Should you feel like getting your lights Punched out, and you’re in NYC, go see Gretchen Van Lente’s curatorial slate of actors human and non-. (Like this beauty in blue.)  One of the things that’s so hardcore fun about puppets is their variety; custom does not stale, etc., and that’s worth the entrance fee all by itself.

Haven’t yet seen the movie, but the rights tangle sounds like a jolly mess it would take Sherlock’s meth-addicted lawyers to unravel, so thank goodness Holmes and Watson have only their fashion sense to worry about.  The deerstalker doesn’t really make it, but those little round glasses, zowie…Costuming will play a big role, no pun intended, in our production – as it does on the novel itself, rather.  Those cravats!

Reading sideways, as I work, about the task, perils, and thrills of adapting one form into another: not always a cakewalk, a fact that relieves me. Then again, there’s this, starting from the summit and walking off into thin air, looks like.

…is just what it sounds like: Victorian punks.  Love the yellow pantaloon fellow – not everyone can work that outfit, but he so can.

Someone asked me – they always do ask, and in this media-saturated world, when everyone is shouting for your attention, who can blame them? – anyway, this person wanted a one-sentence description of Under the Poppy: not what it’s about but what it is.  And this was mine. riffing from a friend (hi, Deb!) who called it “so rich and dark that it is like a piece of expensive chocolate!”  Perhaps we ought to serve both at the publication party?

[All photos: DC.]

[All photos: DC.]

We had the first table read of the Under the Poppy script today and … where do I start?  Not only did I learn a great deal about how (and why) the words met the air, all of which will aid me immeasurably as I revise, but watching real live actors engage with the script was a total thrill.  And the talk/questions/feedback/scrum of ideas afterward, with people who know and love and study theatre, hearing what they thought of the play, what images they saw in their minds’ eye(s), their suggestions and blue-sky dreaming: exhilarating.

What was best of all, though, was  “fun”: as in, this would be such a fun show, a fun world, to set design, to stage, light, costume, act in: fun to be set free in the louche and passionate confines of the Poppy, and make it, as you play, your own.

Is it possible to have too much fun?  No, it is not. Thank you, actors, readers, and especially Julanne Jacobs, who set this day in motion, and Diane Cheklich, collaborator extraordinaire.