This week was quite strange. We went back into rehearsals/tech for Goodnight Moon, which was fun and stressful. Since it’s the end of the summer, many people on the tech staff are leaving, and since things are still changing in the tech process of Goodnight Moon, it’s been difficult to know what to ask for and what to leave be. But the play demands changes to be better. We ended our day on Friday with a completely new plan for the clock and the red balloon which means we are going to have go back on Tuesday and re-tech some things we already did. It will ultimately make everything better, but when we are already short on time, changes like these make everyone a little nervous.

Add to that an earthquake and a hurricane, and it’s a little surreal.

It’s also strange to be coming up on the end of the summer. The college kids are returning, and the wind is getting cooler, so the feeling of Ithaca as a whole is changing. I’ve been melancholy this week, and I can’t tell if it is the weather or if I’m a little sad at the prospect of leaving this place. I’m sure it’s a little bit of both. It has been a magical summer for me; I’ve learned so much, and now I am unsure what to do with the new found knowledge, and how to keep on the trajectory that started here. What do I do with my new skills? How can I put them into practice on a regular basis, and not lose the momentum of working in a non-stop theatre environment? Where do we go from here? These are questions I am always asking myself, but they seem to be crystallizing in this one moment. I am at a professional turning point, and don’t know if my answer will come from asking or listening more. Probably both. The summer at the Hangar has been invaluable, but seems (currently) to be leaving me with more questions than answers. There is one week left. I’m sure I’ll have it all figured out by the end.

The Game is now up and running and I am finally getting to work on Windowless Apartment, the collection of musical vignettes composed by Salomon Lerner, and featuring the four Barrington Stage musical theatre apprentices.  The last two mondays we had relatively ridiculous 10 hour rehearsals, from 10am to 8pm, where we accomplished the bulk of the staging and choreography.   All our other rehearsals are short chunks of time we have to find between the performers’ master classes and their show schedule.  It’s been interesting working with this group of actors, as I’ve found myself going between exercises I would use with students and giving them free reign to make decisions as professionals.  This production is really a showcase for Salomon’s music, their talent, and my directorial skills… and we don’t have a lot of time and resources to make it work.  My priority was just getting all the material up on it’s feet in a way that was engaging to watch, and now that the pieces have some structure, I am able to get more detailed with the performers in regards to their character work, physical presence, and story telling.  Usually I like to spend a fair amount of time doing this upfront with a comprehensive table-work process, but without knowing how long it was going to take to shape this material I found myself choosing to work from the outside in.

Yesterday Bill Finn joined us for part of our rehearsal, and after watching a 47 minute run of the entire project, launched into an impromptu master class with the apprentices, asking them each to get back on stage and go through their solos again while he gave on the fly feedback and direction from his seat in the theatre.  It was one of the coolest moments of my professional life.  Bill was seeing all the nuances that I wanted to address, and just nailing them with targeted, unfiltered authority.  There was no flowery craft or guiding the actors with a secret agenda, rather Bill just said exactly what he wanted to see and hear, he grilled them and they got it.  It was another one of those electric moments, the air was charged with dynamic high-stakes energy, and everyone involved felt transformed by the experience.

The show goes up this coming saturday at 11pm, after the The Game.  We’re doing it in the second stage theatre, which is a step up from the high school classroom last year’s fellow got to direct in.  Bill and I both felt that having the show in Stage Two made it more of a Musical Theatre Lab event, and it just so happens that the set in there now (for My Name is Asher Lev) has plenty of playing space… the only downside, it’s made almost entirely of windows.

The cast of "Windowless Apartment." From left: Michael Wessells, Hannah Richter, Taylor Anderson, Michael Hewitt

Salomon Lerner, composer of all the vignettes in "Windowless Apartment", and me!

Next week will be my last at Barrington Stage, and I can’t believe this summer and my fellowship are soon coming to a close.  I am lucky to be staying on to work with Bill and the composers he’s chosen for the Ridiculously Talented concert.  It turns out Taylor Trensch and Adam Monley, both from Mormons, Mothers, and Monsters, will be returning to sing for the event, so that will also be a nice reunion to cap my experience here this summer.  There’s a special thing going on here at Barrington Stage. I’ve been fortunate enough to become part of the community this summer, and I hope to come back and be part of the craziness again!

I am sitting on my back porch, looking through the trees at the Ithaca City Cemetery, about to get dressed up to go to opening night of The Rocky Horror Show, where I will be taking notes like “Come together earlier for alien antennae sex,” and shouting out, “Describe your balls!”

Such is my life here at the Hangar these days.

We just finished the final tech for the show today (God help us all. I guess they call this kind of last minute technical rehearsal a “Hail Mary” cause it really is a hope and a prayer at this point.) Everyone is on overload; the show is so big and working on a musical this quickly is difficult because everything is about timing. What beat does that fall on? When should you begin moving, let alone (Hail Mary) remember your harmonies, dance steps and spacing? How can you place yourself just far enough away to get there just in time? When should we call the light cue so that it matches up with the sound that is playing under the spaceship that is taking off while the fog machine is attempting to create just the right amount of smoke? This machine set off the fire alarm at the theatre while we were practicing the floor show. This meant we all had to exit the building, actors in costume, and wait for the firemen to come back and give us the okay. We lost a lot of tech time on this moment, but it was amazing to be outside with this:

Magenta (Kellyn Uhl) and Riff Raff (Zachary Clause)

and this:

Dr. Scott (Orville Mendoza)

At one point in rehearsal, the fire alarm when off in the high school we were rehearsing in, at just around the same point in the show and there was no fog machine that day. This show is just too hot to handle.

I just looked at the time, and I have to go get gussied up so I can look half as good as the show. It’s the day of the show, y’all! I’ll try to post more soon.

xoxo

So. I’m late again. I know. It’s REALLY busy here.

During the days last week I was in rehearsals as the assistant director for the Rocky Horror Show (directed by Devanand Janki), and in the evenings I served as the Producer for (my assistant director for the lab) Chelsea LeValley’s Directing Project. It was a strange, floaty week. After all this time where I’ve had to be the great galvanizing force in the room, I had to take a backseat, in a way, and find my way into different roles. It was difficult and easy at the same time; the work load was lighter (sometimes) but my brain kept feeling like I was forgetting something, because I had less to do.

Talking to Chelsea about her project crystallized several of the things I’ve learned about myself and my directing style so far this summer. It also made me realize that there are things that I take for granted, ideas about performance that I do not think of at all as “wacky” (to use a word recently used to describe me), that are BRAND NEW, WAY OUT THERE ideas for some. Chelsea is constantly telling me that I am helping her to break out and try new things and experiment, when all I think I’m telling her is to allow for change and possibility and not try to figure everything out before rehearsal. (There’s apparently a bunch of colleges that teach you to pre-block the show. I’ve heard about it from several lab members. Now, I’m all for pre-production, but planning what line someone’s going to cross on before you even know who is playing the role seems a little wacky to me.)

Granted, I’m minimizing, I’m sure. I accept my crazy, and know that the kind of theatre I like and make is generally a little far out for those more familiar with only a traditional model. I am extraordinarily pleased that I have exposed this delightful young director to ideas she may not have come across otherwise. She always wanted to do a play in a river; all I did was tell her it was okay. She wanted to adapt a script; all I did was tell her how I do it. I spent a lot of time last week stressing about whether I was doing a good job or not as “Producer.” Whatever is the ultimate answer to that question, I did an excellent job of helping Chelsea accomplish what she wanted to, and of that I am extremely proud. She says she is inspired by me to think of herself as an artist, which touches my heart every time I think about it. It’s something I began actively pursuing a few years ago in my creative life, and had set to the back burner, so when she tells me that she sees me as an artist, and wishes to emulate that, I feel pleased and flattered beyond description.

Let me talk a little bit about Rocky Horror and then I must to bed. We had our first day of tech today, which means a long day of work in the theatre kick-starting a long week of hard work in the theatre. This is on the heels of two weeks of hard work in the rehearsal room, so we’re all running on coffee and glitter at this point. What I can tell you is this: THIS SHOW IS GOING TO BE AMAZING. The rehearsal period was fast and furious. My Lab company was not quite prepared for the amount of SINGIN’ and DANCIN’ they are doing in the show, and have all been feeling the stress of being asked to perform at such a high level all the time. They have done a kick-ass job, though, and now that they see the space and the lights and costumes, I think it has motivated them to take their performance up to the next level. I mean, come on. It’s a rock and roll musical. We have a rock band onstage: the guitarist, bassist and sax player are roaming the stage with the phantoms. The set is HUGE and makes the Hangar look like nothing it’s ever seen. I can’t list all the elements that make this the perfect musical for me to be assisting on (the glitter shoes, the pink fan dance, the silhouette sex scenes…) or how many things I’ve learned from watching Dev work, but let me assure you that I am exactly where I need to be. I will definitely be writing more about this soon, but for now, I must to bed. Here’s a little visual treat in the meantime:

Kellyn Uhl as Magenta, Kevin Green as Brad, Austin Ku as Frank, Stephanie Koenig as Janet, Zachary Clause as Riff Raff

Admittedly I am overdue on my blog post for this past week, but I have not had a single moments rest to sit and reflect over the course of the last ten days!  First we had a series of runs for The Game in our rehearsal room at St. Josephs high school.  Designers came to take notes and prepare for tech rehearsals, and I spent my time tightening up the opening number, working with the opera singers, cleaning transitions and fine tuning the musical staging for our larger ensemble songs.  I also had  lot of interface with the writers of the show, discussing their ideas for last minute revisions and bringing them to the director for approval.  Everyone was feeling the time crunch as we knew there were only two days ahead of us to get the show teched.

Moving into the main stage wasn’t as daunting of a shift as I thought it would be.  Somehow the Barrington Stage crew were able to strike and unload the set from the previous production and bring ours in during one overnight change-over! We arrived to a nearly completed set, with only painting and decoration left to be done during our off hours.  Our first night in the theatre we had a what’s called a “wanderprobe”, where the cast and the orchestra go through the music together for the first time.  The actors were mic’d, so sound levels could be set, but rather than going through their exact blocking, they were free to wander  around the stage feeling (and hearing) the space.

The  next two days we worked from noon ’til midnight setting the lights for the show.  The costume shop had been working around the clock for the past few weeks, and on the first day of tech we finally got to see what everything looked like together.  It was really astounding!

The Cast of The Game in Costumes by Jen Moeller, Set Design by Michael Anania, Lighting Design by Jeff Croiter and Grant Yeager

The Opera scene, Costumes by Jen Moeller, Set Design by Michael Anania, Lighting Design by Jeff Croiter and Grant Yeager

Of course things took longer than we had time for, and so teching the finale, which includes an epic underscored sword fight, had to wait until our third day, when we also had a back to back dress rehearsal and first preview.

The first audience response was overwhelmingly positive, but the writers and Julie all found things they wanted to change once they saw the show up and running.  The next day we moved a scene near the end of Act I to the early part of Act II, cut about 40 bars of music from the opening number, simplified some vocal arrangements and restaged a number of transitions.  By the time we got to our third preview we had shaved 12 minutes off the entire running time of the show!

During this time of intensive rehearsal, I was also getting started on my independent project, an evening of one acts composed by Bill Finn’s assistant, Salomon Lerner, and featuring the four Musical Theatre Apprentices (MTA’s) in residence at BSC this summer.  After meeting with Salomon to play through his entire catalog, we chose two short pieces and a five stand alone songs that I felt would work well together.  The first, “La Sayona” is a 20-minute piece that tells the story of a young married couple who are haunted by a mythical Venezuelan ghost woman when they try to role-play their way around the seven year itch. The second, “Monster in the Closet” is written in the style of a Theatre for Young Audiences show, a short 3-song vignette in which the tooth fairy helps a two-headed doll-burning monster embrace his sexuality.  The stand alone songs all have to do with love, longing and loneliness, and range in sound from jazz standard, contemporary pop musical theatre, indie rock, and torch song.

Thematically, all of the material speaks to facing the unknown,  whether the situation is comical, frightening, or heartbreaking.   I also had the idea that all these songs and stories could take place in the same location, as different people inhabited it over the years.  The building that survives the break up, the room that remains when the girl grows up, the family moves, or the boy leaves for college.  One of our favorite stand alone pieces is a song called “Sleeping Through the Fall,” in which the singer describes moving into a windowless apartment in Manhattan, and worrying that they will miss everything that happens in the outside world.  Under the clever advising of Bill Finn, we’ve decided to call our evening “Scenes from a Windowless Apartment” and everything is going to be staged around the same simple bed and and desk.  Wildly different stories sharing the same space.  I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to create!

While previews went up for The Game, I spent mornings with Salomon and the Musical Theatre Apprentices learning the music for our piece. Today we had our first staging rehearsal at the Berkshire School of Music, from 10am ’till 8pm. (Mondays are our “day off,” so naturally…) The performance of Windowless Apartment will be August 27, the end of next week, and until then we have to to contend with the show schedule for The Game and a series of master classes the MTA’s have lined up as part of their program, so we are taking rehearsal time where we can get it!

Tomorrow we have our last 3 hours of rehearsal for The Game, with about 5 hours worth of notes and revisions to work through.  Then Wednesday the show opens, and I will have officially completed my second production at Barrington Stage.  My fellowship is set to end August 28th, closing night of The Game and the day after we present Windowless Apartment.  Last night, however, Mr. Finn invited me to stay on an extra week and help with the annual cabaret he directs, Songs by Ridiculously Talented Composers You Don’t Know But Should. It would be a great opportunity and tremendous pleasure to stick around and be a part of it, so I’m hoping I can work it out with BSC and the Drama League! I should have the official word by my next blog post!

We’ve started rehearsals for the mainstage production, The Rocky Horror Show. To sum up: these are the shoes:

All of the glitter horses play the phantoms who come out of the woodwork and are the ensemble for the show. (Which means A LOT of harmonies!) Fun, though. Dev the director and Rob the costume designer have given each of the phantoms a screen icon to emulate as their phantom, based on this larger idea about how the aliens have interpreted the world through the B-movies of the 60’s they watched in the abandoned movie house/castle they reside in. Mostly, though, we’ve just been doing the time warp. (For real, that song is crazy long and complicated!!)

Some photos of the Lab Company in Rocky rehearsal. (I know, Shakina, finally!)

celeste rose and tanner hussar

the exotic princess and the tramp

ryan burch

the adventurer explorer

chelsea levalley and connor lounsbury

the girl next door and the film noir private eye

emily parks and charlie tingen and lesley noyes

the saloon girl, the orphan and the femme fatale

grace stockdale and chris kalfas

columbia (grace is the only lab member not playing a phantom) and the cowboy

The grumpy gus-es are making those faces for funny, they are not that unhappy. Yet. (They’re exhausted, though. They have been working their little tail feathers off!)

All in all, the lab company is doing AMAZING! Sometimes we all get overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we are working on at one time: Rocky; Flying Leap, the staged reading; Goodnight Moon, the children’s musical; plus preparation for Chelsea LeValley’s AD project next week. Let alone life, groceries and laundry! Oh, and we all have to move out of the Ithaca College apartments this weekend. Some people will have to move again before the summer is over. I am one of the lucky ones who at least knows where I am going. (Although I never actually know where I am going. Truth.)

Everyone is handling the stresses in their own ways, and, for the most part, it has been going well. Remember the “feelings” I mentioned a few posts back? The ones I had to deal with as part of my job description (duties as assigned)? Yeah, those get heightened when you are working fourteen-hour days (dancing!) with the same ten people all the time. So we had a couple come-to-Jesus moments this week, but all for the betterment of the company and all individuals involved.

More rehearsal pictures:

undressing brad and janet

lunch break

lab in the lab

Rehearsals are well under way for Barrington Stage Company’s second mainstage musical of the season, The Game.  I have to confess, I love this show.  The text is rich and delicious, the love affairs unbelievably sordid, the music insistently captivating and the costumes (from what I’ve seen so far) irresistibly decadent.  What strikes me the most, however, is how a show based on 250 year old source material can still feel so urgent and modern.  I suppose its due to the universal human–though often inhumane–themes:  Seduction.  Betrayal.  Revenge (as advertised),  and also the more tragic but equally central failings of Faith, Desire, and Love.

Rachel York (MARQUISE De MERTEUIL) and Graham Rowat (VICOMTE De VALMONTE) in The Game

For the first week and a half of rehearsal I spent a lot of time behind the directors table, watching Julie and Danny work.  Director Julianne Boyd creates a fast-paced, inquisitive, and well focused rehearsal process.  The actors play through the scenes on their feet, trying different approaches as they arrive to the heart of the scene. Often Julie will shape the structure, nudging the actors to a particular stage picture, but how that image fills in emotionally becomes the work of the cast.

Choreographer Daniel Pelzig works equally as fast, setting movement on the fly and giving me plenty to notate at top speed.  For the opening number, “Night After Night” we moved through several stagings as the music was re-arranged to communicate the level of debauchery the creative team wanted to achieve.   What began as a minuet became a waltz, and then transformed into a tightly choreographed melee of excess and indulgence.

Now Mr. Pelzig is off staging Into the Woods in Atlanta, so I am in charge of keeping up the choreography and the ensemble-driven scenic transitions.  I also get to generate a small, eloquent phrase for the two romantic leads who reunite for a moment of innocent bliss before impending tragedy in the song “Finally, Finally,” and set the pantomime our caricature-ish opera singers perform in “The Opera.”   Yesterday was my first opportunity to lead rehearsal, and I ran the room for several hours as we tightened transitions, began work on the opera story, and reviewed one of the large ensemble numbers “Just Past Midnight.”  Admittedly I was nervous at first, but the cast, stage management, and musical directing team welcomed my leadership with total respect and I soon felt completely in my element, carrying my script around the room on a music stand, checking the scene from different angles, offering suggestions for refining movement from an internal awareness, and most of all HAVING A GREAT TIME!

The orchestra arrives for their first rehearsal tonight, so a whole new level is going to be added soon.  We move into the theatre next week, and have a few precious days of rehearsal left to polish the staging and heighten the relationships.  Once we get on stage with the epic costumes and gold-gilded everything, all of our spacing will doubtlessly be reworked, which means a whole lot of last-minute duties for me.  I couldn’t be more excited.

I have such high hopes for this show.

I’ve just watched the fabulous Amy Decker (Madame de Tourvel) work through her eleven o’clock emotional breakdown number “My Sin.”  We staged it two days ago, and this was her first run in rehearsal since the structure was set.  I’ve never felt such intimate electricity and magnetic fragility in a crowded rehearsal room.  We were all speechless.  Chills.  Tears.  One of those moments when you’re certain that dramatic magic has occurred.

I want everyone to see this production.

So, I must apologize to Kris and Laura. When you were in your tenure here at the Hangar, and I was blog-stalking you from afar, I thought, “Where are those weekly blogs, folks? How hard can it be to blog once a week?” Then today, I suddenly realized it was already well into week 5, and I hadn’t blogged about week 4, and I thought, “This. This is how hard it can be to blog once a week.” So Laura, I’m sorry. Kris, I apologize. I see.

I was having a conversation with one of my company, and he was saying he was feeling overwhelmed by all of it, that he was having trouble keeping all the burners going on his stove, simmering one show, while keeping another one from boiling over. I understood his metaphor, but had to encourage him to only deal with the thing right in front of him; what was he going to focus on right now? And that’s really how you can get through this crazy schedule, mostly. It is exhausting, for sure, and the kind of mental and physical flexibility required to get through it is draining in its own way. But the best thing I’ve found is focusing on the thing right in front of you as much as you can, and then when you must move on, leaving it aside- alive, percolating- while you focus on something else. So, it is slightly difficult to switch gears, but I’ll try to tell you about LAST week (Goodnight Moon), even though my head is already in THIS week (Rocky Horror). Which is to say, I’ll try to keep the sweet transvestites out of the Bunny’s bedroom.

GOODNIGHT MOON: a love story about a Bunny and her Tooth (subtitle mine)

Working on children’s theatre leads to some ridiculous conversations. Slats, the sound designer, and I had a talk about whether or not “the wiggle noises contained a sense of possibility,” (they do) and if “all the objects need magical noises when they come to life.” (they don’t) The actors and I have clocked many hours (no pun intended) discussing the intention and motivation of the clock, telephone, and red balloon. Also, does the mouse live in the house or is he over for a sleepover? It’s pretty awesome.

Working on a musical in this professional environment is kind of amazing. There’s a musical director and a choreographer who have all kinds of bits and pieces of help as you work, and a stage management team who is always taking notes and tracking things for the production. It’s like being a real big kid working in a real big kid theatre. It’s pretty awesome.

With the crazy Hangar schedule, we rehearsed it for a week (culminating in a run, which was well received by the powers that be. yay!) and now have put it away to focus on the mainstage and staged reading. Which I will talk about next time, as I am in rehearsal for both RIGHT NOW.

xoxo

majestic, isn't she?

It’s only been a week?!? We opened and closed a show, had a script analysis class, have already started rehearsals on Goodnight Moon, and as I write this my little glitter horses are taking in some voice class with Karl Gregory, actor and voice maestro.

So what do I say while I have a hair’s breath of time to myself? Ah dear blog readers, I can’t contain it all in words, but I will try, and although this post is short, I will have some time to elaborate soon.

For those of you who are here to get an idea of what it is like to be a Drama League Director at the Hangar, my word for you is unsurprising: BUSY. I have definitely found the schedule to be the hardest, and it’s probably because I am far enough out of school that I have forgotten how to run on a couple hours of sleep a night. But to be given an opportunity like this, to work ALL THE TIME on what I am most passionate about? It’s worth it every late night and early morning. Almost everyday, at some point, I think, “I want this to be my life all the time.”

For those of you who know me, and wonder how I am, my word for you is complicated: GOOD. I am good in the way you are good when you are stretching out a muscle that has atrophied in a cast for a long time. It is uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of being painful, but you know that you will be stronger because of the stretch. I am having so much fun, my company is amazing, but there’s a lot of “dealing with people’s feelings” that i was unprepared for. That sounds horrible. It has been amazing to be seen as a resource for the people in my lab company. Things I take for granted as part of my theatrical education are new news to some of them, and they look at me with a sense of respect that inspires me to be sharper and more careful in my thinking. That is not to say that I have any idea what I’m doing. I am everyday working on listening, trying to find my way without deciding which direction to go, and making it all up as we go along. These are the things I am encouraging my actors to do as well.

All in all, the summer is amazing and I don’t want it to keep going because I don’t want it to end. Magic and majestic.

I will post some photos of the Wedge show with commentary as soon as I get them from the scenic designer. Everyone’s SO BUSY HERE!

soon. xoxo

What a week!  Mormons, Mothers and Monsters opened to a great review in the Boston Globe, but just when I thought I was off and running on The Game, things got crazy.  The much acclaimed Jill Abramovitz (see my Week 2 post about her work as Mother) was put on two weeks of vocal rest due to a severe throat infection she’d been battling during our entire rehearsal process.  There are no understudies in a lab show with such a short run, so we had very little time to find a way to keep the show afloat.  Friday night’s performance was canceled, and the entire administrative staff of Barrington Stage Company put their heads together to come up with an alternative.  The marvelous Bill Finn actually suggested to the group that I step into the role, a challenge I most certainly would have accepted, but the creative team felt certain that turning the Mother into a drag role would destroy the dramatic tension around the protagonist’s queer coming of age.  There’s not much conflict to coming out if your mom is a 6′ 2″ tattooed drag queen.  Still, I was flattered by the vote of confidence from the guru of BSC’s Musical Theatre Lab.  As a much more sensible (though equally hectic) option, we recruited the talented, hilarious, and brave-as-all-get-out Christianne Tisdale who learned the role in 5 hours and took to the stage for a two-show Saturday, book in hand.

The silver lining to all this, for me personally anyway, was that I got to learn on the fly how to work a put-in rehearsal.  A put-in rehearsal is just like it sounds… you are quite literally putting an actor into a role, teaching them the blocking and choreography, and making sure they know what’s happening around them.  For these rehearsals, where Christianne hadn’t even read the script yet, there was a lot to catch her up on.  Vadim spent two hours going over the music with her, then the cast came in and Adrienne led them all through the show scene by scene.  We ended up cutting one of the numbers (“BYU for Me”, where Mother tries to convince Mormon to attend the religious university, a fun uptempo song with more pom-poms and cheer moves than one can handle while holding a script!).  The next morning, without the cast, I worked opposite Christianne on stage in every scene, while Adrienne and Vadim coached us through the show once more from top to bottom.  Then it was showtime!  Christianne was phenomenal, and managed to discover some really tender acting moments even while turning pages and sight-reading her music.

While all this was going on at Stage 2, rehearsals we’re getting underway for The Game, wherein Ms. Tisdale is also playing a principal role.  We had only just started music rehearsals when the crisis arose over at Mormons…, but by the time we started the put-in, The Game had moved on to full staging rehearsals.  Christianne and I were running between rehearsal spaces, from 1990s Pittsburgh to 1770s Paris, monster claws to corsets.  Christianne was a total trooper, and while I missed out on watching Daniel Pelzig develop the choreography for the decadent and debaucherous opening number “Night After Night”, my notation skills were put to the test as I caught up and quickly transcribed all the action that had been set in my absence.

Unfortunately Jill Abramovitz is out of Mormons… for the rest of the run, but Christianne Tisdale has graciously accepted the task of taking on two shows at once.  She will finish Mormons… this weekend, and then be back on The Game full time.  She and I have one last rehearsal together mid-week.  Adrienne has left for her next show in Los Angeles, so Mormons… is now under my care, as well as the infallible stewardship of Production Stage Manger Rose Packer.  The whole cast and crew have been awesome through this hurdle, and the show will go on!

As for The Game, by this time next week I’ll have much more insight into the production.  The cast sound phenomenal, and the ensemble work I’ve witnessed thus far is fun and thrilling.  The week ahead is all about exploring the intimacy between the principals.  In a show steeped so deeply in seduction and betrayal, there’s a lot of sexual energy to harness and unleash.  I’ll be sure to share all the sordid details!