Evil Diva Productions

Random and marginal notes

kristinmh — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:44:10 +0000

*Crossposted to Scintillator*

I’m in Ottawa right now for an independent touring workshop. So far: really helpful for what I want to do (i.e., get Fallen Voices on the road) and I’m really glad I came. I’m typing up today’s notes right now, because I know from experience that if I don’t do it know I will entirely forget what everything I wrote refers to. To illustrate, some of the things I wrote today:

- “Yr a Canadian product! Lk wheat, nuclear reactors!”
- “Be persistent, don’t harrass (diff is hrd to tell)”
- “pure genre pffft”
- “Why 8 PM?”
- “Health Arts __ __”
- “guess ↑ expenses, ↓ income – ASSM SMTHNG WILL GO WRONG”

All excellent advice, no doubt, but if I wait for a week to transcribe my notes I won’t be able to translate them at all. (“Health Arts __ __” refers “The Health Arts Society of Ontario”, an organization that puts on concerts in hospitals and nursing homes. No one could remember the full name.)

Uncle Harry’s House of Unnameable Horror?

kristinmh — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:24:18 +0000

I was working today on a breakdown for the video of “Call of Cthulhu: The Puppet Opera” (coming soon!). I think it’d be really funny to make a title sequence for a Lovecraftian children’s show.

It wouldn’t be hard (a little stop-motion or something), but I do need a good title:

“Uncle Harry’s House of Unnameable Horror”

“Yog Sothoth and his happy little friends”

“Playtime With Cthulhu”

“The Rl’yeh Boys Comedy Hour”

“Cthulhu’s Children’s Puppet Theatre”

I still think the first is the best.

Oh, if you’re interested in more background on Lovecraft, you can watch this documentary, via snagfilms.com:

(If the video isn’t embedding properly for you, you can watch it here.)

Fallen Voices Original Cast Recording: A sneak peek

kristinmh — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:33:28 +0000

Here’s a little taste of the upcoming Fallen Voices: Three operas for Two people original cast recording.

In this excerpt from Time Will Erase (music by Alex Eddington, libretto by Kristin Mueller-Heaslip), Anna Akhmatova recalls a frustrating and alienating experience from her youth and muses ironically on the changes that were about to happen in her life.

Time Will Erase: The salon scene

Inside Evil Diva HQ

kristinmh — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:44:21 +0000

As you are doubtless aware, here at Evil Diva Productions we spend our days in the Fortress of Evil Diva-tude before going forth at night to do battle with the forces of uninteresting music and insufficiently dramatic opera. Waited on hand and foot by our robot monkey butlers, we write our librettos and our scores on high-tech holographic computers and design our sets in fully functional holodecks….

…Well, actually, there is no Evil Diva HQ.

Unless you count the living rooms, cafes, and occasionally bars we hold our meetings in, Evil Diva HQ is not a physical place but a state of mind.

So until we become rich and famous and build our James Bond villain lair, we make do. We figure it out. We improvise.

Suzanne and I wrote the libretto for Call of Cthulhu: The Opera on our respective decidedly low-tech netbooks, and when we did our eight-hour collective re-write we did it at my kitchen table over vegan lasagna and multiple bottles of wine.

Jen built and painted the sets for Fallen Voices: Three Operas for Two People in her art studio (including a fully functional puppet theatre). We rehearsed it in her living room in spite of occasional interruptions from noisy neighbours, passing trains, and her cat Badger’s desire to nap on pieces of the set.

And Ben is writing the score for Call of Cthulhu on his 4-year-old Mac Mini with an outdated version of Finale in a drafty room at the back of the house.

And while I would love to live and work in a SMERSH-like high-tech secret opera bunker built under an active volcano, we do get along just fine the way we are. And I feel so lucky to be working with such awesome people.