Playing light, before playing hard

Tonight at rehearsal begins the process of technical work. We run the show for the crew tonight, and then tomorrow and Sunday we move slowly through the show, working out all of the sound and light cues, costume problems, and any other technical things that we've ignored up to now. So as we look at a long weekend of detail work, we spent most of last night just catching up on things that needed to be done. We worked with our revolving stage, we looked a couple of problem areas, and we sang some of the numbers that are giving us trouble. We started out warming up around a table, looking to find that sort of ensemble work that would allow us to blend our voices together. But as we started singing one of the songs, it quickly became a hand-holding, arm-swinging, lighter-swaying festival. I think it really did a lot to build the idea that we are singing this song as a group, including the fact that we just started to have a lot of fun as we were singing it. We each took a chance coming up with some bit of "choreography" for our dance session, and the rest of the cast members just followed along with it. Our director was wandering around with a camera at that point, and these pictures are courtesy of him. So the work is really about to start on the show, considering that our first performance is a week from yesterday. But I think we're in a good place, and that it is all going to work out pretty well. I'm not expecting a train wreck of any kind on this show, just careful and deliberate days of tech work.