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Attend the Tale of Theresa Todd: Performance Number Ten

Friday's show was certainly a departure from our normal material. It all started with the seemingly benign offer of "guilty" as the emotional starting point. Mark, with a touch of his usual finesse, got the ball rolling quickly by admitting as his dry-walling character that she (he was Theresa) had 42 bodies buried in the basement--much to the dismay of his sister (Robyn) and the surprise of his two rather odd girlfriends (Jay and me). The voting outcome was relatively clear right from this moment! Jay's audience-inspired character was a shut-in whose small house became crowded with unexpected guests and his butcher Dad. Robyn followed with a free-loading friend who had a crush on a local police detective and sought advice from an oddball fortune teller, Sai Pan. Finally, I dived into the shoes of a young man, with a younger child and an unhappy ex-wife, whose only solace was his balloon animals. (Jim offered a nice "beautiful balloon" parody for my solo at the end of the act.)

But as I said, Mark's storyline was clearly rich with violent potentials, and that was what the audience wanted, so that is what the audience got...! It was a fun second act in that it retained the structure, but reinvented the content in a surprising new way. One at a time, Mark and his murderous passion, infected the show, until nearly every character was pulled into his/her web or became the victim of his contagious intent. This even included Jay's adorable Barny character who uttered, "I'm five!" as he limped off the stage with a slashed throat. You had to be there! Mark gave a great Sweeney Todd parody in the second act, while Jay and I had our usual warped sense of fun in the antagonist duet, and Robyn provided fantastic comedic moments as both of Mark's ill-fated sisters.

My voice is still suffering from last week, so I felt like I ran out of vocal steam a little by the end of the night. Alas. Someone in the team noted that my characters all started to sound the same about half way through act two as my voice decided to shut down!

Some quotable quotes that Gina recorded...

Mark as killer Theresa: "The newspaper paints murder and bad people in a negative light."
Jay as officer Captain Joe: "I'm not stupid just 'cause I'm southern."
Mark as killer Theresa: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the dead people room."
David as Joe's eager accomplice, Morgan: "If we catch her in the deed, it doesn't matter about the dead, 'cause the deed is better than the dead indeed."
David as fortune teller, Sai Pan: "I'm going to make this quick, 'cause man who makes it quick has time to watch big game."

Your sounding-more-and-more-like-Kermit-every-minute Director, David C.