Saturday Morning's Allright for Recordin'

It was an uncommon Saturday morning gathering for part of the cast for A Thurber Carnival last week. I had to be up early enough to take the half hour drive into Shepherdstown, and be there by 10:00AM. One of the cast members works at the nearby Shepherd University radio station, and we were there to record a promotional spot for the play, as I mentioned before.

Great little station. Reminded me of my own college radio days. Cramped quarters, but we got it done. (Even though one cast mate had to stand in for another, who was unable to make it that morning.)


We were given permission to to use about one minute of dialogue from the show, and it just so happens that the first 60 seconds of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ends at a very convenient cut-off point. So we ran through it twice, just to make sure the timing held up. (It did.) Then we recorded two takes. And that was that. Afterward, each of us gave our name, and a few brief thoughts about what we enjoyed about being in the production. The entire thing will be edited down to two, or possibly three minutes, and played on the air this week on the college radio station. (Which has a range of about 40 miles I am told.) Hopefully that will attract some people.

After the recording I walked by to the theatre, and helped with painting for a bit. There is no set to speak of, but there were several pieces of wooden furniture that needed to be painted off white. I hadn't helped with painting on a show in years. (Most of the community theatres don't need, and in some cases prefer the cast to not be involved in set construction.) But I was always fairly good at it, so long as it was just solid colors, as it was in this case. Coat of primer, coat of white. I think the director planned on putting one more coat on everything sometime over the weekend. I painted for about two hours.

A scheduled cue-to-cue with all actors on Sunday was canceled. The director felt in the end that there were too many things up in the air to make the rehearsal practical at that point. The small tech crew went in, but actors were given the night off. So tonight, (Monday) will begin our tech week. A Tuesday rehearsal has also been added. We  need it.

Those who read my blog we probably notice certain patterns. One of them is the whole, "we are in tech week and further behind than we should be" scenario. This is another installment in that series, as I really feel we haven't gotten to where we ideally should be by now. I confess once again that I am a bit nervous having only four days left at this point. The dance is still unrehearsed. (Thanks to the previous mention "dance problems". We haven't had music yet. We have a long way to go. But one consolation is that pulling together a bunch of individual skits in a short time should be somewhat easier than pulling together one continuous play in the same amount of time, at the same level of unpreparedness. In other words, it will be easier to make up lost ground with this show than with a standard show. I am counting on that being true. But hauling ass will still be required.

That ass hauling starts tonight, with costumes. (Which I am going to be wearing for the first time tonight, if the clothes I am bringing meet with the approval of the director. We don't need complicated costumes for most scenes, though I am starting to wonder about the Civil War uniform for If Grant Were Drunk at Appomattox. That is the sort of complicated costume change that I would have preferred to run a few times before tonight. But that is the one type of costume I couldn't possible provide myself.

So I'm in for a long week of long nights. But I want to be in for them. I want to have our nose to the grindstone on this one.