Post 227 - October 24, 2020

Day 227…

Showtime.

Today is the first day of early voting here in New York.

All of the discussion, the fighting, the thoughtful debate, the slinging of mud, the anxiety, the smugness, the questioning, the fear, the projection, the posting, the tik-toking, the instagramming, the facebooking, the snapchatting, the drawing, the singing, the yelling, the speaking, the thinking, the joking, the worrying, the fretting, the watching, the listening, the blocking, the shunning, the ignoring, the drinking, the eating, the sleeping, the changingofchannelling, the checking, the calculating, and all of the deciding has been the rehearsal for today’s first preview of what’s to come for the next four years and beyond.

Previews of the next four years have already begun in some places across the country as voters mail in their ballots, leave them in dropboxes or show up in person.

51 million people have already cast their ballots nationwide and there are still 10 days left before the actual day of the election. That number is 4 million votes higher than all of the early voting put together in 2016. That number represents 37% of all the votes that were cast in total during the election in 2016.

The number of early votes cast in Texas, North Carolina and California are already more than the total number of votes that the President received in total in those states in 2016.

When you are putting a show together, you start with an idea.

The person with the idea then has to get other people to get on board with them. You can decide to do all of the early work yourself or you can create a team of writers and composers to do it with you.

The story begins to form.

At some point, you begin to take what you have and read it aloud to a few friends and colleagues. They give you suggestions. You either ignore them or you incorporate them into the project and begin to adjust the direction it’s taking. You find a director.

The piece gets to the point where you are now ready to present it to a larger audience - hopefully one that will get excited about what you are doing and offer to support it. Over the course of a couple of readings, you put together a group of producers, financial investors and hopefully get a regional theatre on board so that you can start to plan the actual production. You choose a choreographer.

At that point, hundreds of people start to get involved - along with the director, you start choosing the design team, the technical team, the casting team, the promotional and marketing team, the press team.

Momentum has begun.

The production gets announced. An opening night is chosen. The designs start being set. Schedules get set with build dates and load in and rehearsal dates that all backdate from the announced opening night. The show starts to get cast and the stage management team is put together.

Pre-production starts - you’ve booked rehearsal studios and chosen a prop supervisor who begins to put together rehearsal props or cheap mock-ups of larger set pieces. The wardrobe supervisor starts to pull together rehearsal versions of some of the more elaborate costumes.

The rehearsals start. There is always an argument about how long you get to rehearse. No money starts to come in until you have your first preview and the audience has been allowed to buy tickets. Before that, everything is coming out of the initial investment, so money is tight. The longer the rehearsal period the longer you have to pay all of those salaries and rent on the rehearsal rooms out of your investment fund. If you’re very lucky you get six weeks in a studio. Four weeks is the more likely number although smaller theatres often shave even more time off.

Union rules dictate that you rehearse for up to seven hours a day for six days before you need to take a day off. There are constant meetings and discussions happening outside of those hours. The cast all need to be fitted into their actual costumes and wigs.

While the cast is working with the director, and the music and choreographic teams in the studio, the set, lights, sound system and video systems are all being loaded into the theatre and set up.

After the studio rehearsals, everyone then starts working together for the first time onstage in the theatre. The show gets teched.

Lights, sound, set, projection, costumes, wigs, makeup, along with the band all coordinate together and slowly, the show starts to come together. This period, called tech, can last a couple of days or, if you have a very complicated and intricate show, is can go on for weeks. The stage manager, along with the director, is pushing everyone forward.

Then, when everything is almost ready, you have a final dress rehearsal for family and friends and colleagues. The ‘almost’ in almost ready is an extremely relative term.

When we had our invited dress rehearsal for the musical of Titanic, we had to stop the show more than twenty times. I’m not sure that we actually ever got to the end of it that day. Nonetheless, we then started previews the following night.

All during previews, you come in early every morning to start fixing and changing the technical elements of the show.  After lunch, the cast then comes in and you work those changes and fixes into the show. You get about four hours with them a day. There is then a dinner break (although some tech departments end up working through it at great expense) and everyone gets ready for the performance that night.

The first paying audience starts taking their seats a half hour before the performance. At the same time the cast is called backstage to start getting into their costumes and makeup.

And then it’s showtime.

The creative and producing team sits out front and watches the show with the audience and notes the response.

Changes need to be made but what are they? There is always a fight about that. ALWAYS.

Changes can go into the show every single day during the preview period. Some big and some small. Sometimes whole new songs get written and whole new pieces of scenery get built. Costumes and wigs change. Scenes and songs get cut.

Sometimes people get fired and replaced.

On the musical of The Red Shoes, from the beginning of the process, it seemed like somebody was getting fired and replaced every few days - actors, the stage manager, wardrobe supervisor, more actors. The director. We started referring to the show as The Pink Slips.

Millions of dollars are at stake, not to mention people’s reputations - artistic and otherwise - and tensions can run HIGH.

You can start thinking that you are doomed, that nothing is working, and then get to opening night and the reviews are raves.

Unfortunately, the opposite can happen as well. You can start thinking that because the people you are talking to all seem to love it that you are in great shape. Opening Night is a confident celebration and then the reviews come out and it’s like you’ve had your knees broken by a thug with a tire iron.

Titanic, after all of our endless work, got lousy reviews but it didn’t matter. Audiences started loving it anyway and it grew and grew in popularity until we won the Tony Award for best musical that year.

Doing this concert with Patti LuPone tonight is all of this on a much, much smaller level. Far fewer people are involved.

Most of the material in tonight’s show, Patti has sung before, so we know how to light it and mix the sound for it. Some of it is brand new. We’ve had to make many adjustments to what we usually do to accommodate the fact that it is going to be live streamed.

Usually, we would be doing the concert in a hall that seats thousands of people. Tonight, we are in a space that seats less than two hundred and nobody who isn’t actually working on the show will be in the space with us.

No matter how much you prepare and how much you rehearse and plan, you can never really know how the show is going to go that night. You can never really tell what the response is going to be. I have been wrong far more times than I’ve been right, so I try not to project. I try and just do my job the best I can and hope for the best.

That’s what I TRY to do.

We have some technical work to do this afternoon. Patti and Joe will come in later on for a sound check and may run some of the things that they weren’t happy with at yesterday’s rehearsal. Then we will do the show.

I am going to vote tomorrow or the following day. Today is about getting the concert done, tomorrow I’ll go back to concentrating on the future of the country.

In 2016, none of us believed that Hillary Clinton would lose. That the President could actually win, was a joke that none of us on the left truly could become to be.

2020 seems even less certain.

The two candidates that we are about to choose between have each followed a similar path that a Broadway musical takes. They each started with an idea, attracted followers, grew their teams, debated their competitors, won some primaries and ultimately became the candidate. They’ve been performing their shows for months now.

On Broadway, the equivalent of where we are right now is award season. Which musical is going to win the Tony Award? They are all different.  Some support one, some another. The one that ultimately wins will survive. The ones that don’t, often will close.

When Julie Andrews opened the envelope onstage at Radio City Music Hall in 2005 and said, “and the Tony Award goes to… Jersey Boys,” that’s the moment that we knew we’d won. Not  a second before.  Before, we thought we might, but then we also thought that we could lose to The Drowsy Chaperone. They had won some of the other awards against us.

We aren’t any more certain about what is going to happen on November 3rd.

Heck, I don’t know what is going to happen tonight at New World Stages. I know that we are all going to work hard this afternoon, but how will the show go tonight?

We’ll know when we know.

We’ll know what happens on November 3 when we know.

Until then, all we can do is prepare as best we can. Keep working. Keep focused.

And, more than anything else, keep hopeful.