Note from now: I’m home! Flew back yesterday. I should be able to get caught up on these with a quickness, as I’m expecting my life to be not-so-interesting now that I’m back.
Take it as read the every morning I got up, had in-room coffee while reading the internets, got cleaned up, went down to breakfast, and headed out. Same here.
Second day of rehearsal – we finished blocking Wand’ring Minstrel and then blocked Our Great Mikado and the next scene with Ko-Ko (Lord High Executioner, Little List). Then Andrew, our wonderful dance captain, took us out to the parking lot to drill this stuff while the ladies worked inside. Fond (well not-so-fond) memories of drilling the Haka for our 2003 Utopia – same church, same parking lot.
One funny thing is that our director does what a lot of choreographers do (or fail to do), which is throw out a lyric to attach a movement to, but not be specific about the music underneath. If the phrase starts on a pickup, often what the choreographer means is ‘start the new movement on the next downbeat’. So if we start a move on “with joyous shout”, it doesn’t start on ‘with‘ it starts on ‘shout‘ because that’s the next strong downbeat. We needed to do a military march with arm gestures on our choral response to the “patriotic sentiment” section of Wandr’ing Minstrel, which led to me heading off a problem at the pass and saying, “guys, we start marching on Nanki’s last “poo” – and yes, I know what that sounds like”.
At lunch, we Americans worked on American cabaret numbers. I was doing “They All Laughed”, a Gershwin song I’d last done in a cabaret for the Philadelphia Freedom Band in my mid-20’s. Nice to revisit it again, even though the key was about a step high for my comfort zone. (I dealt with it.) I’d also found and was prepared to MD a choral arrangement of Good Vibrations, and we read through it, but it became clear pretty quickly that it wasn’t easy to throw together in the amount of time we had (very little) – and we ended up cutting it a few days later, which I was totally fine with.
The afternoon was more blocking. We’d been asked to work in our costume shoes, which for me were my wedding shoes, the most expensive pair I’ve ever owned. (“These shoes are three hundred dollars! Let’s get ’em!”) But boy did my feet hurt at the end of the day – I went and bought some cushiony insoles right after. But a conundrum – do I buy the gel ones that I know will be more comfortable, but might actually make me a bit taller? We’ve already blocked two entrances by height order. I got the cheapy ones that weren’t very thick and I guess they sort of helped.
I also bought a sandwich for dinner because I had another show, so really got some needed downtime beforehand. The show was Charles Court’s The Sorcerer, not high on my list of favorite G&S shows, but one I have great affection for because I’ve been involved in really fun productions of it. (My first time on the Festival podium was Sorcerer, right there in the same house with the same orchestra.) This production was somewhat modern-dress – well, it might have been 20th century, but it wasn’t old-timey – and set around an ice cream truck and used a cast of 9. It was completely delightful, even though they cut some of the big chorus numbers because they didn’t make sense with a small cast. Excellent cast, even the poor Marmaduke who’d made an apology announcement for his cold and indeed had to play various games to get his notes out.
I went to the Festival Club afterward, not feeling very social, but did end up having a lovely chat with Robert G, one of our regulars who had to drop out of this year’s show because of family issues. And I skipped the cabaret, which is a shame, because apparently it was excellent. But I just don’t do late nights well, and we had another full day of rehearsal ahead of us.
I don’t think I have any pictures from today, but now that I’m home, I’ll gather all the pictures and may sprinkle them through posts I’ve already posted. We’ll see. I’m glad I’m not getting graded on this, let’s just say that.
The Toast Point Page 