Blurring

The days are blurring together.  This is the trickiest part of a rehearsal process like this, where you have 12 hour days in the theatre and are teching every tiny moment but have no idea how the show works as a whole.  It's taken us six days to tech both acts of this behemoth, and now we have 5 hours tomorrow and about 5 hours Tuesday to run it enough for it to make sense at all.  The days are running together and there's no time to make a note about what we've changed in these six days, so you're relying on sense memory to get you from point to point, and at this stage, sense memory is not reliable.

So you sort of jump and hope it sorts itself out on the way down.  It's nerve-wracking, but also enjoyable in its way.

Funny details:

• Part of the deck gave way today - we were standing offstage when part of what we were standing on basically caved in.  It was exceptionally startling!  As another actor put it - when you're standing about dressed like you belong on the Titanic and something starts to sink under you, you get nervous.
• One of my fellow actors has now ended the last three nights by asking everyone in the dressing room what the weather is like outside...that's right, asking the other 8-9 of us who have been on stage with her in the theatre with no windows what its like outside.  I find this hilarious, and continue to respond, "How would we know?"
• Our music director/conductor is terrific (one of the best actors in town as well as an amazing musician) and he has a talent for the apt musical allusion - which he will make by simply beginning to play some related song on the piano.  For instance, when our director headed out to climb to the balcony, he played "Up On the Roof."  That's a terrible example, but most of his snippets make me laugh as soon as I recognize them.  I just can't think of the funnier ones right now.

It's still an amazing way to make a living, this is just the slightly tedious part.  Though even as I say that, I know the tedious part has been pretty awesome, too.  I'm just tired.  Tomorrow we have a few hours off, and I have so much I need to get done and yet there's no way I will get even 3 of my 7 things done.  Bleah.  These past few days I have had to toss all my new year's resolutions aside - I'll try to reboot them, but these past few days have just had to be about the theatre.

And that's ok.  In fact, it's wonderful.  God, I hope I can say that over and over and over again as time goes on.  Let me keep being one of the lucky ones, I won't forget what it was like to be unlucky.

Ok.  Tired.  Must go to bed.