I'm Back!

Well, hi there!  You probably thought I died (or maybe just that I gave up on the whole blogging thing, which is much more plausible).  It's been over a month since my last blog post -- so much for that whole posting once a week thing!  Truth be told, working two shows at the same time while still trying to perform my "real" job at least adequately takes a lot out of a girl.  Anytime that I wasn't at work, at rehearsal, or at a show I could not force myself to get in front of a computer.  Instead, I knit, cuddled my dog, and self-medicated with what some might consider copious amounts of wine.

So, strap-in (or press the eject button now), because this is going to be a rather long and wordy post with a smattering of pictures and not a whole lot of knitting news.

First-up, I closed Journey to the West last Saturday after an extremely smooth run.  There were no real tragedies or anything that ever caused us to have to stop the show or send the audience home (which I consider a success).  We had some props malfunction onstage once or twice, however.  Our bird from our "bird on a rod" prop fell off the rod near the end of the show which resulted in looking like the poor thing had dropped dead downstage right.  Luckily, it didn't fly into the audience which is what I had always been afraid would happen since I saw that prop (I actually had a nightmare about that).  During our second to last performance, our nine-pronged fork (which was a large pitchfork-looking thing made out of wood and painted to look like bones) broke in half right before it was presented to the Monkey King.  Thankfully, Monkey King is supposed to reject it as an inferior weapon, so he just went with it as an even bigger excuse to reject the thing.  Those were really the only two memorable whoopsies from the whole thing, which is pretty amazing.  All in all, it was a fantastic and awesomely fun run (even if we did have rather small houses almost every night...boo).  My cast and crew were simply amazing and I couldn't have asked for a better group of people to work with -- I miss them already!

How about some pictures?  You got it!

The Director giving notes to Tripitaka before the show.

Peach Girls!

One of our Ensemble Women having her makeup done by her own daughter.  Say it with me...Aw!

Sharpie-ing shoes - this happened a lot during the run.  Everyone's shoes really took a beating.

Our Monkey King getting his hair painted.

Be forewarned before attempting to read anything in the picture below that it contains some adult innuendos.

Funny and awkward things said during rehearsal and backstage.  Started by our Guanyin and added to by everyone.

Despite what a great run we had, I have to admit, I am pretty excited to be working on only one show again.  I think my dog is pretty happy about it too.  Rehearsals for Spring Awakening are going pretty well so far.  I hadn't worked on a musical for about 6 years and I'd forgotten just how many more moving parts are involved when doing a musical as opposed to a straight play.  You need separate rehearsal time for music, choreography, and blocking/scenework, which is difficult to do when you're a small community theater and only have four three-hour rehearsals per week.  We've had to add in some extra Saturday rehearsals to compensate.

It's starting to come along, though.  We finally combined the choreography, vocals, and staging together for the first time last Friday in a stumble-through.  It went much better than I thought it would!  We still have a lot of work to do (especially with some of the vocals...some songs are still...rough).  There's a lot of technical things I need to start work on like figuring out set changes and tracking microphones, but I'm pretty relaxed about the whole thing at this point.  We'll see how I feel in two weeks when we're about to go into tech week, though.  Now, if I can only get our boys to quit accidentally breaking the school chairs during Bitch of Living before the props mistress kills me (or them...or all of us).

On the knitting front, I finished my Pointelle socks for the September SKA Sockdown on Sunday, but I haven't had a chance to take them out for a photo shoot yet.  Maybe this weekend.  I also started carrying around a pair of Monkeys in my bag so I could knit in the green room at Journey while I was waiting to give calls.  Pointelle is much too difficult of a pattern to travel with what with all its lace charts.  Monkeys are perfect for traveling -- easily memorized but still entertaining enough that I don't start gnawing on the yarn.  They're still in my bag in case I have any downtime before Spring Awakening rehearsals (or for when we're just doing vocal rehearsals), but progress has certainly slowed down there.  I'm sure they'll get much more attention once SA opens.

I'll try and get some entertaining pictures of SA rehearsals this week when I'm not busy doing line notes, correcting blocking, or doing set changes.  And I'm going to try and take my Pointelles out for a shoot (I have big plans for how awesome these photos are going to be....we'll see).  So, I may be posting again this weekend if that works out.  I'm also going to try to start posting more photos in general (not just of knitting) so that I can improve my photography skills.  Again, a lofty goal....I'll do my best!