As Raw As It Gets

About nine months ago I started doing stand-up comedy with my friends at Happy Yess. We started out small and token, but this year we’ve launched a re-vamped and rejuvenated version with themes and headliners and organisation and everything. I’m really excited to be a part of it, and putting some time and energy into developing my own stand-up stuff. Having tried a few different ways to stand up on a stage and make an exhibition of myself, I can confidently assert that comedy is both the most challenging and the most instantly gratifying of all the theatrical arts.

On Friday night I took it to the next level. I decided to enter the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s Raw Comedy, which is a national amateur comedy competition. It was a significant step up for me, having only tried out comedy in the comfortable shelter of Happy Yess, and it was certainly a much larger audience than I’ve ever tried to be funny for before. Apparently there were about 400 people in the audience. Not that I could see any of them for the bright stage lights.

A few of my fellow contestants were trying out comedy for the very first time. And I was surprised at how many of the others had never been backstage at the Darwin Entertainment Centre before. These days I’m as at home backstage as I am in a bar or a church, but I suppose not everyone has had the same theatrical background as me, or lived in Darwin for as long.

There were about a dozen contestants, all of whom did a pretty good job, and the crowd were, for the most part, really good and generous with the laughs. There were only a couple of instances of heckling, and they were reserved for those who could obviously handle it. And at one point a little girl jumped on stage and asked if we had any fish for her.

Phil had assured me that the best strategy with Raw Comedy was to do a musical number, so that was what I did. I’ve been writing little musical numbers for Happy Yes for a few months now, so it wasn’t a big stretch to write full song for the competitions. And it went over pretty well.

I really hadn’t been too fazed by the whole process, but when the winner was announced and it wasn’t me, I discovered I had wanted it a little bit more than I realised. I was a little disappointed, but no so much as to harbour any ill feelings.

In the wash-up, Phil asked me why I had done a song. “I’ve spoken to the organisers,” he said (apparently this is still the sort of thing that just happens to him), “and they told me they’re really not looking for musical numbers these days.” I don’t know… one of these days.

I think I’ll probably give it another go next year. We’ll see what happens.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Typecast

A week or so ago I went along to the university theatre to try out for this year's Opera NT production. They’re putting on Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida (Or Castle Adamant) which has the demographic advantage of having an unusually large number of female roles for a G&S (I say advantage due to the ratio of women to men in our company) and the thematic advantage of taking a cast full of women and using it to poke a large and comically painted stick at radical feminism.

“But what of the males?” I hear no-one ask.

There are enough roles to go around, but rather unusually only two roles for tenors. After last year’s effort, which basically involved me poncing around with an outrageous accent and waving a sword around every once in a while (and hell, sometimes I just do that on weekends), I figured I was going to have to lift my game. It’s just one of those little challenges that present themselves when you join an opera company but can’t actually sing.

Not that I was going to let that stop me. I fronted up to the auditions with my most trusted and experienced accompanist (ie. Phil, who had nicked Pastor Holly’s guitar for the afternoon) and filled the auditorium (well, maybe half of it?) with the dulcet tones of Joss Whedon’s “Everyone’s a Hero”. It went alright, and I totally nailed the big finish, but I’m not sure the casters appreciated it when I called them a bunch of scary, alcoholic bums. It was totally in character, okay?

Much to everyone’s surprise, I got a call-back for the following evening. So now the big question was which part could I possibly be in the running for? There were only two tenor roles going after all.

Would I be Prince Hilarion, the dashing, heroic and completely mental leading man, storming the castle walls and winning the heart of the wilful, demure and completely mental Princess Ida?

Or would I play Cyril, Hilarion’s true, valiant and completely mental companion through thick and thin, who for reasons which seem to have more to do with harmony structure than with plot development, accompanies his master on his quest to Caste Adamant?

If you know me and my theatrical persona well enough, then by now you’ll have guessed which one I came away with.

Neither.

I’ve been cast as King Hildebrand, who is father to Hilarion (I’m only twenty-mumble plus one…), king of all the good guys (that doesn’t sound right either), completely mental (well…) and, most notably, a baritone (?). Mind you, it’s a pretty cool role. At first I assumed it would be mainly speaking with a few ensemble bits like last time, but it turns out I’ve got a few solos to put together before October which will be … interesting. Fortunately none of them drop below what I can sing, so I can get away with it. Best of all, the choirmaster has offered to give me some help improving my singing voice between now and then, which will be awesome and will hopefully go a long way towards making me look a little less silly on the night. In the meantime I’ll just work on memorising lines and figuring out how to approach opera in my own way.

In my own not-that-operatic way.

Garry with 2 Rs

A Bit of a Tease

I’m edging closer to crossing another goal off my 2011 checklist. So far this year I’ve already appeared in two improvised comedy performances with some local comics. They don’t really take a lot of preparation, and by definition require no rehearsal, so I’m lumping them and the two or three more we plan to run later this year together and calling them one theatrical performance.

Next weekend I have my audition for this year’s Operatunity production. Last year’s audition and eventual production was such a crazy experience I decided to try it all again this year. I’m still working on something suitably classy, impressive and appropriate for the try-outs. I’ll keep you posted.

More interestingly, I’m getting involved with a local performing arts group called Corrugated Iron, who put on a show-case review of local talent every year called Tease. Phil suggested I submit a short one-act play I’ve been writing for a while. I went along with it to humour him, and surprisingly enough they’ve decided to go with it. All of a sudden I’m a playwright. Craziness.

Initially the idea was to just submit the play and possibly assist with the direction. But after agreeing to present the play, Corrugated Iron went and cast two of my good friends Phil and Danielle in the two main roles. That just left them with the problem of who to cast in the third role. I couldn’t help but my hand up for it, so now I’m finding out what it’s like to be writer, director and actor all in the same show. Traditionally, writers are supposed to get affronted by directors’ arrogance, directors are supposed to be disappointed with actors’ ineptitude and actors are supposed to lament the writer’s lack of vision. I don’t know if I can manage all that, but I’ll try not to beat myself up about it.

Once more, with feeling!

Garry with 2 Rs

The New Game

Way back some time in the last century when I was in high school I was part of an unusually close group of friends. There were five of us in total. It’s not really clear what bought us all together as we didn’t have anything observable in common except for irreverent senses of humour, an incination towards the theatrical and a tendency to call “bullshit” when we saw it (usually emanating from one of the other four) which tended to alienate us a little from other students, not to mention the teachers.

Chris, Phil, Jess, Garry (well…) and Dan.

Actually, the other thing we had in common was that all of us had parents associated with the staff or governance of the school we all went to. It was an extremely poorly kept secret that said parents had a number of informal betting pools running.

1) Which of the five would be the first to get married?

2) Which of the four guys would end up marrying Jess?

3) Which of the five of us would turn out to be gay?

Our school being of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion, obviously there was no actual gambling involved, especially on that last one.

Shortest odds for first married were almost certainly on Daniel, who was the oldest of the gang and had been voted the southern hemisphere’s most eligible bachelor (his parents had objected to the use of the term ‘sexiest man alive’) three years straight, albeit by a panel that consisted of the other four of us. Consensus on which one of us was going to marry Jess depended on whose mother you were talking to at the time.

In the end Chris was the first to go, in what was described in hushed tones as something of an upset. However, he had to go all the way to New Zealand to do it, which was agreed by most to be cheating. Jess went next and threw a spanner in everyone’s mother’s works by not marrying any of us (actually, Jess’ mother was probably quite relieved). At least she had the common decency to marry a local. Just a year later it was Phil’s turn.

And then there were two.

Ever since Phil’s wedding back in 2006, Dan and I have been engaged (huh?) in a gentlemen’s wager. I say gentlemen’s wager, but I really just mean friendly competition, as there were no stakes riding on it, and I’m not a gentleman. Basically, we decided to see which of us could go the longest without getting married.

If that seems like a reasonably pointless (not to mention backwards) competition, that’s just because… it is. But when you think about it, it makes much more sense than trying to see who can get married first. For one, it provides an extra layer of disincentive to do something stupid too soon if you get romantically entangled (“Maybe we should take this to the next level… nah, I wouldn’t want to lose a bet to Dan”) and also it has the added benefit that if you lose, at least you’re getting married, so that’s some sort of consolation. As endurance sports go, doing it this way has also made it much more competitive, as remaining single has historically been something both Dan and I have been pretty good at. It’s been six long years, and neither combatant has shown any sign of flagging.

That is, until now.

Yes that’s right, I have an announcement to make, the repercussions of which could shake the very firmament, but probably won’t. It has come out of nowhere and taken more than a few people by surprise, especially me, but… I, Garry with 2 Rs, am now officially…

The winner!

Indeed. Dan announced his engagement last weekend, and I am now The Last Man Standing. It has been suggested that perhaps I shouldn’t be as happy about this as I so obviously am. However, these suggestions have, without exception, come from people who gave up and got married years ago and are just jealous. As Josh Lyman so eloquently put it:

“I drink from the keg of glory. Bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land”

Or as Horatio Nelson said:

“First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can.”

And as Sachin Tendulkar put it:

“You can’t hold a ceramic tiger with a pair of size nine mittens made out of apricot jam”.

…

The point is that, the wager now being won, I can stop playing. All this time people have assumed I am single because I’m a cynical cranky debt-ridden misogynistic bastard (or possibly that I turned out to be the gay one. I don’t know what the odds were on that and I don’t think I want to), when all the time I was just trying to win a bet. And now I have.

So it’s time for a new game. I was going to call this new game “Travel Monopoly Junior” but apparently that’s already taken, so I’ll leave the title open as a work in progress. Everyone else around me having been disqualified on grounds of matrimony, the new game is a variation of solitaire and begins when the person left of the dealer rolls a seven. Winner is the first person not to die alone. Spades are trumps, it’s tippy-go and only one person gets to be the top hat.

Make of that… nope. Just forget it.

Garry with 2 Rs

New Year's Morphological Nightmares

My mate Phil was rostered on to preach at church last Sunday. He was bouncing some sermon ideas off me, and told me that since it was a service for the second of January, he was thinking of taking a New Year’s resolution theme. He was very excited about his idea of changing it to “New Year’s Revolution”. Thankfully he had come up with some better ideas by Sunday morning.

I, on the other hand, have been musing on the quirk of the English language that makes ‘revolution’ the noun of both ‘revolt’ and ‘revolve’. I like the idea that a complete overhaul of the system, and just another spin of the endlessly turning wheel are both represented by the same word. It’s like taking the adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” and expressing it in just one noun. Brilliant.

I thought it seemed especially appropriate at this time of year, when so many of them are being made. We all have these great ideas about what we can achieve in the new year, but in the end it’s just another tick around an endless cycle. And then I realised I was thinking about the wrong word. Damn it Phil, that would have made for an awesome, and potentially even moving, sermon. I mean blogpost.

There again, if the verb of ‘resolution’ is ‘resolve’ (and it is), then if we follow the revolution paradigm (there’s a science fiction film title in there somewhere) then ‘resolution’ should also be the noun of ‘resolt’. Tragically that’s not actually a word.

But it’s not that far from ‘result’. I’m sure if I tried hard enough I could come up with something deep about the journey from “Resolve” to “Result” being only a morphological derivation away. Unfortunately, “Result” is already a noun, so the methodology falls away a bit. I mean, it can be a verb if it wants to be (Garry’s pointless and boring morphology tutorial resulted in people throwing potatoes at him and ceasing to read his blog), but even so I think the link is a little thin.

The point is…

What about ‘re-salt’? As in, “after the application of the first pinch of salt, the broth was still too bland, so I re-salted it, in a frivolous act of re-salution.”

Oh never mind. Last year’s running totals have been removed and replaced with a set of New Year’s … goals. Some are more achievable than others, but we’ll see how many of them I can check off by this time next year.

Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

Oh good grief. Does anyone know if ‘resolution’ as in “My monitor’s resolution is set to 1689x1050 pixels” has a verb form? This is going to keep me up all night.

Australia's Too Cool To Be There

On Sundays my post-church conversations (at least those that don't come after a Sunday when I'm on bass) generally go something like this:

Gw2Rs: So what are you up to for the rest of the day?
Whoever: I dunno. A few guys were talking about getting together for lunch somewhere.
Gw2Rs: Sounds good. Who? Where? When?
Whoever. I dunno. Ask Hannah.

Last weekend, sandwiched between the Brisbane trip and a week in Ramingining (East Arnhem Land) with work, my post-church conversation took a slightly different turn.

Gw2Rs: So what are you up to for the rest of the day?
Phil: A TV producer rang me and asked me to audition for Australia's Got Talent. Apparently they're short on applicants and need comedians.
Gw2Rs: ... ?
Phil: Want to come along?
Gw2Rs: Um...
Phil: Let me put it another way. Can you give me a lift?

For any normal Australian, the fact that producers of prime time national television shows are ringing up and asking for favours would be the stuff of several blog posts in its own right, but for Phil it's just one of those things that happen in the universe he inhabits. If John Lennon came back from the dead and announced that the Beatles were organising a comeback tour, the first thing he would do would be to call Phil and ask him to open the show for him. Phil would then put him on hold to check his calendar.

And so it was that I packed up Samantha after worship and drove Phil into town for the auditions. And being a compulsive attention junkie with an electric keyboard in my car, I figured 'what the hell?' and grabbed a sign up sheet of my own.

Much like the producers, I figured there wouldn't be many people there. I hadn't heard anything about it until that morning, so I assumed it would be a low key affair.

Just like the producers, I couldn't have been more wrong. The foyer of the Plaza Hotel was packed out by every wannabe singer, dancer, juggler, comic, rapper and contemporary poet the city could generate. I hadn't heard about it because I don't watch TV, but apparently Channel Seven had been advertising it for weeks.

It should go without saying (but it probably doesn't, so I'll say it to be on the safe side) that Phil and I were both way too cool to be there. But since Phil had been called up specially and since we'd come all the way into town and since sitting around doing nothing was all I had planned for the afternoon anyway, we decided to go through with it.

We were then treated to a parade of young hopefuls walking into the audition room as their numbers were called, each one trying nervously to pretend that they were too cool to be there. Obviously the exceptions were Phil and I, who were neither nervous nor pretending. We just really are that awesome.

Highlights:

1) At one point I saw in the queue a line of three highschool girls dressed identically carrying identical accoustic guitars. I assumed they were a group act, but they all went in identically one at a time and sang identical accoustic renderings of 'Torn' by Natalie Imbruglia. I guess they were all trying to stand out with their distinctive look.

2) Just after Phil went on, a troupe of a dozen septegenarian dancing girls in bikini body t-shirts arrived and performed an upbeat square jive. I don't know if they had talent or not, but they were bizarre enough to get their photos in the newspaper.

3) The cake was taken by an elderly cowboy who wandered into the foyer of the Plaza with his horse and began asking young hopefuls, including Phil, if they would like to perform their acts while standing on a horse. Phil politely declined. The Channel Seven crew arrived and offered the man an audtion form, which he then refused to accept. That done, he took his horse and went home. It turns out he really was too cool to be there.

As for my audition, I'm not really sure I'm the reality television type.

Gw2Rs: My name is Garry with 2 Rs and I'm a singer, song writer and stunt linguist.
Judge: A star what?
Gw2Rs: No.

Still, I sang my song, thanked the judges for their time and got the hell out of there. I doubt I made the required impression, but I've been fooled before. So either I'll rule a line under my blossoming reality television career for now, or you'll be reading the mother of all blog posts in February/March next year. I'm not holding my breath for that as it's at least two months away and my current breath holding record is 34 seconds (I have shallow lungs).

And I'm too cool to be there anyway.



Garry with 2 Rs

P.S. I'll be in Adelaide until after Christmas. It's a well established fact that nothing blog-worthy ever happens in Adelaide, so have a great Christmas and I'll see you in 2011! Peace.

Milestones

Well, it’s been a while since I posted a piece on how awesome I am.

Okay, it’s been about three weeks. But this time I’ve actually got something worth bragging about. Sort of. This is my one hundredth Far From Home/Cum Tacent Clament post.

“There’s a roar from the crowd and a grateful acknowledgement from the members. 100 posts in three and a half years, on two different websites and on four different continents. A superb innings in difficult conditions. Your thoughts, Richie?”

“Yes it’s been a marvellous display this. There’s been some stiff opposition at times from the combined pace attacks of England and Adelaide as well as an entertaining battle with the off-spin of AAMI insurance company. But it’s definitely Garry’s aggressive and off-beat approach that has won the day, thanks in no small part to some excellent support at the other end.”

“Yes, that’s right. I thought the partnership before lunch with Oxfam Girl was particularly good. It wasn’t the most elegant or conventional display we’ve seen, but there was no denying the sheer brute power of Oxfam Girl. When she hits them, they stay hit.”

“Yes, but all the attention was at the other end, of course, where Garry with 2 Rs has treated us all to an impressive demonstration of loquacious stroke play. He was seeing the ball as clear as a bell and large as a beach ball, and settled in early to play his natural game.”

“Yes. Now, if you’ll have a look on this replay here, you can see that Hillsong is clearly offside as she launches a cut-out pass to Samantha who backhands it down the line towards deep forward pocket for a birdie. That’s a home run in any pool in Australia.”

“The really interesting thing about it is… wait. … what?”

“Sorry, I think something’s gone wrong with the metaphor generator”.

“Ah crap. Cut to classic catches while the tech guys sort it out.”

…

Meanwhile I’ve passed a couple of other milestones lately. I’ve reached ten runs for the season for Palmerston (unusual), brought my net debt to the bank to under $30,000 (unimpressive) and turned twenty seven (unprecedented). Also, the cool change I mentioned a couple of posts ago is looming like the edge of a monsoonal trough. But more on that anon.

I was hoping to be able to coincide my one hundredth post with my one thousandth hit since installing my hit counter, but I actually passed that back in April sometime, and I’m coming up on twelve hundred now. And I think only about half of them are my mother. The rest are probably me and Kirribilli Kim, but it’s still an achievement, right?

More importantly, the time has come to stop borrowing sign-off lines from other people. This has less to do with passing a milestone than it does with the fact that I’ve pretty much run out of ideas, but that’s beside the point.

Rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream are going well, and we’re into production week now. When I say well, I mean that the director and stage manager are starting to get a little desperate, but so far it hasn’t exceeded my normal day-to-day operational level of desperation, so I feel like I’m keeping up okay. I might even be slightly ahead. Either way, since the show opens this weekend it could be a while before I have enough spare time to post again, but you can expect a full update on all the goings on backstage, including all the juicy gossip about how many cast members managed not to fall hopelessly in love with Phil Denson.

Once the play is done and dusted, I’ve got a month full of family visits coming up. This means getting my house looking presentable and making sure my car is serviced and spotless before my father gets his hands on it. And somewhere in there, we’re still planning on shooting a short film. So yes, life continues at its normal operational level of desperation.

And just a brief reminder: this post will not feature a carefully selected borrowed sign-off line.

…




Garry with 2 Rs

Things that amused me this week

Things that amuse me this week:

Bangladesh beat India.

My CELTA teacher looked at me like I was an idiot when I said the sentence "I used to drink champagne every day" has an infinitive in it. This probably won't amuse anyone else but me (except maybe Beth) but I've included it for completeness' sake.

Ireland beat Pakistan. Furthermore they did it on St. Patrick's day.

Despite losing two days to a serious fever, I still managed to complete two CELTA assignments this weekend.

My family described Phil Denson as the easiest house guest they'd ever had. I'm not sure why this amuses me, but it does.

Fat people on bicycles.

Until next time then, when I might have something more substantial or meaningful to say (this is highly unlikely).

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs