Bonding

The actor’s favorite pastime is telling war stories.  Times we were on stage and a fellow actor went up,* or worse, missed an entrance.  Stories of ridiculous ad libs, and silly in-joke style games.
Monday night, over dinner, Jeff Withers related a story of a fellow actor going up. This actor came in with the wrong [...]

The Results of Tablework

This is what I do to a piece of text I’m working on — all of that is basically code for how to say the piece to make it clear and beautiful as possible.

(Click for full sized image.)

On Our Feet

There comes a time in every rehearsal process when the table goes away, the floor gets taped,* and we get on our feet.  That time came on Sunday, after a final read, putting a button on the tablework.  Since I happen to be in act one, scene one (in this case, preceeded by a prologue, [...]

Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting

So there are twenty-four actors in this show, and I think about twenty of them pick up arms over the course of the Fifth act battle at Shrewsbury. As the men we are playing are much more skilled than the men we are at this sort of swordplay, we need a little help to look [...]

More Tablework

“At this stage in the process, don’t just hydroplane over your rhetoric - Take the time to work out your thoughts…” ~ Steve Fried
Tonight we (finally) got to some scenes I’m in.* Verse, check. Rhetoric, check. Perfect reading, um… not so much.
The thing is, when you get really deep into the tablework, it becomes clear [...]

Tablework

Most rehearsal processes for Shakespeare plays start out with a few days of tablework. What that means is that before we start blocking the play, (working out all the physical action), we sit with the script around the table, and do very close reading of the text. Because the language is so complex, we need [...]

Unwinding

Last week, before we even started rehearsals, Michael Pocaro and I did an educational event for Milwaukee Shakespeare with an honors class at UWM. We talked about the play with the students, who had just finished reading it. We also answered any questions they had, and many questions went beyond the scope of the play [...]

My favorite line from the first read-thru

“The turkeys in my pannier are quite starved!”
~ 1st Carrier.

First Day

So we met on Tuesday for the first time. I’ve actually been looking forward to this day for quite a while — since getting the offer about a year ago. That’s right, plays are often cast that far in advance. Actors are pretty busy creatures, always bouncing around from one town to the next doing [...]

Post #1

All right, here we are with the first installment of my little blog chronicling my experience working on 1 Henry IV.
And who am I? Why, Matt Daniels, of course. Many of you might remember me from a number of Milwaukee Shakespeare performances, including Antipholus of Syracuse in Comedy of Errors, Gratiano in Merchant of Venice, [...]