"Pay What You Can" Concert Scheduled for Jan. 13.

WHAT: "Living in the Bonus Round 2010," a "pay what you can at the door" concert featuring the music of composer Steve Schalchlin (Shack-lin). Admission: Pay what you can at the door. First come, first served. Also welcome: Well behaved pets that get along with
other animals.

WHY: To benefit St. Clement's food pantry and free veterinary clinic.

WHO: Steve Schalchlin at the piano, Zero Hour's Jim Brochu, a reunion of NY and LA cast members of The Last Session (Michele Mais, currently in Rock of Ages, Stephen Bienskie and Amy Coleman), plus popular NY singers Jennifer Wren and John Fitzgerald.
Plus special unnamed surprise guests.

WHEN: Jan. 13, Wed., at 7pm. House will open at 6:30. Approximate running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.

WHERE: Theatre at St. Clement's. 423 W. 46th St. New York. For info: 212-246-7277.

Bono's Top 10.

In a terrific op-ed piece in the NY Times today, Bono, from the group U2, writes a Top 10 things we can do going forward. One of them, in particular, struck a chord with me: non-violence to end oppression.

Viva la (Nonviolent) Revolución

“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work,” President Obama said in his Nobel acceptance speech, “I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence.”

So, he might have added, are the Germans and Eastern Europeans who came out a couple of months ago to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Wall. And so are the brave Iranians who continue to take to the streets despite the certainty of brutal repression. Like Neda Agha Soltan, they are living (and bleeding and dying) testimony.

The start of the decade ought to be a time for a little bit of hope — not the wispy stuff, but battle-hardened hope, forged in the grim, purposeful spirit of the times. So I’ll place my hopes on the possibility — however remote at the moment — that the regimes in North Korea, Myanmar and elsewhere are taking note of the trouble an aroused citizenry can give to tyrants, and that people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.

But, I add, the next Gandhi doesn't need to be Muslim. It's a role any of us could assume, and should assume, every single day.

My Friend's Daughter Gets Married...

...and it becomes a story in the Washington Post. This image of her in the snow in her wedding dress is stunning. Congrats to everyone involved.

Zero Hour Video Diary #8: Backstage Fun.

Jeramy is starting to get fan mail. He's really on a tear this evening, imitating Jim, confronting me, and telling stories. Oh, and someone bought the painting that Jim did that night for $250, to be donated to the St. Clement's food pantry (which has something to do with the big news about Jan. 13 that I can't tell you about yet).

Top 10 Memorable Moments in 2009.

BroadwayWorld.com just posted the 10 memorable moments you might have missed in 2009. And one of them was:

Jim Brochu begins Zero Hour with his back to the audience as he growls warnings to someone knocking on his studio door. As he turns around, mid-growl, you'll be forgiven if you think you're seeing a ghost. In look, manner and voice his resemblance to the great Zero Mostel is a remarkably accurate recreation.

All About Piper Laurie (and us).

Piper Laurie is profiled in this terrific article by Simi Horwitz in Backstage Magazine. I need to post this to the Zero Hour website, too.

Since I think of her as simply my friend, I keep forgetting that she's one of the world's greatest actresses. She really is. If you ever stumble across one of her movies while channel surfing, you just marvel at her presence.

Piper, at the age of 15, she lied her way into acting classes, and when she was signed to a studio contract, she was appalled at the fact their only interest was in picturing her as an empty headed bimbo with big tits who ate flowers and was princess-like delicate.

(Of course, all of us who love movies love those old images of her in the tight sweaters, looking lustily into the camera. They always painted her as being slightly other-worldly, but with big bazongas in a time when big bazongas were all the rage. What the studios wanted were variations of Marilyn Monroe, of course.)

It pissed her off so much, she tried for a juicy theater part, but was rejected because the producer felt it would ruin the play to, essentially, stick an empty-headed bimbo in the part. She says...

"I was devastated. I flew back to L.A. and decided I had to change the meaning of what Piper Laurie stood for."

Laurie's first major break—and she says she had to "fight for it"—was in a General Electric Theater drama, "The Road That Led Afar," "a beautiful script that someone had stolen for me," Laurie says. "The directors and producers would not meet with me. They said I was not an actress but a sexy bimbo. I pushed my agent to set up a meeting, and they finally did."

Laurie violated all the standards of the era by arriving for her audition with messy hair and no makeup. Indeed, she came dressed for the role—a young hillbilly—instead of sporting the high heels and white gloves that women almost always wore to auditions. "I said I had just come back from horseback riding and didn't have time to change," she recalls. "I put on quite a performance, and when I got home I got a call from my agent, who said the producers changed their mind and I got the part."

Next thing you know, she was making out with Paul Newman and nominated for an Academy Award for her work in "The Hustler."

There's something marvelous about her ability to be absolutely still in a scene. Her husky voice -- it was always husky, and even when they dolled her up in all that 50s movie star tight sweater babe splendor, when she said something, it laid heavy in the air.

But that's acting. In real life, she giggles.

Listening to her work with Jim was something I'll treasure always. She always seems to know how to zoom in on the truth of a scene.

The cool thing about "Zero Hour" is that people constantly tell us they forget they're watching a play. Even Don Myers, our stage manager, said, one night as Jim, in character, was going on about knowing certain dead actors, he thought to himself, "Is Jim old enough to have known those people?" completely forgetting it was just the play. It all feels so real. Like you're actually spending a couple of hours with Zero Mostel.

Jim has the natural qualities of the vaudevillian like Zero and Jim's mentor, David Burns. Piper seems to come from a more Actors Studio technique. (At least, that's how I perceived it. Jim has a natural talent that I don't think can be taught. He doesn't play Zero. He simply becomes Zero. Lynn Lane said she was never so nervous before a show, and was relieved that Jim really brought back her friend, Zero).

Madeleine Gilford, after watching Jim in "Zero Hour" in Norwich at the Spirit of Broadway Theatre, whispered in his ear, "You're a better actor than Zero." Jim would never say that about himself, of course.

The other night, another friend of Jim's sent him a list of things he remembered David Burns used to say while they all sat in Burns' dressing room after Forum. One of them was, "The kid's young, but he's got talent."


NOTE:
Piper and we became friends because she attended, and said she loved, "The Last Session" in Los Angeles, which featured Michele Mais, who's now on Broadway in "Rock of Ages," as Tryshia.

Speaking of that, I'm going to have a big announcement on Monday. We're going to issue a real press release, the whole nine yards.

Just mark down January 13.

7:00 pm

Theatre at St. Clement's.

Pets welcome.

Pay what you can at the door.

Larry Kramer's Life in the Bonus Round.

New York Magazine runs a terrific feature by Jesse Green, catching us up on the great, angry Larry Kramer, whose work is one of the reasons why I'm still alive today.

"...the AIDS work that made Kramer both a hero and a lightning rod for controversy, in particular his co-founding of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982 and, when that ended badly for him, his creation of ACT UP in 1987. Arguably, these organizations were responsible, in their good-cop-bad-cop way, for bringing drugs to market that now make it possible for millions of HIV-positive people to live reasonably normal lives. As a side effect, they also instigated a fundamental shift in the way the public participates in decisions about health policy and pharmaceutical research. His former archenemy, now friend, Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, divides American medicine broadly into two eras: “Before Larry and after Larry.”

SPL's Children of Hate Feature Carolyn Wagner from "William's Song".

Children of Hate, an article on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center, features Carolyn Wagner, who I sang about in "William's Song," recently featured by the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. I never knew any of this about Carolyn's background.

Taking on the Klan
One summer night in 1965, 12-year-old Carolyn Wagner watched as Klansmen bound a young black man to a tree in her father's field, accused him of violating the "sundown" rules in nearby Booneville, Ark., that forbade blacks from staying in town after dark, and lashed him a few times with a bullwhip as he cried out in pain and fear.

It was no different from beatings at other Klan gatherings her father had attended, but what happened next remains vivid in her memory: the Klansmen decided to tie the man to the railroad tracks below the pasture. When they were done, they ambled back to the field to discuss crops and politics. Wagner, a reluctant witness to her father's Klan meetings, couldn't stand it anymore. She stole down to the tracks, used a knife she kept in her boot to slash the rope that bound the man, and told him he could follow the tracks to Fort Smith, the nearest large town.

"That was a turning point," recalled Wagner, now 56 and living in Tulsa, Okla. "I felt like I had made a difference when I was able to cut that man free. I realized I can make a choice to be a passive observer or I can become involved to diminish the harm that they're doing. And that's what I did from that night on, and that's what I'm still doing."

And there's more! She was in Memphis when Martin Luther King was assassinated, after driving her father there to attend the Klan rally opposing King.

In April 1968, Wagner drove him to Memphis to take part in a Klan protest during the sanitation workers strike made famous by the appearance of Martin Luther King Jr. She was there when the civil rights leader was assassinated. In a Memphis newspaper, she read that the Department of Justice was planning a crackdown on the perpetrators of civil-rights era violence. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy two months later, Wagner, then 15, wrote a letter to the FBI accompanied by a list of names and addresses she'd copied from her father's Klan directory. She wanted to get them all arrested. "I included my dad on that list," she said.

Wagner, who used her maternal grandparents' home as the return address, never heard back from the FBI.

Carolyn is in bad health right now. So, everyone who reads this blog, please keep her in your thoughts. I'm so happy I have this moment to cherish, thanks to Teddy Witherington, Kathleen McGuire and the rest of the San Franciso Gay Men's Chorus:

And then, there's William's Song sung by the chorus:

The Brits Love Jim, Too!

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/zerohour-rev.htm

Sometimes it is hard to believe that a writer can fit so much information into a play that lasts only 90 minutes plus interval. Jim Brochu, who also performs, has chosen as his subject a man who, like a cat, seemed to have nine lives - and every one of them worthy of elaboration on stage.

Brochu starts with the advantage that he manages to look and sound like Zero Mostel, effortlessly catching the quirky mannerisms and Jewish intonations of the comedian turned actor.

This is a performance of ironies. A play about an archetypal Jew is performed in a church. Add to that Mostel's most famous performance came in Mel Brooks' The Producers, an experience that its star hated from start to finish...

Jim Brochu paces the story well, gives his audience lots of laughs and then hits them in the solar plexus with the bad times. This solo show has already won awards out of town and deserves to augment them in New York.

A Very Nice Christmas Present

http://www.onoffbroadway.com/2009/12/best-and-worst-in-2009-new-york-theater.html

The best solo shows included Will Ferrell in "You're Welcome America: A Final Evening with George W. Bush," Coleman Domingo in "A Boy and His Soul," Jim Brochu in "Zero Hour" and Carrie Fisher in "Wishful Drinking."

Best One-Person Shows:

1. Wishful Drinking (Roundabout Theatre Company)

2. You're Welcome America: A Final Evening with George W. Bush (Broadway)

3. A Boy and His Soul (Vineyard Theatre)

4. Humor Abuse (Manhattan Theatre Club)

5. Zero Hour (Theater at St. Clement's)

Dear reader,

One of the difficult aspects of this blog is that whenever we do a new show, the blog becomes a bit of an extension of the production. A new review comes out. I post it. Or there's an event. So, it gets a little boring. Sorry.

Also, I go for long stretches of the day where I'm not connected to anything electronic. I'm not a Luddite. I know that private time, alone time, needs to carved out.

So, when I do finally sit down to write a blog entry, the time is short. And I don't know what's personal and what's not. For instance, when we get a great review, it's very PERSONAL to us. We are rejoicing.

But when one posts these things, it just looks like promotion.

Boring.

People have been asking me about my music. So, in case I forgot to mention it, mark Jan. 13, 7pm on your calendar. It'll be a "pay what you can" concert, with very special guests. So, everyone can afford it.

I haven't played an actual concert in New York in forever, not since the big Last Session night 11 years ago. We did Big Voice, but I haven't just sat in front of an audience, with a piano, in concert, since then. I'm going to make an official press release for after the new year. So, I don't want to discuss it too much here.

Speaking of Jim, he thought he looked bad in the sequence where he's telling the story of the blackout. That's bad editing on my part. You know, these video diaries are my hobby. Putting them together helps me think. And time is also my enemy on them. In fact, I mis-numbered "Snow Day," calling it 5 when it was 7.

Before every show, Jim has a ritual, like many professional stage actors. He arrives at least an hour early to the theater and just sits on the dark set. It gives him a chance to feel the room, power down, focus and prepare for two hours of being Zero Mostel.

He also walks the set, checking to make sure everything is exactly as it's supposed to be. It makes him feel safe.

In the video, Jeramy talks about how the first thing he, as stage manager, remembers to set is the glass of pencils.

That's because the other night it was in the wrong place. Jim got up to move to the pencils, didn't see them, got confused, lost his place in the script, and jumped two pages, which he then had to reinsert later because an "act two pay-off" needed the "act one set-up."

For the stage managers running lights and doing sound cues, this presented a problem because, once he doubled back to get the next pages, they had to flip back in their books, too, in case a cue was called for during those lines.

Also, a phone ring was imminent. They didn't know if he would find his way to the exact cue or not -- and since the call is an interruption of a stream of dialogue, hitting it too early could throw everything off.

So, every night, Jim comes out front and sits in the chair in the dark and thinks through the whole play. He thinks I made look like crazy ol' grandpa out on the front porch disturbing the kids, which is, by the way, a role he'd relish."

So, he was doing his pre-show meditation prep, the crew had finished early, we knew a blizzard was arriving. It was a rare moment of perfect calm. I grabbed the camera. You know you have a happy team when the crew comes early enough for moments like this to happen.

Today is matinee day. An Internet reader is coming to the matinee with her mom. Then, tonight, we're taking the crew to Sardi's for Christmas dinner (actor's menu, of course!).

Christmas Day, Jim has two shows, and then two shows Saturday, and one on Sunday.

Now, I'm gonna start planning "Living in the Bonus Round 2010."

What a great time for new year.

Mark Evanier Remembers Arnold Stang.

Arnold Stang died. He had one of the greatest voices ever committed to film or TV. It was both immediately identifiable, uneasily imitated, and always, always hilarious. A sadsack Daffy Duck.

Mark Evanier, whose blog is an essential, tells his story here.

He was a joy to work with. The only direction I gave him — the only direction you could give a guy like that — was, "Try to sound like Arnold Stang." He did so with ease, like he'd been doing it all his life and he was perfect. He was also gracious enough to record a message for my answering machine.

While I was recording with Arnold, Eddie Lawrence arrived. You may not know Eddie's name but he's a wonderful character actor and comedian who did a series of much-quoted records as "The Old Philosopher." His catch-phrase was, "Hey, is that's what bothering you, Bunky?" Anyway, he and Arnold were longtime pals, and when Arnold and I were done with his cartoon and he exited the booth, he and Eddie embraced.

Then Arnold looked him in the eye and sounding as serious as Arnold Stang could possibly sound, he pointed to me and said, "Eddie, don't give this young man any trouble. He's a fine director and you just do everything he says."

Eddie promised he would. That wasn't good enough for Arnold. He added, "If you give him any crap, I'll come back here and kick your ass." Then he handed me his pager number and said, "Remember...if he gets out of line, call me and I'll come back and kick his ass." This wasn't necessary but there was one moment when Eddie was giving me a little problem and I had to threaten, "I'll call Arnold." He immediately apologized and agreed to do it the way I wanted. The power of an Arnold Stang threat.

The notion of anyone being afraid of Arnold Stang is so wonderfully absurd. Thanks, Mark, for that story. Go to his site for videos and a sound clip.

Zero Hour in NY 7: Snow Day

Anticipating the first big snow storm of the season, we introduce Taylor and then spend time chatting on the stage of Zero Hour with the Jim Brochu and crew. Hilarious bits: Don teaching Steve how to do the pre-show announcements, and Jeramy imitating Jim answering the phone as Zero.



(Video is mislabeled "#5" but changing it is too much of a hassle, so it'll just have to stay as it is.)

A Good Day of Rest.

I don't think I left the bed all day long yesterday. I even called Mark Janas and told him, even though the streets had been cleared and transportation around the city was good, that I was going to, regretfully, miss the Salon last night.

Readers who expressed concern don't need to worry. This was all preventative. It was a case of me listening to my body. I have just learned, over the years, when I've pushed myself too hard -- and I had hit the wall. So, as we learned in our literature, I listened and I obeyed. It went against every impulse, of course. I would rather have been at the church and the Salon.

But, enough is enough. Opening this show has taken a big toll. Jim (and I) have been going from promotional event to promotional event, and though I tend to stay backstage during his performances (usually sleeping on the couch or reading a book), it's stressful and exhausting to be always on the go.

Steinbeck was particularly happy that I just cuddled up with him all day. I don't think he ever stopped purring. I love that cat so much.

And it paid off. Today I feel reinvigorated and rested.

Steve is Staying Home Today.

I never miss a "performance," but this morning Jim talked me into staying home. I was supposed to sing for the Sunday morning service at St. Clement's. But, last night, the snow storm hit just as we were leaving the theater after the evening performance.

Jim, however, will go on as Zero today.



When I wrote to Rev. DeChamplain, I simply told her that my immune system, as strong as I feel from day to day, just isn't up to this. I know. I played the AIDS card. I hate doing it. But I have come to respect the fact that I have limitations. I don't like it. Anyone who knows me knows I never turn down a chance to sing.

So, I'm staying warm, and I'm taking it very easy today.

Jim, however, will be at the theater. He will go on!

Friends of Zero Mostel, a Panel Discussion.

If you're a theater lover, I think you will enjoy this stimulating discussion about Zero Mostel held at the Barnes & Noble book store at Lincoln Center in New York. So much theater history here, and frank talk about how Zero could be a very challenging person to work with, and to be around.

Famed lyricist of "Fiddler on the Roof," Sheldon Harnick, actress Frances Sternhagen, Lynn (Mrs. Burton) Lane, Louise Kerz Hirschfeld, Jim Brochu and host, Peter Filichia.