Short rehearsal schedule!

In community theater, it's customary to have anywhere from 2-4 months of rehearsal for a musical before the show actually opens, depending on how many nights a week you can get your rehearsal space and whether it shuts down, as schools do, for holidays, breaks, or weather.

For this production of The Mikado, we have a mere six weeks! Instead of the usual progression of read-through, a week or two of music rehearsals, then blocking, our schedule is much tighter. We had our read-through on Saturday and tonight we're blocking the Act II finale already! Thank heaven it's a short one, but I suspect I'll be one of the few who has more than a vague idea of what we're supposed to be singing. (Comes of having done Mikado in the chorus - "Recently?" "No, years and years ago!") I am definitely not off book, but should at least be able to keep up.

This is going to be a new experience for me in that our "orchestra" will consist of two pianos hidden behind a screen all the way upstage. No conductor. I've only run into this sort of thing once before. I was doing "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", and there we had a small combo on stage, hidden behind a scrim up right. There was a conductor in that case, but he was behind the scrim with the instrumentalists. What I learned was that I just had to listen like crazy and hope for the best. I don't remember any train wrecks, and audience reaction was good, so I guess it worked.

This theater is actually a concert hall. That means there are no wings, no fly space, and no orchestra pit. (Why would they need one? In a concert hall, the orchestra performs on stage!) This set-up presents unique challenges not only for a "pit orchestra" but for the set designer. The rules dictate that nothing can be suspended from overhead, nor anchored to walls or floor. I can't wait to see how the set builder works around that!