Oo, now we’re back into the swing of it and it’s show week. As per tradition, I’m now conducting rehearsals out of the full score, not the vocal score. Back for Pirates (10 years ago now!), I started the habit of creating a photocopy of whatever full score I was using up to 11×17″, making it nice and big. I’m kinda blind, and also, in a show situation, you really do have this large universe of an entire orchestra down below and an entire cast up above, it’s a large panorama of people you need to communicate with, so squinting at a score is just not going to help. I also, years ago, pasted a little cheat sheet on the inside the enormous 3-ring binder – of “crochet = quarter note” and such – just in case the orchestra throws a curveball question at me. As we went through rehearsals, and there was a little downtime as Rick or Rachel solved a staging problem, I’d get my highlighters and highlight the score, and add all the ‘this is how you conduct this spot’ markings.

Monday morning, I’d sent out an apology email about the little diva fit I’d thrown on Sunday, and everyone was very nice about it. The upshot was that we would definitely have a regrouping production meeting at the end of every day, which meant the days would be quite long, but that was OK.

We finished blocking all the bits we hadn’t gotten to yet, like the Act 2 finale, (or ‘the megamix’, as we called it, as it churns through reprises of the greatest hits of the score). I ran over the recitative with Martin (Sir Joseph) that leads into the Act 2 finale. There is a recitative there that was replaced with dialogue early on, but I wanted to reinstate just the very end of it, where Sir Joseph gets a little poetical, and that worked nicely.

After rehearsal, we did a cabaret rehearsal for the group numbers. I’d suggested we do the Champagne Song from “Fledermaus”, and had envisioned finding some adventurous sopranos and tenors to do the Orlovsky, Eisenstein and Adele solos, but we decided just to do two verses and have the men sing one solo and the women the other. Which led us to take the whole thing down a step, which was fine. It was iffy whether I as MD would actually need to conduct this number or not. The other group number was the “Song of Purple Summer” from Spring Awakening, which is a number I didn’t know at all, and which was quite tricky in its pop harmonies. I wasn’t involved in MDing this, and I decided for myself that I would probably skip it and not sing it in performance, no big deal.

The production meeting, up at Production House, didn’t start for quite a while. I was going to leave after the production meeting and find dinner, but they were having kind of an ‘arts and crafts’ party to build and paint props, and pizza was ordered and it turned into a whole party with wine while they’re spray-painting fake crates out on the patio. So I hung around through the meeting enough to eat and drink, and then headed home, picking up some groceries on the way.

I crashed in the comfy chair and did some knitting and was going to watch TV, but I couldn’t even get the laptop to connect to it. I was having the worst tech luck.

---

(I’m now at the point where things got so busy that I took only random scattershot notes until the show was over. I will have to look at the rehearsal call sheets for Tuesday and Wednesday and my own credit card history to remind myself of what happens next – which I will do. Stay tuned!)