Bring on the blunders!

Back for more...to all of you nay sayers who thought I couldn't do this more regularly, I'm on to day two.  The trick will be continuing on with this next week as I start rehearsing with "The Hired Help".

The 10 hired actors (we'll call them "The Hired Help," for lack of any other term...and not knowing them enough to make up a sarcastic and possibly critical term) from NYC and Boston are beginning to arrive today and will conclude on Sunday night.  However, yesterday we were notified that "Hired Help #9" and "Hired Help #10" had informed management that they were to arrive together by car on Monday night at 6:00pm.  You could probably guess that management's reply was something to this effect:

[Dear "Hired Help #9 and #10",
     Your contract start date is Monday morning starting at 10am as clearly stated in the document that your agent has received and forwarded along to you.  Starting the season with an infringement of your contract would be a poor way for us to begin our working agreement together.  Please inform us of your alternate plans for travel into The Mountains of Musical Madness.]

This late arrival would cost the theater, collectively, a missed day of rehearsal on the first two shows that are rehearsing.  Let's see if they solve the problem...which I'm guessing is created by the fact that one of them has a gig on Sunday night that they did not get out of.  Perhaps a very late night of driving is in store.

So the first two shows (one of them being "a talking"...that is one which lacks music and dance interruptions) start rehearsing on Monday, in addition to "The Cherubs", who are in rehearsal for four different shows of their own as we speak.  Three rehearsal spaces are hard to come by, so a local church is in cahoots to help us out.  They tend to do this each year.  Thankfully the heat wave has broken here and we're looking at rain (however needed) and 60 degree temperatures for our first week working together.  This should help everyone's temperament as the last few days here have been scorching and really unpleasant to work with.

Moving on....I have my first "Moment of Professional Blunder" to share with you for the year.

Moment of Professional Blunder #1
Yesterday I spoke with the business manager, let's call her..."Godzilla" because she usually lacks any kind of grace in leadership, about a casting concern.  That is that our first show has a lot of ensemble involvement, mainly in singing harmonies for the music a certain of well endowed western/pop/broadway crossover diva.  Because of the casting of "The Hired Help" we are left with only a small number of females in the ensemble 4 ladies to 11 males to be exact. Now anyone can see that this would be a problem, especially since male voices tend to produce more sound in general than female voices....nobody needs to hear that much tenor ever...even I can admit that!  So I went to "Godzilla" and asked for some on stage support from another staff member that works under her torrential reign (notice the play on words here).  After being told by "Godzilla" that she would think about it, but had some genuine concerns about this person splitting their time between on stage duties and their assigned duties, she went immediately to the subject of hopeful relief and told her that she didn't see any possible way to have her on stage at all this summer.  [insert screeching sound effect here]

Didn't you just tell me that you would think about it?!?!  AND....what makes you think that the best way to deal with this is to not respond to myself and "The Man" who had made the request but instead to talk with the person (almost in a scolding manner) who was an innocent object of a possible solution instead?!?!  RUDE!  I brewed about it all night, thinking about how I would never respond to a professional conversation/request by going to another, VERY UNINVOLVED source.  Water under the bridge, I've concocted the response that my mom would be proud of and plan to deliver that with a smile today.  It starts something like "I'm sorry that this situation played out the way it did.  Perhaps next time something like this....blah....blah....BLAH!."  What do you think, mom?

We'll that's all for today.  I'm off to hear "The Dwellers", that is the people who live in this area, audition for hopeful spots in our shows.  Some of these people have a very rough time getting through their auditions...this should be interesting.

Happy trails from the Mountains of Music Madness!
CK