Headmistress Powell
December 26, 2010 11:56 PM
Midsummer Variety Concert by Headmistress Powell
The performers had been working hard, the voting forms were ready for the audience, and Sonora had a special guest in attendance. After almost a full school year of exploiting all her educational contacts, Headmistress Powell had finally found someone to succeed her for the new term. His name was David Regal, and had been able to come to Sonora especially to see the Midsummer Concert and see more of the school and students that would be in his care at the end of the summer. Sadi had met him many years ago at a conference on Ancient Runes in Nevada, and had only kept very vaguely in touch, mostly through hearing about him in educational papers than communicating directly. It was very odd putting someone in charge of the school who hadn’t ever taught there before. However none of the teaching staff desired the administrative role over their teaching roles, which Sadi could completely understand; she had missed being in the classroom herself. Nevertheless, David would undoubtedly fit in just fine with time, and be a real asset to the school. He was currently occupying the seat next to hers at the back of Cascade, which had been rearranged and charmed to provide a large stage area where the staff table usually stood, and rows of seats steadily inclined with the highest seats towards the back of the room, looking down on the stage. There were no curtains or lighting, because the performance would only last the afternoon, and the extra accessories had seemed unnecessary; this concert was about showcasing students’ efforts and abilities, not the faculty’s capacity to transfigure the school.David Regal had to admit that he had been surprised when Sadi had approached him to fill in the position of Headmaster at Sonora. It had been a pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. After thinking it through and discussing it with his wife, he had accepted the job. After so many years of teaching in a private magical school, it would surely be a change to take charge of such a prestigious and large school. It excited and frightened him at the same time, it was a really big change, and it would take some time to get used to it. Quite honestly, he had never thought about being part of a school’s administration, he loved teaching too much. So, when he had been invited to watch the Midsummer Concert, he couldn’t decline, it was the perfect opportunity to get to know his staff and alumnus. He sat besides Sadi, and his brown eyes scanned the Cascade Hall, it was the first time he set foot on the school’s grounds, he had to admit that what he had heard about it had not done it justice. Sonora was impressive, and he was certain, the concert would be too. He smiled at Sadi, and sat quietly waiting for it to start.
After lunch, which had been organised slightly earlier than usual, students had been asked to gather (or remain) in the Hall. The performers had the privilege of the first row of seats, and could watch the other performers when not onstage themselves. When their turn came, each performer could make his or her way to the stage via a set of steps at each side. There was a small backstage area that could hold six or so students, just in case it would be needed for the group act that was a play. The acts would be introduced not by a staff member as during the last concert (Simon Tellerman had since progressed to his own Vegas act), but by the current Head Boy and Girl. Jera had volunteered to announce the individual acts, and assigned the group acts to Thomas. Therefore, according to the order of acts that had been randomly selected, Jera would be introducing the first performance. When the students had gathered and largely filled the seating area, the Head Girl made her way to the stage. Public speaking was not one of her favourite activities, but her confidence had developed sufficiently over her seven years of magical schooling that she could at least talk to the student body without feeling the need to hurl.
“Welcome everyone to Sonora’s Midsummer concert,” she began, her voice signalling that anyone who hadn’t yet found a seat should do so quickly. “There are eight student acts to be performed, and then everyone will be able to vote. The categories are Best Group performance and Best Individual performance. There will also be an overall House winner, decided by the staff,” she reminded them of the competition. “I’ll be introducing the individual acts, and Thomas will be introducing the group acts,” she gestured towards the Head Boy. “While the votes are counted, you’ll be free to purchase cakes, from, um, either of the bake sales,” – The DISCUSS table run by Coach Pierce and Professor McKindy had been strategically placed at the other side of the room from the table run by a group of seventh year girls composed of the Smythe sisters and Chelsea Brockert, whose goods were being used to raise awareness of WAIL - “and before the winners are announced, the Headmistress will announce next year’s Head Boy and Head Girl.” Many of those whose names had been on the voting ballot were actually performing, so they might have a particularly memorable concert. “First, to start us off, I’d like to welcome to the stage the first group performance, which will be a choir, comprised of Dana Smythe, Alison Sinclair, Edmond Carey, Jane Carey, Samantha Hamilton and Kirstenna Melcher.” Jera led the applause and quickly made her way off the stage so the group could make their way onto it.
After the choir, the next performance was a balance act by Jose, then the first musical solo by Demelza. Then there would be a group dance act, followed by Jessica and her ukulele. The group play was up next, then it would be Holly singing, and Juri’s act would be the last.
Subthreads: Starting off the choir by Dana Smythe with Kirstenna Melcher, Samantha Hamilton, Jane and Edmond Carey, Alison Sinclair
A Balance Act by Jose Hernandez, Pecari
Please sit, relax, and enjoy the show by Adelita Garcia with Charlotte Abbott
<i>Saving You</i> by Juri Dahlgren
Colors of the Wind by Holly Greer
<i>The answer, my friend...</i> by Demelza Eagle
'No Rest For The Wicked' Part One by The Group Play with
VOTING BALLOTS by Headmistress Powell with
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Headmistress Powell
Midsummer Variety Concert
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Headmistress Powell
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The Group Play
January 07, 2011 9:37 AM
'No Rest For The Wicked' Part One by The Group Play
(OOC: co-written by the authors of all the characters mentioned)Play practices had been difficult, since they had to work around both the Aladren and Crotalus Quidditch team practices (not to mention the final match that pitted the two leads against each other – but that might have just helped with some of the irritation that was supposed to exist between them) and CATS and RATS preparations and regular schoolwork and everything else going on, but Daniel felt they'd done a good job and it had pulled together pretty well given the time constraints.
Once Gray had finished writing the script, he and Jera had taken the lead over Nic and Neal on the stage hand crew, while Daniel and Jose had directed the actors' line readings and practice. Over the last week, they'd run through full dress rehearsals with sets, props, and everything until their play was as good as it was going to get. All that remained was showing that to the rest of the school.
There were times when Gray thought an insufficient amount of thought went into some things around Sonora, and hearing the schedule for the Concert caused him to experience one of those times. He had, in accordance with the spirit of the event and the votes to be taken after it, gone as over the top with both the complexity and the special effects as he’d thought Daniel would allow and he and Jera could really manage, and that meant that not only did he want license to blow parts of the stage up, but he needed time to set up even the more mundane parts. Between two other acts, with two to follow, was not really a good time to blow things up or take that time. Especially when the stage itself wasn’t remotely set up to accommodate him.
Things didn’t go quite the way he’d wanted them to, but within a reasonably short time after Jessica Zeworth stepped down, the stage featured a large cauldron, a long but surprisingly light table, and a similar throne. On the throne, behind a few lines of light Gray hoped looked vaguely menacing, with orders to look supremely bored, was a white-haired Charlotte Abbott (who was pleased to be sitting down because her quick costume change hadn’t given her feet time to recover from her dance). By the cauldron, which was bubbling ominously and producing large quantities of pink and green smoke, was an equally fake-aged-up Daniel, stirring and adding in what appeared to be a large rock.
The potion turned black, and fire appeared to rise out of the cauldron.
Daniel jumped back from the flames throwing one arm up protectively between himself and the special effects, as if the rock's addition had caused a reaction he had not expected instead of the result that had been supposed to come of it. “Curses!” he cursed, then lowered his lowered his arm and grated out, “Foiled again! I’ll never succeed!” The only reason he had allowed that line to stay in the script was because of the conversation that followed it.
“That’s what I’ve been telling you for the past hundred years,” Charlotte offered the reply that she thought spoke volumes about this couple’s relationship. She managed to succeed at sounding suitable unimpressed for her first line, then after a pause, added, “Did you actually just say that?”
Daniel smirked and admitted, “On some level, I always wanted to say that.” In all truth, it was a sentiment that Daniel could identify with. Not that he ever wanted an opportunity to say 'foiled again' because that would mean he'd been foiled not once but at least twice, but there were some really awesome lines from various plays or shows that just didn't come up in normal ordinary conversation. “It seemed like an opportune moment. But no matter.”
Now that he'd gotten the stereotypical villainous expression of defeat out of the way, he drew his wand and waved it at the cauldron, returning it to its previous non-flaming state. It was one of the few wand effects in the play that he performed himself. He tucked his ten inches of wood back into his robes and added philosophically, “Minor setbacks are to be expected. I see what went wrong there. Soon, my love,” which was an endearment he would have rather used on someone he hadn't once dated, but the other female options were all significantly younger than him and would have been even weirder to address so, “we will be eternally young, the perfect complement to our established immortality.”
“I’m still betting on turning into a grasshopper first,” Charlie countered, maintaining an air of disinterested doubt. She liked the sarcastic nature of her role, but it wasn’t something she herself could easily identify with. She could, however, imagine her parents’ continued exasperation with their children, and somehow the relentlessly unimpressed attitude practically formed itself.
Daniel disregarded this slight to his ability to create eternal youth. He imagined it was something his character had a lot of practice with. “Well, you also bet on your brother and your ex teaming up to slay my dragon and rescue you, and you see who won those fifty galleons,” he remarked dryly, which triggered the next flashback scene.
A curtain, the enchantments making it look like a portrait of a castle almost better than Gray had expected, swung out from the side, hiding the original scene while Gray prayed he and Jera would be able to hold it up with their wands without too much wobbling for the duration of the scene (Jera wasn’t so worried, simply because she didn’t worry as much as Grayson; nobody did). Two large, charred things – originally pillows, enlarged by magic and stuck into armor transfigured from one of Gray’s book boxes – were levitated in from the same side by Neal and Nic (the two younger stage hands had been practicing) and dropped the 'dead bodies' in front of the castle curtain. Kate Bauer walked out in a dragon costume from the right as Jose and Eliza walked around the curtain from the backstage area to the left.
Jose held out a hand toward Eliza and smirked in the smug satisfaction of a bet well won. “Pay up.” He wiggled his fingered in classic arrogant impatience. It wasn't anything he'd do in real life, but that had no meaning once he was in a role. And this guy was clearly an insensitive clod.
Eliza scowled, secretly, even after all this time, wondering what kind of mind the playwright had. If her kidnapper’s pet dragon toasted her little brother and her long-suffering fiancé, she thought her reaction would be much different from her character’s. “Oh, all right,” she said, then handed over a little money bag. A few pieces of gold glinted at the top, strategically positioned over the old scarf she’d contributed to props to fill it up. “Going to count that?”
Jose shook his head, secure in his victory and the knowledge that his character had his own dragon, and said, “I trust you just enough to wait until you’re not around.” He hoped he had a good enough control on his tone to imply, And if you short-changed me, I can just kidnap you again, but he wasn't sure how well that carried through to the audience. Playing a bad guy was kind of fun, though.
Eliza rolled her eyes. That wasn’t a very ladylike thing to do, but she had been informed that this was comedic in nature and that the normal rules didn’t really apply. Besides, that wasn’t nearly as bad as being more upset about fifty galleons than she was about her brother. “You’re so sweet,” she said.
The three younger kids left from the same sides they’d entered, and Gray summoned his part of the props back while Jera did hers, giving Daniel and Charlotte the stage once more. Gray wanted to listen to his dialogue and see how it was playing out, but was too busy getting the backdrop reversed, moved through backstage so it could enter from the other side next time, and making sure those decorative enchantments were also holding. And really hoping that the unfamiliar dude with the headmistress wasn’t in with a publishing company, considering that the images had been pretty much taken from one of his books and he had no idea how legal that was.
“Even becoming an evil overlord didn’t give you better taste,” Charlotte said, not having moved from her seat, apparently bound by the lighting effects around her. “And you wonder why you had to kidnap me to get me to take an interest.”
It was fairly obvious that his character had a somewhat warped view on reality, but Daniel had lived with Holly Greer as a sister for his whole life. It was not difficult to replicate an assurance that his view on the world was the only one that could exist. “Oh, you were just playing hard to get,” he corrected absently while fiddling with the cauldron.
“No,” Charlie corrected in a tone of mild frustration – but only mild because her character had apparently given up on trying to make her crazy co-character see sense, “I just thought you were a loser.”
Originally, the script had given Daniel another line here that went maniacally, 'I am not a loser! I’m a winner! I always win! Always win, always win, always win! I win, I win, I win!' but Daniel had thrown down an executive veto on it. Instead, he just gave Charlie a glare and said calmly, “I always win in the end.” He felt that expressed the same delusional inability to admit failure while not sounding like a two-year-old having a tantrum. Plus, it sounded way more evil. Especially when he allowed himself a small smile as the scene changed.
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The Group Play
'No Rest For The Wicked' Part One
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The Group Play
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5
The Group Play
January 07, 2011 9:40 AM
'No Rest For The Wicked' Part Two by The Group Play
(OOC: co-written by the authors of all characters mentioned)The second backdrop cut in, this time showing a village, the kind where the houses were topped with straw. Eliza entered from the left, humming and swinging a basket full of dried flowers.
Jose came in from the right, making a beeline for her. “Hello!” he greeted, getting in her way, and tried on an awkward yet hopeful smile. The Jose/Daniel character at this point was early enough in his life that he clearly had no social skills around girls.
Eliza looked up. The chronology of this play was almost as confusing as the psychology of the people in it, but at least her character was kind of normal at this point. “Good day,” she said with a slight smile, then started trying to go around him.
“I like you,” Jose said, awkward and blunt and moving to block her escape again.
Eliza stopped, and for one moment, wasn’t sure of her line. This was her longest portion of dialogue in the entire play, and while most of it was pretty intuitive once she’d worked out the story, enough to ad lib a little if she really had to… “I like you, too,” she said. “So much. You’re so wonderful, and so intelligent, and so devilishly handsome – “she gushed, only to be interrupted by a shriek from behind the backdrop.
“That’s not what happened!” Charlotte exclaimed, trying not to laugh, as she had done on more than one occasion in rehearsals. No matter how you looked at it, shrieking from behind a backdrop as your past-play-self gets manipulated was just plain funny.
Eliza took a step back, then shook her head in confusion before resuming the scene on its ‘original’ lines. “I’m glad,” she said instead, politely distant. That wasn’t an attitude that she found it very hard to act. “I need to go now –"
Jose stepped into her path a third time, and blurted out every young teenage male's most terrifying question without any kind of finesse. “Will you go to the dance with me?”
Eliza bit her lip, looking sorry and a little put out. “I already told Perrin I’d go with him,” she said. “And, um, I can’t say I really like you that way – I’m sorry, goodbye – “And, despite that scene having always felt unfinished to her, she hurried offstage.
Jose let her go, scowling at her back. “No – no – this cannot be!” He paused for a beat, then frowned deeper and said, “I never really wanted to say that. Which is why I will never say it again!” Daniel had almost made him take those lines out, but, unlike their shared character's opinion, Jose had always wanted to exclaim 'no this cannot be!' and was eventually allowed to keep his opportunity to do so. Daniel justified it by explaining that this was 'young and stupid them' and an important moment in their character development toward never saying such moronic things out loud. The play's first line was clearly a backslide moment of weakness.
Above Jose's head, dark clouds began to form. Of every piece of magic they’d arranged for this, this was the one Gray had been most sure would not work. They weren’t as huge and dark as he would have liked, and he was still concerned about the good the effect would be now that he definitely wasn’t allowed to have lighting hit the stage, and with keeping enough light on Jose anyway, but it seemed to be working.
“No, sir!” Jose continued his soliloquy, “From today, it’s all winning, all the time! I’ll do whatever I have to, work all the days of my life, and I will rule the world! There’s no way she can turn me down then!”
Kate entered, and the clouds began to dispel. “I was just wondering,” she said, trying very hard to blush and being pretty sure that she wasn’t pulling it off, because the terror of coming onto the stage had worn off after her stint as the dragon, “if you’d come with me to the dance, if she’s not interested?”
Jose frowned at this new girl who was not Young Charlotte/Eliza and therefore not part of his obsession. “No,” he stated, even more bluntly than anything else he'd said. This character was not one to sugar coat things.
Kate stomped her foot. “Fine, then!”
The backdrop began to move away, cuing the actors to exit again, revealing Charlotte and Daniel once more.
“And then she became the first witch to ever try for Dark Lord status,” Charlie mused aloud, letting the audience know what happened next. “It makes me glad that I just argue like part of an old married couple instead of being in one.” If she hadn’t known any better, Charlotte might have interpreted this as a stab at her own, real life personality. In actuality, she wasn’t paranoid enough to think that Grayson Wright cared about or even noticed her social activities. “Another contribution to the romantic maze would have been the end of the world.”
“No,” Daniel agreed absently, having clearly only been paying partial attention to what Charlie had said. “We don’t need another end of the world. I’m still cleaning up paradoxes from the last one, after she decided to kidnap my past self when my less-far-into-the-past self was already established.” It had taken a few reading for that to make sense to him, but he couldn't think of a better way to phrase it either, so he'd left it as it was and hoped hearing it spoken aloud by someone who understood the chronology would help the audience follow the twisted timeline. Stealing a glance out into the audience, he couldn't tell if it worked. It was dark and the stage lights Neal was in charge of working were blinding him a little.
“I have to give her points for determination,” Charlie spoke her line a touch too late, having been distracted by the less-far-into-the-past-self line. Luckily she thought she probably wasn’t the only one who’d struggled to make coherent sense of that concept, and the audience might have needed the extra time to decipher the meaning. “And at least she had style,” the second part of the retort was delivered with more vehemence than usual to make up for its delay. “You just pointed a wand at me and informed me I’d been kidnapped.”
At her words, Daniel's attention returned fully to the scene in progress and gave out his next line at his cue promptly and arrogantly. “It got the job done, didn’t it?”
Eliza entered, wearing a long blonde wig, very high heels hidden by her too-long robes, and big sunglasses in an attempt to make it less obvious that she was the same person who’d spent most of the play as Young Charlotte. “Your ex-girlfriend is attacking the castle again, My Lord,” she told Daniel, sounding bored.
Daniel sighed heavily, like this was something that happened regularly. “Which timeline is she from this time?” he asked in the tone of voice of someone who was annoyed by having to deal with something trivial.
Eliza shrugged. “How should I know? She was wearing a helmet and riding a dragon at the head of an army. I didn’t really stop to ask questions.”
Daniel's eyebrow rose, as if involuntarily impressed. To make up for it, he just remarked, “As long as she doesn’t have my past self with her. The one thing I’ve never done is seen my past self die. I’d rather not find out what happens if it does.”
“What, evil overlord’s not interested in gaining all human knowledge?” Charlotte scoffed. She wasn’t sure if that had been the line exactly, but it was close enough.
Daniel gestured irritably. “Yes, but not enough to clean up more paradoxes. Or find out what happens when someone who’s technically immortal dies before becoming technically immortal while his technically immortal future self is on the scene.” He stepped away from the cauldron he'd been hovering over for all of his scenes, and Vanished it with another wave of his wand. At the same time, Gray and Jera stopped sustaining the menacing light lines around Charlotte, 'freeing' her from whatever imprisonment they had represented. “Well, back to the tallest tower with you. Or perhaps the dungeons might be safer, until we deal with this dragon.”
Finally standing in a genuinely stiff way, because she hadn’t had time to do her cooling down stretches after the ballet, Charlie stood slowly from her seat. “Make someone change the featherbeds first,” she ordered. “I haven’t been down there since the last time I set off one of the anti-escape spells you put on my tower.”
Daniel chuckled with the memory. “That was what I’d call an explosion. But yes. Minion,” he pointed at Eliza, to distinguish the minion being addressed from the dozens that must surely be waiting just off stage, “do that. Keep her with you.”
Following his commands, Eliza and Charlotte exited the stage. Daniel sighed heavily again. “No rest for the wicked. It’s hard, being an evil overlord!” He pushed back his sleeves, held his wand at the ready and advanced off-stage, ready to take on the dragon and the army.
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The Group Play
'No Rest For The Wicked' Part Two
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The Group Play
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