Things are pretty rough at the moment, mostly due to the convergence of events between work and theatre. A sudden change in our project at work has caused us to bump into overdrive, at the same time as Fiddler enters its tech week.
Much of the success of this project rides on my ability to deliver a superhuman effort over the next month. My coworkers understand tech week means I’ll be leaving early (well, early for the tech world anyway) and that I’ll be making it up in the weeks to come, especially as my evenings free up (which hasn’t been the case during the rehearsal period). But we’re on an extremely tight schedule and failure really isn’t an option, so it’s scary.
We had our sitzprobe on Saturday, and I was surprised by the orchestra. It’s about 18 pieces, which is a lot for a community theatre show, and they’re surprisingly… good. Not necessarily the most incredible that I’ve ever been fortunate enough to work with, perhaps, but they sound really tight and are all clearly very professional and highly skilled at their instruments. I heard it bandied about that many of them are volunteers from the Everett symphony. Whatever the case, we’re damn lucky to have them.
Likewise, the Historic Everett Theatre is a pretty monumental venue, and one of the reasons I was interested in the part. Orchestra pit, full flight gallery and over 800 seats with a balcony level. Gonna be a fun space to work.
The show is pulling together, but it’s a stressful ride. We had the cue-to-cue today, and it lasted two and half hours longer than it was scheduled to run (for a total of five and a half hours). I try to be a role model for professionalism amongst the rest of the cast, but my patience is wearing thin and lately I’ve had to settle for just doing my best to keep my mouth shut and not to make things worse for everyone else.
I wish I had a clearer sense of my own performance. The cast and crew are all very generous with their praise, but I know the complexity of what I’m trying to accomplish and it’s not a helpful metric to measure things by. I’m strong with the comic aspects of my character but it’s like walking a tightrope for me… I’m astutely aware that many of my choices run the risk of coming across as absurd and more of a caricature than real life. For example, there’s a bit of comedy I do in my first scene. It’s nothing much; I just play a startled reaction to seeing Yente. The timing is really tricky for me, though, and I rarely get it perfect. A few rehearsals back I dropped the ball on it entirely, and wound up being way too big and mugging it completely. The rest of the cast went into hysterics and loved it… I didn’t know how to express to them I’d actually failed at what I set out to do.
I desperately want to be believable… I love the comedy of my character, but I know I won’t be the slightest bit funny if I read as insincere. It’s easy to make people laugh; it’s a lot tougher to make them care about what happens to your character… for it to matter whether he lives or dies, succeeds or fails at getting what he’s after. Hopefully some of my more honest friends that come see the show will be able to critique it for me.
After rehearsal yesterday I permitted myself to get unexpectedly dragged out to a production of Rocky Horror down in Gig Harbor of all places. I went with a bunch of people, but mainly a couple of my friends who had been in my production of it, and we had a blast shouting all of the callbacks we’d learned during our run. I managed to make their Riff Raff break character twice, and felt pretty accomplished for doing so.
My Theatresports team won for its fourth weekend in a row. I keep feeling like we are getting lucky with our victories. I don’t think there was anything lacking to my performance in particular, but I know I’m capable of better. Anyway, I’m officially on hiatus now until after Fiddler closes three weekends from now, so it’s up to my team to carry on without me. I’m actually kind of glad for the break… it’s good to get a chance to be away, and let it be renewed for me and remind myself of how much I miss doing it when I get back. It might even be what I need to break me out of the funk I’m in and get me back to the level of performance I ought to be at.
Dan.