I'm finally home after a really frustrating and difficult and mutinous rehearsal, most of which had to do with completely redoing the act one blocking - we had a meeting after the rehearsal and everyone aired their points of view and we made some decisions about how the rest of our rehearsals would work. What I was hoping to do with the staging part of the reading was clearly too ambitious, although had we not had the surprise of the awful set we have to work on, I do think everything would have come together. But, we do have the set and I'm just going to treat this much more conventionally, reading-wise, with everyone onstage in chairs and people just getting up, doing their scenes without much moving around, and letting the material just play rather than trying to be clever with staging that we have no time to make clean or good. So, after rehearsal, I went and did a sound check for Jan Abrams, then met Adam and Cason at Jerry's and we went through the entire script, figured out where everyone would be sitting, and then where they'd stand - we were able to keep a lot of what we'd done in terms of the original areas, but all choreography is now out - I should never have tried that - it took six hours of valuable rehearsal time that we could have been spending with the actors getting comfortable with the material rather than worrying about very difficult routines. We don't have a huge amount of time, but with everything simplified I'm hoping everyone will be much more comfortable and that we won't burden ourselves with a lot of extraneous walking around. We start at ten tomorrow, and we'll spend the first thirty minutes with the ensemble drilling their music - the next thirty minutes will be for the solos while Adam and I take the ensemble and talk them through where they'll be sitting and how they get from place to place - it should be much simpler for them. Then we'll start at the top of act one and go over each scene at least three times so they can get used to where and how they're playing. That's the only thing that's going to get us where we need to be - drilling and getting everyone comfortable.
