Showtime

Well, Guys and Dolls opened last week and what a hellish week it was. The last week before a show opens is called, "Tech Week". This week is when we move from the rehearsal space into the theater. It's also the week that the technical staff gets hold of the show... set designer, lighting director, sound technicians, stage crew - the cast is puppets at their command. First tech rehearsals are spent moving from position to position while lights are focused on us. It's a long and tedious process where nobody seems to care how the cast is holding up. Day one of tech week started at 4:30 in the afternoon and ended somewhere around 12:30/1:00am. The rest of the week continued like that. I'd get up at 5:30 in the morning to get to work by 8:00 and have to report to the theater at around 4:30 or 5:00 (depending on traffic). Stay at the theater until the techs were done with us, get home around 1:00 or 2:00am then start all over again. By Thursday (Preview Night - the first in front of a real audience) just about everybody is a zombie. I really wish there was a better way of doing this...
The last time I did a show with this company (Paul in A Chorus Line), they neglected to tell us that Reviewers would be in the Preview Night audience. The only thing they told us was that the audience was a group of invited high school drama kids. I was horribly sick by that point in the process and thought, "Well... it's just high school kids... just get through it. Save your strength for the true Opening Night." not knowing anything about a reviewer in the house. Well, this maniac decided to give me a nasty review. Worst part about it was this guy didn't write for an actual newspaper, he wrote for some online site.
Lovely. So if you google hard enough, you'll find a hateful review of my performance as Paul. It's been six years since that show and that review is still floating around out there. AAARGH!