I’m not quite as “angy” as I was last Friday – but today was another non-stop fun-filled whirl as I tried to get the one group locked down. Still waiting for the “disorganizer” (the secretary responsible for the crapload of inconsistencies otherwise known as the group file) to get back to me with the final travel dates and plans of a couple of people. I did get some relatively final lists (with cancellations I’d never heard about before today) faxed to the hotels and talked to some actual human contacts at each hotel.

International wasn’t so bad – two more of my cow-orkers are taking calls for “new” international trips and referring anything strange or challenging to me, so they’ll cut their teeth on the easy roundtrips to Paris and so on. I had a chance to get a lot more caught up on the backlog and get back to people with fare calculations from the rate desk. More to do tomorrow.

Last night’s early show at the Marriott Theater
was a disappointment. It was a production of “Ain’t Misbehavin'”, and we got stuck in traffic and missed the first 2 numbers. RATS. However, after we were seated and during a lull between numbers, Earle leaned over and said “You didn’t miss much.” I was surprised to hear that, as the Marriott productions are consistently excellent given the limitations of theater-in-the-round.

However, the problem wasn’t the production, it was the cast and the book. There were some great singers, and every one of them was fighting to be heard above the others, and all of them were over-singing to the point where one female singer sounded just horrible. I’m not sure if that was supposed to be a “character” point, but it was a nasty shrill grating overtone that was like nails on a chalkboard. Eeeesh!

There were a couple of numbers that were really great and even show-stoppers, but most of the time I was just checking the program to see how many songs until the end of the act. My problem is that I need a plot in order to get caught up in a show, and “Ain’t Misbehavin'” is a loose collection of songs without a hint of a narrative. It was really well staged – they dressed up the band in vintage attire and lit them from below so that they were part of the action (normally they’re invisible in the glassed in “orchestra booth” on one side of the theater). The costumes were pretty good, but not quite up to their usual standard. The cast were all new to the Marriott, and maybe that was the problem – no familiar faces. It’s not like there isn’t a pretty deep talent pool of black performers on the Marriott roster – the guy that played Pooh-Bah in Hot Mikado, for example, and the guy that sang Jim in Big River. For women, there are some dynamite ladies that were in the cast for both Big River and Elmer Gantry. But no, they cast from national touring companies and from both coasts. Kind of a shame, because part of the fun of a Marriott show is recognizing members of the ensemble stepping up and getting a big lead part when you’ve seen them playing bit parts with one line and part of a song in previous shows.

Maybe nobody suitable from the “repertory company” was available for the full run of this show – but somehow I don’t think so, and they were casting people with impressive resumes. They tried to connect to the audience during the show, but it was just a little too over the top (and screechy) for me.

Dinner afterward was considerably more enjoyable than the show, and still we had service problems. We were at the Weber Grill (yes, there’s a restaurant run by the people that make the round, enameled grills). In hindsight, I should have ordered the fish and eaten half as much. But it was a fun evening with much laughing and catching up. We took along some printouts of Steve and David and yours truly in our mudbaths to prove that we’d actually done it. The evening ended up much better than it began.