January 25, 2010

• Panic Time

  Well, it got a little ugly last night at one point near the end of rehearsal.  One person from each of the conflicting sides got a little into it.  And for a change, one of the two was NOT me!  What's funny is now they've reversed what they want to get done.  One who wanted to work numbers before is suddenly clamoring for "Please let's do run-throughs!" and the other is saying "Let's finish staging the numbers!!"

  Although, I do have to say that at one point I spoke up.  Our music director has been taking more than a couple times to throw in his own blocking and staging suggestions.  If I had been directing, I would have said, "Thank you.  I'M directing!" but that's just me.  Anyway, we were staging one of the songs and it was getting a little too busy for me.  I was very worried there was no way we were going to remember all of it and the simpler the better.  Our music director during a break had told our director, "Why don't you try this for the end?" and it was a series of way too many complicated steps, which they started to show us after the break.  We tried it once and everyone was so confused, I finally said, "Why don't we just step in toward the center on those 8 counts?"  Our music director said, "It's not that hard," to which I replied, "This close to Tech Sunday could we PLEASE make it easy on ourselves and do this, thank you!?"  And we kept it the simple way.

  We still have THREE numbers to stage.  And we only have 4 rehearsals until Tech Sunday, one of which was supposed to be a sitz probe, but we decided we would need that extra rehearsal.  Considering that we have yet to have run either act completely off book and completely staged, it's very much needed.

  This show REALLY should have been completely blocked without the musical numbers within the very first week back from Christmas/New Year's.  Then the musical numbers should have been staged.  And we should have been doing run-throughs all of last week.  Instead, too much attention to detail was taken way too early and now we are all in panic mode that we're not going to know our lines/entrances/exits/staging because of it.  What I'm even more worried about are some of the complex props that we need to work with - such as a telethon type tally board that we have to update throughout the show - but we don't have them yet.  More and more props for sight gags are added and added and it's getting to be too much since we don't actually HAVE the props yet.  Even more importantly, we should have had our robes a week ago.  Some of our staging/blocking is probably going to need to be changed, or at least might be more difficult than we thought because of the monks' robes we'll be wearing.

  I know that everyone says every show feels like it's not going to pull itself together in time for preview, but this is MUCH further behind than it should be.  We REALLY need one extra week and I'm quite a bit worried about how it's going to be come Opening Night!

  • 6:16 am
  • 3 Comments