We were called for a pickup rehearsal yesterday evening in preparation for this weekend’s run. It was a refreshingly productive hour. We reviewed only choreography, so we didn’t waste time clowning through the dialog (alas, a practice all too common in the amateur ranks). Really the point of the evening was to work Ivan into the show, as he is substituting for both Billy and Zach these next three performances. It’s not uncommon to see substitutes in the chorus/ensemble. Indeed, Kelly went on for Christy our opening weekend. A lot of the community theaters around here run four weekends for a musical, and it’s hard to keep a group of eight or twelve decent singer-dancers together for that long. It is certainly the case that the orchestra roster will vary weekend to weekend and night to night. A solo line that you’re used to hearing from a violin or trumpet one evening will come from the keyboard. There are directors who make a signature of this. RCP’s production of Barnum is storied for its who’s-on-tonight cast.
I’ve also seen substitutes in speaking roles, and in straight plays as opposed to musicals. It’s an interesting challenge to work with the different energy that you get from an actor that you’re less accustomed to.
I played Dr. Pinch in a production of The Comedy of Errors about ten years ago. The design concept for the show was sort of a comic-book post-modern Anything Can Happen Day. The multi-colored set incorporated a kid’s slide. In the world of this show, anachronism was a good thing. And there was a chorus of about eight without speaking parts; they were there to give some depth to the picture, and to participate in sight gags like a twelve-man double-take. So naturally the markeup of the chorus was fluid.
Dr. Pinch’s big scene is with Antipholus of Ephesus, whom he thinks is mad. Pinch tries to drive out the evil spirits:
I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers
And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight:
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven!
Now David, my director, sometime during rehearsals gave me a battery-operated fan and said, “Use this for the exorcism, if you like, or find something else goofy.” And this eventually turned into “what is Gorsline going to pull out of his kit bag tonight?” I made an agreement with Angus (playing Antipholus) that he would see everything at least once during tech week, but once we were up, I would pull things out more or less at random. I had a rain stick, and a soap bubble pipe, and a couple of other things along with the mini-fan.
(This was not unlike the arrangement that Terry has with our director of The Foreigner that his Charlie would find a different “translation” of Froggy’s “Gomo rim jambo” every night.)
So, it must have been second weekend, and a young lady from England—Nikki I think her name was, first nanny that I met who wore Doc Marten’s—joined the chorus for her first performance. She told me afterwards that it was all she could do to keep her composure when I pulled out a hand-cranked egg beater and waved it over Antipholus like a security screener’s baton.