Ned Donovan - Ithaca ‘12

Hey everyone,

As you can tell from what’s written as the title of this post, I am part of a new show!  It will be going up the weekend after Halloween, on Friday and Saturday the 7th and 8th of November.  It will be a midnight run, running from 11PM to 1AM on both nights.  This is both to show that it is on par with Rocky Horror Picture Show in terms of campy Halloween value, and to make sure that people can see Evil Dead after seeing Ithaca College’s mainstage production of Andrew Lippa’s Wild Party, and Triple Threat Theatre’s production of Bare.  

What is written above, however, will be the last time that I refer to the title of said show in this post, because a certain rights granting company would not be happy with me to discover that we were putting on this show.  Therefore I will take the minimal list in saying it once, and not say it again.  I will say, however, that this musical is going to be hilarious, offensive, raunchy, and filled with as much cheesy blood and gore as we can muster.

Hey everyone,

This past wednesday at noon marked the end of my first quarter of college, and the beginning of fall break.  I know that I’ve only been here for a couple months…but the break was necessary.  The prep for midterms was deadly, including a night of not sleeping, and another night of basically not sleeping.  It was hell.  Each of my midterms went well I believe, especially Stagecraft.  My favorite final class day would have to be Ballet, however, because after the first 40 minutes or so, we went outside and did improvisational ballet next to the Ithaca pond - the looks we received were priceless.  We also got to see some AWESOME Geese, which stole a lot of our attention.  There was also a guy feeding fish off the bridge over the pond, which was cool because there was a whole swarm of fish going for the nutrigrain bar that he was throwing, however more to the point there were these two or three large catfish that were butting in as well.  They stole our attention as well, and after many tries, I managed to get a picture of the big guy.  You have to look hard to see him, he’s a little below the middle and looks kind of like a leaf.

Hey y’all,

So this weekend marks the closing of Ithaca College’s Mainstage production of the show “The Exonerated”.  This is a show about six people who were convicted guilty and sentenced to death in various parts of the country, and were subsequentially exonerated of all charges before they could be executed.  The show is a commentary on the broken nature of the legal system, and while it doesn’t call for an overhaul, it does seem to call for abolition of the death penalty.

After seeing the show, I don’t believe that I like the show as a whole all that much.  That being said, this production was beautiful, elegant, and utterly heartwrenching.  The entire cast was phenomenal and the direction by Cynthia Henderson just lent itself perfectly to the nature of the script.  Every member of the cast really excelled themselves into the character and told these stories as best as they could.

One of the characters in the show is a man named Kerry Max Cook who was wrongfully accused of raping and murdering a girl in Texas and sentenced to death.  Twenty Two years later he was released after DNA evidence showed that it wasn’t him.  The man who did it was not sentenced to death, and is now out of jail and free.  Tonight, October 11th, Kerry Max Cook was present at the production of “The Exonerated” and stayed afterwards to have a talkback Q and A about his experiences.  This man is amazing folks, he is a wonderful speaker, he is open and honest, and he is truly admirable for standing up and telling us his tale, and allowing us to tell his tale through the show.

Hey everybody,
So this is going to be my first post which we may call “useless”.  However I have in the last few weeks here at Ithaca, encountered some of the funniest theatre-or-music oriented videos I’ve ever seen, and I really feel like I need to share them with you all.  So instead of doing multiple posts about these things, I am just going to post them all.  Please enjoy or not, but they are truly hilarious and will certainly brighten up your day. 

Seth Rudetsky deconstructs and roasts Barbara Streisand:

Seth Rudetsky talks about Barbara Walters:

Rob Paravonian analyzes the Friends themesong and “Every Morning” by Sugar Ray:

Leslie Uggams BUTCHERS “June is Busting Out All Over” (you can stop watching this after the first two times):
 

That’s enough for now, but I will surely post more as the weeks go by.
ENJOY!
~Ned Donovan