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August 23, 2012

The Best Thing About My Job

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:04 pm

You may know I have a bit of a problem with long runs. Namely that I never get them. While my most extensive experience with long runs involves a show that’s soon to celebrate its 25th year on Broadway, I still consider Silence!, which has been running a little over a year, to be a long run in terms of any show that I’ve worked on full-time.

So right now the thing I find most different from the shows I normally do is when I wake up in the morning and one of my actors is sick, and I’m like, “Oh, too bad! Feel better!” and then I send a couple texts and emails and go about my day.

We don’t have the most secure understudy situation in the world (1 male and 1 female swing), and there are definitely scenarios where very bad things could happen if the wrong two people were out, but for most cases we’re covered, and I didn’t even have to teach them their parts!

Taking over a show that’s already been running has been a strange experience for me, and in some ways I’m dealing with new-show issues (like the recent move to a new theatre), but walking into a situation where — first of all, there are swings — and everybody already knows their jobs, definitely eliminates some of the things I normally have to worry about (like that at any moment an actor could lose their voice or get food poisoning, and we’d be screwed). And on top of that, I have a sub! How cool is that?