Friday, June 18, 2010

A Pair of Special Guests

We received a few special guests at the show last Sunday, Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry.  Mr Henry is acknowledged in the dedication page of Neverwhere for bringing the idea of tribes of people living in the London underground to Mr. Gaiman who put it into a television series that Mr. Henry produced.  

They were incredibly gracious. Snuck in right before the curtain speech and hung out in the lobby during intermission to chat with our Artistic Director, Dorothy Milne, about how much they were enjoying themselves and that they intended to stick around after to meet the cast and offer congratulations and autographs. Which they did. Needless to say, everyone was totally thrilled and geeked out by the experience. Me included.

Mr. Gaiman tweeted that he will blog about his experience when he can blog again. I am especially proud for Rob, who received many hearty handshakes on his adaptation from the men who dreamed it all up in the first place, which is an incredible honor. And as a company of artists, meeting them and having their sanction that we did well is a tremendous validation.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Extension logistics and more (more?) press

Due to popular demand, we have just extended the run of Neverwhere until July 18th. While some of the original cast wont be able to do the extension, we've snagged some excellent understudies to back them up and will be running what we call put-in rehearsals (plugging in a new actor in place of the old one and doing a run of the show with them). I'll have a little bit of work to do, especially in tweaking the fight with the Beast of London, but regardless I'm glad the show has legs.

If you have 30 minutes to spare and want to hear me blab about staging Neverwhere in an interview podcast with my scenic designer Alan Donahue and projections designer Charlie Alves, you are in luck (clicky clicky).

And Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune wrote some more about us here.