OK. I've slept. Thanks for the 'welcome backs' and interest in the show. As I said, it went pretty well for only having about 25 hours of rehearsal. I'm not lying! All of the principles were out-of-towners, but the rest of the cast was comprised of locals (translated: This was a community theatre production), so they could only rehearse from 5-10 in the evening. That was a little bizarre--the rest of us would stay in the motel watching HBO ("Angels in America" is quite stunning--I wish I'd gotten to see the whole thing) and sleeping until 2 and then we'd be off to rehearse for a couple of hours and then it was time to go home again! Too weird. Anyway, we ended up performing the show in a high school auditorium because their normal performance space was being renovated, so we had limited resources for costume space, lighting and scenery. The four-piece orchestra was stuck in a corner backstage with no monitors because all of the channels on the soundboard were used up with body mics, so they could never really hear anything we were doing and vice-versa. It was definitely a lesson in listening.
The cast were all very nice, which made up for their lack of experience--sort of. The lady who played Mrs. Fezziwig nearly killed me every night during our number. She had obviously never had any dance training (the choreography wasn't difficult step-wise--it was just very athletic) and she would whip me around like a rag doll while I was trying to sing and stay on my feet. At the end of the song, on the "button," she would sit on my knee and we would form a tableau, but toward the end of the week, she would sit on my knee and put her head on mine, completely covering my face with her mob cap and mugging like you've never seen a person mug before. Well, I wasn't about to have that amateur upstage me at the end of my big number, so I got in the habit of yanking her off of me before she had the opportunity to block my visage. It was all very "All About Eve" and I was so over her by the end that I didn't even say goodbye to her. Bitchy? Yes. Justified? Absolutely.
The day that I got to my first rehearsal (Sunday, about an hour after I got off the bus), I found out that I would not only be playing Mr. Fezziwig, but Topper, Mr. Jollygoode (one of the charity collectors) AND I would be understudying the Ghost of Christmas Present! And get this...I had to go on for Christmas Present on Tuesday--both shows! (Did I mention we were doing two to three shows a day? Well, we were.) I got paid an extra $100 for it, so that was fine by me, and the director said he was truly impressed with my "real" voice and my ability to pick up another person's role so easily without rehearsal, so hopefully that means I'll be working with him again. He's a really nice guy, and seems to know what he's doing, so we'll see. He said something about "next time," so that's a good sign.
I could write a book about some of the characters I met while in West Virginia. There was a very unfortunate fourteen year old girl who was in the thick of her awkward stage, and she developed a crush on me. She had the most unnaturally orange hair I've ever seen in my life, which she tied in a knot on the top of her head that added an extra six inches to her height. She had braces and beady little blue eyes, and every time I had to grab her hand in my song it truly made me nauseous because it felt as if she had just dipped her hand in a toilet bowl--cold and wet. BLEH! She was a sweet girl, but definitely awkward. And someone needed to tell her not to tuck her blue jeans into her knee-high black hooker boots. That's all I'm saying.
Then there was the woman who played the Ghost of Christmas Past. She was also a wonderfully sweet woman, but she was a little on the obese side and wasn't really able to bend her knees. She would waddle and shuffle her way around, trying to learn a British accent (which turned out to be a strange combination of Scottish and West Virginian), smiling all the while. My only problem with her was trying to get past her when we had quick changes--she would walk offstage at a snail's pace, blocking all the traffic behind her, and even though we were all whisper-screaming "WE'VE GOT QUICK CHANGES! COMIN' THROUGH!," she would waddle and shuffle and look around incredulously, and then be surprised when we would run past her like we were in the Kentucky Derby as soon as she got through the door. One day she came up to me and said, "You know, you're so funny in that one scene, and I have no idea what to do during that number, so I think I'm going to do what you're doing cause I think it's just so GRAYT!" Oy.
I won't tell all the tales today. I'll save some for you. I did manage to get some pictures, and I'll try to get them developed ASAP, so be prepared. Now I'm off to the post office to find out where the heck my stuff is...wish me luck.
