Preview of a dress rehearsal
Mother Courage and Her Children is open; it has been quite a week for the National Arts Centre’s English Acting Company.
I wrote previously about the immense challenges presented to us by mounting a play that is considered one of Brecht’s masterworks. The outcome of working through those challenges was a Pay-What-You-Can dress rehearsal this past Tuesday, and I want to tell you a bit about that day. I’m not writing this in the spirit of gossip, but because I have often talked in my own blog about the beautiful moments that can come with a career in the theatre, I think it’s important to describe the opposite end of the spectrum. If you’ve been keeping track of our work on this play, you know that the preview performance that was supposed to take place on Wednesday night was canceled; after reading this, you may understand some of the reasons why.
To recap the events of the lead-up to last Tuesday, allow me to quote myself:
With six very full and focused days of rehearsal on the stage, we have yet to finish working all the way through the play once, and I am only cautiously optimistic that we may manage to wrap it up some time tomorrow, during day seven. We’re still figuring out where the pedals in the car are, and how to adjust the mirrors, and hoping we never have to parallel park in the snow.
Well: at the end of day seven, we had managed to work through almost the entire play. This left us five hours of rehearsal to finish working through the final scene-and-a-half or so, and then to work through the sound and light cues for the first four scenes or so. It was a pretty tall order. And regardless of our progress on Tuesday afternoon, we knew that our audience on Tuesday night would be seeing us run the play from end to end for the first time. Ever.
Speaking personally, I was very excited about Tuesday. I thought, as many of us did, that it was actually going to be a terrific experience: for us, because we’d finally get to feel the entire play, with all the bells and whistles; and for an audience, because stopping the show was basically going to be an inevitable occurrence, meaning they’d get a cool and utterly unique glimpse into how a theatre company works.
At 4:45 PM in the afternoon, though, we had run out of rehearsal time, and did not complete our ambitious plan for the day. The stage manager used the final moments to show us some lighting states that we didn’t get a chance to look at, and then we broke for dinner. Our assistant director, Stephen Ouimette, assured us that he’d be in the house with the script for the performance, in case we needed to ask for help with a line. Tanja Jacobs, our Mother Courage, suggested that Stephen might benefit from a vocal warmup.
7:30 PM arrived faster than many of us hoped. Our director, Peter Hinton, addressed the dress rehearsal crowd of about 300 before we started. “Tonight’s a bit different than other dress rehearsals in the past,” he said. “It’s the very first time we’ve put all of the scenes, costumes, sound, lights, music, props, and special effects together and run this play right through from beginning to end.” He explained that actors would very likely be asking for help with lines, because a first runthrough can be overwhelming. He warned the audience that we would very likely have to halt the show at some point, to correct something, and that we’d get going again as quickly as we could. And he thanked everyone for being patient.
The performance began, and went off the rails almost immediately, as we all expected it would. The net effect on the cast was both crushing and galvanizing. The audience saw some very raw rehearsal work: lines were dropped and prompting was common; actors missed cues or were in the wrong places; one scene was done in the wrong lighting cue; set pieces knocked into each other or were moved incorrectly; actors saw each other in costume or in wigs for the first time, which affected focus; songs had to be stopped and restarted due to sound balance problems; props were missing or didn’t work or got lost in the shuffle of scene changes; the show had to be stopped many times — eight or so? — in order to correct issues. At one point a disgruntled man in the balcony screamed “SPEAK UP!!” at the stage. Many of our guests left at intermission. Those that stayed witnessed a production that ran for about four hours. After all was said and done, most of the cast was found sitting together in a single dressing room, not speaking, sipping beer and slowly shaking their heads.
In all honesty, nothing that went wrong was terribly unusual; it’s all stuff that I expect to happen on any show when it’s being run for the first time from end-to-end with full tech and costumes. In fact, I’ve been involved with first run-throughs that were far worse: the difference here was that we had a few hundred people sitting in the audience watching us; and despite the pre-show speech, some people’s expectations simply could not be met. It was a frightening realization of the kinds of bad dreams I have before opening nights, and I hope I don’t have to experience another night like it for a while.
And so, for these and a few other complicating reasons, the decision was made to cancel our subsequent preview performance, giving us a much-needed extra day of rehearsal. We took what we learned from Tuesday night — a great deal, indeed — and poured it into preparation for our “first” preview on Thursday; that outing was far, far better, as evidenced by the fact that we shaved 18 minutes off the first act alone. And now that we’ve finished our first weekend of performances, I can say that we all look back on Tuesday as a gift of a failure for what it taught us about the show and about each other; ultimately, Mother Courage and Her Children is better for it, and with heartfelt thanks to the audience members who were with us on Tuesday, we are now ready to present the show we always intended to present. And it’s pretty damned good.
Tags: dress rehearsal, Kris Joseph, Mother Courage and Her Children, NAC English Theatre
