Kim’s Domain

Weeks 5 and 6 were relatively uneventful.  Week 5 I closed Barber of Seville and the next day began rehearsals for Fall of the House of Usher.  Our initial tenor dropped out, so the Apprentice who was supposed to be his understudy got promoted up to the role.  He was very promising from the beginning and has only gotten better.  Everyone was well-prepared for the this show, so there weren’t any extra coachings needing to be scheduled like there were for Barber, so that was nice.  I ran the first week of rehearsals on my own since the ASM and PA were busy with She Loves Me, which was a huge success so I will give a shout-out here to Matty and Jacqi.  Usher is a five person cast so running it on my own was no problem.

Week 6 we started to work the ASM and PA, the "ninjas" as we call them because they are in black from head to toe (sound familiar, David V.?), into their scene changes.  We had special rehearsals just for them before we did work throughs of each act, and that seemed to work really well.  (Of course everything changed once we got to the theater, but I’m not there yet.) The whole process of rehearsing Usher was such a pleasure because the cast is so good and our conductor is so much fun.  She specializes in weird modern operas and keeps everyone laughing.  Despite Usher being a heavy show, there was lots of laughter throughout the rehearsal process.  Everyone involved commented on what a great process it was.  Yay!

So we got into the theater a day earlier than initially scheduled.  We called it a spacing rehearsal.  We had one IATSE crew member who ran the rail and worked under work lights.  It was a work-through, so every time we came up to a scene change we stopped, changed the set, and then moved on to the next scene.  It was immensely helpful since it gave the ASM an extra day to start figuring where everything was going to fit backstage, and allowed the singers time to walk the actual paths backstage.  However, we only had the ASM and PA there, and not the third crew member.

Then came first night of tech.  Frankly, it sucked.  Although it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been because we did get through the whole show.  The first act was very painful, though.  The rail (I have two flymen) were having some major problems.  They were bringing in the wrong linesets, bringing linesets in instead of taking them out, and it didn’t help that my paperwork was less than perfect and I had some discrepancies between my book and the paperwork.  The scene changes were all really tough and we ran them at least twice.  The ASM and PA were in my ear most of the night trying to figure things out which irked me a bit and led to my ASM and I also getting into a little tizzy, but we talked it out and now we’re fine.  And nobody got hurt and eventually things got figured out.  The second night of tech, last night, was much smoother.  After having teched the show, my ASM was able to see more clearly how things could work backstage and talked through all the scene changes with her crew before we started tech.  Also my paperwork for the rail was updated (although still not perfect, there’s this one stupid set piece that has 4 different trims that even I still get mixed up with) and they felt more comfortable running things.  There is still one scene change that is really really tough, but tonight we will have a full crew (we were missing one crew member last night, and it still went smoothly, that’s how much my crew rocks) so it should be more or less cake.  I have to add a couple more rail cues because the director was not completely clear with what he wanted during our paper techs and only last night made it clear to me what he wanted, but they shouldn’t be too bad.

I can’t believe the season is almost over.  I’ll be home in little over a week, hooray!