So, this is how show day works at the Festival. As early as you can get in in the morning, everyone who can cart stuff loads in the costumes and props, and the sets (which are supplied by the festival) are loaded in and set up on stage.
As soon as possible, the cast is allowed on stage and the director walks through the show for spacing on the set and stage (which we’ve never had access to before). If there are different sets for Act 1 and Act 2, Act 1 is done first, then replaced with the Act 2 set.
Around lunchtime, the stage is off-limits for about an hour, although backstage and dressing rooms are still open. Then it’s opened up again.
From 2:30-5:30 is the orchestra dress. It’s the only time to run the show on the set in costumes, and the only time to work with the orchestra. As MD, you’d better be ready to hit the ground running in this rehearsal, as you have to do any explaining, trial runs, and fixes in addition to running the whole show, in that three-hour window.
And then the show goes up at 7:30!
So… as MD, I wasn’t technically needed anywhere until 2:30, but I always go into the pit and finish marking up parts while they do the staging rehearsal in the morning. As much as you can mark up parts ahead of time, there’s always stuff left to do, particularly because some ‘conducting things’ get set or changed at the last minute. One thing I always do, mostly in the string parts, is indicate with clear markings how I’m conducting transitions and recitatives, so they don’t have to figure it out as we go through our one run. (And then I have to make sure I’m conducting those spots consistently, which doesn’t always happen).
So that’s what I did, and what we did. I schlepped over with my score, orchestral parts and outfit and checked in at the stage door, dumping my stuff in the dressing room I was sharing with male principals. And then down into the pit.
I had told Brad that he wasn’t needed for that morning, but sure enough, at some point they needed accompaniment for an entrance, so I ended up at the keyboard in the pit, hacking away until Marisa realized what was going on and took over for me.
At lunchtime, I followed the throng to Waitrose to get a couple of sandwich value meals, one for lunch and one for dinner. Sat out on the Spring Gardens mall (beautiful day) to eat lunch.
Back to the Opera House and to the pit to get ready. Chatted with several of the orchestra folks, including some who’ve been in the orchestra every time I’ve conducted, starting back in 2012. Bit of an issue in that I only had one book for some sections (Flutes 1 & 2, for instance), and the flutes had seat setups so sharing a book would be tough. I had to tell them, “I understand your problem, but I still only have one flute book.” They ended up photographing the book and sharing it somehow that way. Lessons learned, I’ll make sure I have one book per player next time.
One question, which was completely legitimate, made me laugh, “which act are we starting with?”. If the show has two sets, you often start the dress with Act 2, then they switch back to Act 1 during the break and you run Act 1. This allows them to leave Act 1 up for the show. This makes sense logistically, but really effs with your head as a performer. I remember during Pirates, by the time we got to Act 2 in performance, it felt like we’d last done it a hundred years ago. But Pinafore was all on the same set, so we were able to run it in order.
At 2:30, Sally handed the orchestra over to me and I talked through the score. “This number is normal.” “This number, we take this one of three possible endings.” “This number, we’re doing an extra repeat right here.” All of which was marked anyway, but let’s head off questions at the pass. The weirdest part, which as soon as we made this decision in staging, I knew would be tough, was that in the Act 1 finale, we were coming to a dead halt at one point, waiting for staging to happen, and then picking it up again. As written, there’s no halt there and so I needed them to play a particular downbeat twice – once as the final note of the first section, and once as the starting note of the next section. I’d notated it in the parts so that the winds would finish the first section, and the strings would pickup the next section, but as I explained it, one of the musicians said, “Do you mind if we play that downbeat both times?” I was like, “no, that’s terrific, go ahead, I just couldn’t figure out how to notate it in your part without it getting really confusing”. They got it.
And we did the run. It’s tough – often they don’t really watch and you give really clear signals which are not followed. As I said to the cast later, ‘it’s very squishy‘. Some moments in the show didn’t go great, but we had time to go try them again after the act was finished. Another cockup happened during Act 2 – the great Scena for Josephine, “The hours creep on apace”, starts with woodwinds alone. And half of them didn’t come in. And the reason was because we’d swapped out the preceding dialogue with an alternate version and the winds were listening for a dialogue cue that was now different and which never came. So we stopped and fixed that. Never mind that I had been gesturing clearly, ‘hey we’ll be playing soon’ and then ‘ hey, we’re about to start’. The winds were just glued to that dialogue cue. Anyway…
As often happens, the dress feels squishy but once the orchestra figures out how you’re doing something, in performance, it’s fine. And that was mostly true here. We wrapped it up before 5:30, as it was going quite well and Pinafore is a short show. (for longer shows, often you have to skip big chunks of dialogue in the run so you have time to get to all the music – we had to do that for Ruddigore and Mikado too, I think)
Then time to kill. There’s a door and staircase backstage that leads out to a rooftop where you can get some air, and I ate my other sandwich meal out there. and got into “performance head”. Went and changed. Oh, boy, I hadn’t ever put on the tie before, and it was quite short. Was I even going to be able to trap the tail behind the tie clip? Answer, yes, but it was a close call.
As always, the last fifteen minutes before the show is me standing sidestage getting more and more into ‘perfomance head’ and trying to avoid people chatting with me, which of course they do because they’re just waiting around for curtain like me. I’d had the conversation with Keith, the stage manager, about what my cue was to start each act. (more than once, for previous shows, I never got a cue even though I was told I’d get one, and almost hit the podium late)
Finally Neil Smith went out for his curtain speech and I went down to the pit, hanging around behind the tympani before he introduced me. Made my entrance, clap clap bow, and off we went into the overture. Unlike the last show I conducted, we did not get stopped after the overture because someone had had a medical accident on stage, we went straight on. Act 1 went just fine, except (of course I only focus on the mistakes):
- During the “oh pity pity me, our captain’s daughter she” section, which is tricky and had a specific conducting pattern assigned to it, I just bzzzted out mentally and forgot how to do it. So I just gave a downbeat for every beat, and that seemed to work until my brain got back online.
- During “over the bright blue sea”, where the ladies are offstage and couldn’t see me, Marisa was standing sidestage to conduct them (for staging reasons, on the opposite side of the stage). This went fine during dress. However, during performance, a combination of different lighting sidestage and Marisa wearing a black dress meant suddenly Marisa was invisible and the ladies had no idea what was going on. So that was squishy, but on review, wasn’t that bad.
- During “now give three cheers”, the cast was largely facing upstage for “Hurrah, hurrah, hooray!” and didn’t get my tempo at all. Luckily that finished quickly before it got really embarrassing.
However, some of the trickier bits, like practically at least three moments during the Act 1 Finale where Ralph has to start a new tempo out of nowhere, went just fine. (Thanks, Chaz!) The audience seemed to really like it.
Fifteen minute intermission. The only thing I remember about this is, unlike Act 1, I absolutely needed an active cue from Keith the SM to go make my entrance. And right as it was about to happen, Marisa kind of floated in, just being part of the action, and stood immediately between me and Keith. I just said, “Marisa, bad place to be, sweetie” and she went, “Oh!” and scooted.
Act 2 went beautifully, I must say. Lauren totally nailed the Scena, of course. And this led directly into the Bell Trio scene, which was hilarious.
You can’t see it on the video, but after the 2nd encore, I was very deliberately raising my baton up high so Martin had something to react to. When he yelled at me, I dropped my arm down with a quickness.
For Savoynet shows, we often have some visual bit that we’re trying to keep quiet about until the audience gets to see it (so no sharing on social media). For Ruddigore, it was our skeletons, Marco and Giuseppe. For Pinafore, it was the flag bit.
The applause was loud and long enough for the flag that I actually had my left hand up in a ‘stop’ motion to Captain Corcoran so he didn’t cut the applause by jumping in with his next entrance. That’s one of my favorite conducting tricks, the ‘traffic cop’, super helpful for spots where the singers get nervous about waiting for an entrance and might jump in early.
Anyway, the rest of the show went beautifully and the audience was very appreciative and I was happy to get to conduct the fun part of the overture (one of my favorites) again for curtain call (which are called ‘bows’ over there).
Happy, exhausted. We all got cleaned up and changed and cleaned up our dressing rooms. I didn’t have to bring my costume anywhere, so I managed to get to the cabaret space early enough to get a seat with Rick, the director, and his daughter, and get a beverage. Brad and Trond were there, sitting out in the ‘audience’, said hi to them.
The cabaret was a lot of fun! I got to do David Mallett’s “Garden Song”.
I’d originally slated this for the American cabaret the previous Sunday, but it got moved. Anyway, this gentle song was quite different from the other cabaret stuff, and I think a nice palate-cleanser. I was really happy with how it went (although I should have just not looked at the phone, I would have been fine on lyrics) and it was very well-received.
After the cabaret, there was much schmoozing. Super-funny thing, I met two people who turned out to be our Boatswain’s parents! Daniel’s from Long Island, lives in Montreal now, I had no idea his parents were coming to the show. But it turns out that when the dad was Daniel’s age, he was in a production of “Pirates” that Brad music-directed in DC. So Brad and the dad got to reconnect, and how random is that?
And we all wrapped up the Festival Club portion of the evening with lots of hugs and smooches and signings-of-programs and farewells, as a lot of people were off to home or to London or wherever the next day. (I had managed to set this trip in my favorite way, which is a day of doing nothing but winding down before heading home the day after that, so I was under no pressure.) I headed out and of course, to home, although I found out the next day that pretty much everyone else headed to Production House for an after-party that went into the wee hours.
Coming up – the wrap-up!
The Toast Point Page 