Fun Times

Travis and Frank were vacationing in Vegas this weekend so I got to spend some quality time with my FAVORITE Fabulous Entourage band-mate and my favorite Fabulous Entourage band-mate-significant other. Except for Sarah. And Chelsea even though I don't know Chelsea that well. And Chris is really cool too.

Anyway, the boys took me out on my night off and we saw "Zumanity" which is the sexy-Cirque du Soleil show. It had been rumored to be everyone's least favorite Cirque show, next to "Love" (the Beatles one) but I thought it was pretty rad. As far as overall plot and aesthetic, it was a bit disorganized and inconsistent, but the acts themselves were cool enough that I was able to overlook it's shortcomings. My favorite part is a toss up between the lesbian contortionists in the fishbowl and the 'husband/wife' act where the lady balances on one hand on the guy's forehead. Ow! I was talking to my dresser, Patricia, about it because she used to be a part of one of the most famous trapeze acts in the world, and she said that doing a headstand or handstand on someone else's head was the first thing she learned to do in her circus-upbringing.

P: Yeah, when you're brought up in a family of performers, you start training very young. Like, we started taking our daughters up on the trapeze when they were about 4 or 5. Here's your water bottle.
Me: Thank you. Wow, and they weren't scared?
P: Well, we just have them sit up there and get comfortable being up there so they're not afraid of it. It's like a game.
Me: Wow, so those performers, they don't get nervous when they're flying around up there? I need a Ricola.
P: Here you go. No they're not scared at all. You adjust to it gradually, you start working on an act for a couple of hours a day and then you start performing it and it grows from there. Like the first act I learned was balancing on my father.
Me: What?
P: Yeah I did a headstand on his head.
Me: Like - your head on his head?
P: Yes. Here, put your shoes on.
Me: Wait, when you were 5 you could balance on your father's head with your head?
P: Turn around we need to put on your necklace.

Wowee wow. These people are amazing. I have to do like 2 hours of yoga just to warm up for Mamma Mia. And all I do is run around looking Swedish. Imagine if I was going to have to stand on the top half of my ribcage while my lesbian lover did a handstand on the bottom half. I think Frank had it right when he said, "I think the trick is that they're just never warmed down."

Top Joke

Last night I met my first celebrity in Vegas! One of the ensemble members in our cast is dating Hung from Top Chef (see picture at left) and he brought him to this composer's showcase that some cast members were attending last night. He introduced him to us and everyone was all excited, but no one said anything about him being on Top Chef. So when he sat down next to me I leaned over and said "your challenge is to make something delicious using only items from the buffet table! you have 30 minutes! go!" My friend Rod Sutton who was sitting to my left said, "'Something delicious'? Real specific." Hung looked at me and said, "30 minutes? that's a long time." Okay so it was a bad joke, but my Padma impression was spot on.

you've all been replaced

Though I miss New York terribly and think about all of my friends there every day, I have managed to make a few new friends here. I know it's crazy, but it's true. This is a picture of Kate, me and Jen. Kate and Jen play my best friends Ali and Lisa respectively in the show. They also play my best friends in real life. This is our Charlie's Angels picture, which Jen gets mad about because it's racist that we make her be Lucy Liu just because she's Asian. I like it because get to be Cameron.

Hold me closer Tony Danza . . .

Last week company management offered us free tickets to The Producers starring Tony Danza at the Paris. Our free seats were some of the best seats in the house: front and center, about 5 rows back. There were about 15 Mamma Mia people in the orchestra section and then like 50 empty seats around us. On a Friday night. Yikes. I feel unqualified to fairly critique the show because they do a 90 minute condensed version of the Broadway show which I have never seen, but that being said, it was a pretty grueling hour and a half of musical comedy. It was one of those productions where you can see the actors working really hard on stage. Like the director had told them that this show is quirky and raunchy and stylized, but then didn't show them how to make it that way so everything just seemed contrived and overwrought. There were some good performances, but overall it made me want to see the show with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

They offered us two tickets per person, so I of course signed up to get 2 even though I knew I wouldn't have a date. My friend Jen (who plays one of my best friends both on and offstage) did the same thing, so we agreed to be each others dates and then to try and pick up some guys at the casino to give our extra tickets to. This sort of worked, but we sort of got too tired to really seek out guys that we would actually want to go on a date with and ended up handing the tickets off to the first pair of bewildered looking guys we could find. They were probably more excited that Jen and I were talking to them than they were about getting tickets to the Producers, but they accepted our offer enthusiastically. After the show they thanked us and tried to ask us out for a drink, but after 90 minutes of forced jokes about the ca-razy world of musical theater that we had to return to the next day, we were unfortunately too tired.

keep them closed!

No Britney did not come to last night's performance of Mamma Mia. But this is kind of a funny story:

All of the backup vocals in Mamma Mia are done live backstage. Even though it sounds like canned 'oohs' and 'uh-huhs' because of all the reverb they put onto them, the vocals are all done by ensemble members in about 5 different vocal booths off stage left. Each vocal booth has a condenser mic in the middle that everyone stands around and behind the microphone is a monitor showing the conductor in the pit so he can cue the back-up vocals and give cut-offs etc. The camera that tapes the conductor is at about stage level, so it also captures the image of about 6 people in the front row since they're directly behind the conductor's head.

Last night, one especially relaxed audience member in the front row decided to throw all her mother's etiquette teaching to the wind and sit with her legs wide open despite the short, white dress she was wearing. Little did she know, that her coveted front-and-center seat assignment allowed her (thankfully covered) crotch to be video taped and exposed to the entire ensemble singing backstage for the entire show. I'm sure vocal cues were missed and cut-offs extended because we could not stop laughing at this poor girl's mistake. And she had no idea! So be careful front-row ticket buyers. You never know who's watching.

Opening

So I opened the show this week which was good. I wasn't nervous at all which I thought was kind of weird, but I guess when you're being put into a show that everyone else has been doing for 2 years or more, you don't get that same anticipatory excitement. Also there's none of that, 'I hope they like it!' anxiety in a show like this. It's Mamma Mia, they're going to like it. So even though there were a few costume changes I was unsure about and had only practiced the curtain call once (which is about as long as the entire second act - I bow 5 times total) I was surprisingly calm and focused most of my energy on remembering all that biting, witty dialogue.

I had like 8 bouquets of flowers in my dressing room which was rad, and people kept asking to come in and see the spread because they'd heard it was like a funeral parlor in there. I felt like a real star! The flowers were good for me politically too though because my friend Kate came up to me and said, 'we figured you must be really nice if you got that many flowers from your friends.' So thank you to everyone who sent them, not only because they were beautiful, but also because it won me acceptance points among cast members.

There were no big mistakes or anything, it just felt good to finally do it and to have an audience there. During 'Name of the Game' which is my big solo number where I'm confronting one of my 'dads' about our familial status, a few audience members tried to start clapping along which was really awkward because it's a slow song that doesn't necessarily lend itself to audience participation. I had no idea what was going on at first and thought that maybe they were just clapping for the song because they knew it and they were excited to hear it, but then it kept going at this weird, slow, labored pace and other people kept joining in trying to make it this kumbaya type of thing that just totally backfired. So I was thrown off for a minute, but I just kept singing and finally they got the picture that it was not working and stopped. At least they were enthusiastic.

All week long there have been parties and gatherings to go to, though on the actual opening, I just went and ate sushi with Kate afterward. I was pretty exhausted and got drunk off one Kirin Light, which was a good way to spend my first post-show decompression. We'll see how I feel after 6 months of this. Probably still getting drunk really quickly.

OMG

I am here. OMG! I work at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino which is this big, gold panel rising out of the horizon on the south end of the strip. It's ridiculous, there's like all these huge neon signs and some palm trees and a fountain or something and there are Mamma Mia slot machines with rotating screens above them playing videos from past productions, and every 10 minutes or so no matter where you are you hear Dancing Queen piped in over the speakers. It's carpeted (for some reason I thought that was weird), dimly lit and there are no windows so you never know what time of day it is and you can smoke everywhere. During the day the casino is pretty empty so it gets kind of creepy and depressing as the slot machines and croupiers just kind of sit there in a smoky-ABBA-infused haze. The first time I ever went inside I was with Rob Sutton who plays one of my dads and who had driven me there from the airport, "No fucking way this is where I go to work everyday," I said to him. "Yup!" he replied.

What I didn't realize about all the casinos in Vegas is that each one is like it's own little world. One could theoretically spend their entire vacation in one casino since each one has 10 restaurants, a theater, a music venue, a pool (some with real sand and waves), a spa, a mall and enough bars to keep you constantly drunk for days. I guess that's the point. I'm excited that they let you bring drinks into the theaters. They should do that on Broadway, I bet it would up their attendance. And make some of those second acts easier to bear.