A.H: Despite colds, lost voices, general exhaustion and the strongest alcohol punch EVER at the best opening party EVER I can safely announce that the cast of Sleeping Beauty has lived to tell the tale of our first week and has now boldly embarked upon our second. As Lucy mentioned last week was a crazy blur of early starts as an armada of schools bombarded the theatre day after day and now, as the second wave of primary schools continues to bear down upon us, we have had two days off to regroup, rearm and are now ready to go forty more times unto the breach, dear friends!
As we in the ensemble have grown ever more accustomed to the theatre and the trickier parts of the set the show has only grown slicker. If you’ve seen the show you’ll know that there are a series of trapdoors which are used a great deal throughout the show, during the tech they were a nightmare but now opening/ closing them and negotiating the tiny spaces beneath them has become second nature. But, just as the rehearsal process had its specific set of questions (“would my character really do that?”, “wouldn’t it be better if we...”, “how do we get that table off stage?”) so too does the run. Some of today’s top quandaries include:
1) “Does applying this make-up regularly make it permanent? It’s stopped coming off in the shower”
2) “Can you put a Ruff in the laundry?”
3) “Was that small child lying when he was overheard saying ‘If someone comes up through the stage I’m going to throw a gas grenade in their face!’?
However, a rather more important and less trivial quandary is how on earth do we keep the show feeling fresh and alive when we’re doing 57 performances of the same show? At drama school this was something I always wondered, and occasionally worried, about and now I’m going to have to work out. Not to say that I’m struggling or finding it boring, quite the opposite, but it’s important to realise that every audience member who buys a ticket deserves to see the same level of quality whether it be the very first or very last performance, it may be show 47 for us but for each member of the audience it’s the first time and may be a rare night out they’ve long looked forward to. The seasoned Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale says that whenever an actor feels like a show is getting old they should simply listen to what the other person is saying and it’ll become interesting again.
However, there definitely wasn’t a problem keeping it fresh today. Halfway through act.1 a chimney flies in from the Gods and lands centre stage...except today, it didn’t. It merely hung a foot off the floor then began to yoyo up and down as the fly team tried to fix whatever had gone wrong. Meanwhile, we were all acting normally trying to ignore the problem, acting away. However, the problem was unfixable and so stage manager Nat came out and stopped the show as the tech team worked out what had gone wrong. But, a minute later the two-storey yo-yoing chimney was fixed and with a quick “Just pretend that never happened!” from Kath Howden to the audience the show continued and went brilliantly albeit a tad giggly.
One thing though has been continually useful, something that to date has never faltered to raise everyone’s energy when sitting in a cramped compartment under the stage at 10am: the sound of the kid’s excitement. As the house lights go down and the stage lights go up they have never failed to go CRAZY and put a smile on our faces. In an instant the cast is infused with energy and ready to go as the adrenaline begins to pulse. Paddy Cunneen’s opening score begins to play, the cue light flashes from red to green and we burst through the stage and the show begins.
‘Sleeping Beauty’ is on at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, from 1 Dec to 6 Jan. For all tickets please contact the box office on: 0141 429 0022, or book online at www.citz.co.uk.
No comments:
Post a Comment