Midnight Soapscum Year 2 Episode 2 - Live Original Stage Serial in Anchorage

[If you want to avoid my way too long and highly tangential intro, you can go straight to my comments on the performance.]

Where else can you see live stage serials? I'm sure they must be out there, but Google didn't help. I did find videos of Pakistani stage shows - the Urdu language shows didn't work, but the Punjabi ones did. But I'm not sure these are serials or television or live stage.

I found a blog post about writing in serial form, even writing a serial on her blog, but despite the post title "Writing on Stage: Coming to terms with serial writing" I couldn't find any stages in the post.

And then I got this:

STAGE 4: CREATING A SERIALS PREDICTION & ISSUE
Now that Horizon knows how many copies of a serial you take, how often the serial should be claimed and who your vendor is, you can now create a prediction pattern and set an issue to begin the prediction pattern with.
1. Use Item Search/F2 to bring up the item search box and search for the relevant journal.
2. Send to/F10 the title to ‘Serials Control’.
3. Ensure the correct copy for your location has been selected and click the Prediction button located along the bottom of the window

Then there's Todd's Serial Blog and his other blog Todd Gault's Serial Experience. Both seem to be about movie serials.

I found a post by a young Indian actor looking for work on Cinechance that seems to be an electronic classified section for actors to find work in India.

About Myself :

hi guyz ,m vikram frm delhi.m 21 yrs of age nd graduating. i hav worked in serials for dd "do behne" , & "kabhi dhoop kabhi choan" both directed by reputed director "mr shiv kumar".also done one ad film for india tv. i love to act nd travel..........[emphasis added][And before you make fun of his written English, his bio says he also speaks Hindi and Punjabi]

And I learned from StageNews that

The BBC’s drama production department has announced a restructure of its senior staff, with head of series and serials Kate Harwood promoted to the role of controller of series and serials.

But that's television and radio.


I also learned that there is a software called live theater:

Live Theater 1.2 description
Live Theater - with the help of the software Live Theater TM you will be able to arrange the live broadcast from theater, TV etc. to a wider range of the Internet audience.

It is highly recommended to use broadband Internet connection for using Live Theater.

Here are some key features of "Live Theater":

· Broadcasting of live streaming video over Internet from any possible external video signal sources (video camera, web camera, video capture card etc.).
· Re-broadcasting over Internet of any source of TV signal, digital and analog.
· Broadcasting of the prerecorded video files.
· The areas of use are not restricted by the above mentioned. Live Theater can be used for any other purpose of brodcasting [sic] streaming video over Internet.
· The main advantage of Live Theater is ability of broadcasting of high-quality video without purchasing the expensive hardware and password protection from watching by an unauthorized user.

One problem I had with 'live theater' was that it monopolized the google hits for that search term.

So why all this esoteric trivia? Because I was trying to find out how unique Christian Heppinstall's Midnight Soapscum production at Out North is. Just because I can't find anything about live theatrical serials doesn't mean someone isn't doing them. After all, I didn't find Soapscum googling variations of stage/theater/serials/ etc. either. But given the obstacles to producing a play a week, I bet it's not happening too many places.


Christian's first run of Midnight Soapscum was a live, theatrical serial about a centenarian Russian emigre and her porn studio empire in San Francisco and it first ran over a couple of months in Spring 2007.

And now it's back - five new episodes of Midnight Soapscum. This time the subtitle is: Goes To Hell.

Just the idea is pretty amazing. Live, original episodes, performed weekly, with local talent. Christian's cranking out an hour and a half of material a week! And it's good! It moves along, it's funny, and the acting is first rate.

Think of this as Saturday Night Live as a political sitcom performed on stage before a live audience. No broadcasting. No huge budget.

Christian not only writes and directs Soapscum, he also stars as Svetlana Smirnov. That's him as Smirnov in the poster. He uses the episodes to comment on a wide variety of current issues and personalities. [Update: Christian emailed me to say that he's not directing this time. Jon Minton is. Sorry Jon.]

This year's incarnation takes place days before the 2008 election and the focus is on whether Smirnov is going to support Proposition 8. Characters include, besides various porn actors from the studio, Marie and Donny Osmond, Todd and Sarah Palin, a terrorist chained in the basement who turns out to be Osama Bin Laden, Barack Obama, four amazing aliens, and a slew of others.



Here, the Palins are plotting. . . well, I can't quite remember what they were plotting. The script takes so many twists and turns. The guy in the tie is Obama.









The cast is so big they could have a full house even if there was no audience. And I suspect they'd have almost as good a time without an audience. The second person in red with the two story blond wig, sitting above the cast on the right[left - somewhere between third grade and a couple of years ago I knew the difference between left and right], is NOT Svetlana, but the narrator who keeps the audience appraised (and well behaved) of what all is happening between scenes. She also had the list of all the characters and named them before and after the show. But I didn't write them all down and there was no program.


But is it any good? The acting is good and considering they didn't have a lot of time to learn the script - and they have a new one next week - I don't remember any flubs. The jokes would be funny to liberals but it might get tedious for conservatives. The people we were with thought it was a bit too long - partly, I think because it doesn't start until 10:30pm and it ended just past midnight. Considering what they were trying to pull off and their low budget, I thought it was amazing. (I have two standards. One is an absolute standard. The other is based on quality/cost. This one did pretty well on the absolute standard and would have swept the Tony's on quality/cost.)

And we have it here in Anchorage at Out North (you can buy tickets online) for three more episodes. And don't worry if you missed the first two episodes, it doesn't matter, trust me.

Christian has a pretty strong background in theater. I met him when he took some public administration classes with me. But he already had a masters in theater and had performed and/or directed in San Francisco, New York, and Budapest where he lived for several years. He's also the director for the Anchorage Theater of Youth and has been active in HIV/AIDS education. He's bright and aware and it shows in Soapscum.

Bent Alaska has the details of when the other episodes will be presented.