MTSU has an ongoing partnership/internship program with the Flying Fig Theatre in NYC. This article appeared in the Times over the weekend. Li’l ole MTSU was referenced in the opening paragraph.

Special kudos to Scott Boyd, Associate Professor of Theatre at MTSU, who designed the set and lighting for the production.

I’m not sure what this is really about, but it can’t be what I think it is.  If it is, it just means that the complete takeover of our attention spans and ability to totally emerse ourselves in a work of theatre has been successfully perpetrated by the producers of network television.  What do you think?

Link.

Well, Steven and I have been busting our humps for the past week and I’m happy to report that the pdf files for all of the female Shakespearean monologues have been uploaded. Steven is getting the links posted online as quickly as his life will allow. (He keeps talking about this “life”, but I’m not exactly sure what he means…)

Anyway, I’m continuing to plow through the men’s monologues now. My guess is that it will take me about another week to get through them all and have them uploaded. After that, we are going to go through the process of checking for any errors we might have missed in the mad rush to get them posted online in time for the big holiday rush on Shakespearean monologues.

In other news, Waiting for Lefty went off pretty much without a hitch. I know I didn’t post too much information about about during the process (which was my intention). I will be putting up a “Post Mortem” slug about it sometime this week.

Oh yeah, if you were one of our workshop attendees at the Southeastern Theatre Conference, make sure you take the time to leave a comment! Our server went down for a couple of days and one of the posts we lost was contained the links to the files I promised would be online. Here are those links again:

Preparing for Your Undergraduate/Graduate School Audition

Melodramatic Improvisation (or The Long and the Short of It)

I just received an e-mail from Steven Shults at Shakespeare Monologues (http://www.shakespeare-monologues.org) and I am pleased to announce that we have just created a partnership with him.

Our site is going to be the host site for a collection of Shakespearean monologues that are pre-formatted to be actor friendly.  The main link to each monologue will reside on his site, but the links will point to a pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file that will be hosted here on our site.  If you have not already visited the site, you should do so.  He’s got a great collection of monologues already online and is continually adding to them.  As of now, he only has links to the page containing the monologue at the MIT complete works online.  That’s a great start, but its not too actor friendly.

So, I’m going to begin putting together some pdf files containing the monologues that are preformatted for scansion–ready to go for actors.  I can already hear the shouts of thousands of undergraduate and graduate students everywhere.

The process is going to be time-consuming and it will take a while to get all of the online, but once it’s done, it’s going to be a great resource on the internet for anyone who’s working on a Shakespearean monologue.

Okay…I know the site was down for a couple of days last week, and I’m pretty sure we lost some posts before I could get a backup done.  So, I’m sorry about the loss of some of the posts.

In other news, I’ve added a link category titled “Shakespeare Resources”.  If you know of a site on the web that is a good source for Shakespeare resources for actors, leave a comment here or e-mail me and I’ll add it to the site.

In other news, I’m guest lecturing/coaching the Shakespeare section of one of the advanced acting classes on campus for the next couple of weeks.  So far, we’ve just covered scansion basics, but next week we start to work on their monologues geared toward auditions.  I’ll post some updates on the work we do in class.

That’s all for now, I’ve got a few drinks to have on this excellent St. Patrick’s Day!  Erin Go Bragh…

I’m sitting in my hotel room at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in Orlando, Florida after a rather exciting day of theatre workshops and seeing old friends (or should I say “friends from the old days” so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings?). I presented two workshops today, the first of which came as kind of a surprise since I found out I was doing it late yesterday afternoon. It was a panel discussion geared toward high school students making the transition from high school to a university theatre program. I sat on a panel with Jim Stacy from Louisiana State University Alexandria, Chet Longley from University of South Carolina Aiken and my collegue from Middle Tennessee State University, Kyle Zimmerman. The workshop was based around an article that Professor Stacy had written for an issue of Southern Theatre magazine that sought to help dispell some of the myths some high school students have about university theatre programs. It was a lively discussion and was well attended by high school students and faculty members as well as some current university students.

Next, came my workshop with our good buddy John Mauldin (see the bio links to the right) that was designed to help high school juniors and seniors prepare their university theatre program auditions. After a little screw up with our data projector not having been delivered on time to the conference room, we got our “lecture” portion of the workshop out of the way and opened the floor up to some of the students in attendance to showcase their audition pieces and hear our responses. My only regret is that we didn’t have more time to see more pieces. John and I are already talking about offering the same workshop again next year and requesting a longer time slot. The lecture is important–especially for students who might not be getting that information from their high school drama teachers. As we’ve discussed here before, some high school programs are nothing more than an English teacher’s chance to put on a show or two in the school’s “cafetorium”. Students who are serious about theatre coming from those programs might not get this information otherwise. In the past, there hasn’t been a great deal of workshops or information for high school students as part of the Conference, but thankfully that seems to be changing a bit.

For those of you who were in the “Auditioning for a University Theatre Program” workshop, I promised you that a version of our PowerPoint presentation would be available on this website. Be aware that you will need to have the Acrobat Reader loaded on your computer to access this file. It’s a free download.  For more information about John and I, check out our bio pages in the list of links to the right. Welcome to the site! Feel free to look around and read some of the other postings. Oh yeah, check out the Green Room, too! So far, there hasn’t been a whole lot of action going on over there, but hopefully, you can help get things started!

Tomorrow, three of my collegues from MTSU and I are presenting a workshop entitled “Melodramatic Improvisation OR The Long and The Short of It”. The workshop is the brainchild of Professor Zimmerman. Perhaps I can get him on here to explain it a bit further. Still, it should prove to be a fun workshop. I probably won’t be posting about it immediately afterwards because I’ve got to catch my flight back to Nashville, but be on the lookout…

Link.

Thanks to my buddy widgett over at Needcoffee.com for the headsup!