCarthy, an actor I've worked with on several tours, and he suggested placing an ad in PCR (Production Casting Report) which I did, thinking it might get us one or two CV's...

It was sent out on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon my inbox was screaming in agony at the sheer bulk of emails that were arriving every hour. Wednesday morning brought the first batch of snail mail CV's, this morning brought even more. My inbox is STILL receiving applications as I type this.

It's a little overwhelming, exciting, daunting, and just plain scary. Some of the people applying have worked on The Basil Show. That's awesome. I love Basil Brush, even if he's not quite as gay as he used to be.

So... Tomorrow I have the task of looking at the characters in "Dracula" and "A Christmas Carol" and deciding who to invite up for an audition in York.

My only real regret is not having the time to audition every single one of the people that have taken the time to apply.

Can you tell I'm feeling pretty humbled by this?

Hi. Hello. Greetings.

This is the first entry on this Blog - how very exciting!

So, for the last several months I've found myself spiralling deeper and deeper down the rabbit-hole. Having given up my hazardous lifestyle of international search and rescue missions for the British Government last November, I decided to try my hand at this theatre company business. Hell, monkies that ride unicycles make money - why shouldn't I?

For close to seven years I worked in amateur circles as a Director, Writer, Actor, Stage Manager... as well as working as an actor, stage manager, general do-gooder and superhero within professional TV, film, and theatre... and after experiencing the good, the bad, and most definately the ugly, I decided that I wanted a shot at the helm. I had experience as an actor on the recieving end of a harsh audition panel, as a FOH manager and technical wizard, I've walked into theatres and found we were playing to 9 people in a 2000 seater venue, I've played to full houses, gone onstage with half a days rehearsal... I'm not sure what else, but it feels like quite a lot of experience for a 25 year old who grew up in a little seaside town.

So, armed with this weighted head crammed full of gooey theatrical trickery and the skills required to stage a blinder of a show on around £70 and a packet of wheat biscuit mix, Stageworks Theatre was forged from the darkness... or something equally cinematic pleasing to the eye. Picture the scene in Lord of the Rings when Sauron's minions are crafting all those mean looking pointy axes and things. Somewhere, in the dregs of all this lurked an idea that stole away into the night, across Middle Earth, and then got lost and ended up in my head. Weird, huh?

So this Blog is going to be an insight into the creation of a new professional theatre company - one mans quite ridiculous quest to just... put on some bloody shows that people will really, really enjoy. It'll be horribly honest I'm afraid, no glamourising of the nettle-ridden path I'm about to venture down, leading to either massive national success, or a job in Malton Bacon Factory.

I hope you enjoy reading my rambled writings.