Surreal. That is the only word to describe the first run-through of A Christmas Story. At one point the actor playing Grown Ralph looked at the director and said "Is this for real? Is this really happening?" The director and I looked at each other and she said "We just did not think this through, did we?"
We were rehearsing in two different rooms- one for the Parker house, and one for the other scenes. Not ideal, but we were making do. Then came time to run Act I. If you've ever seen or done A Christmas Story, you'll know why this was a problem- the play is, essentially, the movie onstage. It relies heavily on cinematic-style montages of scenes- 2 pages in the house, 1 page at school, 1 page outside, 3 pages in the house, and so on. For 77 pages. The run-through took about 2 hours, for 1:09 of actual stage time (I'm pretty pleased with myself that I even managed to salvage an accurate run time from that fiasco).
Yesterday was The Great Rehearsal Migration of 2010- the Ballet moved out, which meant that Peter Pan moved their rehearsals from the small rehearsal room to the big rehearsal room, and so A Christmas Story moved downstairs to the small rehearsal room. This meant moving 2 sets of rehearsal furniture and props and all of the ensuing detritus that accumulates in rehearsal spaces, as well as taping out 2 groundplans.
Frantic taping ensued- the floor of the big rehearsal room is unsealed (whose bright idea was that?) so spike tape pulls the paint off the floor. Which means the sets had to be taped in painter's tape, and then spike tape got laid on top of that to color-code the various sets.
In other news, I worked the overnight electrics load-in for Peter Pan, which got me out of the Monday all-call for the scenic load-in. It was fun, and even though I worked from 1:00pm on Sunday-7:00am Monday with an hour break for dinner, it didn't feel like that much. I'm not going to say I was full of energy at the end of it, but I definitely wasn't as exhausted as I expected to be. We started with a bunch of set-backs- couldn't start hanging until midnight for various reasons, spilled coffee on the plot, and had to frankenstein the gel cuts for the cyc fixtures (you can get 4 cuts with the grain going vertically, but only 2 if it goes horizontally. Guess which one we needed? Guess what the ME didn't know when he ordered the gel?) but we prevailed! The hang went really well and we got everything done!
I say I started work at 1:00 on Sunday, but really I just watched the ballet. Ballet Memphis was in residency at POTS for the last 3 weeks, performing A Midsummer Night's Dream. I watched the show from the booth- our lighting designer ran their board for them, so I sat with him and listened to their PSM call the show. I wanted to shadow her, but she called the show from the deck and there wasn't really room for me to stand with her during the show. I really enjoyed the show, it was pretty gorgeous and surprisingly funny. I wish that there were more of the Mechanicals- it's just Bottom and Quince. I guess that's standard for the ballet version? I don't have anything to compare it to, so that's pure speculation.
Right now I'm sitting at the light board- I'm running the board for our lighting designer/master elec while they focus the show.
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