Blocking the "major numbers"

After speeding through the show again musically, we took a dinner break before we headed off to the theatre to work on our first staging rehearsal. I gave us an extra evening to work on what I started calling the "major numbers" of the show. Lots of the songs are simple and short, but there are a few that are going to require a whole lot of planning and practice to get them to look good. So instead of taking all the time to work on them when we have to be blocking the show, I wanted to see if we could get them done on the first day and then go fill in around them.

Overall, it was a good rehearsal. We didn't do as many songs as I would have hoped, but even I admitted that my plan was a little ambitious when I had only two hours to work on it. But we got the opening and the finale done, and those were the two that were giving me the most headaches when I sat down to plan them out. We've certainly got a lot of the hard stuff under our belt now, and it's a matter of getting on to the simpler and quieter moments in the show.

It is somewhat of a challenge, through, to be blocking a show slightly out of order. For instance, we have three of the songs blocked, so we know where everyone needs to be in order to start them. Which means that as we work the scene that leads up into those numbers, we need to make sure that we keep things consistent so that the actors can end up where they need to be. Otherwise, we'll have traffic issues and we'll have to go back and work out those moments again. We don't have the time to work those moments again, so it was important that we get these things right the first time.