We have finished tech, we did a very successful first dress rehearsal, then turned around about three hours later and did our final dress rehearsal for 300 high school theatre students.
On Saturday we had our first preview, last night we had our second preview. Before each show we spent five hours making changes to lighting, sound, staging, choreography, and fight choreography. All the shows have gone very smoothly, and the rehearsals during the day have been low-stress affairs. I’m very pleased with how it’s going.
I planned my week so that I would have today totally off as my reward for surviving tech and first previews. I bought 2 weeks of groceries last week, and got up early on Saturday to do some needed shopping downtown.
Today I got out of bed around 1:00 and then spent nearly 2 hours dealing with the 15 emails I woke up to. Having Mondays off is kind of annoying because everyone else has just gotten back to work and has lots of questions and things to get moving on.
Other than that I’ve been taking it easy until dinnertime. Tonight I updated our electronic script with a few small cuts and changes we made in the past week. I also found some small typos and formatting errors when I began using my calling script at the beginning of tech, because before that I’ve just been dealing with the original script we began rehearsals with and making the changes in pencil, except for a few particular pages which required me to print out the updated page.
With that done, I’m now starting the electronic calling script. I have no intention of using it until after opening night, as switching scripts from the one you learned to call the show on is kind of a scary thing. Ashley is staying with us longer than we thought, and among other things Nick and I have planned, she’s going to learn to call the show even though she wouldn’t actually be able to put it into practice. At the invited dress she sat next to me in the booth and updated our per-scene running times during the show. Once the new script is done, she can be another eye reading it along with the show to look out for any problems.
Sweet! I didn’t know you were having Ashley “call” the show. Maybe once she learns the calling, she can hang out with me backstage and “run” the deck with me….except for Fred….He’s too damn big and another person can’t fit SR when he’s moving :P
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Comment by Nick Tochelli — January 12, 2010 @ 2:25 am
Hi! I came across your website/blog via a prompt book related google search. I’m a very recent graduate about to embark on my first paid SM gig! One big quirk is that the director doesn’t do email or own a cell phone which is already proving interesting!
Well,thought I would say hello. Hope you enjoyed your day off :)
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KP Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Um wow. That sounds really problematic! I consider myself in some ways “lucky” that I started my career just before it was customary for everyone to be expected to regularly check email and cell phones, because I have a little bit of a perspective on what a pain it was before. Good luck with that — at least you know any show you do after that should be inherently better!
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Ellen Reply:
January 16th, 2010 at 7:40 am
It’s pretty awesome! (not!) I totally get that (royal) we have quite the reliance on cellphones and email but it’s so much easier to get in touch with people that way. You can still screen calls if you want etc. So far it’s making me look a bit useless to some of the actors I think as it can take a couple of days for him to get back to me. I do what I can do but yeah, the next show has to be better :)
Ha! Sorry for the ramble :)
[Reply]
Comment by Ellen — January 12, 2010 @ 6:18 am