pedanther

The Christmas Show opens today.

The last week of rehearsals was extremely fraught, but it all came together at the final dress rehearsal, to everyone's relief. It wasn't perfect, by any means (I think everyone in the cast and crew made at least one mistake), but at least we can now be confident that we have a show, which had not been entirely clear up to that point. One thing that helped, I think, was that we had a bit of an audience; up to then, even in the previous dress rehearsals where we were theoretically going straight through without a stop, everybody knew that if they really messed up we could just stop and try again, but with an audience that was no longer an option and everyone had to step up their own game and be ready to cover for each other.

(This is a sign of how fraught things had become before then: as tensions mounted and people got increasingly snappy with each other, at one point I found myself reading up on how to perform the cut direct, that social weapon beloved of Regency historicals, because it felt at the time like the only thing that would adequately express my feelings toward one particular uncooperative cast member. I decided pretty quickly that I was being overly melodramatic, but even now that things have mellowed I think it's unlikely that person will ever again be cast in a show I direct.)

This is the point that, as director, I would usually hand things over to the stage manager, who runs the actual performances, and have nothing to do except sit back and enjoy the show. However, it's been a bad season for finding stage managers, with all the usual suspects either away, dealing with personal crises, or in the cast, so as it turns out the stage manager I'm handing things over to is... me. (As the producer - who's off the hook because she'll be on stage filling in for a cast member who had a personal crisis - pointed out, as an eleventh-hour fill-in stage manager I do at least have the advantage that I already know the script back to front.)

The opening week nightmare has put in its usual appearance, suitably adjusted for the fact that I'm stressing about being the stage manager and forgetting my cues instead of being an actor and forgetting my cues. It didn't manage to achieve the old full-on blind panic (I don't think it ever will again, now that I know it so well) but it did come on pretty strong. That's probably mainly because the last week of rehearsals has been so fraught, but it might also be partly because this is the first time I've had it since I moved house, so I'm in a new bedroom with new shadows for my brain to make mysterious and frightening.

Speaking of the stress dream reminds me of an odd thing that happened when I was trying to get to sleep after the final dress rehearsal. I couldn't at first, because my brain was running around in circles worrying about the cues I'd missed, and the cues everyone else had missed, and then, as I got sleepier, non-existent cues that non-existent people had missed. After a while I got tired of this, so I got up, pointed at the door, and said, in my best no-nonsense stage manager voice, something along the lines of "We can't do anything about it right now, so go away and let me get some sleep".

Weirdly, this actually worked.
 

1. There are 18 novels and a bit over twice that many short stories set in the Liaden Universe, and yesterday I finished reading through them all one after the other. It took me a bit over two years, although that's mainly because I was blogging each chapter or story as I read it, which meant I couldn't read the next one until I'd thought of something to say. Without that restriction, I'd have got through them much quicker, but then I'd have probably missed a lot of things I noticed on this re-read.


2. Rehearsals have begun for the Christmas Show. I was nervous before the first rehearsal - I was running it alone because my co-runner couldn't make it, and although I'd only called half the cast that still meant more actors than every play I've directed before now put together - but it seemed to go all right. And seeing them moving around the stage helped me figure out what the set should look like in the first scene. (Note to self: Draw a diagram of that.)


3. I seem to have become a morning person now. I'm regularly waking up a couple of hours before work (or the equivalent time on weekends) without any artificial assistance, and regularly feeling sleepy and going to bed about eight hours before that. I do wonder if it has anything to do with spring and the sun coming up earlier; it'll be interesting to see what happens when the days start getting shorter again.


4. I haven't mentioned Doctor Who Legacy in while; not since I reached the end of the first "season" and concluded that it still didn't have anything resembling a plot. In fairness, therefore, I should note that it does develop an actual plot toward the end of the second "season", though the connection between the story elements and the actual gameplay remains tenuous to non-existent.


5. My new favourite podcast is I Was There Too, which explores the world of movie-making through the perspectives of people who had tiny roles in big movies. Guests have included the first marine to die in Aliens, the woman with the baby carriage in The Untouchables, the Apple Store clerk in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and, in a special group interview, all those other people on the bus in Speed.

1. A signal boost I had intended to do sooner: August is naarmamo, National Art Making Month:

Basically in August we hope to make one piece of art every day. NOT NECESSARILY VERY GOOD ART. But a finished achievement of artistic endeavour.

A picture, a painting, a photo, an icon, a sketch, stick figures, a line on a page, a model, a sculpture, a finger painting, a finger print, a song, a poem, an interpretive dance, a bruise, a something. We are surprisingly non-judgey about what counts as art :)

And it really doesn't have to be very good. I try to stress that quite a lot. There are people here who have never drawn a thing, people who only ever do art in August, people who are very much doing it for fun rather than greatness. There are also people who are very good at art indeed, but who still find it a challenge to devote time to it every single day. Don't be intimidated, it's all good.

With it being every day for a month, the emphasis is much more on getting something done rather than getting it done particularly well.

I'm thinking of giving it a go this year.


2. I have been to the gym at least once a week since I mentioned I'd started going again. I might like to have managed more often, but it's still a good deal better than not going at all.


3. Every now and again somebody will try to get a theatre improv group up and running here, and I'm always there when they do, and usually there'll be a workshop or two and maybe a performance evening and then nothing until the next time.

This time, we might be on to something. The people running it got organised and arranged a series of workshops over the weeks leading up to the first performance night, some of them at different times of week so people who couldn't make it to some could make it to others, and even though only half the people who attended workshops were available and willing to perform on the night that was enough. (And the fact that it's people, plural, running it this time is I think also an important factor. They're both people who've tried individually before and not got far; by joining forces they're able to cover each other. The fact that they could offer workshops on nights that one or the other wasn't able to be there is not the most subtle example of that, but it's not the least important either.)

The performance night went really well, and it looks like we've got enough momentum going to do another set of workshops and another performance night soon. (Quite a lot of people had praise for my performance in particular, which was nice, but I don't think that's really the most important thing. And, as I tried to explain to some of them, improv is really a team effort and any standout performance is being invisibly supported by the efforts of everybody else in the scene.)


4. And that's pretty much the only acting I've got done so far this year, because the opportunities for acting in regular productions have tended to clash with other commitments. Including, as I've mentioned, the fact that I couldn't act in the short play season because I was busy directing one of the plays.

I don't think I've mentioned yet that I will busy directing again later this year, as I've been tapped on the shoulder to direct the Christmas show. We'll be doing a pantomime called Humpty Dumpty: The Egg's Files, which I've noticed is somewhat awkwardly titled; if you know the plot you can see where the title comes from, but if all you know is the title it's probably giving you the wrong idea about the plot. It's about a small egg-shaped robot who has been entrusted with certain secret files which might help the noble rebels overthrow the evil Galactic Empress (and her chief enforcer, who wears a face-concealing mask and breathes noisily).

It seemed like a good time to revive it, considering what else is being revived this December.


5. It's one of the lesser-known laws of nature that any arbitrarily-selected quiz night team that includes me will always come second. It happened again last night. I also won a spot prize with my rendition of "That's a Moray", and took the third prize in the big raffle. And, more importantly, had a lot of fun spending an evening hanging out with friends. It was a good night all round.