It’s been a busy, busy couple of weeks, but we are comfortably moved into the theater and we’re on a glide path to opening on Friday. Crew are working out the logistics of scene shifting. Here’s hoping all works out with the operational fountain that is planned for the “If I Were a Bell” scene, which is my surprise favorite, due to the tipsy abandon that Molly brings to the song.
I’m really enjoying working with Brian as a music director. A lot of the things he does (like actually conducting warm-ups, so that we will focus on following him; and his harmony exercises) I’m sure are standard practice, but they’re new to me. He has a dead-calm demeanor, which can make him hard to read sometimes, but placidity during tech week is a valuable commodity. Along with my keyboard and iPod, a really helpful tool has been MTI’s RehearScore, a MIDI-based rehearsal pianist who never gets tired. I’ve been looking forward to music rehearsals, because the music for my four songs (“Luck Be a Lady,” “The Oldest Established…,” “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” and the reprise of “Guys and Dolls”), for the most part, has been easier to learn than the choreography that goes with it.
It’s no surprise that I am one of the slower learners at choreography. Choreographer Ivan and assistant Katherine have been generous and flexible as they take a bunch of middle-aged white guys and make them look like spicy salsa dancers and jitterbugs. Building a dance, in my sparse experience, is more like fashion than anything else: it’s about trying things, piling on things, and then editing them down. From the outside, it looks like the choreographer is “making it up as he goes along.” All this can be unnerving to us short-bus dancers in the back row. When you’re struggling to execute something, it’s hard to hear, “okay, that isn’t working, let’s try this” or “there’s a little dead spot here, so we need to add something…” Now in a scene, if a director were to say, “it’s not reading, try it sarcastic… now try it tragic,” I would think nothing of it. That’s the work. But remembering which way Ivan’s “Happy Arms” move goes, and expressing something with my face at the same time, is another thing. Section leaders Chris and Mark have also been very helpful in getting us through the dances.
Most days at the rehearsal hall, my practice clothes have been a fedora, t-shirt, hiking shorts, and shiny black FBI-shoes oxfords. I look like a hapless tourist. But I am long past caring about that.