This month's G2GR is coming to you live from the dressing room of The Little Theater on the Square in Sullivan, IL where upstairs Buddy Holly is currently rocking the Apollo Theater! We are currently in our opening weekend for Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story after only ten days of rehearsal. This show is more of a play with music, as all the songs performed are done in a concert style with the actors playing all the instruments. This has made it a beast of a show to tackle in such a short period. Our director, Erik Hayden, is a fantastic musician as well as director and has been very helpful in assuring everything runs smoothly. Another big help is that many of the cast members have done the show before which allows more focus to be placed on the technical aspects of the show (sound, lights, sets, etc...) than scene work and music rehearsals. This is all well and good, except if you've never done the show before! I definitely had to put in many extra hours for line memorization, scene work, and music rehearsals. But it's all fun work to do! Overall, it's been a great experience and wonderfully refreshing to work on a new project! It is, however, a little overwhelming getting emails about my Hairspray rehearsal schedule before I've even wrapped my current show, but that's a good problem to have!
From outside the Green Room:
Things wrapped up nicely in New York before I left for my current contract... I had finally gotten back into the swing of coaching and was really starting to love ushering as well, but those things will always be waiting for me when I get back. I packed up my room and got it ready for my subletter a few days early because Morgana and I were headed down to the Washington DC area for my brother's wedding. It was a great venue, beautiful ceremony, awesome party, and all-around perfect weekend getaway with Morgana before I had to leave. You can read more about it on my new sister-in-law's blog! On the day of the wedding, we had some extra time to kill in the morning, so Morgana and I went horseback riding through the country. It was so nice to get outdoors! I don't think I've been on a horse for over a decade... I left Sunday and flew into Chicago where a theater representative picked me up and we drove the four hours down to Sullivan. It's a very quaint little midwest town but we've had some fun at a local Chili Cook-off and The Great Pumpkin Patch, among other fun little adventures!
Lessons Learned:
I was going to talk about how preparation and personal practice time are key in such a short rehearsal period (we put the whole show up in ten days, I remind you)... but decided to focus on something else because today at the Saturday Matinee, I got a little emotional at the Clearlake Concert which is basically a giant 20 minute concert of all of Buddy's greatest hits to finish the show. I play Keys 2 during this part so I get to look out over the audience and watch everyone. It really hit home that the majority of the people in the audience lived these moments for real... They may have never seen Buddy Holly live, but they definitely went and saw other shows like this and are very familiar with the music. It must have felt like a time-warp for them to be there. I saw elderly men and women literally dancing in the aisles like they were 16 again, smiles ear-to-ear, because the last time they shared this experience they were 16! The pure power of music and theater was made very evident to me today... and it's always nice getting reminded of that every now and again.
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