Monday, November 20, 2006

I'm very behind on my blogging so I'm going to play catch-up in chronological order.

First night. I set off from here with suitable trepidation in my heart. Caught up with lovely Jonathan on arrival about the music. Rallied my cast for a warm-up on stage at 7 prior to curtain up at 7:30. Trotting round busily running dull errands for people - apple juice from the front of house people to the girls' dressing room and such like.

Till Richard accosted me at perhaps 6:58 to alert me to the fact that lovely Karen (Grusha) and Stephen (Corporal / GM) were stuck in traffic behind an accident somewhere around Gorgie. And had been for an hour and a half.

As additional excitement, Charmaine (rider / stableman / little fox) was stricken with some weird coldlike ailment that seemed to render her almost incapable of speech.

So this neatly distracted me from my nerves. We felt we could delay the curtain by 10 or 15 minutes but not much longer. So I briefed a couple of boys to read in for Stephen if need be - less of an issue as his part was small. And decided that I would have to go on as both Karen and Little Fox if need be.

Wendy helpfully said (and this is my favourite quote of the run): "But you can't do that. That will affect us all." You don't say.

As it turned out, Karen and Stephen turned up at 7:29 and about 45 seconds. Poor Karen ran into the dressing room, changed, wept and was on stage ten minutes later. For which I shall have eternal respect for her as she gave an excellent performance.

And Charmaine miraculously rallied as curtain up time lately approached and drank cough medicine for the rest of the week which seemed to fix her.

It was a good show. Lighting looked beautiful - although we did have an exciting mid-scene-6 black out in the midst of one of Ian A's impassioned lawyers' speeches. Sound was almost there. Cast did dandily and little Rhodri, one of our 'Michael's', was suitably adorable.

General feedback afterwards was good and we sold about 40 tickets. Not quite enough but I had high hopes for the ensuing nights.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home