Feeling better about this

Sunday night's rehearsal was pretty bad, and last night's was HORRIBLE! One of my fellow castmembers shared this afternoon that "the audience looked like they were in pain"; probably an accurate assessment. We were dropping lines and missing vocal entrances right, left & center, even places we'd never had problems before. Maybe we were thrown by having enough room to work for the first time ever. (I had reserved my church's social hall and taped out the dimensions of the stage we'll be working on.) Whatever it was, I was about ready to slit my wrists in despair.

This afternoon we had just over 3 hours in the space - our only rehearsal there before we open on Saturday! It went much better than last night (it pretty much HAD to get better; couldn't have been too much worse), so that now I'm almost optimistic. ;)

It's been weird not having a proper tech week. Every other show I've done has been able to load in the weekend before opening or, in a few rare cases, even earlier. This gave us upwards of 4 nights in the theater with the sets, sound, lights, etc., and each rehearsal ran at least 4 hours. I'm still a bit nervous about not getting to work in the space again until we have an audience, but we did well enough today that the nerves aren't unmanageable, fala Bogu.

Another thing making this a weird tech week is that today's tech was in the afternoon; I was home and done by 5 or shortly thereafter. I can go to bed early during Tech week! What a concept! And tomorrow we have no rehearsal at all, so I'm going to the cabaret performance of the woman teaching the cabaret workshop I'm taking next week. (Which reminds me - I'd better start solidifying that memorization - we're supposed to have both our pieces memorized when we show up for the first session on Monday.)

This being a Fringe Festival, the 5 core venues are booked pretty tightly. In practical terms, that means we only get to show up an hour before curtain and half an hour before they start letting the audience in, and get into the dressing rooms only 45 minutes before curtain. We have 2 rooms perhaps 8 feet square serving as dressing rooms. They have mirrors and room for a clothing rack but nothing else, so I'll need to remember to put my make-up on before I leave the house on performance nights. Heretofore, I've always put it on after I got to the theater, perhaps because I could leave my stuff there. Not here. We do get a 2'x4' area where we're storing the cubes that are serving as set pieces, along with a few other large items, but costumes, props and personal items have to be cleared out within 15 minutes of the final bow.