{"id":20001,"date":"2019-04-17T14:46:50","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T19:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20001"},"modified":"2019-04-17T14:46:50","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T19:46:50","slug":"barrymores-ghost-sings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/04\/17\/barrymores-ghost-sings\/","title":{"rendered":"Barrymore’s Ghost Sings!"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Well, and it just occurred to me that this is the third consecutive show in which I will sing onstage. In Lughnasa<\/i>, Jack sings a few lines of a song he remembers from his childhood to demonstrate his returning memory; in Final Arrangements<\/cite> Victor croons drunkenly to the wounded flower delivery man; as the second act of I Hate Hamlet<\/cite> begins, the stage directions describe Barrymore as singing to himself.\r\n

Maybe it\u2019s the fourth? I don\u2019t remember singing during The Thirty-Nine Steps<\/i> but it\u2019s certainly the sort of thing that might have happened. Looking at the script, I don\u2019t see any opportunities for bursting into song. Probably didn\u2019t happen, then. Never mind.\r\n

I don\u2019t do musicals. I do like to sing, and on occasion people have encouraged me to do musicals, but while my voice is loud and resonant, I can\u2019t consistently sing on pitch, or even hear what pitch I am supposed to be singing on and whether I am on it. I sing perfectly cromulently when it\u2019s a snatch of song unaccompanied by instruments or other singers and nobody knows how the tune is supposed to go. On the few recent occasions where I have had to sing properly<\/i>, I have found it nerve-wracking. I don\u2019t want that to be my primary experience of rehearsals or the performance. But I don\u2019t really mind this sort of thing.\r\n

In the other two shows, the writer specified the song and the part of the song, including the lyrics\u2014I knew exactly what I was supposed to sing and just had to figure out how to sing it and make it work. In IHH<\/cite>, at least in my acting copy, there is nothing beyond singing to himself<\/i>. I don\u2019t know what Nicol Williamson sang for the Broadway premiere. I mean, given that production\u2019s troubles, I don\u2019t know whether he sang anything, and kinda doubt he sang whatever the writer and director wanted him to. Or of course Dramatists Play Service, Incorporated could have chosen not to print a lyric to which they do not control the rights, even if it was a small enough snippet to avoid violating the rights of whoever does control it. I don\u2019t know. In the absence of advice from the playwright, we have to choose something for Barrymore to sing in our production.\r\n

So far, I have been amusing myself. I thing I have sung a snatch from a different song in every rehearsal, mostly without the intention of ever using that song again. We approach Opening Night, however, and a decision must be made. Which song is it to be?\r\n

My inclination (and of course the decision is not mine but the director\u2019s, however this particular director has indicated a willingness to take the actors\u2019 inspirations into account) is that it should be a song that John Barrymore might have known before the Opening Night of his Hamlet in November, 1922. I also think it should be a song that at least some of the people in the audience might recognize, or at least recognize as old. And I think the song should be funny to the audience, at least somewhat. Finally, it should be at least plausibly in character for Barrymore\u2019s Ghost as Paul Rudnick has written him and as I am playing him.\r\n

It has just occurred to me that Irving Berlin\u2019s \u201cThe Near Future\u201d, with its well-known refrain How dry I am, how dry I am\/It's plain to see just why I am\/No alcohol in my highball\/And that is why so dry I am<\/i> would do. It was originally in the Ziegfeld Follies<\/i> of 1919, so it would work quite nicely on all counts. Hm.\r\n

Before that occurred to me, I was inclined to \u201cMademoiselle from Armenti\u00e8res\u201d, which is still a possibility. The problem with that one, of course, is that I still would have to choose which words to use from a gazillion possible verses and a gazillion different versions of each verse. Even ruling out the ones with your actual profanity (there is only one naughty word in the whole play, unless I am missing one somewhere, and it isn\u2019t Barrymore\u2019s Ghost who says it) there are still a lot of choices left. I could indeed sing a different verse every night (including all the rehearsals and any time we work that opening for any reason) without repeating myself, though I would probably have to do a little research eventually.\r\n

And while I\u2019m on the subject, a question for y\u2019all Gentle Readers that is only tangentially related but I\u2019m interested in what y\u2019all think\u2026 The vast majority of the versions of \u201cMademoiselle from Armenti\u00e8res\u201d that I\u2019ve seen (which is of course a tiny subset of them) delineate the duration of the titular Mlle\u2019s erotic deprivation as forty years. And yet, it seems to me clear that fifty<\/i> is both funnier and more alliterative than forty<\/i>. Is the vowel sound that much better? Is there some other reason why the lower number is the canonical one and the rounder number the variation? Or am I wrong about which is funnier?\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger rambles for a while, parleyvoo; Your Humble Blogger rambles for a while, parleyvoo; Your Humble Blogger rambles for a while and then asks for your input on an important question, hinky-dinky-parleyvoo.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20001"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20004,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20001\/revisions\/20004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}