18 Nov 2016

Thank You Toronto, For Making Manteca Great Again

Photography by Kris Frostad

Opening Monologue Nov. 10, 2016 - Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

Thanks everyone, thanks for making Manteca great again.

I'm thinking about the meeting Obama had today with Trump at the white house and it starts early in the morning when President Obama openings his eyes in bed at dawn, thinks about his upcoming day and groans, "Fuuuuuuuckkkkkk"

I know one thing for sure, you know the Obama's "when they go low, we go high". Obama is going to be unfailingly polite to Trump, he will call him Mr. President Elect, he will shake hands, "not so small really! ". But you can be sure he’s going to try and pysch him out you know that… he’s gonna leave the birth certificate on the coffee table, he’s going to have his assistant call on the red phone and pretend to be Putin and Obama will take the call, listen for a minute and then tear Putin a new asshole, in Fluent Russian!

This week I’m thinking we have older white males with no college education to thank for this. Hey wait a sec, I’m an older white male without a college education. (My girlfriend says I skipped a lot of grades). I voted for Clinton, it wasn’t hard to do, you don’t need a fuckin PhD to know the Republicans have never done a god damn thing for working folks…as Obama says, "come on, man!

The only educated question you need to ask yourself is this… who would you trust more your government or your insurance company?

You know Melania met with Michelle at the same time... " I love vhat you’ve done wif de place. Any udder of dos tings, you know doz word tings, yeah de speeches! Any more speeches hanging round here you vont be needing?

And then in Texas, George W. wakes up looks at Laura and says,
"Laura, Laura wake up, I’m not the dumbest US president any more …sombitch!

7 Nov 2016

Prepping for The Twelfth of Never Show

manteca-keeper-niagara-sm

 

You might ask, what do you do to prepare for a new show? Excellent question, thanks for asking. Well, the new show is on Thursday, Nov. 10, this week at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, so today our lighting director Duncan MacMillian and I will go through some of the lighting cues he has programmed for the set and discuss projection for a new video we will be rolling into the show. Our front of house audio engineer Tony Crea made some wonderful recordings of the new show when we were touring it this summer and so I will be making notes today for what we should review in this weeks rehearsals. Morosely we call these tapes, “the black box”, as they reveal our mistakes, none of which were fatal on the dates so far.

We will have a special surprise guest for a couple of the tunes and she is diligently working on her parts. There is some touch-up work to do on the physical set today, which I do not want to tell you too much about, as it is also a surprise…Today we need to confirm the band and crew meal, the equipment delivery and pick up and the schedule for our videographer, who will be recording the show. Oh yeah and must do laundry…

See you Thursday at 8 fresh and clean, at least for the first song.