Category: Miscellaneous

Does not fit any category. Usually items unrelated to acting.

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A Christmas Carol at Kudzu

I went with Rebecca Coffee (Director of A Christmas Story) and her family to see A Christmas Carol at Kudzu Playhouse last night. Now I am not a critic and I do not plan on starting now. I will say it is worth seeing.

The point of this post is not the play itself, but the actors in the play. I did light and sound tech for this show last year and have throughout the year worked with many of the same actors. So after the show, during the greeting the cast, I received hugs from what seemed like, half the cast (more like a quarter of the cast of 40).

It just show me how close cast members can sometime get. It is very nice to be part of a community of actors who enjoy working together.

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Update: Mid-November

With my new job came a limit on internet time. That’s just the nature of the company I work for.

Anyway, A Christmas Story has just 5 rehearsals before the preview night and opening night. It is slowly coming together, but there are still some things that need work. Mainly, any show with kids lends itself to some level of unpredictability: Will they remember there lines, be in place for their queues, etc.

The part that scares me is not the quantity of lines, half the book, but the fact that as the NARRATOR and being invisible to the rest of the cast, if I forget a line there is no one I can improve with to get back on track. It’s all me. If I loose my place… well.

I always believe that it will happen during a run, that is, that I will forget a line or my place. That way I do not fear it so much. I plan on what to do as much as one can plan on forgetting a line. I may let the cast or director down, but hopefully the audience will not notice… to much.

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MAT Awards 2008 Season

The Metropolitan Atlanta Theatre Awards’ 2008 Season is underway. Kudzu Playhouse has submitted two plays for review. One of them is Breaking Legs. Looking over the award categories, I think BEST ACTOR IN A MINOR SUPPORTING ROLE, PLAY is what I would be looking at in the individual categories. That would be cool.

We have a great cast and I would hope we could get BEST OVERALL PERFORMANCE OF A PLAY.

Take a look at MATs website for more details.

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Been a long time.

I know. It’s been a long time since I have written anything. I have a new business I have been working on called MonaVie. As an incentive to build this business, I would not allow my self to act until this business was well and truly successful. It’s taking time and I sure do miss acting.

So I just need to balance the two. I have got to get back on stage. Acting is just way too much fun not too.

A couple of things to notice. I have changed web hosing companies and also changed the web address. Actor.JayCroft.com is the new acting address. I could not do this at my last hosting company. I really wanted to use WWW.JayCroft.com for many things including acting.

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Website Upgrades

I have just released a major site overhaul. I rewrite most of the site from scratch. When developed this site (blog software excluded) a few years ago, I was learning. I am much better at coding PHP, HTML and CSS. The old site was not very pretty on Internet Explorer.

So, from the ground, up the site is now more dynamic (vs. static) and easier to update page text. For example I don?t have to update the home page with current events. I update a text file, upload it and PHP will get the most current text.

As far as CSS goes, the site is much cleaner code wise. For page layout, coding tables were an easy way to get items to display where you wanted them on the page. All that is gone now. I have gotten much better at CSS and put items where I want them.

Another improvement is to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). These days, it is all about getting traffic to you site and the best way to do that is by being found in Search Engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. I won’t go into details for that, unless you are a developer and have websites of your own, you don’t really care.

The site looks much better and cleaner overall. I just noticed an issue in IE6 and I still have some tweaks I want to include (view larger images, url rewrites, making the blog look just like the rest of my site, etc.).

Overall I am very please with the new site.