Seasonal Saturday - What a Day!

This has been a pretty crazy week. The first week of any quarter invariably has been rather manic, but Winter Quarter Week 01 is also when a substantial number of UCLA productions hold their auditions. All at the same time. I saw a huge number of people, with great spirit and enormous talent, and it was rather brutal having to make the cull down to only seven people for Pains of Youth. (Those seven are a remarkable lot, and I'm very excited to get to work with them.) Erendira, Rent and all of the undergraduate one-acts are also fully cast at this point, and will doubtless be great shows, all.

This week - as well as my own New Year New Blog New Everything stuff, I also had a full load of reading for one class, another that began very first thing Monday morning, and then auditions every evening. On top, we have also started rehearsals for the opera I'm working on in the Music Dept, so there was time to be spent down there too. AND the Entertainment Design class I'm TA-ing kicked in again on Thursday....!

So you'd imagine that after all that I'd take Saturday off and chillax a bit, eh? Not so! I was in Westwood first thing (guess where I got my coffee...) and then up to UCLA at the crack of noon for the first of a series of classes with the enormously charming Alfred Molina, who is teaching Shakespeare. He is splendid. Thereafter it was back to Schoenberg Hall for a full sing-through of Dialogues des Carmelites. Despite how many times I've heard the music on cd, I wasn't really prepared for the incredible punch that it packs. I look forward to it being a very deep, very rich experience. After THAT it was back to the Theatre Dept, for the Thesis performance of the MFA actors in my year. It seems like only yesterday we were all performing our autodramas for each other, and already they have presented their final iterations of that process. Time flies!

After the performance I went to my new favourite Indian restaurant, Nizam, at Westwood & Pico, and tried Mulligatawny soup for the first time. It's delicious! Spicy Sunday began early ;)