Vaudeville - Previews

The preview period can be one of the most exciting periods for a new show. The show is close to being fully formed, yet it is also at a point where small changes can have very large effects on the piece.

Chris talks about the pleasure of feeling the audience's reactions to the piece. When you are intimately associated with a show your focus is on its improvement primarily. You forget the pleasures of the first readings and the first workshops. While you're in rehearsal you laugh at the jokes and delight in the offers the actors make that bring unexpected life or light to pieces of text, or silent moments. But, once you get into the final weeks, it is in improving the weaker moments that take up the biggest part of your time.

When people talk about the detail they find in the characterisation, and how they felt at certain electric moments, this can often re-invigorate these moments for the theatre-makers. They become new again through the experience they create in others.

The vibe at previews can vary significantly. Some people are there because they don't want to pay full price, some people are there because they like the unpredictability and extra 'live-ness' of previews, some are there because they have been given free tickets, some are there because it's the only night free in their schedules. It's a particular mix of people that is different from other audiences in the run. Chris addresses the audience for the first two previews to remind them that it's a preview and that work is still being done.

Indeed, every day the team works on the show before the night's preview. Chris generates a list of priorities for each rehearsal period before each show. The things he works on are broad issues in relation to the way the piece is being played. He identifies 'big picture' tweaks he wants to make to the show, then identifies all the specific moments in the piece that need detailing or shifting that will add up to generate the 'big picture' tweak that he has in mind.

It is a process of honing and refining. The discussion surrounds clarity, and what is serving the play. Now that the play is nearly fully formed, it is easier to tell what changes will serve the whole. This process engages a lot of different types of changes. Pieces of scenes are cut, lines are added to clarify moments, staging is switched to highlight something in particular. A myriad of different changes are made to shape the work towards opening night.

Some of the changes feel big, like cutting half a scene. Others feel smaller, like bringing a scene further upstage, or re-rehearsing a scene with a particular thought higher in mind. But, from a certain perspective, all of these changes are 'small' because they are all about clarifying, rather than generating anything new. However, as I said at the top, though each change might be small, their effect on the work can be highly significant.

Today's rehearsal is reasonably relaxed. The tension that accompanied the first preview has dissipated, and the company is building its confidence heading towards opening. If anything, there's a slightly weird atmosphere to the rehearsal. The cast break into unusual accents from time to time for no reason. People are murmuring refrains from the songs, odd connections are being made between lines, and people bring up random tangential references as they talk. It's not a lack of focus; when people are supposed to be 'on,' they are. It's just a slightly strange atmosphere that takes hold of the room. Perhaps it's reflective of the slightly 'no-mans land' place they are in at the moment; the play has played three times before an audience, but it hasn't opened; the routine is similar to the energy of being mid-run, yet it is still being rehearsed and modified daily. It's an 'in-between' state that most shows don't even get, seeing as most shows don't get to play four previews before they open.

Tonight's preview is the fourth and final. Tomorrow night is the opening. Somebody asked me in a comment last week whether the show would change a lot across the previews. The simple answer is that it has already changed a lot across the first three. Perhaps the more interesting question is what has changed, or how has it changed across the previews. Because no a great deal has been added. At its essence, the great majority of what has 'changed' was actually already there.

But through the bringing of aspects of the play to the fore and the pushing of other aspects back, the play is experienced differently, and yes, it is changing in important ways. I will try to get an opportunity to speak to Chris about how he understands the change in the piece in the final few days of the process. In some ways, especially when it's a new play, this feels like a separate process in itself.

Vaudeville - After dress run

The final dress run is over. There's 2 hours now before the first preview opens to the public. All the actors have gone for dinner.

No major surprises. A couple of minor problems, but nothing that's nothing out of the ordinary and Chris says the dress run is where he thought it would be going into the first preview.

I'd love to be able to talk to the actors right now for you and get their thoughts 2 hours before going in front of the public with the show for the first time.

Right now I'm sitting in the theatre and it's completely quiet, save for Jonathon continuing to work on the set. He's a workaholic and will probably be going right up till opening with touches here and there.

I'll head up to the Green Room and see how they're feeling. I can't promise they'll want to talk. I imagine they'll just be focussing all of the energy for tonight.

Vaudeville Rehearsal Day 23 - One day before Preview.

It's the last day before the first preview. The morning is for technical 'fix-ups,' with the actors arriving at 1.30pm again today.

The mood is relaxed. Yesterday's technical issues have mostly been worked out to everybody's satisfaction. Tomorrow's dress rehearsal will make it clear whether the solutions are working properly or not.

It has taken the entire afternoon and evening to finish the tech with the actors. Although the actors weren't performing at high energy, there have been a number of really important breakthroughs during the day. The lights, the sound, the set have all done their job in informing the actors how scenes are supposed to work in performance. You can feel pennies dropping all over the place, and connections being made that have previously been understood in an intellectual way, but not 'felt' by the actors.

Though they haven't run the play since last Tuesday, it feels as though it has come a long way during the last couple of days. The 'unknowns' have dimished significantly in the last couple of days in respect of their physical environment, and what they will experience on the stage, and that confidence is already being displayed as they 'run' scenes in the tech.

Chris says he expects tomorrow's dress rehearsal to be a bit rough. The actors will really have to conserve their energy through the dress rehearsal so they can hit the first preview with the energy it needs.

Although there is an audience tonight, previews are previews, and Chris expects the piece to develop significantly through the previews and through the season as well. The difference between previews and the season is that the cast are scheduled for rehearsal until opening night. If moments need fixing there is time to run them and work them. Once you get into performance the director has time to give notes, but no time to do any re-working of moments in a rehearsal context. This is a huge difference. There are times when notes cannot shift or reveal a moment; it can only be done in a rehearsal environment.

Further to that, a director usually wants the actors to 'own' their parts. It's part of the confidence a director wants their actors to have that allows them to grow and soar in their performance. Constant changes can sometimes undermine this confidence, depending on the actor and their relationhsip with the director. The energy the actors have once a show is in performance is for the show; this is a different kind of energy to the energy they use to explore the work in rehearsal. This can also sometimes make it difficult to shift something once a show has opened.

That's not to say that the show won't change. Chris makes the point that the show will inevitably change. The show will 'settle' and the actors will more deeply understand certain things as a product of the repetition. Also, it will change as a product of different audiences coming in to see the show each night. The actors are keenly aware of the things that work or don't work, and the show evolves in microscopic ways to this nightly dialogue. Sometimes a series of microscopic changes in a particular direction eventuate in significant changes to the show. Other times, it's a process of moments moving back and forth as different audiences respond differently, and more importantly, how the actors 'test' a moment in different ways to feel how it works best.

Tomorrow is the first dress rehearsal, and the first preview. The countdown has ticked over the zero days, and is now in the hours, minutes and seconds only. Right now the atmosphere is relaxed and confident, with a hint of expected apprehension. But we'll see whether that changes tomorrow.

Especially for Friday I'll be posting again between the dress run and the first preview, SO COME BACK FOR THAT!

Vaudeville Rehearsal Day 22 - "Heads down..."

The morning is spent continuing yesterday's lighting plot, which is followed by the sound plot. There is still more work to be done on the lighting plot, but it will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

The actors arrive at around 1.30pm and go to get into costume for tech-ing. Chris and Lally are photographed by the newspaper on stage. They stand next to the infamous 'Machine of Unhappy;' (yes, it's as crazy as it sounds, and I imagine you'll get to see it in the paper).

The moment the actors arrive on stage in costume is exciting for everybody. Mark steps out first. What a great moment; everybody feels it. Wow.

Two hours later Chris says he's already numb to it and now he's just focused on the work needed to get the show into shape. The first audience will be in on Friday night.

Tech-ing a show can be really time consuming because every lighting cue, sound cue, action with a new prop, action associated with a new piece of set, every 'trick'; virtually everything that is not 'acting' is tested and worked through to be sure that everybody has it covered.

This tech time has a classic calm before the storm feel about it. The performers are generally the ones with the higher stress levels through the rehearsal period, but in tech time the pressure is transferred to everybody else, and the actors roll through the show at a medium energy while all the technical details are worked out.

As we expected there are some tricky technical challenges, which take considerable time to sort out. As each of these technical moments take shape it fills in some of the detail that Chris has been talking about in rehearsal. He might say, “At this point the something will do this thing we're planning,” but until you actually see it and feel it in the theatre it can be hard to comprehend the full power of it.

There are other things that unfortunately don't quite work in the tech run and need to be put off until a part of it is fixed or adjusted so it can work. There aren't many of those moments in the tech run, but the trouble sometimes is in knowing when to keep trying to get something to work and when to leave it and move on.

This concern is magnified because at this stage in the process, if something is left to later, later might never arrive and the element might end up being cut all together. Providing, of course, that the technical detail doesn't define a moment so important that it can't possibly be cut. But that can actually be worse; it's annoying to cut something because it technically doesn't work, it's a nightmare when that something can't be cut because it's vital, but it somehow doesn't quite work either.

As I said, fortunately, there are only a couple of problems that were put off for the sake of 'fixing.' Probably less than might have been expected for the level of technical detail in the show. Nevertheless, everybody would prefer there were none at all.

The day ends at 10.30pm and they've got about a third of the way into the second act. There's plenty left to do, but everybody agrees that it's been going well. The actors are super keen to get through it. Every minute spent working through technical details is a minute they can't run the scenes in the show, which is what they really want right now.

Tomorrow is the clincher, because after tomorrow, anything that's not working is just not going to have time to get fixed by the first preview. Of course, the Opening isn't until next Wednesday. But the public is still the public.