Tuesday I ran lines
with two actors to prepare them for their understudy blocking rehearsal
Wednesday. I then had an hour in the office-but I had already done a majority of
the schedule, so I was able to confirm some information regarding head shot
sessions coming up this week. It’s a lot more manageable this week!
I had 3 hours off,
and met up with Gail for lunch (she was staying with family near Welland). It
was wonderful to see her again.
I felt exhausted
and unfocused at rehearsal today. I wasn’t doing a good job of being on book. I
wasn’t fast or loud. Everyone has off days I guess… I felt I was a bit more on
top of anticipating and preparing for going back on certain scenes. It’s so
weird not using scene maps here, they have ‘tech flow charts’ instead, I
haven’t created a document like that before and I’m not the one doing it on
this show so I feel a bit lost sometimes. I’ve also been on book and am still
struggling with being able to track while being on book, especially since the
actors are not all using their rehearsal costumes so I don’t have a visual cue
to remind me or help me out. I’m struggling a bit with working on a team that
constantly needs to know everything that’s going on-in a controlling way, and it
makes me feel like I need to have permission to do anything so my instincts and
initiative gets stifled. I need to find a way to get over this, as it’s not the
first time I’ve been on a team like this and it makes me feel like I’m going
backwards instead of progressing…Tomorrow we do a full run of the play and I
don’t feel prepared, but the ASM is on top of it, so it will be fine. This run
will get me back on my feet with costume information and I’ll be able to get
timings and make note of all the places I need to update my running lists. We
still have about 4 weeks before we hit the stage, so I feel good about it all.
Things I’ve picked
up from the SM team, putting post its sticking out of pages to flag them for
line notes, then writing the page number, what the actor should be saying and
what they have been saying, so you can find them all at the end of the day and
write them out. This way you don’t take up an actor’s time, you just pass them
the post-its and they can look at them on their own time.
Keeping track of
how long we actually spend on each scene in rehearsal so that when we want to
rehearse a scene later on, you’ll know how much time it actually took, instead
of trying to estimate it based on the way the director and actors works.
Our run this week
went really well. I was able to take timings for everything and track a lot
more costume information. I wasn’t on book for this one so it was much easier
to collect all the information.
We don’t rehearse
more than 3 times a week, so it’s a bit of a challenge to stay focused and be
prepared each time because there is so much time in between rehearsals and I’m
doing office hours in between. Sometimes I’ll have two full office days in
between rehearsals and it’s easy to forget what we’re doing next in rehearsal.
I’ve managed to
update my wardrobe running list (a list of all the times an actor changes
costumes or removes/uses bits of their costumes on stage for one reason or
another, the list is then handed over to the wardrobe and wig departments so
they can fill in all the details according to what they’re building, and lastly
to the wardrobe runner for our show-the person during the run of the show who
is in charge of any kind of costume bits/information and makes sure all the
actors do the changes they need to do.) I’m going to get the ASM to look it
over because I’ve never done a document like this one before and it’s not the
easiest layout to wrap your brain around.
I also found out
this week that Sweet Charity has 207 pairs of shoes in it (i.e 207 costumes)
and about 310 costumes changes in the span of a 2 hour show (with a total of 23
actors). That wardrobe running list is 23 pages long, my list is 3 pages long.
Perspective.
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