Of catfood and songs
The Catfood Fiasco
[Read on the Rafa Santos catfood fiasco here]
Thing is: that isn’t the first time I heard the catfood analogy to theater pay. I’ve heard it before, from someone else in rehearsal room banter. That’s really what makes the difference: there are jokes you tell your friends, then there are the ones you don’t print or show.
Remember, remember, Joan Rivers and the eat your dog joke. It’s equivalent to the N word: fine and fun among friends, but it’s a media grenade onscreen.
While I’ve accepted his apology, and I do hope all the best for Rafa Santos, I also hope the community considers the repercussions of the statement. It takes guts to wade through the theater and freelance creative industry, especially one in a developing country. So far, I’m amazed that we continue to churn out talent and shows. We’re only as good as the gigs we get, and we’re very thinly protected by the labor laws.
For the most part, it’s a wild, wild, world out there. What I wish is that it gets us thinking of a standard for all engagements and companies to follow. We have the passion, we just need the regulations to allow us keep working at it.
Off into the world we go
Speaking of regulations, from what I know from working the trenches of the stage, I can take a guess as to why they imported a cast for the Songs of Andrew Lloyd concert. Abby wrote about the concert here, which also sums up my sentiments.
So, why the import? Let’s just say that just say that some companies didn’t abide by the fine print way back when, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
It’s a pity though, I remember before Miss Saigon got staged in Manila they’d frequently stage even grander revues with Philippine talent.
I enjoyed the show, but I firmly believe Pinoys could have done it better. I’m also slightly miffed that they got bigger showbuyers for it when they could have gotten a full show of equivalent, if not better caliber, for a competitive price.
Call me naive, but for all our accomplishments in the theater scene, I daresay we can market ourselves. It just needs the right push, and I haven’t seen that push in a long while.
Louder than words
“The sound you are hearing is not a technical problem. It is not a musical cue. It is not a joke. It is the sound of one man’s mounting anxiety. I… am that man.” -tick…tick…boom!
I remember a 60 year old woman who sat in our poetry class back in college. The woman – for the life of me, I forgot her name – spent most of her life abroad as a nurse.
After her retirement, she decided to go back to painting and literature, passions she put on hold when she pursued nursing and raised a family. She sat in different lit classes around Ateneo, soaking up everything from lit theory to poetry to creative wrting.
“You will always have time,” she once told me when I divulged anxiety about not having the time to achieve everything I wanted. ” look at me, I’m doing all this and I’m already 60!”
In time, I remind myself as I go through my schedule and tick off my to-do list.
In time. I have to think as I grit my teeth and tackle the drudgery that comes with a job.
In time, I sigh, as I struggle to put together the rhythm and lines I once weaved with ease. It will come, I tell myself, to shoo away little mental vampires that cackled in glee at the scrawls on my paper. Emily Dickinson’s poems were valued more after her death.
I remember Johnathan Larson’s “tick…tick…boom!”. Over time, it has spoken more to me than “Rent”. My sister criticized “Rent” for embellishing a life of deliberate poverty, of featuring spoiled “hipsters” who thought honest living was much too mainstream. tick…tick…boom! was more honest, I believed, having had the chance to see both shows. In tick…tick…boom! lay the moral lesson of making the most out of our talent, and the choices we make around them. Even if it takes us away from them.
“the tick tick booms are softer now. I can barely hear them, and I think if I play loud enough I can drown them out completely.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHBMxhxMYIg]
You can read more about it at the show’s wikipedia page.