Weird, but cool.
Talk about getting shot out of a cannon, in the best way possible.
We’re back to in-person theater and things feel immediately familiar and yet a little different. We’ve got some new policies, procedures, and personnel. There are masks, more hand sanitizer than I’ve ever seen in my life, plastic bags around the scripts, and a general sense of, “is hugging allowed?”
Wow. We’ve just completed our first day of full company rehearsal. This is the first time the entire company has been in the same room since March 2020. We’ve had a whirlwind few weeks and, helpfully, sort of eased into the process. We began two weeks ago with something very special: A concert performance of the show in front of the Lincoln Memorial. This was a really fun way to get back into the show. We had a mix of the Broadway company and our touring company to fill out the cast and the show was performed in its entirety, albeit at microphones and with scaled-down staging, props, and costumes. I had a week of preproduction at home, fine-tuning prop presets and printing sign-in sheets (now “touchless” via QR code...we live in the future), and then it was time to walk into a rehearsal studio again. We spent a day on music, two days learning the new staging, a day of run-throughs, and then traveled to DC by bus. A few hours of soundcheck and spacing later, we said “GO” and off we went. What an exhilarating day reintroducing the country to our story for the first time in nearly18 months, introducing live performance back into my own life, and commemorating the 20 year anniversary of 9/11.
Next up, we spent a week at good old Ripley Grier with four of our standbys, two replacement actors (one of which was three days from going into the show before the shutdown), our dance captain, and creative associates. The goal was to assess how much and how quickly everything came back to the performers and then re-teach and work everything on our feet, as necessary. This also gave the standbys a good leg up on one of the five tracks that they each cover. The show consists of specially choreographed actor-driven scene transitions. There are 14 chairs and 3 tables, all of which move frequently into different configurations onto one of the hundreds of ultra-specific spike marks, all while props and costumes are tracking back and forth and being passed around from person to person. In standby rehearsal, when you don’t have the full company rehearsing, the SM team has to fill in all the gaps in order to run things in any sort of real time. Our PSM reads and sings in for missing actors, and myself and the 2nd ASM do all of the chair moves (sometimes perfectly in time, and other times with fudged timing because we don’t have enough hands, but always with an eye to safety and consistency), track props, and assist with costume changes. We usually have the top layers of most costumes in rehearsal, because they are integral to the choreography (the actors needs to learn when they’re taking things on and off to become new characters, which chair they’re setting them on, who they’re passing them to, etc.). This was a really productive week, felt much more like the “real show,” yet still felt very much like a “soft start.” It's been challenging in a lot of ways (we had to remind ourselves not only of the onstage world of the show but also, logistically, how we ran standby rehearsals). The same will be true once we reopen the show and resume onstage standby rehearsals, but then we’ll need to let the crew do the resetting (although SMs can move the furniture in most venues because we’re standing in for an actor, and...same union), and yours truly will again be calling automation while doing an onstage transition to fill in for missing actors, a skill I pride myself on developing.
And now we’re here. Four Covid tests later, in Memphis. Rehearsing at the gorgeous Holloran center, unpacking the office for the first time in way too long, and taking turns sitting in music rehearsal listening to our company harmonize for hours. It’s good to be back.
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