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| I'm still so proud of these shows. |
Working a show is extremely time consuming and I am very
picky about what shows I will say yes to. There are only a handful of directors
I really want to work with. Some I work better with than others. I’ll be honest
the director of The Mousetrap (and Little Women last year) and I are pretty
much the dream team of director/stage manager. We think alike and we have a
tendency to be extremely ridiculous and garner very strange looks from cast
members who don’t particularly know us.
The Mousetrap was hard for all of us. It was just a hard
process, but we had a show at Murray State College looming on the horizon after
it closed. We got a week off (in which I got to watch one of my favorite girls
make her college theatre debut) and then had auditions. We were set to do two
one act plays: a comedy and a drama. They were great shows, but the comedy
called for five actors and the drama called for ten to twelve. Night one of
auditions we had one person show up. This is a very small college and the theatre
department is building (quite well in my opinion because there’s a ton of
talent there we, eventually, realized). Night two we had three more! Except one
of them had a wedding the day of one of the three performances so that wouldn’t
work. We left night two to go out and recruit actors.
We took a week off (auditions were October 1 and 2 and we
were set to open November 8…) and the director of the program went into
recruitment mode. I don’t know how she did it, but she somehow delivered to us
the absolute perfect group of nine actors which we made work with some
creativity. Between school holidays, the director and stage manager being out of
town (and the SM seeing Idina Menzel and Josh Groban (swoon) in concert), and
other school conflicts we ended up with ten rehearsals and most of them didn’t
involve the whole cast plus we were rehearsing the two shows on different
nights so basically there were about five rehearsals for each show.
I’m going to skip ahead to November for a moment and finish
this story in one post, but we somehow made it to tech week. The day before I
had a Bedlam theatre day…I was missing Bedlam football (the University of
Oklahoma (my alma mater) versus our in state rival Oklahoma State University)
due to the show so I went to a play at OSU to see one of last year’s graduates
in his college theatre debut at OSU and then went to see a musical I had been
really wanting to see at OU. During intermission of the evening show I started
to feel queasy. I managed to make it through Act II and about a mile from my
house (85 miles from OU) before I had to pull over and throw up. I spent the
rest of the evening puking my guts out.
Happy Tech Week!
I quarantined myself from the cast as we did dry tech. Luckily
it seemed to be only a 24 hour bug and I was right as rain by Monday. We ran
through the shows and realized that there needed to be major work on lines.
Tuesday our lead for the comedy and a prominent character in the drama called
to tell me she had strep. She had antibiotics and expected to be good by dress
rehearsal Wednesday.
We had one rehearsal with the cast off book before we
opened. I still don’t know how we pulled it off, but they ended up being
fantastic shows and I am really proud of the work we all did. Those kids put
their all into making the shows great.
We also proved that it wasn’t necessary to spend an arm and
a leg on a show. All the set pieces, except one which had to be built, were
found in the theatre and in storage. All the costumes came from the costume shop.
The props were gathered by the cast and I from our houses. The director and I
spent a grand total of maybe $30 on specific props we needed.
They were simple shows, but did what we set out to do: tell
two stories.
Though that did bleed into the next month when all was said
and done I had some fun things planned for…
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