meanwhile, back at the ranch...

SO it's been almost a month since my last post... I'm going to recap some stuff in bullet points.

-We survived The Miracle Worker. It was an excellent run of an excellent show. The set turned out gorgeous, and although I never actually saw them, I've been told that the lights were gorgeous too.

-We survived The Producers too! The actor who stepped in to play Max did a fantastic job, and the reviews of the show were fantastic. We struck that show last night...

-So about The Producers... the set for that show was so intense/had so many moving parts that we ended up getting the lighting designer, the ATD, the sound intern, and the carpentry intern to be our run crew, in addition to the 3 run crew members we already had. We tried at first to get by with crew and actors moving the set, but the scene changes took forever and were just dangerous, so we ended up with shop staff doing it. It worked out so well, though- it took 2 of the guys to move each wagon, where it took 4 actors to do it, and they did it in half the time.

-Another fun thing about The Producers is that there was not enough room backstage to store all of the set pieces, furniture, and props, so we set up a big pavilion tent outside and at intermission, we rolled up the elephant door and switched out stuff that was only used in Act I for stuff that was only used in Act II. It was ridiculous. There were also times (like the Accountant scene in Act I that required 5 rolling desks with chairs attached) that furniture came offstage and literally just kept going straight out the back door. We were scared about what would happen if it rained, but we got super lucky- there was only one night that it rained, and it held off till right after Intermission. We knew it was coming and did the shift in 7 minutes, literally running back and forth between the backstage and the scene shop, where we were keeping all of the props that could be damaged in the rain. It was really windy and the clouds were just black, and almost as soon as the Entr'acte was done, the bottom fell out. We group-hugged and said a prayer of thanks to Thespis and Dionysus for holding off the rain for us.

-A perk of having half of the tech staff on the run crew instead of high school apprentices was that things got fixed really fast, sometimes within minutes of it breaking onstage. That was super helpful when it came to things like the gun that kept misfiring or facing coming off of platforms as we move them on and off stage.

-Also, while all of this Producers craziness was happening, I was in rehearsal for Alice in Wonderland. I have neither the time nor the inclination to open the can of worms that is the recap of the rehearsal process for Alice at this moment, so that will wait for another time.

Kansas! Also, blind kids!

So tech at Weathervane is NUTS. We have 3 days of tech- one day of spacing, scene changes, etc. (it's the first rehearsal on the actual stage) and then 2 days of dress rehearsal.

The thing about My Fair Lady that made this whole process even more intense is that because of the renovation, our second dress rehearsal was also the grand-opening-ribbon-cutting-gala-ceremony-extravaganza with like 250 donors, season ticket holders, etc. Too bad we didn't make it all the way through the end of the show in the first dress! Wahoo!

So for the gala, they got everything ready and all fancy and made a bunch of speeches that we didn't hear because we were rehearsing, and we start the show, and halfway through the Overture we hear a siren outside, and then the Artistic Director yelling "HOLD! HOLD! HOLD!" There was a tornado warning (watch? warning? whichever one is the one where there's actually a tornado). So the actors are all in the dressing rooms, and the audience is chillin in the seats for about 10 minutes. One of our donors is the county fire marshall, so he had his radio and was getting all of the updates on the situation, which quickly progressed to a tornado moving in our general direction, so we evacuated everyone into the Children's Theatre, which is the safer building- no windows, lower ceiling, etc. So then we had about 300 people in the Children's Theatre, which isn't completely finished being constructed yet, so the crew was frantically carrying in chairs for the old people (most of the audience was old) and flashlights in case we lost power and it was a MADHOUSE. At one point the Artistic Director started serving cake from the gala, and then the cast was singing to try and keep people from panicking. All of the crew and the theatre staff were remarkably calm and composed during the whole ordeal, thank God.

My SM & I decided that if the theatre is actually hit by a tornado, at any point in the summer, really, we will be getting matching tornado tattoos. We thought we were all going to get blown away, the weather was absolutely terrifying outside! Also, wouldn't it just be beautiful irony for the brand-new building to get blown away by a tornado during the ribbon-cutting ceremony?

Anyway, we finally got to resume the show, we got started around 9:15. A lot of the audience left, understandably, but we had a fairly large number who stayed all the way through. And when I say all the way through, I mean we skipped large sections of the show that we had run in the first dress so that we could make it through the end of the show before midnight, which we barely achieved. The result of all of this was that we opened the show without ever running it from start to finish on the stage in one sitting.

We opened last night, and it actually went very well, considering. The other crazy thing is that the first day of performance for one show is simultaneously the first day of rehearsal for the next one, so we rehearsed Miracle Worker from 10:00-5:00 and then went to open My Fair Lady.

Miracle Worker is one of my favorite plays, I really like it. I wish I could see it performed in Tuscumbia, they do it every summer in Helen Keller's actual house. The character of James is such a great part, the actor who's playing it is doing a fantastic job. I really just think James is so funny, poor guy.

We have two girls playing Helen- the main Helen and then her understudy. Her understudy is one of those obnoxious Broadway babies. Also a very bossy child. Helen is fantastic, though. We played a lot of blindfolded games with the kids and the girl playing Annie, which of course resulted in us being groped by blindfolded 10-year-old girls, because they put their arms straight out and up, which is right at boob height. Classy.

We're rehearsing at a Lutheran church in downtown Newark right now- no more rehearsal in the abandoned elementary school/architectural firm gym! The irony of this situation is that the church also houses the Licking County Center for the Visually Impaired. We share a wall with them, and can hear them on the phone all the time. It's a little uncomfortable, actually.