The last two days in Romania.

On Tuesday, I took a break from my work to walk through the cemetery here in Cluj.  It sits a few blocks south of the central square in town, on a hillside. It was beautiful, and sad, naturally.  Most of the gravestones had multiple names engraved, indicating either that multiple people were buried there (stacked, like in the Jewish Cemetery in Prague) or just in memoriam. I snapped a lot of photos of gravestones, in search of the oldest ones.

Here's a site from a relatively recent burial. Note the mounds of pine branches. It smelled like Christmas. I imagine it's a holdover from the days when the stench could be overwhelming.

This plot had five spaces for caskets, but it appears that the deceased are buried two deep. The little engraving in the middle of the edifice indicates which people are buried in which positions.

Dripping black paint? Creepy.

A Greco-Roman temple entrance on an Egyptian pyramid. Just covering your bases, I guess.

This is one of the oldest stones I found.

Later that day, after the cemetery and a bowl of warming soup, E and I headed down to the theatre to see our show open. The performance was good, but not great. Everyone in the company was a little thrown by the audience on Saturday night, and I think that there was more than a little bit of milking going on.  But still, it was a good show, and afterwards, E and I joined some of the company members for some pizza and beer to celebrate. One of the clowns, Catalin, joined us for the dinner. He and I went running together last week along the river in Cluj, and he suggested that we run, or if the rain let up, we go for a bike ride. A bike ride sounded more interesting to me. Cata said we'd ride about 20km (12.5 miles).  Sounded good to me.

When we met this morning, the rain was gone, the roads were dry, and it was a beautiful day. We hopped on some mountain bikes and rode into the Transylvanian mountains. It didn't take us long to get out of town, and once we did, Cata ducked us onto a mountain trail. The trail was not particularly fun - very muddy, and a little treacherous for me (a novice mountain biker). We didn't last long on the trail before he popped us out onto a road where we could ride without mud. We trekked up the mountain road, on pavement, gravel, dirt paths, etc. Up some fairly steep inclines. We rode through deep forest with sun-dappled trails. The last part of the incline was so steep that I fogged up my sunglasses by exhaling. We popped out onto a grassy hillside area, about 1200 meters above town, south, looking over some beautiful mountains. The air was cool and crisp. 

Cata took us around, past the observatory used by the local universities, up some more hillsides, before we got back on a road and began our descent. And what a descent! I was in the highest gear, pumping madly, and still wasn't adding much energy to what gravity was providing. We sped down the road, around corners, in and out of shadow and light. It took us a fraction of the time to get down as it did to get up. 

Here's the map of our return journey. The ride up was a shorter distance (we cut the corner where the distance/time marker is), but I think it was about 30 miles all told. My legs are a wreck.

Now, it's Wednesday evening, and E and I are about to head out for our last meal in Romania. Tomorrow, we get up super-early to catch our flight. I can't wait to go home!

"These are the nuts of my Communist youth"

Yesterday, on our day off, E and I took a drive with A, our excellent guitarist, into the mountains of Transylvania.  Cluj is situated in the Transylvanian foothills, so it's not much of a drive to get out of town and into the countryside. A has been super generous with her time, and she offered to take us on a drive. We started in Cluj and headed west, towards a hillside town called Belis.

We made a few wrong turns, but soon we were on the right path, a narrow two-lane road into the mountains. We passed by a few lakes that were connected by a series of dams.  The mountains are old and smooth, like the Appalachians.  The houses were either Germanic or Communistically brutal. The weather was beautiful.

We tried to find a spot where E could go swimming, but most of the roads were high on the mountainside and the paths down to the shore were all private property. We found one public sunbathing area, and E was tempted to go in, but while debating the cold water, the tunnel on the other shore started spitting out water, creating an eddy in the cove that none of us wanted to deal with.

We drove further up into the mountains, through a mountain town called Marisel that had lots of livestock and hay bales.

When we finally got to Belis, it was a bit of a disappointment. The town was virtually nothing, and we didn't even stop.  The journey was much more interesting, so we stayed in the car. The sun hitting the mist in the woods was beautiful, and the mountains in the distance looked like the Blue Ridge Mountains back home.  But with lakes.

Once we passed through Belis we continued north, heading back to the main road.

Between Belis and Huedin, A pulled us over to show us how to pick green nuts off of a roadside tree. She said that she did this all the time when she was younger. We stopped to pick some nuts, and then in Huedin, we stopped for a coffee. While we were at the coffeeshop, A went across the street to get a knife to cut the nuts open with. She came back with other things to eat, and we had a good time munching on nuts, Romania chocolates, and a Communist-era version of Fruit Loops, which seem to be made out of barley and food dye. As we ate, A told us about her childhood in Communist Romania. 

We got back into Cluj as the sun was setting, and we settled in for the night.  Just one week until the show opens!

And, as a bonus, here's a photo of Cicicu, one of the actors in the company, wearing a terrific terrible English shirt.  It just reminded me how much I'm looking forward to getting back to S and Los Ageles.

A day off and a wedding

Today was our first day off since we've been here in Cluj. The week ended on a solid note, though it definitely had its ups and downs. We were briefly replaced with the need to replace our musician, which sent ripples of discomfort throughout all of us, but we were able to get that sorted out. Then, I had to go back to the drawing board, adding some music to some of the songs I had written. Plus, we had a number of absences in the cast this week, making it a little difficult to rehearse cohesively.

Thankfully, things seem to be going well. The show is in decent shape, and we're looking towards a much needed couple of days off.

Today, E and I were invited to the wedding of two of the members of the company. Both Dragos and Romina were in 'War of the Clowns' two years ago. Dragos is in the current show, but Romina couldn't make the commitment (she's got a baby on the way). Dragos was out for much of the week getting prepared for the wedding, and E and I were both delighted to join them on their special day.

The wedding wasn't actually a wedding. The civil ceremony happened three days ago, so today was just the reception & celebration. We traveled up a hill outside of Cluj to the Grand Hotel Italia, which was built a few years ago by an Italian developer with, according to the folks I talked to, mob ties. It's a huge building, with white marble and big open spaces. There were six different weddings happening at the same time while we were there.  A fancy joint.

The reception was lovely. As people wandered in, they were escorted to their tables (our tables were assigned, but our seats were not) and given a plate of appetizers (meats, cheeses, eggplant, caviar, bread).  E and I sat in the middle of a four table section that seemed to have been given over to the theatre.  As we ate and visited with some of the company members, the room filled, and the wedding party arrived.  D & R entered, raised a glass for the first toast, and then smashed the glasses in a box of rocks.  Then, we all sat down for the first course: ham-wrapped fish with rice. Yummy!

Soon, the music started. The music was a combination of American standards ('Fly Me To The Moon'), opera arias (some of the guests are company members with the opera company in town), and a handful of Romanian folk songs. I was hoping for more national flare, but as one of the other guests explained to me, filling the playlist with Romanian folk tunes is a great way to drive all of the young people away.

After the fish course, there was some dancing, mostly to American pop & rock.  E and I both had to escape the very loud room (89 dB, A-weighted) to the outside for a bit of quiet. Then, the main course: turkey and scalloped potatoes.  Then, more dancing:

As the night went on, the party kept going. Children were running around the dance floor and the lobby, a small fireworks display went off on the front steps (sponsored by one of the other wedding parties), I did a little dancing, and E spent some time talking to the son of one of the company members who wants to be a director when he grows up.

At around 9pm, we decided to call it quits.  The party, we were told, would go on another four hours or so, but we were both pooped, and I had work to do. We hopped a cab back into town.

Congratulations Romina & Dragos! Many wonderful years are ahead of you!

Opening

It's the day of the show, y'all! Time to wrap up here and get ready for the next adventure. I took a final run along the river, washed some laundry, and started packing. S and I joined Eli, Mihai (the artistic director), and Anca (Mihai's wife) for lunch at a new local restaurant called Adi's Steakhouse. 

Adi's Steakhouse has an interesting business model: they rely entirely on referrals from previous customers. They don't advertise and don't even call themselves a restaurant. Rather, the only way you can get a table for he first time is through a referral. It's a little weird to me, but if they can generate buzz through a little bit of exclusivity, more power to them. 

The meal was excellent. We started with bread and two pate-like spreads: tuna and artichoke. Then, an awesome green salad (the tomatoes here in Romania are perhaps the best common tomatoes I've ever had, btw). For my main course, I had the ribeye. I'm not usually a steak guy, but the head waiter (Adi himself?) talked it up extensively. It was exceptional beef from Argentina. Finally, for dessert, we sampled a few dishes, including a Hungarian rum cake that I'll dream about tonight. 

Back at the room, we took a small snooze. Well, I did anyway. S has had a very rough time sleeping since she arrived.  The beds are terribly hard and she can't get more than 30 minutes of sleep without waking in pain. Hopefully Croatia will be better. 

I got to the theatre about two hours before curtain to help the clowns warm up. They were in great spirits and used the warm-up to tease each other and limber up. There was an exchange of gifts and some preshow celebration. Then, the show...

...which was awesome. The clowns were excited, which rubbed off on the audience. The audience was excited, which rubbed off on the clowns. The show was terrific! Not flawless, but exceptional, with everyone using each others' energy to create the piece. The curtain call was easily 10 minutes, and Eli and I were pulled up on stage to participate. After the show, there was a party in the upper lobby, where I got to talk to most of the cast and say goodbye to them.  S took off for home early, but I stayed a little later.  Truly a great night. Congratulations and thank you to everyone at the National Theatre of Romania - the cast, the administration, the crew, the audience... you made this experience memorable and exceptional!  Thank you so much!

And so ends a very busy spring for me.  Since mid-March, I've opened four big shows in four different cities on two different continents. I've had two dance pieces premiere at a national conference. All this while teaching full-time at UCI. I've earned a break.

Tomorrow, we fly to Croatia to meet Chris & Elysia!  Hooray!

Work notes and a short day

A short day at work today. We only had the morning to rehearse, so E called in the company to work a few notes.  On the docket was a restaging of the curtain call, a refresher on finding your light with the company, and a couple of clean-up moments regarding audience interaction.  

Before rehearsal, I snuck down to the trap room and shot this photograph. The machinery to raise and lower the traps are all original, dating from almost 100 years ago.  This shot is from upstage left, looking towards downstage right.

After rehearsal, we met up with S and grabbed lunch. Then, en route to our afternoon wanders, we ran into Matei and Ramona, who were hanging out and causing trouble. Ramona went home, but Matei spent the afternoon with us at the awesome Ethnographic Museum. That museum had lots of artifacts from Transylvanian life, including tools, clothing, musical instruments, cooking equipment. It was really something special!

After the museum, S peeled off to relax, and Matei, E, and I went to check out some more of the city (and have a beer, natch). We stopped off at a street faire so Matei could buy a gift for his girlfriend and Eli could buy some stuff for his wife and daughter. Then, home for a siesta. 

S never got up from the siesta. She's all jetlaggy, so E and I went for dinner and the ice cream festival before heading into our rooms for the night. S was still napping.  I hope she's not up all night...

Tomorrow, we open!

Preview!

S and I got up this morning and wandered town a little bit.  I wanted to orient her, so we walked to the landmarks she needs to navigate and up a hill to see the city laid out below. 

We also found a nice little piece of racisim:

Then, coffee and a snack, and on to rehearsal.

At rehearsal, we ran the show and took care of a few notes. Eli and I met S for a quick dinner (pizza, salad), and then I headed back to the theatre for our first (and only) preview.

The preview went well!  We learned a lot about the show, including the fact that it’s really not appropriate for kids under seven.  After, E, S, and I went for a cocktail and an ice cream treat.

Home, for notes.  Tomorrow’s another short day of rehearsal!

Short Day

Today was a short rehearsal day. We ran the show in the morning and cancelled the afternoon session. There's a balance Eli's trying to achieve between drilling for precision and keeping enthusiasm up. As you might imagine, those two ideas are inversely correlated. And, since the level of precision we're used to isn't really happening with this cast (they are terrific in many ways, but performance consistency isn't one of those ways), there are diminishing returns when it comes to drilling scenes.

Other than that, the show looks great!  A bunch of us went out for lunch after rehearsal. After lunch, I swung by the grocery store to pick up some food for Sarah - she arrives tonight!

--later--

She's here!  That is all.

Breakthrough!

We’re finally back in tech today.  We started the day with a run, which went mostly well.  Clowns were filled with new ideas, we had a bit of a personnel shift, and we stopped and started a bit.  Still, not bad. After the run, I made some changes (some new content, lots of placement/cueing changes), and Eli and had lunch. During the meal break, I made my way into a small cathedral across the square for some beautiful photographs.

The Cathedral

Inside the Cathedral

The National Theatre

After the meal break, while doing notes, I had a discovery with Shoby, the guy running sound for the show. We’ve been having a bit of a language block and have been calling a translator for many of the more detailed notes. What we discovered was that while my Romanian is virtually nonexistent and his English is only slightly better, we both speak passable Spanish.  Suddenly, we were able to communicate much more clearly.  Hurray! In the evening, we shot some posed photos before starting a run.  

Eli gives notes to the cast.

The run tonight was the first time I got to hear the show from the house (I’d spent tech and the first run in the booth with Shoby, making sure his notes on cue placement were accurate).  Shoby his all of his cues in the run, but I have a bunch of level notes and a handful of rebuilds to do… … but instead of notes right away, we went for dinner and a few beers with Cristi (the scenic/costume designer) and Jan (Jann?), another composer who works at the theatre. Terrific conversation about theatre v. cinema, the value of rhythm, Muppets, and Buchla synthesizers. Now, back to work for me.

Salt Mines

Today is a day off, and Eli and I went with Cristi to the salt mines outside of town. The mines were in use about 100 years ago, but when it became too expensive to harvest, they shut down. Shortly after (during the communist era, I guess), they reopened as a tourist attraction. A few years ago, they underwent renovation and are now quite amazing.  When you drive up to the mines through the Romanian countryside, you are alarmed to see what looks like a UFO sticking out of the hillside:

It costs about $5 to go inside, and once you're in, you descend and descend, down a ramp, a long hallway, a flight of stairs, past a shiny rock, into an antechamber, past a small alter with icons and blue light, and down some more steps. Then, you seem to be in a small room, but it sounds much larger. If you walk to one edge, you can look straight down and see this:

That is an island in the middle of a lake, about 20 stories below the surface of the earth. Those yellow things? Two-seat rowboats.

You can take the stairs or an elevator down to the bottom levels, where there are places to walk and things to do like mini-golf, billiards, and even a ferris wheel!

The mine was beautiful.  A stunning feat of human engineering and a beautifully well-designed (and well-lit) attraction. My only complaint was that there was very little of educational value in the mine. No diagrams, no text, no stories. I wanted to know more about how it was built, and why, etc.

After the mines, Cristi took Eli and I to a great Viennese restaurant, where I ate sausage and drank Stiegl beer. Eli had a salad. Like a good boy.

It occurs to me that I haven't posted many photos of people on this trip so far. So, here is some proof that we all went down into the mines:

Baia Mare

We woke up on Saturday morning and joined the company on a tour bus to Baia Mare, a town in the Maramures region of Romania that used to be a bustling mining city. Since then, according to Miron (who in the company but from Baia Mare), the mines and processing plants have shut down, causing a massive brain drain among the youth.

The theatre company had been invited to perform at a local theatre festival, and Eli and got to tag along.  The bus ride took three and a half hours, much of which was along narrow winding mountain roads at a high rate of speed (slower, thankfully, than Amalfi drivers). When we got into the city, E and I took a wander. We found a church being built:

E bought an over-the-counter inhaler for his asthma, and we found a farmers market for lunch. We gorged on schwarma and placinta, which is a sort of stuffed white pizza. Mine had sheeps cheese and dill. E had plain. 

While we ate, we wandered the stalls, which overflowed with tomatoes, citrus, garlic, cherries, shallots, and squashes that I had never seen before.

We took a siesta and reconvened for the show. ISLANDS is a folk guitar/hip-hop musical based on the writings of Gellu Naum, a well-known Romanian writer.  I may not have understood the language, but I thought the piece was terrific. Great performance, great music...  Just terrific!

After the show, we joined the company for a beer and some dinner, then some more drinks. 

Towards the end of the night, Catalin decided to buy me some tuica. I drank the first glass, and then a second glass, four times larger, showed up. I gasped, and Catalin assured me that I had to drink the whole thing before I left the table. Silvius helped, and by the time I got up from the table, I was mercifully able to still say my alphabet backwards (thanks to Anca for the challenge).

This morning, we woke, grabbed some breakfast, listened to a Gypsy play the accordion, and got back on the road to Cluj. It's election day today in Romania, and the police were out in force to make sure that there was no voter fraud. Shortly after we left Baia Mare, we got pulled over by the cops, who checked to make sure that we were not engaging in any illegal voter bussing:

Everyone scattered when we got back, and Eli and I took a siesta (checking email, grading, etc.). In the afternoon, we made it down the street to the art museum, which had a beautiful collection of Cuban photographs and an extensive collection of Transylvanian art. Some of it was truly lovely. I particularly liked the contemporary pieces.

In the evening, Eli and I went to one of the local universities to watch their graduating actor class perform a physical theatre workshop (some of the professors are members of the company I'm working with). It was about two hours long and featured clowning, mime, some dance, and a lot of straight ahead physical theatre. It was not all up my alley, but the students were quite strong. They were not afraid of image, metaphor, or physical theatre. Seeing the piece really helped me understand what acting is about in Romania:

After the piece, the professors placed wreaths on each student's head, and the audience cheered for them. We sang 'Gaudeamus Igitur' and watched admiringly as these students who had studied together for so long, received accolades from their professors and cheers from their friends. It was a beautiful close to a long three years of their life, and Eli and I were both grateful that we were invited to take part in it...

...which reminds me that today was graduation day at UCI for the MFA students!  Congratulations to Beth Lake and Jeff Polunas, and to all of the other MFA students!  I'm proud of all of you and look forward to working with you in the 'real' world soon!

Tech!

Today was the first day of tech.  We started out with a bit of bad news.  We had to let one of actors go. C is a terrific actor, but he was having a hard time working as part of an ensemble. After trying to get him to be a team player for a few days, Eli finally had enough, and he removed C from the show.  The rest of the cast was pretty stunned; I gather that no actor had ever been removed from a show before. I was sorry to see him go, but it was the right decision.

Losing C meant that our morning schedule was a bit screwed up.  Eli met with the cast to explain the situation (there were some tears), and then we had to reshoot the poster.  While that was happening, I was working with Soby the house sound guy to set up the computer to play back sound. 

Then we tech!

Sort of.

Not everything was ready for tech today: we had no video, and we were missing some key visual elements of the scenery.  Plus, there was the expected amount of cultural differences regarding how tech rehearsals run.  Eli and I expect a certain sequence of events, but things are, of course, different in Romania.  Here are some observations from our first day of tech:

• The stage manager here is in charge of the technical operation of the deck. Not wrangling actors, and not calling a lot of cues. Most of the cues are taken by the operators themselves. I spent today standing next to Soby, telling him where each cue goes. He took good notes and we used a translator for much of the day, but I’m a little bit nervous about what happens after a two month break between shows or a change in operators. 
• Nothing looks as beautiful as a high-powered fresnel an a low setting. It’s so warm – like hugging a candle. But with less fire.
• I spent the entire first half of the day scribbling notes on paper. I hadn’t written that many notes by hand in tech in ten years!
• For all of the weird lack of punctuality regarding rehearsals and breaks, we started back with tech rehearsal at 5.05pm after a 5pm call.  Guess that’s what happens when you don’t have to wait for half hour.  Also, when we took a 10 at 8pm, the actors were back onstage at 8.10.  They’ve NEVER been that punctual. I don’t know if their motivation was wanting to finish for the night or a little fear over the loss of C.
• We’re cutting cues left and right. Well, not cutting, but consolidating.  It makes me a little nervous, as the consolidation means that we’re making sonic events a particular length of time, which means that the actors can’t ever deviate.  We started the day with about 60 cues in this 75 minute show. Now we’re at 48.
• I would kill for a bilingual & bicultural stage manager.
• The difference between audio connectors that look ALMOST similar but are quite different was never more apparent than this week.

Dinner break was pizza at a bar with some of the cast and crew. We told many inappropriate jokes. I learned a new one about camels.

For all of my fears about our collective lack of preparation, we made great time! At 8pm tonight, with two hours left in our day, we finished teching through the show. Eli and I were astounded. We never expected to finish in one day, and here we were with time to spare. We went back to do a little review work and broke for the day at 8.30pm. There’s still plenty to do, but at least we got through this beast.

Onward and upwards!