Made it through hell week. Fiddler is open! Had a few friends come to opening night, which was really nice of them.
Notwithstanding the typical challenges of hell week, things were made especially brutal when Tzeitel (my primary scene partner) didn’t show up on Tuesday, because she was being rushed off to the hospital to have her appendix removed.
The surgery was laporoscopic, which apparently means minimally invasive, and she was hell-bent on being sufficiently recovered to perform for our preview on Thursday. As far as choosing people to be absent the last two tech rehearsals goes, she and I were certainly more at the “fine-tuning” stage of our stuff, so it was an acceptable albeit extremely scary scenario. (A brave villager understudied Tzeitel those two nights at the cost of rehearsing her usual scenes, which was excellent of her.)
What had me more worried about it, though, had to do with my song, Miracle of Miracles… the musical director added a harmony line for Tzeitel to the very last line of the song, which had been fine until very recently, when we got to sitzprobe last weekend and for some reason I screwed up my own melody line when she came in with her harmony. I thought it was a one-time thing, but the next time I did my song after moving into the theatre it happened again, and I surmised it had to do with my reduced ability to hear the accompaniment. We experimented, and found that when I was close to the keyboard I could sing with her doing the harmony no problem, but on stage my success rate dropped closer to 50-50.
So the plan was pretty simple: we were going to nip the problem in the bud and over the next couple of days we’d practice the hell out of it before and after rehearsal. Except the next day was Tuesday, and Tzeitel was in the hospital instead of at rehearsal and nobody else knew her harmony (which she had concocted with the musical director and wasn’t written down). So I was unable to practice it before preview on Thursday.
So preview rolled around and sure enough I got it wrong, but also in general had a lot of trouble following the orchestra. I was not alone in this and some begging and pleading got them to set up a monitor on stage (actually, got the musical director to bring in his own from home). Last night (our opening) I didn’t screw it up, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’m now hearing the orchestra well enough to have eliminated the problem. The next couple performances should paint a clearer picture of that.
I’ve had some nice compliments on my performance but I’m still very much working the kinks out of it. My song in particular there’s a lot of new mechanical things I’m dealing with and thinking about (such as listening to the orchestra) that reduce my ability to be in the moment. I think I’m being believable and playing my intentions for the most part, though, so I’m pretty satisfied with that.
Eight more performances over this and the following two weekends!
Dan.
Good work! I’m taking my boards within the next few months. So you can imagine how crazy it is when I hear appendicitis – I have so many stupid facts that have to come out.
Miss performing dude. And i’m still counting on you to help me do the medical ed games. iphone maybe?
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