Opening Song: "Love Bites" - QED
NCO Daddio: Director Extraordinaire proudly presents...
BEHIND THE SCENES
Alias: Day of the Doppelgänger
For those of you not "in the know", I was recently given the opportunity to write, direct, and star in my very own one-act play entitled ALiAS: Day of the Doppelgänger (Working title: "CATALYST"), and it was definitely the most rewarding experience of my entire high school career.
In preparation for the show, I had to perform numerous tasks in a limited amount of time: composing a soundtrack, creating an opening credits sequence, designing the sets, sketching and selecting costumes, and casting just the right people.
THE SOUNDTRACK
To provide an exciting musical backdrop to the nonstop action in my play, I used songs from artists such as Gwen Stefani, Lunatic Calm, Prodigy, Rob Zombie, Britney Spears (WOO!), The Black Eyed Peas, Michael Jackson, Fatboy Slim, etc.
THE SETS
The second hardest part of bring this play to life was the enormous amount of props that my original script called for. Pictured above is the set for the famous Strip Club scene, "Club I-Socket."
THE COSTUMES
The original character sketches above depict some of the costume ideas for the five central characters in my play: Special Agents Dolly, ManEater, Jackal, Medusa, and Candyman. The costume selection was total HELL for me 'cause I had to make a lot of compromises and sacrifices due to the lack of resources in our Drama closet.
Luckily, I assigned color schemes to every character so we could build from there. And it definitely paid off in the end, no matter how much we all complained about the endless quick changes during the actual show.
THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT /
CASTING CALL
Since I wrote the play, ALiAS was created with a lot of my friends in mind. Due to time contraints (I was given two days to write the entire play!), a lot of my original ideas had to be taken out and I took the play in a totally different direction. Instead of a gritty action-adventure, I wrote more of an edgy drama with some dark humor and an omnipresent cloud of sarcasm hovering overhead. My biggest complaint about the script is that my ending is very "thrown together"... but if I kept the original concept, the play would have lasted an extra 5-10 minutes and I was already being hassled by LeFrancois.
The role of Medusa, the feisty agent with electrical wire woven into her hair, was altered severely due to the timing issue. Since I had written the role with actress Shannon Szuba in mind, I felt that she would be the perfect character to keep the audience connected to the play; in other words, I made her a normal person (an agent-in-training) who had to assemble the best four agents who ever worked for the CATALYST agency. In other words, she was my protagonist/main character. Her polar opposite, the antagonist, was Mutoaro Velasquez, the supervillain, portrayed by Guy Loudermilk and Chelsey Soroka.
To provide some dark humor, the four retired agents held odd jobs: Jackal (originally written for Josh Lang but given to Zach Ward) hosted a TV show in a South African jungle; ManEater (played by the one and only Nicole Camara) was the spokesperson for Donatella Versace's company; Dolly (played by Carolyn Kenney) used her stock investments to buy a mansion and spend the rest of her days creating "non-conventional" art; Candyman (played by myself) had the intelligence to work for NASA yet he decided to take a job at a Manhattan strip club.
The overconfident Agent Isis (played by Chelsey Soroka) was killed in a hail of gunfire before the opening credits rolled--in the original version, her body was never found so Mutoaro really would have been a "doppelgänger" posing as Isis in America while the real Isis was held in a Japanese hospital.
My favorite person to work with was, by far, Jessica Rivera, who was the only person considered for the role of Donatella Versace--her other role, KiT, however, was written with Sherry Powers in mind. Jess came in to every blocking rehearsal and was willing to do whatever I asked of her. She gave me some advice every now and then and SURPRISE SURPRISE, I actually understood where she came from, listened, and followed it. She even rolled off the edge of the stage in a pitch-black auditorium just so her fight scene with Jackal would look better. And it did.
ALiAS: Day Of the Doppelgänger opened on Friday, May 6, 2005 to a reasonably big audience (most of whom came with Nicole!). Since the technical crew (except Sam) didn't show up until the day before the show, I didn't have time to go through every action with them, even though the Director's Cut scripts were very self-explanatory. As a result, most of the sound cues were off and the lighting was OK, and I actually had to FIRE the blue-haired curtain puller 'cause he kept wandering around. But I couldn't have been more pleased with my actors who NAILED all of their lines!
Wow, all that harassment and extra rehearsals actually helped (go figure)! After directing last year's technical extravaganza and acting dud, 3 Doors To Death, I did everything I could to make sure my actors knew their lines and their choreography and felt comfortable without their scripts. They really made me proud--good job, you guys.
However, the one thing I couldn't stand was Zach and his ad-libbing, especially since I wrote the script so the lines would be simple and come out naturally. Usually I don't mind ad-libbing but his changes really did nothing for the play if not make it awkward. Tisk, tisk. I was not amused.
For the Saturday show, we pulled out all the stops and I spent hours writing some idiot proof instructions for the tech crew... which worked for the most part. And as a result, the Saturday show was a million times better than the Friday premiere. And my supermodels actually showed up! To join Julie Barrick on the runway were Becky Hunter, Jessika Keller, Marty Hoegg, Allie Farkas, and Patrice Pierce. It made the scene more believable and more FUN. Even if the sound crew screwed up the songs. RRRrrr. It worked out in the end.
The biggest mistake from the Saturday show was Heather accidentally taking my trademark phrase "Next track" (meaning "next sound cue") literally and playing the Bee Gees song, "Emotion," during the Sorpresas Labs break-in scene. In my opinion, ALiAS easily outshone both of the other one-acts, although I thoroughly enjoyed Nicole and Doug's performances in Gone Tomorrow as well as Teena's performance in Man Of The House.
"Best dancer I’ve ever seen" - Girl who snuck backstage
"Great Job!" - Random Old Person in Audience
"You’re Hot!" - Female JiMBO Fan
"Good Job. Your pole was kinda limp." - Krystal, Rice Lady's big sister
"We want to bang you!" - Sara & Nichol
"You’re an awesome break-dancer and an awesome clarinet player" - Other James
"Really good." - Adam & Colin
"You and me--after the show" - Marty
“Amazing!" - JiMBO Fan
"Excellent play, James. I loved Shannon's line about 'digging up corpses, tearing off the flesh and wearing it like a track suit.'" - Shannon's Dad, "Scooby"
In addition to the positive feedback about the acting, the musical score, and the choreography, my fellow writer, Jessica Rivera, wrote an article about the Night of One Acts for the school newspaper entitled "Hot, Young Thespian Action."
THE 2005 DIONYSUS CLUB
TONY AWARDS
At the award ceremony, ALiAS: Day of the Doppelgänger won TWO Tony Awards: Best Costumes in any Production and Best Supporting Actor (my performance as "Candyman"). Finally, Susan Lucci wins the damn emmy! WOOOOOO!!!
(click to enlarge)
So this is odd but I found this looking for my googleganger. It came up under 'Allie farkas' but I quickly realized, it was me. Not a google ganger. Hi James, nice article.
ReplyDeleteHaha, hey Allie! Sorry it took forever to respond, I was on a 5-year hiatus. Had such a wonderful time writing and performing in "Day of the Doppelgänger!"
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