#15: Big Night

Once again I apologize for not keeping up with my blog. But it’s been complicated.

First of course, there were things to do. I mentioned in the last blog that I was preparing piano parts for the show. I had still not finished them by the time rehearsals started. I think the music director and pianist were both a little nervous about not being able to see them sooner, but they didn’t say so.

And although I decided against an orchestrator, I did hire a dance arranger to prepare piano parts for three dance sequences and for the fight scene. She sent the parts one at a time and I needed to look them over to make sure they would meet our requirements. I would send her comments and she would incorporate them and send them back. And of course that took time.

And then I got sick. I had been coming down with something and it was getting worse. I went to the doctor and was told it wasn’t serious and if I took the medicine I would be over it in two to four weeks. Two to four weeks! We open in ten days! I decided my stress level would be much more manageable if I didn’t go to any more rehearsals, and maybe with less stress it would get better faster. I had been to eight rehearsals up to that point, but for the last six I would just show up at the start to see if anything was needed and then go home. And my condition improved fairly rapidly after that.

The last rehearsal I’d seen was the “stumble through.” In the two previous rehearsals they had worked their way slowly through each act of the show, blocking out each actor’s movement. For the “stumble through” they went through the whole thing from start to finish as best they could. And it was rotten. So I knew the show was rotten.

Now, I had been warned that shows look really bad until they open, and Cole Porter even wrote about it in Kiss Me Kate:

Four weeks you rehearse and rehearse.

Three weeks and it couldn’t be worse.

One week, will it ever be right?

Then out of the hat it’s that first big night!

But these people had clearly not seen this show. It was rotten. I knew it was rotten. And even though my health had improved sufficiently that I could have attended the dress rehearsal, my embrace of masochism did not rise to that level. Yes, I was obliged to see the performances, but I did not have to sit through anything else. So for that last rehearsal I just showed up long enough to talk to the videographer and answer his questions, then went home to calm my nerves.

But all during this time I had remained upbeat and enthusiastic to the public, telling them what a great show it was going to be. I lied my face off, but you would have never known it from my ingratiating smile and sunny disposition. And during this time ticket sales took off, aided, no doubt, by my mendacity. (Perhaps also by there being 25 people in the cast and production team, each with friends and family members at least mildly curious about the show—but perhaps not.) And so the Saturday night performance sold out two days before opening and the Friday night show shortly after. It was crazy. And all for a really rotten show which, thankfully, I yet to subject myself to.

The inevitable, however, could not be postponed indefinitely.

Opening night I arrived early at the theater in case the videographer needed assistance. He said he had stayed for the entire rehearsal the previous evening and was impressed with the show. I found this strange, because he seemed like a man of the world who would be able to tell a good show from a rotten one. Perhaps, I thought, he was a little off his onion. The music director had also been telling me that she thoughts things were going well, but I knew she was just trying to keep me from getting so depressed that I slit my wrists before everyone had been paid.

In the time before the doors opened, while everyone else bustled about tending to last minute tasks, I took the meager meal I’d brought and sat alone under the glowering, gunmetal gray of threatening skies on the bench outside the theater door, eating my sandwich and watching it drip on the sidewalk. A little girl in the parking lot watched me suspiciously. I don’t know why. Perhaps she didn’t approve of the way I looked. I couldn’t blame her. I wiped up the drips and went in to meet my fate.