Wed: Last day in the rehearsal room. My sinuses are still miserable (I think it’s mold and/or pollen. I had the same problem last year).

I have a whole bunch of disposable daily contact lenses left from the last time I bought them, and they’re kinda old, so ‘expired’, but I’d tried them on a month or so ago to see if they were still OK and they seemed to be. So in prep for this final run, I put a pair of contacts in before leaving the hotel. The left one went in right away, but the right one was recalcitrant and took many tries to get in. (I should have trashed it and used another one.)

Off to the church, where we all got in costume for a complete run. At some point, my right eye got irritated and I must have rubbed it because the contact lens disappeared. Or at least, it wasn’t in the center of my eyeball any more. It might have fallen out, but I was pretty sure it had just migrated off to the side, which happens sometimes, because my eye was irritated AF. So we start the run and I’m freaking out because what if I have to go to a doctor or the hospital or something to find this wayward lens? Every attempt to view the eyeball in a mirror when I had a minute wasn’t showing even the edge of it – or was that it off to the right? I couldn’t tell.

The run itself started fine – the men’s chorus arc starts with our toughest scene (opening through Pish-Tush’s song) and is shortly followed by our next scene, Behold the Lord High Executioner through “Little List”. As soon as Little List was done, and I had a long breather before the Act I finale, I went upstairs, where most people weren’t, and locked myself in a bathroom. Basically, I just stuck my finger in my right eye where I thought the lens might be and dragged over. And I got it! So pulled the damn thing out and threw it away, hurrah. I still had the left one in and decided to just go with the blurry right eye for a while. (and then put another one in before Act 2, and that was fine, and never had a problem with the contacts again)

The rest of the run went well. We’d lost a chorus member (to COVID, we found out later) and had to reblock some stuff, which we did. Then cleanup and notes and stuff and we didn’t get lunch until 1:30. After that we were way off schedule, but it was OK. We had our annual raffle (I’d donated a knitted hat) and I won two prizes – a large G&S coffee mug and two tickets to my friend Carol’s Light Opera of New York’s next concert. My buddy Audrey got the hat!

We then met as a company and went over logistics for show day and cleaned up the hall and exited.

Carol had approached me about dinner and I ended up getting a bunch of people to go to the Thai restaurant where we’d been last year the day before the show. I went over to make a reservation – as with last year, it was hard to get tables, but I got a later reservation and a promise that we could split into smaller groups to be seated. Texted everyone with the info.

Back to the hotel to get settled and run over my blocking and stuff. I took my laptop down to the bar to have a cider and do some paperwork and prep for the next day. By this point the dinner people were texting me and then two dropped out and someone got added and it was turning into the whole ‘cruise director’ thing that I was trying to avoid. So I did the bare minimum there and then brought my laptop back upstairs and headed to the restaurant.

It ended up being just six of us and we did get seated together. Food was really good! We shared a couple of starters, then I had two more appetizers – a bowl of soup and chicken satay. It was fun, but I was beat by the end of it. Ended up back in my room by 9:00.

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Thurs: show day! The way this works is that in the morning, you help everyone else load in to the theater – costumes, props and so on. Then about 10:00 you’re allowed on stage and you do ‘placing’, which is let’s try moving to each position now that we actually have a stage and the real platforms and stairs we’re going to use. We did that, and it wasn’t too bad, although we went out of order which didn’t help anyone. We were missing a chorister because her mother was sick and it was unclear through this first rehearsal whether she’d be able to do the show (she could and did show up, phew). And our comic lead was under the weather and came late, but did come. (I don’t know if there were frantic discussions among the production team, but if Sam had actually not been able to do the show, our Go-To would have probably been our ‘go-to’ – he’d just played Ko-Ko a few months ago.) We had a lot of room on stage, it was quite different from the rehearsal hall.

I stupidly thought we might finish the staging rehearsal early, but alas, no, and we only had 90 minutes to go out and get lunch (and also dinner since we wouldn’t be able to get out of the theater in makeup between dress rehearsal and show) and get back and into costume and makeup. I went out and bought and basically inhaled a pasty, then bought a sandwich and carrots and sodas and water from the Waitrose. Stopped at the hotel on the way back so I could use my own bathroom, heh.

Back to the theater, into makeup. I hate doing my own makeup, I’m just not very good at it, and the light wasn’t great in the dressing room. Some people’s makeup was quite severe in the underlining and highlighting, and that turned out to be what was wanted, but mine was, um, ‘subtle’. I got powdered, then into costume. (I ended up punching up the makeup before the performance, but it still wasn’t much of anything.)

The dress rehearsal, which is our only time with the orchestra, went just fine. Usually, if you have to switch sets between Act 1 and Act 2, the dress will start with Act 2 so you can then switch back to Act 1 and leave it alone for the performance. But our set change was so easy (just move a set of platforms from left to right), we did it in order and we all appreciated that. The curtain call was screwed up for some reason, I think it was the lighting and curtain fall sequence, and we may never have done it correctly during that run.

Now it’s 5:30 and we’ve got two hours to kill before the performance. We hide in the dressing room, with most of the lights off because it’s hot and humid. Eat our sandwiches, shoot the shit, punch up the makeup.

And then we were off and running! The audience seemed to like it. They laughed at one of my favorite jokes, which was that the guy playing Pish-Tush didn’t know the dialogue. I hand him a libretto, and he says, “And what may be your business with…” (turns page) “Yum-Yum”.

One of the bits in Wand’ring Minstrel was during the “sentimental mood”, Nanki-Poo hands out sheet music to 3 people, like “The Lost Chord” and “Orpheus with His Lute”. I was one of the 3, and someone pointed out to me that I needed to hold up the sheet music so the audience could read the title, which is not something I’d done in rehearsal. So I’m sitting in this chair, on a rake, with the prop score on my lap and this sheet music. So when I’m holding the sheet music up, I’m also trying to hold my legs so the score doesn’t slide off onto the floor, and my leg starts shaking in this weird position. So I put my leg down and the score starts to slide so I put it up again (like pointing my toe) and the leg starts shaking again. OK, this is fun. Luckily, that part ended quickly.

There weren’t any disasters on the order of Risa’s knee dislocation last year (Risa was Peep-Bo this year and was very careful) but we did have a chorister fall as we were making an exit from the platforms (others helped him up), and then I fell at the very end of Act 1, when Katisha pushes her way out. I moved away from center, hit the edge of the platform and went right down. I wasn’t hurt, just bounced right back up again, but everyone checked in with me to make sure I was OK before we cleared the stage.

Everything else went just fine, as far as I could tell. Before we went downstairs for places for the Act 2 finale, I preset things in the dressing room so I could quickly zoom to a particular chair, change and get my makeup off and get out of there. Show ends, I leave with everyone else, dump my hat in the box in the wardrobe room, my pocket hankerchief in the ‘bits’ bag in the dressing room, and everything else is mine to bring home. Get changed, makeup off, head across the street to the hotel to dump most of the stuff and to really wash my face.

Off to the festival club for our cabaret. By the time I got there, all the company seats in the special section were filled, but I got to see quite a few people I hadn’t seen yet (like Chris W) and get a drink. I ended up sitting upstairs with Tobin’s family for a while, then went down and got another drink and stood until the final number of the cabaret (Danny Boy), which we all sang. And made my rounds with goodbyes and headed back to the hotel to crash.

I know this is light on detail, but that’s a long day that you just have to sort of float through with limited energy. I will post pictures and videos here eventually.