Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors

This past Sunday, I saw my first live stage play in years (the last one was The Book of Mormon). It was called Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors.

It was at Magenta Theater, which is the main community theater here in Vancouver, Washington. Confession time: I had never been there before! So I wanted to go mostly as a recon mission to check out the venue and see a live production there, possibly in hopes of trying to rent it for the Joel Suzuki stage play.

But it turned out to be more than recon; I had a great time. The play was a lot of fun, and the actors knocked it out of the park (just five of them performed all the roles, which was cool to see since I'm planning on having most of the actors in my play do something similar). I also got a few good ideas, like utilizing more incidental music and sound effects as well as employing stage hands to move stuff around (I cannot believe I did not consider that before).

I attended the final showing, so unfortunately you've missed out if you haven't seen it already. But hopefully it'll make a return engagement next year (or if you're not in the Vancouver, WA/Portland, OR area, maybe it's currently playing somewhere near you)!

Digitech Drop

At Second Player Score practice this past Sunday, our bass player Dan brought over something that could be a game-changer.

It's a guitar effects pedal called Digitech Drop (or I guess its full name is Digitech Drop Polyphonic Drop-tune Pitch-Shift Pedal, which is quite the mouthful). What it lets you do is lower your guitar or bass tuning by half-steps, all the way down to a full octave, with a simple turn of a dial instead of physically (and painstakingly) retuning the instrument one string at a time.

At first, we were going to apply it to the Joel Suzuki musical stage play, to accommodate different vocal ranges of the yet-to-be-cast actors. But then I had an epiphany and realized that hey, we could use it to make some of our songs easier to sing for ME.

You see, over time I've found some of our own songs harder and harder to sing, mostly because of notes in the upper areas of my vocal register. Why I wrote those songs like that, I am not sure, but I do know that I had an easier time singing them when (1) I was younger, (2) we practiced and performed more frequently and for longer durations. But lately, it had gotten to the point where my voice would give out in the middle of sets, so I started making set lists comprised exclusively of songs that never hit the extremes of my range (which excluded a lot of our better material).

But when we practiced with this pedal, we were able to lower the key that the songs were in, and voila! I was able to hit all the notes easy-peasy without stress or strain. Now, I actually kind of want to play more shows (hassles regarding lugging gear and staying up past my bedtime notwithstanding). And I mean, I know we could have gotten the same effect by using additional guitars that were already detuned, but when you're a poor indie local band like us, who wants to mess around with carrying extra instruments and dealing with truss rod adjustments, etc. (something that probably only guitar and bass nerds will understand)? Instead, with just a tiny effects pedal that costs around $150-200, we have unlocked a whole new level of potential.

Does this mean you'll be seeing more frequent announcements for SPS gigs? We shall see!

Stage Play Status Update

Here's the latest status update on Joel Suzuki and the Wavemakers, the musical stage play adaptation of Volume One.

- Wrote out the arrangements for the stage play versions of the songs so that I'd have something to actually look at during band practice instead of trying to perform them from memory.

- Finished reading Writing Musical Theater (very helpful, highly recommended).

- Watched what seemed like a relatively low-budget production of Rent. At least it seemed relatively low-budget when compared to the other stuff I've seen recently (Frozen, Hamilton). But it was still excellent, as the performances, script, and music really carried it. Makes me hopeful for what we might be able to accomplish with little money (although I think we will have some pretty sweet special effects regardless).

- Speaking of money, I came up with a preliminary budget. I think we can pull this off for around $20-25k, which is about what we spent on Hold My Beer. Fortunately we are saving on things like rights and royalties (since I wrote the script and music), a director (which is me), and the pit band (my band). Still, if we can raise more, that would be great, since I would like to pay our cast and crew--for which my goal is to employ as much autistic and neurodivergent talent as possible--as much as possible.

- Finally worked up the courage to watch the video footage of the table read we did in late August. Everyone did a great job; that's not what I was nervous about. I was wondering how the script, story, and flow would sound. But it was actually quite good! And I know I'm probably biased, but I do tend to be my own worst critic, so.

- Booked a visit to PHAME in Portland, a nonprofit performing arts school that serves the intellectual and developmental disability community. It won't happen until November because part of the I-5 freeway between Vancouver, WA and Portland has been shut down for five weeks, but when I do go, I'm hoping I can find people who are interested in working on the play.

- Set our opening date as January 2028 and emailed a local venue to see if they will rent to us. Fingers crossed!