The Oe4K blog

Oddly enough, our performances have been selling out in order, one at a time. Right now, only the performances on the 24th and the 25th still have some seats left. The other four have sold out, and tickets only went onsale yesterday.

If you want to see the show, I highly suggest buying your tickets right now.

If you don't want to see this show... the fact that you're wasting time reading the blog is surprising to me.

First off, tickets don't go onsale until tomorrow and we've already sold out one of our performances.


While I'm at publicity stuff, here's all the places we've been featured:

• We're on this week's Broadway Bullet. It's an MP3 podcast, and you can hear Kim (book), Robert (music) Dan (lyrics) and I (book/lyrics) discuss the show. I don't shut up, but aside from that I hope we give a good feel for how much fun we're having with this show.
• This week's New York Magazine features us as one of 30 things to do in September.
  
• An article from my hometown about getting into the festival.
• An old article from Bobby's hometown about getting into the festival. You have to scroll down a bit.

More to come...

Yesterday was the last "evening" rehearsal; we've been having occasional night rehearsals so Kim and I can come over and contribute when our dayjobs are done. A lot of it was music rehearsals while Greg was in town (normally he's doing musical directing for Spelling Bee in Chicago, IL) but we did go through the ending and streamline it, cutting out some stuff to make the rhythm a bit faster, but also losing one joke that I can't find a place for, the lyric "And like that, Antigone's begun" when Jocasta kills herself.

When you're taking a myth like Sophocles's "Oedipus" and trying to make it child-friendly, really the only way to do it is to turn it some of the second half into a mystery. "Who killed the king? Let's search for CLUES!" Things like that. Eventually at the end the action has to prove that Oedipus killed his father and that Oedipus is Jocasta's son. It's at that point where it becomes (intentionally) absurd, because any moment where a character realizes "YOU ARE MY MOTHER?!?" can't be taken seriously. I haven't seen a real production yet of Oedipus Rex that it didn't seem like an absurd moment.

And as such, our production's key moment of realization centers around an inscribed Baklava pan that Laius gave Jocasta on their wedding day.

(But of course.)

And for the cast, who complain I don't put enough rehearsal pictures up: I go to maybe half of the rehearsals that you do; don't you have cameras? Jeez, I brought the 5 pound bag of gummi bears, isn't that enough for yas?

Don't have much time, but wanted to do a quick post about Saturday day and yesterday day.

Saturday:

• Came in a little late. Watched them do the choreography for the Plague song. When I wrote the lyrics for it, my idea is that Sphinxy, Oedipus' puppet/best-friend has just died, and "What Is It Like When Ya Get The Plague?" is a song where Jocasta tries to explain what the plague is in a "fun!" way. It involves acting out the different symptoms of a plague (you eat some food that's full of mold / then your body shivers like you're really cold) along with hand motions. Sort of a cross between "who stole the cookie from the cookie jar" and... well, I don't know, The Chicken Dance or any Passover song?
  Well, Dan and Jessica looked at it and said, "what if the Plague song was done before the Sphinx dies?" So now, the sphinx is on his deathbed, trying his best to do the hand motions with Oedipus and Jocasta.
• Watched the Blind song's choeography finally. Apparently the humor of the dance never really fully came to me till I saw it. I think what I kept seeing was two people tap-dancing in perfect unison, but one of them facing the wrong way or something. Turns out it's not just that, but it's two guys with sunglasses, tap-dancing with a cane that they sometimes use to feel their way around the stage, and then alternate it to using the way you would in a tap dance. I can't explain it. But as I watched it, I knew I was going to hell.
  
• The show's really coming together. It's fun to watch it on its feet, watching actors make choices, and see the humor come out often in different ways than I've intended.
  

Last night we went over "My Lover Is My Husband Is My Son", which is the "artistic" finale with Jocasta. In it, Jocasta/Laura uses a scarf to represent Oedipus. She gives birth to the scarf, nurses it, dances with it, proceeds to have sex with it and then hangs herself with the scarf. There's tango break in the middle and I'd ended it with a lyric filled with possible ways for her to kill herself. But one thing you don't realize when writing a new musical on paper/computer is how it changes once the dance comes in. We looked at it, realizing that the suicide list was difficult to dance to, kept running around with ideas about her just "talking", a la "Glitter and Be Gay", and then eventually just decided to cut the lyrics and have her only dancing.

Which is a lot closer to our original idea. Before we wrote Lover/Husband/Son, it was just going to be an "artistic" dance with a boombox. Funny how sometimes you revert back to your original ideas.