The last weekend in July is traditionally the weekend of the Basingstoke Tappers & Jazz Dance Company’s  summer show at the Anvil Theatre. Back in January the dance company’s director set the theme for the show and started developing ideas for routines.   The dance classes now will start to incorporate the development of the routines now.

As the webmaster and for the last few years stage manager my involvement comes in short bursts.  Currently the site is getting updated with show details, the information has to be disseminated to various (largely) community sites.  This is a slow process as these sort of sites and their impact change year on year.  This year I’ve been using Google Alerts to help identify when sites get updated and how quickly Google picks up the information.

Once all of that is done, it is increasingly quiet, largely because my other half is going to classes five days a week plus performances for community organisations to help with PR. Then at the start of July (a couple of weeks before the show) it all goes a little crazy. I need to attend the rehearsals so I can see how things should work and produce a set of notes for the crew. Plus contributing with some media for the dancers and last year late on I had additional video media to produce for the show.

Things don’t end after the performance. Between shows if there are any little hitches from the previous night these get worked through – which could be a technical job for the crew with the scenery, or rehearsing part of a routine for the Tappers. Then there is the get out – stripping all the staging, lighting, sound (and there is a lot of cabling for a 20 piece Jazz Orchestra plus mics for picking up the tap from the stage plus monitors for the sound around the Orchestra and dancers), band, scenery that is being ‘flown’ in from above need to be backed and shipped out of the theatre straight after the last show.

If you would like to know more about the Basingstoke Tappers – go here. To book tickets with the Anvil Theatre go here.

Another book being made available to read, but restricted to read on line. Use the link to get to the book.

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

Looks like monster has been moonlighting as a model again, this time for Tesco’s as you can see in the picture. Last photo shoot I know of …

The comedian Lenny Henry is on classic form with a new Radio 4 comedy called “Rudy’s Rare Records” (listen to it from the BBC here). The premise of the show is that Lenny plays a classical record shop owner in London, however when his father reportedly has a heart attack he is drawn back to Birmingham with his son to help his father Rudy, and run Rudy’s  Reggae record shop.

Lenny’s character (Adam) is almost an inversion of his late 80s Delbert Wilkins with a dose of his Chief character from the 90s comedy – completely obsessive to the point of being anal about classical music, a completely elitist thinker. At the same time his son (Richie) is very much an updated Delbert.

If the first episode is anything to go by the next four Tuesdays will be very funny after the news.

For the BBC page on the series go here and Lenny’s own site here.

A slightly different Top 10 to the usual ones when it comes to music, the Top 10 soundtracks can be found at SoundtrackNet : Top 10 of 2007.

I managed to catch a film I’ve been meaning to see for sometime on a flight to Orlando, that being Rendition (IMDB here).  The film certainly lived up to expectation, with a fine performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, and brilliantly muted Reese Witherspoon.  The heart of the story is the question of whether Rendition achieves anything?  As Douglass (Gyllenhaal) says in thevfilm : In all the years you’ve been doing this, how often can you say that we’ve produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies. 

Recommended viewing.