A First Time For Everything

Tonight's rehearsal for A Thurber Carnival was a bit of a milestone; It was the first time that, for most of the evening, we has an entire cast present. The glory will be short lived, as several people have to be out of town for the upcoming holiday weekend, but nonetheless it was refreshing to have every role filled by an actual person tonight. Many a joke was made about each of us being thrown during the scenes by the presence of so many people.

To begin with, the elusive "young female" role was finally cast tonight. Much to my delight it is an actress I have worked with before, in Romeo and Juliet last summer with The Bard's Men. I haven't seen her since that show closed, so that was a fun surprise. She's a good actress, and honestly, a good fit for the characters she has been assigned. So hopefully, she will be able to stick around for the remainder of the run.

We ran Act II tonight. Not in order, and certainly not without hitches. (Some of them due to me. I'm getting to that.) My two largest roles come in Act II. (Mr. Preble and Walter Mitty). I made the deadline for being off book for the former. The latter...not so much. Actually it depends on how you define "off book". If you mean not calling for a line, than I was no where near that. But if if means being able to get where I had to go while calling line a few times, I was basically off book. I more of the lines that I thought, actually. But still, I wasn't as off book as I should have been for the deadline of tonight's rehearsal. So I am a little dissapointed. But I feel very confident I will be there the next time we run Act II.

And I am fine with my other scenes. It's just that for whatever reason, I didn't have as much mental power invested in Mitty leading into today. I think I spent more time with some of the other than I needed. Or perhaps it's the nature of the skit. Either way, I'll hit the script hard, and be much better for Monday. (The next time we are set to run Act II, I believe.)

"Preble" went very well though. I didn't have to call for any lines, and me and my opposite just seemed to hit a great rhythm with it, seeing as how few times we've gone through it. It got done faster that just about any of the other skits that were rehearsed tonight, and the director was quite pleased with it.

We also went through of the micro short fables from Act I for the benefit of our newly acquired "young female". I have my smallest role on one of those. The first thing I was off book for, in fact. So no problems there.

Not many problems at all, really. We have only been doing this show for two weeks, after all. But I caught a sense of things starting to come together. That is even more promising, given that half of our time in those two weeks has been spent on choreographing a 4 minute dance. I get the sense that this is the sort of show and cast that will be exponentially better in just a week. (Even though some will be missing next week.) There is a lot of chaos there, but a few lighthouses have appeared to guide us slowly towards some kind of shore, and I am pleased by it.

And I sense that others are pleased with certain aspects of the show. (I received a nice compliment from one of my co-stars on my performance of Walter Mitty.) And I feel at ease with this crowd. There really hasn't been a lot of the "getting to know you" awkwardness that is often a part of the first few weeks of a show. Perhaps because we have been working on doing so much in those first few weeks. But I also think this is a particularly laid back cast. This, coupled with the fact that I knew one, and now know two people in the show is making for a production that is going far more smoothly 23 days from opening than it could have been going. It could very easily have been a much bigger mess. I have in fact been in such shows. And while there is much work to be done, everyone seems capable of doing it. I'm not always so lucky.

Next rehearsal is tomorrow. Not sure what the agenda is just yet.