[Flashback: 2009. A little theater at the corner of St. John's University campus, appropriately called the Little Theater. Or "Theatre" to those of you who enjoy British spellings and/or pretention.]
The theater house is filled with four-hundred (give or take), red-upholstered seats, on top of which perch four-hundred (give or take) squealing children. As a result, the room begins to take on that stale "children" smell, the kind that pervades an entire room when enough of them are congregated long enough -- the metal of playgrounds, under-the-fingernail Oreo grime, unwashed lunch boxes.
Before them, on the darkened stage, thirteen students sing. They don heavy costumes, from princess dresses to jester hats to prosthetic noses that enable five-foot females to cross-dress as convincing fairy-tale gnomes that eat babies. If you look closely, Henry VIII can be seen moving a tree during the scene change in act two.
The show itself lasts less than an hour -- short enough to entertain the four-hundred (give or take) children, preventing their metallic cookie smells from permanently blighting the upholstery in the four-hundred (give or take) seats, but long enough that the thirteen cast members, out-of-breath, sweaty, and weary, will probably end up skipping their afternoon classes that day. Another day, another Grimm.
Since then, the show became a kind of "hey, remember that time during tech..." story passed between beers that almost always ended with the recount of a near-death experience.
Don't worry. If you missed it the first time, the tomb's been reopened.
[Flash-forward: 2012.]
Excitingly, Grimm was accepted into the New York International Fringe Festival. I won't rehash the statistical, logistical, or capitalistic(al) details. Just know that in a nutshell, a new cast of thirteen, able-bodied actors in the New York area have agreed to tell the Grimm story once again, led by a production team consisting of St. John's alumni, friends, Romans, countrymen. Lend us, the original story-tellers, your ears.
I introduce to you our team: Olivia, one of my best friends and the aforementioned gnome in prosthetics, who's taken off the nose and taken on the intrepid task of directing and producing this show. Kenny, the mastermind behind both the story and the beautiful, Tony-worthy score (I don't think I'm the only one with that sentiment...I'll tweet at Neil Patrick Harris later). Jon, the other mastermind behind the story and the original director of this wonderful, epileptic-fit-of-a-show back in 2009 (of course, I mean that in a good way. Can't spell "epileptic" without "epic"). Vikki, who brushed off her stage manager shoes like it was only yesterday she was compiling cast conflicts and sending out emails about nut allergies. Joe and Keith, our brilliant lighting and set designers (respectively, in both senses of the word). Mike Wirsch (check out his website), our assistant producer who wrote the hilarious video behind our Kickstarter campaign and who made me a mint julep that time we only had a few hours to whip up a press release. Nicole and Alexa, our production assistants who turned a haphazard hall full of performers into a well-oiled assembly line during auditions (and who sacrificed being in the air-conditioning to do just that...)
Together, we are the B.I.G. (Believe In Great theatre) company -- an acronym Olivia created on the E-train just one year ago. It has been an incredible team collaboration thus far. I can't stress enough how proud I am of my friends.
My official role in all this has been dramaturge (THAT'S what I can do with a B.A. in English) and ACR (basically, the middle-man between Fringe and B.I.G.). But I also want to be the team's story-teller. From rehearsals to showtime, I want to capture the journey. Because, trust me, I wish someone had done that the first time around when I found myself on the dark stage, paper-mâché-ing a giant, chicken-wire cauldron behind a giant screen so that three people could use the theater to watch Hancock. Or when Amy, my undergraduate roommate and the lead of the show, nearly fell off the fourth level of the set because no one had drilled it in yet (see what I mean about near-death experiences?). And don't even get me started on topless tech.
So follow me. Follow Grimm. I swear it's not as cultish as it sounds.
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