Laurel & Hardy opened last night and was a real treat.
It’s been quite a tech week – what with flying The Boys, then realising the flying didn’t work and cutting it and replacing it with stage business instead; what with rehearsing the slosh sequence, and trying out flour paste; poster paints; wallpaper paste; water; even mashed potato, before settling on a combination of arrowroot and poster paint that has just the right consistency; what with putting on the wrong sailor suits and accidentally ripping the pockets and sleeves off them, then sending them back to wardrobe to be fixed, then cutting them anyway; what with washing all the costumes and the bedclothes and the wigs every time rehearsals end because everything is covered in slosh…Thankfully, although it’s been a hard week for the team, everyone’s been enjoying the show enormously, so it’s been a sunny, smiley week.
And now the audience is meeting the show, which is a joy. It’s rare to see an audience so enthralled by performers, but they are rather in love with our Stan and Ollie, and are responding vocally and with much applause. It’s going to be a delight to see audiences enjoying it over the coming weeks.
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The technical rehearsals for Laurel & Hardy are a riot. Today I popped in to watch the ‘slosh scene’, where Stan paints Ollie and incites a paint fight. It was very, very, very funny. I began to worry about the audience – is too much laughter bad for your health?
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More auditions for The Wizard of Oz. The people who impressed us last week were invited back for a dance session, with the choreographer leading them through a great jitterbug routine. Everyone had a lot of fun, and worked really hard – forty-five minutes of full-on dancing, followed by twenty minutes of singing and reading from the play. Today we’ll start to make some offers – and I’ll be biting my nails hoping they’re accepted.
More auditions for The Wizard of Oz
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Horrors last night when the lighting system went down just before the show. It was the penultimate night of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and the cast were all bewigged and costumed and ready to go on when the lighting operator announced that we wouldn’t be able to run the lighting cues. Three managers who had just gone home were called back, getting here in double-quick time but still unable to resolve the problem. It just wasn’t working. But we could at least get some light on stage, and so we started the show twenty minutes late with the lighting designer reinventing lighting states as she went along, and with the cast never quite certain what they were going to get! It was all good in the end, though – one of those performances when you feel a great sense of achievement and pride in the team for being level-headed in a crisis.
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A run-through today of Laurel and Hardy, which is just coming to the end of its rehearsals. These run-throughs are where the play really comes together. Instead of running it in brief sections, going over and over each section to get it absolutely right, the actors run at the whole play, starting to get a sense of how to pace themselves through it. It’s hard work for them: non-stop dialogue, songs, dances, the great clowning and slapstick comedy that you’d expect, costume changes and a hundred props.
It feels as though it’s going to be tremendous fun.
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