So this weekend was All Rehearsals All the Time.

We were in the space for the first time, and since my actress Kirsten is in charge of booking the space, we had it basically all we wanted("No, I'm sorry, it's completely booked every minute all week...no wait, I can let you have it from 2a 'til 2.08a on Monday night!").

On Saturday we started with Winchester, because this show is an absolute motherfucker in terms of props and blocking, and we really couldn't do it right in people's apartments. It starts with Omar talking to the audience and Kelly moving every single prop and furnishing around the stage, and it suddenly, magically came to life like it never had before.

Just having Kelly be able to do all of the movement gave her the energy she needed, and it also took the pressure off Omar when he realized that nobody would be paying the slightest attention to his first monologue, because all they'll be doing will be watching Kelly race around the stage like a dervish!

We ran everything else after that, and it's amazing what a difference there was just from the day before. I knew we were hard on a breakthrough, and just everyone being a little more solid on their lines and in the right space would make all of the difference.

The performances are absolutely great--Kelly and Kirsten were brilliant in Penny Drops, Kirsten absolutely taking a couple of tiny notes that I had given her the day before and just stunned me with how they just sharpened these moments so much that you could cut yourself on them.

On the Way Home wasn't quite right, since Omar was still kind of hung up on the fact that he's playing a character so much younger than he really is, and so was doing this weird Shirley Temple short vowels thing at the top of the show that just about makes me want to kick him vigorously up and down the street.

But the this amazing thing is, though, that Omar, even when he isn't doing as good a job as he can and will and Ann is being quietly brilliant next to him, I still cannot take my eyes off him. He is such a movie-star waiting to happen--not because he is classically handsome, though he is quite beautiful, it's because he has such astounding charisma even when he doesn't try that you simply cannot look away.

We started the second difficult, proppy show, Clerestory at the end of the rehearsal.

Omar's character has to have a suitcase filled with different-sized bottles or something, and I was wondering where on earth I would get all these different bottles that wouldn't break when they spilled all over the stage, and then I walked into my bathroom, and realized how easy it would be.

I filled a large Duane Read bag with about a third of my bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body scrub and lotion and masques and cleansers and things and then put the bag in a suitcase because I couldn't practically lift it.

I brought it to the theatre and Omar said, "My God, how will you bathe while the show is on?" and I explained to him that I had about another 120 bottles left behind, and not to worry. That this was what I was obsessive-compulsive about.

Then I showed him how to spill them and pick them up and put them in size order and make certain that everything was lined up just right, and he was finding it a little tricky, because there was stuff that he absolute had to do to cue Kirsten's next line, and the timing was kind of difficult, but it was sort of starting to come together. We didn't have time to finish before going, but I decided to start with it at Sunday's rehearsal.

On Sunday morning first I went downtown to Abracadabra to get a bruise kit and some blood for Kelly in Penny Drops and I did find it funny to ask the counter boy specifically for the Ben Nye thick blood and things, and then I went to the drugstore and got some bandages for her as well.

Then I went up to the theatre and we did Clerestory and it was fucking brilliant. We didn't do it without stopping, but it didn't matter because it was finally what I had dreamed it could be all along. When they finished, I jumped up cheering, and Omar looked at me and said, "I finally gave up," meaning that he stopped fighting himself and me and played the character the way he should be played, the way that scared him.

Everything went well, too, and then afterwards I made up Kelly in her car accident victim role, which she is going to have to do in the middle of the show. I showed her how to do a black eye and a broken nose and it's just so easy and looks great. Basically, the most important thing is that she doesn't do it so neatly that she looks like Pete the Pup in Our Gang with the perfect circle around his eye, and she assured me that being too neat was unlikely to be her problem.

When I was showing her how to do the nose, I did it on myself because I really didn't want to stick my fingers up her nose, and then when he left I didn't wash off the dried fake blood. People looked at me oddly all the way home.

Today's horoscope:
A family member really needs appreciation. Tell those you love how much you care. Noticing the good helps generate more.

One year ago today:
Every year people bitch and piss and moan about how the season starts too early and blah and blah and blah, but the one time that I need to buy Christmas wrapping paper in September, not a sausage!

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Last Updated Fri 28 September 01:18:09 2001