Come to the Big Show!

Elsa Lanchester: SHE'S ALIVE! is in NYC now, written by and starring me, presented by Spin Cycle, with my favorite husband, Mark Nutter, on the keyboard.  We opened last Friday to a gloriously responsive crowd of nears and dears and a few strangers--but honestly, mostly people we love--who couldn't have been more loving. It was SO MUCH FUN.

I posted audience and media responses all over this website, so take a look.  Lots of love. As I've said before, I am incredibly lucky.

The next Elsa show is tomorrow night. Second shows are notorious letdowns: less adrenaline, less excitement, a smidge of laziness that you just can't afford on opening night. . .human nature, right?

So I'm over-using social media by trying to drum up business and maybe a little, I dunno, frisson?! Hope? Fun? Excitement?

It all makes me feel like I'm 8 years old, pacing up and down our block of military housing in Rantoul, Illinois, shouting,"Come to the big show!" the summer I produced/directed the definitive production of "Sleeping Beauty" in my front yard.  I played the prince, because frankly, the boys in the hood couldn't act, and the girls didn't want to play a boy. I didn't mind. I wanted to play ALL the parts.

My one stroke of 3rd grade directorial genius was to cast the twins, Elaine and Mary, as Aurora and the Witch, respectively. Doppelganger Good and Evil! They even had English accents (military kids often sound foreign--remember Kathleen Turner?), and of course I was/still am a sucker for British actors.  They weren't great actors, but they looked fabulous.

The day of the actual Big Show, several of the kids didn't show up, but the show was Big anyway, at least for me. It was a tour de force. "Real encouragin'", as Ruth Gordon would say.

See the above photo?  That isn't little Me and my merry band of Military Brats--it's Elsa Lanchester's "Children's Theatre", where she taught show biz know-how to neighborhood children, armed with her new Isadora Duncan credentials and some sort of funding from a charity agency.  She was just a teenager at the time--and soon turned her attention to more adult entertainment at her Cave of Harmony, the hangout for young London intelligentsia. Famous thinkers and writers and directors and actors and movers and shakers, all when they were young, too.

I imagine Elsa in her wonderful crepe paper skirts and homemade sandals, with her pre-Raphaelite-turned-flapper hairdo, taking tickets and serving tea and singing and dancing and performing topical washer woman skits with Hermione Baddeley, Angela's sister.  Wanting to control everything, wanting to play all the parts. True redhead behavior.

Think she beat a drum up and down the streets of London, shouting "Come to the Big Show"? Or did she let the audience find her? I wish I knew. Banging my own drum was much more fun at 8 than it is now. I kinda suck at it.

Tickets are available at www.spincyclenyc.com.  We're at the Laurie Beechman Theatre on W. 42nd Street, Fridays only, 7 PM, till November 3rd.  My supportive, multi-talented, husband, Mark Nutter, is playing the Prince  (and the piano) in this production--but I gave myself the best role in this show, the title character. No more twins---I get to be the English one, Good and Evil and Flashy and Vulnerable and All Things Elsa.

Come see us, OK? I promise it'll be even better than my "Sleeping Beauty" masterpiece. I'm much bigger now, so this Big Show is BIG!

Come to the Big Show!!!

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