This morning was the last of our 3 consecutive 10:30AM student matinees this week. Some people might look at that and think that after getting over our morning sluggishness, we must be enjoying our evenings off at least. Well no. We have been back in the rehearsal room, working on the 2nd and 3rd of the shows we are doing this year: Alice in Wonderland, and the 1-Hour Romeo and Juliet, which will be performed for student audience that are too young, or for whatever reason are not going to see the full-size show.
After our early shows we have a lunch break, and then 5 hours of rehearsal, until 8PM. So we’re certainly not resting on our laurels despite the fact that the theatre is dark in the evenings.
As for the morning shows, it’s been very hard to get up in the morning. A morning matinee is very hard to prepare for if you haven’t done one in a while. I was thinking this morning that I have no idea how I’m going to deal with 7:30AM bus calls and 8:00 load-ins when I can’t handle a 10:30 matinee.
It’s definitely an acquired skill. The one good thing is that when we have the bus, it’s easier to get out of bed when our beds come with us. If we have some free time during the day, it’s usually just a few steps outside the stage door, where we can take a nap in our own beds, so that makes it easier to get up.
We’ve been working on Alice for two days, then spent today on the 1-hour for the first time. Tomorrow at noon we have more Alice, and 30 new pages of revisions based on exploration we did earlier this week, which just landed in my inbox as I got home. In the evening we have a regular performance of R&J, which everyone is very curious to see the effect of, now that we’ve gotten accustomed to this strange routine of performing in the morning and rehearsing in the evening.
