Musical Rehearsal

We're getting closer to having the site up and running. It's been a few months in the making--well, almost a year if you include the initial 'We should really have our own web site...' daydreams.

Rehearsal went well yesterday. It was actually quite short, a mere 4 hours. Since this past week has consisted of long, grueling, daily rehearsals for almost everyone; it felt like a holiday.

Of course, it made a huge difference that we broke from our ordinary routine. Yesterday was no ordinary day; yesterday we had our first proper musical rehearsal. Yes, we actually had 2 hours to work with our composer, Dave Dello Russo, of the band The Primate Fiasco.

Dave did an amazing job. Earlier this week he wrote and recorded the music for our 4 songs from the play (Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan.) We got copies of his demo tape on Wednesday, and we were able to start working with them on Thursday.

When we first got our music I think we were all a bit nervous. After all, we were stuck with whatever was on that CD, one way or another. But when we started listening to it, and when our 2 guitar players, Abby and Ben, started playing around with a couple of the tunes, we lost a lot of our nervousness. The songs turned out to be pretty and catchy and folksy with that suggestion of ancient China we needed. It quickly got to the point where even the non-singers (myself included) started singing each other's songs, humming along when we didn't know the words. We haven't really stopped since.

Yesterday, during rehearsal, we were broken up into groups (divided by song) and worked with the director, Ellen Morf, and Dave and Ben.

It has fallen to Ben, our own actor / musician, to play most of these songs in the show. All morning he worked with Dave and Ellen on each song. The rest of us would look over every so often and the 3 of them would be conferring over some certain fingering, or writing something down, or passing the guitar back and forth, showing the other 2 something.

As I said, it was a lovely break from the ordinary.

And I think we've mostly gotten over our collective fear of singing. For the past couple of years we blanched at the merest hint of singing: "What? Me, sing? Ellen, are you mad?" was, for some reason, our usual response to the possibility of singing.

But in the past couple of days we've started asking Ellen to do a musical next year. I believe Cats was put on the table. Ellen vetoed it, but you never know...