Tub Thumping

Saturday ended an arduous week of rehearsals. Even with the day off on Wednesday, I could tell that fatigue was high.

Well, let me rewind a bit, as I often do in these entries. Being out for most of the week of April 24 combined with NOT having a stage manager seems to have allowed an unfortunate under-current to begin churning. In a nutshell, the cast has polarized a bit, and there seem to be two factions: the "younger" group and the "older" group. Some of the more seasoned performers, who are working very, VERY diligently on everything I've thrown at them, are frustrated by the apparent LACK of focus, and in some cases, outright DISTRACTION presented by some of the less experienced performers. I've witnessed it in their silence, rolled eyes, seclusion, and in some cases, direct verbal confrontation.

But it's not just the "older" cast members, and it's not ALL of the "older" cast members. Arryck and Tami also expressed frustration with the "chattiness" of this cast as well as their habitual tardiness. As an example, we only had Arryck and Tami for two hours on Saturday, and we lost 30 minutes of it to tardiness.

And on the other side of the fence, I acknowledge that I do this for fun, and I hope that others enjoy working on this production as much as I do. Talking and joking with other theatre people is one of my favorite pass-times, and we have a GREAT group of people in this cast. There are more similarities among the cast than there are differences, and I hope that I can remind them of that this evening when I address (and hopefully dispel) the issue.

Now, onto the good stuff. Dance rehearsal was tough, but VERY productive. Arryck managed in the 90 short minutes we had to teach them the two remaining dances. There is a TON of choreography for this show, but we still have over a month left. No worries. The percussion was tedious but productive. Having the cast work interactively with me on what was needed allowed me to go back to the computer and rework the percussion piece to better suit the needs of the show. My goal is to have something interesting to watch and listen, but that can be played without a huge amount of distraction from the other components of the show.

So, it's a BIG show, creatively. I know that. We're going to shift into third gear this week so that we're in fourth by mid-month. Then, we can enjoy all the benefits of an early accomplishment and focus on fine-tuning the show the closer we get to opening.


- Sean