Thursday, August 11, 2005
Last weekend starts tonight
Hard to believe. This is the way it always is.
When you come to Day One of rehearsal Opening Night seems like eons away. Plenty of time. Nothin' to worry about.
At about the 2-weeks-prior mark you get hit with a bit of a shock. You open next week. Tech and all its joys start within a few days. Wait a minute. You're pretty sure you had forever to get this together originally!
The last week before Opening seems to go by in a flash, even as the more tedious rehearsals where all the technical elements come together seem to last for days.
Then you open.
And before you know it, it's Closing Weekend.
Now I will tell you my dirty, little secret: many of we theatre people are rather peripatetic in nature...going from show to show to show. A bunch of the cast already knows the next show they're in, and some of them have already started rehearsal, overlapping with Brigadoon performances. That being in our nature, many of us are secretly ready for the next show to go through the same cycle.
So, along with the melancholy feeling that you're about to be separated from your new family (and director Jay Manly often talks movingly about the theatre as extended family) there's that excitement and anticipation about the next project and the next family you're joining.
Closing Weekends are filled with mixed emotion such as that. Which often makes the performances only richer.
I guess I'll find out because I'm seeing it tomorrow night. I'll let you know.
When you come to Day One of rehearsal Opening Night seems like eons away. Plenty of time. Nothin' to worry about.
At about the 2-weeks-prior mark you get hit with a bit of a shock. You open next week. Tech and all its joys start within a few days. Wait a minute. You're pretty sure you had forever to get this together originally!
The last week before Opening seems to go by in a flash, even as the more tedious rehearsals where all the technical elements come together seem to last for days.
Then you open.
And before you know it, it's Closing Weekend.
Now I will tell you my dirty, little secret: many of we theatre people are rather peripatetic in nature...going from show to show to show. A bunch of the cast already knows the next show they're in, and some of them have already started rehearsal, overlapping with Brigadoon performances. That being in our nature, many of us are secretly ready for the next show to go through the same cycle.
So, along with the melancholy feeling that you're about to be separated from your new family (and director Jay Manly often talks movingly about the theatre as extended family) there's that excitement and anticipation about the next project and the next family you're joining.
Closing Weekends are filled with mixed emotion such as that. Which often makes the performances only richer.
I guess I'll find out because I'm seeing it tomorrow night. I'll let you know.
// posted by ElisaC @ 12:32 PM 
