Lebanon, Missouri

 

Gwen Verdon in Fame!

 

 Isn't this the best! And now you can add to the names Gwen Verdon and Debbie Allen my own, for I have just completed the first week of rehearsals on The Love Goddess. And while I'm not saying I'm as good as these two yet, it does feel like I'm going to have to get close in order to pull off any of the routines that Jacqui Jameson's taught us. So I look forward that. I wonder how it will happen. That's Jacqui below, far right, if you don't count the reflections. This is a lovely room to be in. Look: Mirrors! Hats!

 

 The absolute best thing about the theatre though is all the foreigners you get to work with: the world shrinks and your view improves and you just feel higher up. Almog Pail, the show's creator, is from Israel, and there's a heavy American contingent too, including songwriter Logan Medland, seen above on the keyboads, triple threat Joey Simon – also pictured – and producer Laura Lundy, who was telling us over a fish supper this evening at The Seashell about her ninety-year old gay mother who got thrown out of a convent and has written a book about it. Laura also asked me to look up her daughter on IMDB, and mate...

 

 After supper we returned to The Cockpit to see Lanford Wilson Talley's Folly which closes tomorrow, a two-hander in a gazebo that I knew nothing about. "Lanford Wilson" is definitely an American name though. One often hears people who work in or for the theatre talk about the unique quality of the medium, a kind of "Here-we-are"-ness that I mainly don't feel at all when I go and see a play, beyond a nudge and a wink, but I felt it tonight.

"We could do this on a couple of folding chairs. But it's not bare. It's not bombed out. It's run down. And that makes all the difference."

 I'm not sure I'd call Talley's Folly a comedy, or even a romance, but it's definitely a thing with a heart, and a brain, and a careful thing, and I loved it. Watching American drama performed live by Amerian actors is a luxury, and also a bit of a relief. There were twenty-one other people in the audience tonight. If you're free I recommend filling the seats on its final day. The tickets are here.