ARS Day 7

Yesterday, I had a much-needed day off. I slept in, got a haircut, bought groceries, watched Sherlock. I also worked on lines, primarily some big speeches I have in Epicene, and I also memorized Flavius's big soliloquy in Timon of Athens.

The ASC posted this photo of me on Facebook today. In celebration of the 25th anniversary, you'll see some photos of ASC actors in 1988. I call this my Titus Andronicus audition.

Today was our first big day to work on The Servant of Two Masters. Alli (playing Smeraldina) provided a schedule for the day. The only commitment I had to the rest of the group was to talk over the props with the other waiters (Traci and Andrew) about the big restaurant scene were Truffaldino serves to both his masters. It involves a lot of props (my posts on Servant will likely revolve around this scene, so get ready). We figured out which props could be doubled and decided that one prop table should work backstage. The minute it comes back stage, it will return to its home whether we use it or not again in the scene (like the soup tureen--a dish that is called for both Beatrice and Florindo--we'll just use the same one).

Music rehearsal was set for the end of the day. I stayed at the theatre and worked on music the whole time. Troupe members offer suggestions for songs on a white board. I created a YouTube playlist for all the songs, so everyone had easy access. As always, it's an eclectic mix. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing a lot more trumpet for this show. A big project was transcribing a haunting trumpet duet line from a song (I'll keep the songs a secret for now). If it's a trickier line, I will sit at a piano with the song on my iPad and plunk out the notes. This still requires transposition--the trumpet is a whole step lower than the piano and other C instruments. But for this song, I think Greg wants to bring it down a half step. So I will only need to transpose these lines up a half step. I'm nearly finished with the initial C transcription.

Oh yes! I managed to track down my costume today. This show is going to cover a wide span of time periods. The waiters have decided on a pretty classic (modern) look: black dress pants, white dress shirt, an apron, and some ties. We found matching ties in the costume shop, so we've got ourselves a nice little uniform going on.

I also volunteered to work on the pre-show speech for this show. I think my fellow waiters and I can work up some restaurant/service industry gags for that.

While all this is going on, the rest of the troupe managed to get through what I think is the first third of the show. We're going to tackle the big restaurant scene first thing tomorrow, which will be a lot of work. Most of the cues are visual cues, rather than vocal cues. Timing and coordinating the backstage flow is going to be key (as well as memorizing the sequencing). I better review all of that tonight before I go to bed and again tomorrow morning.