OK, back home, back to the salt mines, and happily ripping video clips from the show DVD (to be posted soon).
It was a glorious experience, for the most part. Rehearsals were largely a joy. Ruddigore does have a lot of dance, and there were rehearsals early on where, towards the end of the day, the cast was like, ‘brain is full, no more choreography, plz’. But we ended up doing act runs about a day earlier than usual and the show just fell beautifully together.
Meanwhile, there was the annual Savoynet dinner at the local Chinese restaurant (more notable for the company than the food), where the MD (me) leads everyone in “Hail, Poetry”. That same night, the Americans in the cast gave a cabaret at the festival club after that night’s show. Numbers included Cole Porter’s “The Tale of the Oyster”, Wicked’s “For Good” sung by two men, “Sisters” from White Christmas and “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton. My buddy Ali sang Marion the Librarian with a barbershop quartet for “Lida Rose”, and I sang bass for that, great fun. The two group numbers were “It’s Summertime” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. That was a lovely experience, and I’m reminded that the next time I come to the festival and don’t have the weight of the music-directorship on my shoulders, I need to do more of those.
A lot of fun pub dinners and restaurant dinners and solo dinners, and drinks and more drinks, although I maintained my monkish ways (I saw no shows this year, other than my own – completely opposite of my usual). Bunthorne Boy and the Viking came in the day before the show and we had a lovely dinner with Drew (who we went to college with) and his wife Liz and a couple of other friends.
The day of the show is always terrifying. It’s your only day in the theater and you have to have the tech rehearsal and the orchestra dress. I was still marking orchestra parts right up to the rehearsal – there’s really no way around this – some things that get set that need to be marked literally get set the day before in your last rehearsal – but I got it done. You only get 3 hours with the orchestra, and have to run the show in that time, so there’s very little wiggle room. The other shows I’ve conducted at the festival were all on the shorter side, so that hadn’t been a problem, but for this one, I only got about halfway through my list of “let’s touch on this before we start” before both the stage manager and the concertmaster said, “Eric, you’ve got to get on with it”. OK then. Orchestra run actually went pretty good, although I never quite felt like I was completely in the driver’s seat. One odd fluke of this rehearsal is if your show has two different sets (Act I and Act II), you rehearse Act II first, so they can change the set back to Act I and leave it that way for the performance. This had really thrown me for “Pirates” – by the time we got to Act 2 in performance, it felt like we hadn’t done it for 100 years – but this year, it didn’t bother me particularly. We did have to tell the actors to ‘skip to the end’ in dialogue scenes so we wouldn’t run out of time to do the music – and even then, we finished with five minutes to spare.
Phew, that’s over. Made sure I talked to anyone who needed to talk to me, then up the hill to my pub/B&B to chill and change (and quickly eat the grocery store sandwich that was dinner). The first time I conducted at the festival, I wore full tails, because it was my international conducting debut, but since then I’ve always just worn a black dress shirt and slacks, with a themed necktie. For “Pirates”, it was skull and crossbones, for “Patience”, it was a big-ass lily, and for “Ruddigore” – I had brought two ties – one black with big cartoon ghosts, and one more lavender with bats and skulls. I went with the lavender one, happily showed it off to everyone when I came back to the theater.
And then I parked myself by the stage manager’s desk and luckily not a lot of people attempted to talk to me, because I was thoroughly in the zone by then. And Neil Smith, the man who runs the festival, went out to give his curtain speech and I went down to the pit to make my entrance.
The overture went very well, except I would have liked zippier tempi on the patter trio section. This orchestra doesn’t necessarily want to move with you and because you get so little time with them, sometimes you just have to go, ‘well, this is what this is then’ and keep going. But I was very pleased.
Finished the overture, audience claps, I turn the page of the score, and it knocks my baton off the stand. I bend to pick it up and start Act 1 and hear a sotto voce, “Eric!”. What? I look, there’s the stage manager in the pit, right there. “We’re stopping the show, there’s been an incident on stage!” OH CRAP.
So there we were for at least 20 minutes, wondering what the heck was going on (and the audience was too). An announcement was made, the traditional call for “is there a doctor in the house” was made (there was, several actually), and the fire curtain was brought down. And we sat and sat and sat, not knowing anything.
(and then I found out at intermission. It’s a very common and accepted thing for a musical that the cast goes out on stage (while the curtain is down) during the overture and has a little dance party and gets all loosened up. And while they were doing this, one of the chorus members slipped and dislocated her knee, causing great pain and much screeching. We couldn’t start the show until this was dealt with. Luckily, one of the doctors actually popped the knee back in place and that took care of 90% of the pain. They then put the actress in a wheelchair and, while she didn’t get to do the show, she did get to see it. How horrible for her, to come all that way and then not be able to do the show, though.)
So that all happened, and then they announced we’d be starting again in two minutes and we did. And giving that downbeat for “Fair is Rose” was such a relief. Act I was very well received. Some special moments: Rose Maybud had chattering teeth for pretty little Ruth Rowbottom, pulled out and quickly put back in her basket – and later, when she went for her book of etiquette, the teeth went off again. She looked at the basket bemusedly, and it stopped. Hilarious. Rose and Margaret got exit applause for their very funny “are you mad?” scene. And mistakes, too – dialogue dropped, lyrics inverted, even random pitches from time to time. And mistakes from the conductor too, oh yes.
But it mostly went beautifully. Unfortunately, the lovely shaping I wanted to bring to the Act 1 finale madrigal turned out to be impossible because half the cast couldn’t see me, but it was still beautiful, just more basic. (I did not burst into tears after I gave the cutoff for it, but that had always been a possibility.) I effed up Margaret’s finale entrance, but we covered for it and kept going. And mostly it was fantastic.
Act 2 has the ghost scene and I had been very worried, just in general – it’s tricky and Sir Roderic’s big number is a deathtrap for wrong entrances because of the way the accompaniment works – but we totally nailed it. (all my principals were fantastic, but I will call out Tyler Parker here, who was born to play Roderic and indeed has now done so at least 3 times)
Because of the delay, and the show being long anyway, it looked like the orchestra was going to go into overtime. They’re not expected to go past 10:30 – and it was clear halfway through Act 2 that we were going to go past that. For all I knew, they’d just get up and leave before the show finished, but of course they didn’t do that. We wrapped it up at 10:40, to thunderous applause.
I waited on the podium for the orchestra to clear out before I packed up, and many audience members stopped by to congratulate me, including Marian and Arthur, who I used to do G&S with in Connecticut and had come to the festival. And then it was packing up, changing into my Ruddigore t-shirt, and off to the festival club.
We give a cabaret after the show, but I’d figured out a long time ago to not participate if I was conducting, as I’d be totally wiped. So I mostly just sat and rehydrated and drank ciders. I did get to introduce Brad (aka Bunthorne Boy) to Martin, my good friend who played Despard. Martin had been Bunthorne for the last festival show I conducted, and he and Brad had never met, so I made that happen.
And I slunk off up the hill again after midnight, relieved and happy.
Coming up: a last easy day at the festival, the trip home and the plague.
The Toast Point Page 