pedanther

1. At gaming group this week, I played Spyfall and Unstable Unicorns. Spyfall is one of those hidden role/social deduction games that I'm bad at and don't enjoy. Unstable Unicorns is a fun card game that I would happily play again, although the endgame got a bit draggy because the emphasis shifted to everyone trying to figure out who was closest to winning and block them. In the discussion afterward, the more experienced players said that the set we were playing with (which had a lot of expansion cards in) might have had too many blocking cards in it to play well; it certainly had too many cards in it to shuffle easily.


2. The Rep Club's next production is the musical Can-Can, which has just opened. I have not been actively involved, since I was still up to my elbows in Boston Marriage when casting and pre-production started, and once Boston Marriage was over I decided I needed a rest and thus steered well clear of the maelstrom that even a well-organised musical production inevitably becomes. After that will be the comedy How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse, which is holding auditions this week.


3. The brass band competed in the state championships over the long weekend, and won our division. It was a fun weekend, and we are looking forward to doing states again next year (and probably the nationals the year after that, when they will be in Perth again).


4. I am still doing Parkrun. I even managed to do it when I was in Perth for Swancon, since the hotel was not far from the Claisebrook Cove course. (I went early, to make sure I could find the starting line before it began, but it turned out that they didn't set up the starting line until five minutes before the start time, so all I got for arriving half an hour early was half an hour of wandering around worrying that I'd somehow ended up in completely the wrong place. The actual course was great, though, very scenic, and I would happily do it again next time I'm in that neighbourhood.) I didn't manage to do it when I was in Perth for the state band championships, though, because the place we were staying was well situated in relation to the championships but not well situated relative to any Parkrun locations.


5. I've had a set of the Richard Hannay thriller novels -- The Thirty-Nine Steps and its sequels -- sitting in my to-read pile for ages, and I took them along as light reading for the band trip. They're all reasonably enjoyable, but I can see why The Thirty-Nine Steps has been repeatedly filmed and all the others have faded into obscurity.

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.