Harry Williams

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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Monsignor Luigi Giussani, was a well known Italian priest, known for founding the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation. He was fairly prolific in his writing up to his death in 2005. His writings usually cause me to stop and pause in life, especially this part that I read recently:

“The great adventure of human life is to reiterate that Man’s (Christ’s) proposal and to verify it. This is the great adventure that makes life and history pregnant with meaning, rather than a series of events. This is the great adventure that frees us from the feeling of futility and builds on the power of hope.”

This paragraph especially jumped out at me after seeing the movie Bella. For those of you who haven’t heard, Bella is the first movie by the Catholic film company Metanoia. The name Metanoia means “Change in one’s way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion,” and it seems that’s what they’re trying to do - impact culture by helping people to change their lives for the better. The movie opened in the big cities first, and it finally made its way to here last Friday, opening at the Kerasotes Theater in Pekin.

Bella, which is Latin for “beautiful,” is a perfect example of Metanoia’s mission. It’s about a day in the lives of two people, and how their encounter changes their lives forever. It is a very well made film, the acting is very touching and sincere, and the core story is phenomenal. The Christian worldview is represented very well in the movie, and yet, they pull the whole thing off without becoming preachy or lecturing.

I think every Christian around should go and see the movie for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s made by a Christian company dedicated to making quality films. That’s a rarity, especially in today’s day and age, and we should support companies trying to create quality entertainment. Secondly, they’re doing it without becoming preachy, which is important if you want to reach audiences today.

Thirdly, it’s a really good film. It’s not a shoot-em-up thriller (which I sometimes like) or adventure / super-hero movie (which I love), but it’s one of those films that sort of just stops you dead in your tracks and causes you to think. Think about your life, about what you do, and about how you go about your daily lives. It makes you really see life as a “great adventure…pregnant with meaning, rather than a series of events” as Giussani says.

So, if you haven’t seen it yet, I would HIGHLY recommend checking out Bella for all of those reasons. It is rated PG-13 because of a few serious thematic elements (they do tackle issues of death and abortion), so I’d use discretion with taking kids. But for everyone else, just go see it. I doubt you will be disappointed.

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Boy, was it a busy weekend!  Last night, my dad and I got back from the Information Marketing SuperConference in St. Louis.  Most people hear that I’m going to a conference, and they say “Oh, that should be fun,” thinking it’s a fun conference from 9 to 5 with after hour parties and such. Well that’s definitely not the case with these conferences!

They are fun, but in a different way. You get information thrown at you for 4 days straight about marketing, running businesses, etc. Every day starts at 8 AM and goes until 9 PM or later, with about an hour off for lunch and dinner. So, these are far from relaxing conferences. But we sure learn a lot.

One of the speakers at the conference was Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity.com. He had a really interesting story and presentation telling about his experience with working with AmericanAirlines, and his move to create Travelocity.com, which revolutionized the travel industry. When you think about it, booking travel today is vastly different from 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, you usually had to go through a travel agent. But, after the start of Travelocity and other sites, 10,000 travel agents were put out of business, and today, the majority of people research and book airfare online.

His talk was a good example of one of the sayings that kept reoccurring throughout the conference - the only thing that we can count on is change. It’s an old saying, but definitely very true, especially today. Living in the Internet Age, things are changing faster than they have ever changed before. Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and blogs are just the big online phenomenons that have cropped up. Digg, del.icio.us, flickr, Technorati, and RSS are some of the lesser known technologies. Change is in the air, and business that adapt are the ones doing the best in this new world.

Speaking of YouTube, they showed some quick clips before starting some of the sessions at this conference. One of the funniest ones was from YouTube. Click here to view it.

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The lights blinding your eyes, your heart visibly beating in your chest, the adrenaline pumping - yes, it was audition time this past weekend. This past weekend, I auditioned for the February production of Little Women at Peoria Players Theatre. As I was sitting there during auditions, I realized what the American Idol judges must feel like. Person after person gets up on stage and tries to catch the director’s eye as they show what they can do.

I’ve been performing all of my life, since the age of 3, and it’s funny how you still get nervous every time you audition or perform. Granted, it’s MUCH better now, as I’m usually well prepared by the time I get up in front of people. But, you still get that nervous, tense feeling as your body knows a performance is coming up. The trick is to channel that energy into the performance, and use it to actually help you perform.

Anyway, I auditioned on Sunday afternoon, and then was called back on Sunday night to sing one of the solos for the part and to read some of the lines. Later on, the email was sent out - and, I made it! I will be playing the part of Theodore Lawrence III, also known as Laurie, the lead guy in the show. Yes, it’s the story about a girl named Jo, and a boy named Laurie. Maybe names were different back in 1868.

This will be a really neat show for me to be a part of, since all of us read the book as kids. The show is a musical, and it opened on Broadway in 2005. The story follows the classic Louisa May Alcott story, and the music was written by Jason Howland with lyrics by Mindi Dickstein.

The complete cast list for Little Women is:

Jo March - Jennifer Gordon
Marmee - Barb Couri
Laurie - Harry Williams
Meg - Rebecca Meyer
Amy - Hope Grandon
Beth - Stephanie Meyer
Professor Bhaer - Dave Schick
Mr. Brooke - Bruce Colligan
Aunt March - Pat White
Mr. Laurence - Bruce White
Mrs. Kirk - Sarah Robins
Hag - Mary Keltner
Troll - Carole Rogers
Rodrigo - Joseph Pluth
Braxton - Andrew Werner
Clarissa - Andrea Williams
Clarissa’s sister - Katie Meyer
Knight - Charles Brown

If you haven’t heard of the Little Women story, check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Women

And for more information about the musical, check out:

http://www.littlewomenonbroadway.com

Just to give you the heads up, Little Women performances will run at Peoria Players Theatre from February 1 - 10, 2008.

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If you want to know what my family is like, just watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding. We’re not like that to a ‘T,’ but we’re pretty darn close. When that movie first came out, we went with my mom and several of her cousins and their families. It was a blast, and it was a good thing that there weren’t many other people in the theater because my family was pretty loud (watch the movie - you’ll understand). What can I say - we’re just an exciting family, and know how to have a lot of fun.

This past Saturday, I helped my cousin and her husband move into their new house. It was fun for me, since I got to hang out with a couple of my cousins as we moved them. It’s even funnier because my cousin’s mother (my aunt) reminds me of the mother from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, so we’re always cracking up when she’s around. Moving is also fun because it’s a challenge playing “Tetris” as my cousin put it, trying to efficiently pack the truck to fit as much as possible, while keeping things safe during the move.

When the dust had settled in the new home, most of their things were safely in it, and just needed to be moved to their proper places. It was finally starting to look like a home by the end of the day when the doorbell rang. My cousin went to answer her door, and it was the neighbor across the street. She was really nice as she welcomed my cousin to the neighborhood, and had brought over a welcoming gift.

They chatted for a few minutes, and when my cousin came back in the house, nobody could believe their eyes. In her hands was a freshly baked bundt cake! There was no flower in the middle (that would have been TOO perfect), but it was a bundt cake nevertheless. What were the odds of THAT happening?! Oopa!

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A couple of weeks ago, my now-16 year old sister Mary received a cell phone from my parents. Since she’s becoming more involved in activities and classes, they thought it best she have a phone. To her and the younger 2 sisters, it’s the coolest thing to have a phone. It’s a new expression of freedom, a sign that she’s more of an adult now, etc.

But the funny thing is that she barely uses it as a phone. She currently uses it more as a camera instead of a phone. And of course, the first thing she did was to put a picture of Zac Efron as the wallpaper on her phone. All 3 of my youngest sisters are crazy about “Zacky Honey” as they call him. And Mary’s birthday last week reflected this as she received CD’s, calendars, and cards all featuring Zac.

Mary loves her Zac cell phone wallpaper, so I decided to give her a nice surprise during her birthday week. One night, I was at my parents house alone. I was in the kitchen pouring myself a drink when I noticed that Mary had forgotten her phone on the counter. Well, of course I couldn’t resist, so I opened it up and started snapping pictures, until I finally captured the perfect pose. Have you ever tried taking a picture of yourself with a cell phone. It’s pretty difficult! Getting the right picture DID take awhile, but what are brothers for?

I set the new, beautiful picture as the phone background and went about my business. When Mary got home that night, I was in the kitchen reading the paper. She rushed over to her phone, saying how she couldn’t believe how she forgot it. As she opened it up to see if she had missed any calls, I could barely keep from smiling. But the scream as she noticed the different picture was priceless and well worth the effort. I thought it was a good replacement, but she apparently differed in opinion as she quickly swapped it back to “Honey.” Oh well…I had at least performed my required brotherly duty of harassing my sisters.

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