Pounding Headache

So we gave it a go at percussion last night.

Leading up to rehearsal, I'd already mapped out the 100 bars of music, added the music for each part based on what I knew my cast would each be able to handle. I'd already burned CDs with a master track and an individual track for each person and their instrument. I acknowledged that it was flat and juvenile, but it was at least doable.

I'd asked Brian to come in last night to assist and perhaps spice it up a bit, and he jumped in with both feet and did that. One of the problems we discovered was that having two people missing made it VERY difficult. Brian started layering rhythms into the second and third movements, and while it sounded much better and more interesting, we couldn't achieve it in the two weeks that remain. I looked around and saw half the cast exhausted from drumming non-stop, and the other half bored out of their minds because they had done essentially no drumming, and I called a break.

I took a sanity check from each of the cast members along with Brian, and determined that we're going to go with the percussion as written. Had we addressed this weeks ago, we might have had more "improv" time, giving the folks the ability to grow into their part of the percussive harmonies I've established. After the break, I had Brian show us some of the basics of drumming, and that seemed to bring things back to earth.

We finished up by going through the intro to the piece about ten times. I think it will work. We'll try it again every night next week and see if it stands and breathes on it's own, and if all else fails, we can simply transition to the "hard eights" leading into Beautiful City right after Rudy pauses us with the four measures of "heartbeat". That alone will achieve what I wanted, and it's a sane fallback position.

Thanks to the cast for enduring that last night and giving both Brian and I some time to work through it. Neither of us has done anything like it before.

But I'd like to see what we can do with this in the mean time. They have three days to play with their CDs over the Memorial Day weekend. I hope they blow me away when we get back on Tuesday.

And, as usual, I have a ton of work to do. I have to finish the masks. I have to "skin" the menhirs, patch, and paint them. I have to add the upper piping to the menhir frames so that props can be stored on top as well as inside. I have to make several pieces for the Pharisee head (eye brows, ears, nose). I need to buy the missing instruments for the percussion piece. I need to get a few more props. I need to set the lights and enter some presets and some basic scenes.

Time to make my usual "Sean's Big List".

- Sean