We are almost finished recording the cast in our studio. Thought I would share a few pictures that we took with Marc Kudisch, Andy Karl, Michael Marcotte & Lisa Howard. We record our singers in the room known as our bedroom, usually with a lab or two on the bed watching. (Sometimes snoring – it’s not unusual for a singer to stop a take and say: ‘… um, your dog is snoring”).
Just one of the perks of recording at FatLab Music!
Lisa in action at the mic
Mike, Marc Kudisch, Roscoe, Kevin Del Aguila
Mike, Marc Kudisch, Andy Karl, Kevin Del Aguila
Mike & Michael Marcotte
Ms. Alice Ripley is joining our cast of superheroes as Eagle Woman this week in our recording studio for our demo of The Protagonists.
Kevin and I are really excited to have her. Although she will not be sporting her wings and feathers, she will be bringing that incredible voice with her. We are happy to report that the Eagle Woman has Landed!
I was fortunate enough to receive another commission last January from The Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus to set a text from Tony Kushner’s Angels In America. The piece is called “I Want More Life”, and Brent just finished mixing a recording of it in our studio.
Dr. Stan Hill, Artistic Director of TCGMC, (also responsible for my last TC-GMC commission, Through A Glass, Darkly) asked me to write “I Want More Life” for the Tony Kushner Celebration at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. The commission was made possible by the generosity of Jeffrey Bores and with the permission of Tony Kushner.
Download (ctrl-click to Save As...)
I Want More Life
Vocals by Michael Marcotte, Alex Richardson, Drew Santini, and Mike
Music by Mike
Text adapted from “Angels In America: Perestroika”, Scene 5 by Tony Kushner
Produced by Brent
(c) and (p) 2009 FatLab Music
All Rights Reserved, Text used by permission of Tony Kushner
Previously:
Last year I started working with bookwriter/lyricist Kevin Del Aguila on a new musical called “The Astonishing Return Of The Protagonists” about middle-aged superheroes trying to recapture past glories. This past week we’ve been in the studio recording demos of the first three songs, and the cast we’ve assembled is amazing and sounds fantastic.
- Marc Kudisch (9 to 5, Assassins, The Wild Party) as Captain Marvelous
- Andy Karl (9 to 5, Legally Blonde, Altar Boyz) as Voltman
- Christopher Sieber (Shrek The Musical, Spamalot) as The Sensational Clump
- Tyler Maynard (The Little Mermaid, Mary Poppins, Altar Boyz) as Fishboy
- Kate Wetherhead (Legally Blonde) as Penelope
- Tituss Burgess (Guys and Dolls, The Little Mermaid), Lisa Howard (9 to 5, Spelling Bee), Cassondra Kellam, and Michael Marcotte (Stephen Schwartz’s Making Good, Seance) as The Citizens
- Todd Alan Johnson (a man of 1000 voices) as The Narrator, Volcanix, and all the other voices.
When everything is mixed, we’ll post the demo tracks here — but for now we’re still waiting to find our Eagle Woman. Coming soon!
This blog and the Snowferno site both run WordPress on separate but identically-equipped Lunarpages servers. When I went to apply today’s WordPress 2.8.4 upgrade, one install was giving me “WP HTTP Error: name lookup timed out” messages and no upgrade button, while the other worked just fine. There are some workarounds detailed on the WordPress support site, but I wasn’t happy having to disable cURL on one host and not the other. It had to be something else…
The problem for me was caused by lines 1276-1277 of the WP_Http_Curl request() method in wp-includes/http.php:
1276
1277
| curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $r['timeout'] );
curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $r['timeout'] ); |
I commented those lines out and threw in a line of debug code on line 1325 (after the curl_exec call)
1325
| print_r(curl_getinfo($handle)); |
and tested the cURL transport using Core Control. I found that my requests were simply taking longer than the timeout provided. I don’t know quite why, except to guess that one server must be just more swamped than the other.
I fixed it by building myself a little plugin that adds an action for the 'http_api_curl' action called on line 1315.
After enabling this fix, WP showed the 2.8.4 upgrade button on the Dashboard page, but the WordPress Development Blog and Plugins RSS feed boxes still showed timeout errors. So, I looked further and found a filter that catches and can modify $r['timeout'] in the WP_Http request() method on line 237.
Here is my barebones plugin code, which overrides all timeouts to a massive 15 seconds:
//adjustments to wp-includes/http.php timeout values to workaround slow server responses
add_filter('http_request_args', 'bal_http_request_args', 100, 1);
function bal_http_request_args($r) //called on line 237
{
$r['timeout'] = 15;
return $r;
}
add_action('http_api_curl', 'bal_http_api_curl', 100, 1);
function bal_http_api_curl($handle) //called on line 1315
{
curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15 );
curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15 );
}I recommend you make sure this does not cause any other issues for your WP install. If you know how to make this code into a plugin, then you are capable enuf to be responsible for any adverse fallout. :) I only know this solved my immediate problem while still maintaining cURL functionality.
Our pal and Snowferno collaborator, Ben Britten Smith, asked me a while (weeks?) ago to port his website and blog over to a 100% WordPress-powered site. After we submitted the Snowferno build to Apple, I got working on it, and here’s how it turned out:
new benbritten.com homepage
Ben had previously rolled his own mini-CMS, but had started wanting to unify his site content with his K2-themed blog. Ben’s site is also his portfolio site, so I wouldn’t have normally gone 100% WordPress. But after becoming familiar with the family of WooThemes premium themes for the Snowferno site, we selected the VibrantCMS theme and I went about the business of porting his content over to the new site. Through a little bit of backend category magic, many of the WooThemes manage to separate the blogginess of WordPress Posts from the CMSness of Pages. I’m sure a whole host of plugins would have done something equivalent, but this way it came all built-in to the theme. We also weren’t quite ready to learn a whole new platform like Drupal or Joomla just for a cosmetic upgrade.
And who’d have thought I’d ever buy a theme for WordPress when there are so many good free ones out there. But the thing I do love is the profit motivation keeping WooThemes well-maintained. Just today I found and applied a big update to the VibrantCMS backend. After you consider how many hours they saved me just by including a new IE 8 stylesheet, you can hardly justify not using premium themes.
I needed to map his old URLs, so .htaccess handles routing the old blog permalinks from http://benbritten.com/blog/ up a level to the root http://benbritten.com/. Then since his old CMS used a querystring scheme similar to WordPress, I had to use the Redirection plugin to catch those incoming links.
