April 23, 2011 – 11:35 am
A nice thing to wake up to this morning: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/arts/april-24-30.html He writes, “This might be just the thing to perk me up after a long, restorative doze.” I hope he’s right–he certainly enjoyed Striking 12 back in 2006. Fingers crossed!
Today we freeze the script and score. No more lyric changes, no more melody changes, no more line changes. They learn exactly what’s there as our window before tech rehearsals dwindles down and down. It is tempting, as we watch a run-through, or a work-through of a scene, to come up with text- or music-based [...]
Our musical director and orchestrator is James Sampliner. I have long admired his incredible piano playing, which is WAY better than mine; his incredible arranging skills; his boundless joy at the keyboard which emanates all through the room. I am pitching in in the rehearsal room, composing incidental/transitional music on the fly and playing for [...]
We are in the endgame. We are shifting tiny puzzle pieces around in the last few minutes of the show, tweaking how things land, checking to make sure we like the tone, trying hard not to hold on to something just because we did a lot of work on it and only keeping it if [...]
Sometimes you get too close to something after working on it for too long, and you can’t see the right solution directly in front of you. Back in late 2006 we were sitting around a table, with Jeff Calhoun and Coy Middlebrook and Jeff’s assistant whose name I am embarrassed to admit I have forgotten. [...]
It’s Thursday. 6:24 AM. Waiting for the kid to wake up, which will be announced by a thump on the floor above me and the sound of his feet stomping merrily into our bedroom upstairs. I will call out “is that my favorite boy?” and he’ll shout out, “HELLO, DEEDAH!” and we’ll get a round [...]
So I’m up late the night before, cranking out sheet music for the scene changes, and somebody says something about something at the rehearsal, and it’s like, 10 pm, and I think I nod and say, yeah, sure. I don’t remember what I’ve just agreed to. I simply need to go home and sleep. And [...]
Yesterday was exciting. Yesterday we woke up to find that Val had won the grand prize in a contest, and yesterday Rachel and Val and I had a three-way meeting of the minds where we found and settled on a revised ending that we all really love. This morning I am at the theater, alone [...]