(no subject)

[pedanther]

Looking back, it's been a few months since I posted anything substantial about what I've been up to. I suspect it's not a coincidence that during the same period, if I had posted I would have had to talk about the fact that I was directing the latest Rep Club show.

It's the first show I've directed solo, without a more experienced director looking over my shoulder for the difficult bits, and it's been extremely stressful. I didn't make it any easier on myself by picking David Mamet's Boston Marriage as the play; it's a great play, but a challenging one for the actors. Every part has a lot of lines to learn, and made harder to learn because Mamet famously has a way of writing dialogue that sounds like how people really talk, full of stumbles and people talking over each other and such, instead of the smoothed-out way fictional characters usually talk.

It would have been a hard enough play to do with a full rehearsal period, but for a number of different reasons we ended up losing a few weeks of rehearsal. And we couldn't push the show back very far (we did end up delaying the opening for one much-needed week) because the space would be needed to prepare for the Rep Club's next show, which is going to be the big musical of the year and needs the rehearsal time at least as much as we do. (And once the end of our rehearsal period overlapped the beginning of preparations for the musical, that brought its own complications.)

There were times I genuinely thought the whole thing was going to fall in a heap and never be done, and I suspect the same is true of the cast. We kept going, though, because none of us wanted to let the others down, and fortunately our stage manager is very experienced and has seen a lot of disasters, and was good at assuring us that our situation wasn't nearly as bad as we feared.

And now the show has opened, and I think it's safe to say that it's a success. The first performance in front of an audience was a bit rough, but last night's was solid, and I think they're going to be all right.

Comments

[justice_turtle]

Yay! Congratulations on your solo directorial debut! (If those words aren’t in the right order, please forgive the lapse; I’ve been writing instead of sleeping enough the past few nights. :P) I’m glad it has turned out well! :D

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, well done! I'm sorry it was such a stress getting there, although I am told when it comes to theatre that this is rule and one has to suffer for one's art. ;-)

I'm really glad it's turned out well, though - congratulations to you and everyone involved!

[leecetheartist]

Break a leg and well done!

[igenlode]

Why did you pick "Boston Marriage" (or Mamet)?

[pedanther]

While I was building a shortlist of plays I might be interested in directing, I happened to read an article about Mamet that mentioned Boston Marriage and made it sound interesting enough for me to track down a copy to read.

It got onto the shortlist because it's funny, and has a twisty plot, and does interesting things with language and character, but the reason it got picked above the other plays on the shortlist, if I'm being honest, is that it has a small cast and no set changes, which I figured would make it easier to organise.

I was right about the no set changes, but the small cast turned out to be a mixed blessing, because a full-length play with a tiny cast means that each actor has more lines to learn, with the consequences already described.

[igenlode]

Ah -- we tended to pick plays for the opposite reason, with an aim to providing parts for as many members of the amateur dramatic group as possible (and accomodating the large supply of middle-aged women, who were much stronger performers than the teenage offspring who nominally could have supplied juvenile leads!)

I remember we once embarked upon "The Man Who Came To Dinner" without realising that this required the entire thing to be done in American accents -- the vowels were slipping like mad by the second half :-p

[pedanther]

We do do a few large cast productions each year -- the annual Christmas show, in particular, has a standing rule that everybody who wants a part gets one even if that means adding extra characters. But we tend to alternate with smaller productions, which allows for more variety and lets the club always have something going on without forcing the individuals to always be doing something.