Had my least favorite brand of meeting the other day - a get-together with an angry student about why they've decided to leave the school. I must confess I'm not predisposed to be effective in this type of thing - I hate the idea of "convincing" someone to stay at BHP, and would much rather spend a precious hour helping someone who feels great about staying. This particular student, a 5-year veteran, was seething with anger about the way certain staff members had handled a project that she was recently part of. The list of grievances seemed to consist of the usual bullshit that has been present for every theatre production I've ever done: this personality didn't match with that, such-and-such an email was misinterpreted, so-and-so said such-and-such would happen and it didn't, an argument about who should clear sets or props. Yawn. I mean, YAWN! Most of it revolved around two people who work for BHP/Camelot - let's call them A and B. It was a real festival of what Milton entitled in Dreams Into Action, "Blame Heaven."

So I asked the student to tell me the story again, but with the caveat that she couldn't mention either A or B. She would only be allowed to tell me what she did wrong, not what other people had done wrong. Milton's definition of responsibility: "Here's what I did to screw up, and here's what I'm going to do to fix it." Ouch. That's a bitch, right? Well - she wasn't having much of that. The best I got was a polite version of that distinct brand of non-responsibility, which basically goes like this: "I take responsibility for not recognizing earlier that the people who fucked me over were total assholes." There are innumerable variants of this non-responsibility version of responsibility, but that's the bottom line of all of them.

So, the meeting was a total failure - couldn't move this student an inch. Hate that! I guess the only thing to do is to go back to A and B to see where we fucked up, and go from there and try to do it better the next time.

Had another discussion last night with someone who thinks the BHP should put acting classes on the web. I don't get it. How can you train for the performing arts on the web? I told this person - we could cull from our video footage the 10 best critiques ever delivered by Milton personally, put it up on our site, have some eager itinerant actor in Kansas study these 10 critiques until he could recite them word for word.... Now invite this Kansas actor out to LA and have him perform a scene, and I can pretty much guarantee that it will suck.

The performing arts are about the blood, sweat, tears, emotion, anger, humor, and point-of-view of the performer in the moment of performing. You need a teacher who is in the room to guide, inform, encourage, inhibit the bad, expand the good, scream, charm, cajole the best out of each individual. That ain't happening on the web. Never will. There is a reason most important business is still conducted in person, that people meet each other in person. The web is good for distribution of content and information. One of my posts below is dedicated to the concept that actors need to understand the web as a distribution channel for limitless content that they should create.

As for education, to the degree that education is the assimilation of information, the web can participate in that process, as it is a peerless tool for distribution of information.

But the performing arts are a horse of a different color. The artist in training will always need a class, not a computer.

This weekend I played at the 25th annual STAGE Benefit at the Wilshire Theatre. It was dedicated to the music and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin, and I had been invited to perform my solo transcription of Rhapsody in Blue. The director of the show, David Galligan, had also directed our first big Camelot Artists fundraiser in 2006 that took place over at UCLA, and I performed the piece there - he rememberd it. Coincidentally, I performed at the Wilshire Theatre in 2007, for our benefit celebrating Doris Roberts, also playing Gershwin - my transcription of Concerto in F.

So it was strange to be back in this grand old theatre, by far the largest venue I've played - when I performed in 2007 I was convinced that would be a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Wrong.

I essentially led off the 3+ hour program (including the requisite 45-minute intermission with silent and live auctions), with the overture leading seamlessly to a brief and beautiful singing of Summertime, leading seamlessly to me at the piano. I was grateful to be allowed to perform the entire piece, all 12 minutes of it, which made mine longest performance in the show - but the audience didn't seem to mind. A piece like Rhapsody in Blue has been a crowd pleaser since 1924 for a reason.

Best backstage line: When one performer spent far too many minutes engaged in a pseudo-standup comedy routine as preamble to her song,  Bruce Vilanch quipped to those of us watching on the monitor, "It's like a hostage crisis."