Harry Williams

Boy, it’s been a whirlwind for the past couple of months! Teaching 3 classes at Bradley University has really kept me busy, and on top of that, I auditioned for Singing in the Rain at the end of March, and landed the role of “Cosmo.” In the 1952 movie, the role was originally played by Donald O’Connor, a master of dance and comedy. The lead role of Don Lockwood is played by John Huerta in our production, and was originally played by Gene Kelly in the movie. John and I joke about how hard it is to try and live up to Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor.

Nevertheless, we have some great help with Jenny Parkhurst, our talented director, and Erica Franken, our mad-tappin, brilliant choreographer. And, boy is this show going to rock! In case you’re not familiar with Singing in the Rain, it’s set back in the 1920’s, right when talking movie picture technology was just coming out. Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont are big name silent movie actors, coming out with a string of romantic movies, always accompanied on piano by Don’s childhood friend, Cosmo Brown.

It’s a good old story about love, romance, movie making, comedy, and of course, dancing. Almost everyone has heard the title song Singing in the Rain, as well as some of the other favorites: “Good Morning,” “Moses Supposes,” “Make Em Laugh,” etc.

The show will be playing at Corn Stock Theatre from May 30 - June 7, at 7:30PM each night. For those of you who haven’t been out to Corn Stock Theatre, it’s a pretty cool set up. The theatre is outdoors inside a large tent, and the audience wraps around 3/4 of the tent. So, the performance goes on up on the trim, which is the 4th side, and also in the middle of the tent, with the audience wrapping around them. So, it’s a closer, more personal feel than other theatres where everyone faces the front stage.

PLUS, it wouldn’t be Singing in the Rain without rain, would it? So, they’ve already rigged a system to make it rain in the tent! I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear it’s going to be really cool.

So, come on out during that week to see Singing in the Rain! Tickets go on sale May 19th. For box office information, or to see the rest of the cast list, go to:

http://www.cornstocktheatre.com/singinintherain.html

Hope to see you there for a fun night of “dancin, and singing in the rain.”

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Well, I was just lectured by my sisters this weekend about how long it has been since I updated my blog (the most recent of many lectures).  I decided that I should probably make some time to post some quick updates, since a lot of things have happened recently.  I don’t have time to write about them now, but I will be writing about some of the things soon.  A quick summary of life recently:

• I’m still working 3 jobs (teaching at Bradley University, working at The Iona Group, and working at my dad’s lawfirm).
• I just finished directing a movie!  For the past 4 months, I wrote and directed The Curse of the Singing Basket, working on it with some friends and a couple of Bradley University students.  We finally put the finishing touches on it a couple of weeks ago.  This has been the main reason I’ve been so busy for the past few months.
• I just auditioned for Singing in the Rain at Corn Stock Theatre, and was cast!  More info to come…
• There are also rumblings of an original cast revival of Forever Plaid at Peoria Players Theatre…

Wow, looks like I have a lot of catching up to do…more coming soon!

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Little Women opens tonight!

In celebration, I’ve uploaded around 80 rehearsal pictures. You can either go to the ‘Photos’ section (link at the top), or you can just click here to go straight to the album. Let me know what you think of the pictures by posting a comment to this article. Also, if you see the show, click the ‘Contact Me’ link at the top of this page, and let me know what you thought of it!

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Boy, life has been crazy these past few weeks, and I apologize for not updating this site.  I’ve been working on several projects, rehearsing every night for Little Women, and started teaching a little over a week ago.  I’m teaching 3 classes this semester:

• Intermediate Multimedia Authoring
• Introduction to Web Design
• Advanced Flash Development

So, I’ve been really busy gearing up for these classes, and now teaching them.  Plus, Little Women opens tomorrow night!  I promised pictures, so I’ll post those when I get a chance tomorrow.  And, hopefully, once things settle down a little, I’ll be able to post more frequently.

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Just a quick note that tickets for the Peoria Players Theatre production of Little Women are on sale now.

Show dates are February 1-3 & 6-10, 2008.

Go to http://www.peoriaplayers.org to purchase tickets online, or for the box office number where you can call and reserve tickets. Don’t miss this show - it’s going to be a great production! I’ll be posting some rehearsal pictures soon.

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Disney is continuing its tradition of porting it’s classics over to live theatre shows. Beauty and the Beast opened on Broadway in 1994, and ran over 5,000 performances between 1994 and 2007 and is now being performed all over the country. The Lion King has probably been their biggest hit, playing on Broadway for 10 years, performing for 45 million people in 63 different countries, and winning 10 awards. Aladdin has a 45 minute Broadway-caliber show at Disney’s Great Adventure in California. We can’t forget the High School Musical phenomenon that has taken over the country. Finally, Mary Poppins opened on Broadway last year, and we actually got to see it on our trip at the end of last year. It was amazing!

So, now Disney has announced that the Little Mermaid is coming to Broadway, set to open in January 10, 2008. In the article, Alan Menken (Little Mermaid Composer) states:

“Once we brought BEAUTY AND THE BEAST to Broadway there was an open question about what (show) might be next,” Menken explains. “THE LITTLE MERMAID always seemed like a natural except for under the sea. How in the world do you deal with that? Nobody could quite figure it out.” Once Director Francesca Zambello entered the scene, “She and George Tsypin (scenic designer) had a wonderful concept for how to do the under the sea aspect,” Menken says. He describes the underwater portion of the set as “very open, very translucent. It really deals well with under the sea and then shifting to above the sea. I won’t give away how any of those things are done and in fact, in some cases I barely understand how they’re done. But they are beautiful.”

This is a pretty cool opening, and they are trying something new. PlaybillRadio.com is hosting a “Virtual Opening Night” for the Little Mermaid. At 9PM EST, they will be broadcasting the opening of the Little Mermaid on their website, along with backstage interviews with some of the cast and with Alan Menken.

If you’re available at 9PM EST (8PM CST), this would probably be pretty cool to listen to (unless you’re extremely lucky and have tickets to the Little Mermaid’s Opening Night). If I didn’t have Little Women practice, I’d definitely be tuning in.

Check out the article about the Virtual Opening Night.

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About 2 years ago, I moved into a house near Bradley with 3 other guys. 2 of the guys were FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) missionaries at Bradley, and the other guy was a teacher at Peoria Notre Dame High School. We were a multi-ethnic group - a Lebanese, Egyptian, Indian & Polish. It only lasted for a little while because they all moved away the next year, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted! Sadly, the only picture I have of all 4 of us is a picture that I took with my cell phone a few days before the fellowship broke up. Click on the picture for a larger version.

I’m going down to Texas on Wednesday for the first national FOCUS conference. Since I was going to be traveling anyway, I decided to leave early and spend a few days in Colorado with Anand (my old roommate - the one standing on my right in the picture). Now, I love the Midwest - I’ve lived there my whole life. But, there’s something really cool about visiting the mountains. Anand probably thinks I’m weird because whenever we’re driving around, I’m like a rubberneck, always looking around in wonder at the different landscapes and sights.

I first saw Colorado almost 6 years ago on my first Bradley Chorale Choir tour. That was quite a trip, and was the first time I saw mountains. I’ll have to scan some pictures from that trip because I wasn’t shooting digital pictures at the time. Nothing could describe the awesome sight of seeing my first mountain after driving for days through flat plains.

It was kind of the same feeling this time. We’re driving to Anand’s house, and directly ahead, you see these mountains shooting up to the sky. It’s an awesome sight! I’ve created a new gallery for Colorado pictures, so click here to check it out. I’ll be adding to it over the next couple of days.

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Now that you’ve been introduced to one of the fun projects that we did in college, I thought I’d put up the other Christmas themed project that I produced. This was the final project to my Audio Production class, which was a lot of fun. In the class, we did project on the old reel to reel tape, produced 30 second commercials, and finally got to choose to do a dramatic reading or a radio drama.

I chose to do a radio drama of A Christmas Carol, since it was due around Christmas time. So, I got my friends, Jeff & Mike, to help me out, especially because of Mike’s voice talents. And, I brought my younger sisters into the recording studio to do some of the children’s voices.

If you’ve ever looked at the original Christmas Carol script, it’s huge! It was over 60 pages when I printed the whole thing out. Since I wanted to actually finish the project, I cut it down to about 20 pages, trying to keep the whole essence of the story. Of course, with Mike’s voice talent, we again went with certain themes with his voices. See if you can figure out what voices he was trying to imitate for the various characters.

Click on the links below to listen to this Christmas classic. Or, click on the picture to view a larger version.

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI (Outtakes)

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Since it’s been a while since my last post, I wanted to make this one really worth it. So, in the spirit of Christmas, I dug through my old projects, and pulled out one of my audio projects that I did my senior year at Bradley.

Well, let me back up. Back in college, during my sophomore year at Bradley, I met 2 of my best friends - Jeff & Mike, who were both multimedia majors with me (that’s a recent picture of us). We had really similar interests, were in many of the same classes together, and used to hang out a lot. People used to call us the Three Amigos, since we were always hanging out and working on projects in the labs together (during finals, we would practically live in the multimedia labs - more on that in another post).

There was a lot of work to do, but we would always have a lot of fun working on projects. One of the projects that I had to work on was a final electronic music project for one of my music classes. I had to create a recording incorporating voice and creating all the music.

Since I wanted to do something fun for this project, I decided to do a Muppet version of the classic poem ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas. Jeff, Mike & I are all huge Muppet fans. So, I wrote up a script depicting a “reading” of this poem by various Muppet characters, did the recording, and created all of the music. And, I knew that Mike was VERY talented with recording voice characterizations, so I recruited him to help out with the project. Listen to the project, and I think you’ll be pretty amazed at the wide variety of voices that he can do. I obviously do the initial announcer voice, and I do one other voice (see if you can tell which one!), but Mike did all of the others.

The whole “reading” is around 10 minutes, but it’s very entertaining. So, click here to take a listen and let me know what you think!

Oh, and one other thing - if you like articles on my blog, then please spread the word.  Click on the link at the bottom of any post labeled “Share This.”  There, you can share that post to any of the social networks, or you can click on the “Email” tab to email the post to someone.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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Let me just say that I love Amazon.com. Ever since they became popular, I’ve pretty much always bought my books from them. They “get it” with web site design - the site is very easy to use, and they have some great features. I’ve recently started using their wish list feature just to keep track of what books I want to purchase in the future. When I want to place an order, I can order all of them, and have them show up at my door 3-5 days later. No, this isn’t a commercial for Amazon, I just think they run a great business.

That’s why I’m really interested in seeing how well their latest product - the Amazon Kindle - is going to sell. I went to Amazon’s home page yesterday and there was a letter from the CEO talking about the Kindle. So, I checked out the page for it, and it sounds interesting. Check out the page here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA

Basically, the Kindle is a new wireless reading device for reading electronic books. The difference between this device and other devices is that this device is not backlit, and is supposed to be very easy on the eyes, not like a computer. You can wirelessly download books for about $10 direct from Amazon, and can also subscribe and receive magazines, newspapers, and blogs directly to the device. Then, once downloaded, you can store and read these books at will. It’s supposed to be great, especially for travelers, with around 88,000 books available for download, and it can store up to 200 titles at one time.

There have been other eBook reading devices before this one, and PDA’s have also had the option to store eBooks. However, they’ve usually been hard on the eyes like using a computer screen, and none of them have had the vast power of Amazon behind them. The Kindle is pretty pricey at $400, and it has mixed reviews so far.

But all of these things make this device really interesting to me. I’ll be really curious to see how this device does. I doubt this or any device will totally replace books. There’s really nothing that can compare to reading a real, physical book. But, technology like this could become popular with people, especially in the mobile society today where people travel a lot.

What do you guys think? Would you buy a device like this?

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