Turbulence

So, rehearsal tonight was interesting. Our new Bernard/Robert (we still don't know which part he's going to play) was arriving to rehearsal late, so we started without him, with one of the tech guys and the producer standing in for Bernard and Robert. And neither of them could keep it straight as to which character they were supposed to be, so they kept switching back and forth without even realizing it.

The blocking was confusing for me tonight, I was directed to cross a couple of feet to stage left, then the next line cross back to stage right, and then the next line cross back to a chair stage left and sit, that sort of thing. At least that's how it felt tonight, I've got faith that it won't seem so confusing as we work on this more. Yvonne is a purist when it comes to this script, we are following the stage directions as written. I haven't really been in enough plays to know if this is unusual or not, but in my classes we always completely ignored the stage directions.

I've been working on my German accent, but when I start speaking at a normal speed, it doesn't sound like German to me any more, it sounds French or sometimes British. I think that's because key pronunciation elements of both those are a part of the German accent. And I'm much more familiar with speaking in those other two accents. I just gotta keep plugging away at it.

Then, our Bernard/Robert finally showed up, the poor guy has been up for 14 hours and apparently had a very bad day. It also turns out that he has poor reading eyesight and needs to have everything printed in large white letters on black. He didn't get to read the script last night, but he did spend a lot of time scanning the pages to make the print legible for himself, but when the pages scanned, it took the italics off the stage directions making it impossible to differentiate them from the actual spoken lines. And the page numbers were jumbled in with the text, making it difficult for him to find where we were in the script. So he ended up just sitting out and watching tonight, but with the tech guy and the producer switching roles back and forth, I'm not sure how much Bernard/Robert got out of it. Hopefully, he'll get a chance to read the script tonight. I felt so bad for him though, the whole thing with his script pages almost seemed to be the proverbial straw. So when he sat down, he was a few seats away from me, so I said to him, "It's okay, tomorrow will be better." I could tell Yvonne and the actor playing the French air hostess felt badly for him too.

As for filling the other two roles, one of the actors said tonight that she thought if we didn't get them cast by tomorrow, we wouldn't have enough time to rehearse properly, and we should call off the show. (Hell Week starts Feb 13th, performances start Feb 17th.) She also said that there are so many other local plays that have an abundance of male roles, and that other theaters are currently looking for men to cast as well. And Bernard/Robert said that all the guy actors he knew are busy right now. I told them how we didn't get all of the roles in Honeymoon cast until half way through the second week of rehearsals, and we didn't get to rehearse with the whole cast for the first time until the middle of the third week. Yvonne hasn't posted the auditions on the internet yet, so maybe once she does we'll get more people in. But I'm afraid that she won't wait that long, that she'll listen to the other actor that said we need to call the production off if we don't have our full cast by tomorrow. But ultimately it's her decision. I'm hoping hoping hoping!