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Show Diary: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Rehearsals Week 2 and 3

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I may have picked the absolute worst show to keep a show diary for, to be perfectly honest, becasue at this early stage in rehearsals, there’s not a lot to report. Much of that is due to the fact that I’m a villager. There are only three villager scenes, so I’m not called so often. Especially since we’ve absolutely crushed our blocking in record time. Which is good, because…

Covid shut-down: Mid-week three, we shut down due to a high number of covid exposures in the cast. Not everyone turned up positive, but we took no chances. All rehearsals were shut down at the end of last week, through the Memorial Day holiday. We still have some cast members out, but a five-day quarantine hopefully mitigated transmission. I’ll be masked up until tech week because I’m not taking chances.

No one throws it back like Gaston: Dance rehearsal for “Mob Song” got me and my friend Kaleigh in a goofy mood. Maybe it was the heat of the rehearsal space? Maybe it was hearing that song over and over and over again? During the number, the female-coded villagers leave the stage while the male-coded mob goes to the Beast’s castle. With nothing to do on the sidelines, Kayleigh and I amused ourselves by twerking to the song (which we weren’t singing that night; when we’re learning a dance, we do it to a recording). The thing is, I didn’t remember that there’s a line where Gaston yells something about “grab all the booty you can find.” When that line hit, the laugh that exploded out of me was like a foghorn and an airhorn having a loud three way with a megaphone. It was completely unprofessional, immature, and so hilarious that I don’t regret a moment of it.

Our rehearsal space is so hot. Just oppressively hot. Anyone who has done theater knows that your rehearsal space is always going to be either way too hot or way too cold. There is no perfect temperature in any rehearsal venue anywhere. Yesterday, I spent our ten out in my car, blasting my pits with the a/c.

“Our ten” means our ten-minute break. Here’s some backstage lingo for yous: during rehearsals, you actually do hear “take five” or “take ten.” And when it’s over, they’re like, “that’s five,” or “that’s ten.” It’s not a cliche, it’s actually how the stage manager talks. And it can be very confusing, because you have conversations like:

Me: Hey, are we still on our ten?

Someone: Yes.

This might lead you to believe you’ve got ten minutes. But you’ve actually only got three minutes left to play Candy Crush on your phone, so the ten is meaningless. It just refers to how much time you were given.

It still doesn’t feel like this show is actually happening. Obviously, it is happening, and things are going super well. But since this was our summer 2020 show and it’s been canceled twice, I’m having a hard time believing we’re really doing it. It just became this mythical, far-off dream or something. After Sister Act: The Musical, where I was called practically every night from the first rehearsal on, it’s surreal to only have to show up twice a week. I’m looking forward to the entire cast coming together for full run-throughs, which starts during week seven. It’ll feel a little bit more like I’m actually in a show then. But honestly, having waited two years for this? I’m pretty sure I won’t believe we actually, finally got to do it until we’re tearing down the set.

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