Cross-over days

We had a full day with the full company of The Sad and Cautionary Tale of Smackheaded Peter yesterday. I was looking forward to the day with extreme excitement.

We did worked on some transitions, did a run-through, had a production meeting, changed the beginning of the play, worked more transitions and then had a sound design meeting. That's the order of what happened...

One of our old frenemies, time, tried to sabotage the atmosphere in the rehearsal room at the start of the day. People were a little nervous/tense about running through the play, getting off book, some uncertainty about some physical sections of the play, thinking about transitions- there are still sections of the play that we've not been able to rehearse with everyone present, it's been a tricky process...and the challenges of working several nights in a row at restaurants/shows etc were also affecting energy levels in the room. However a little company TLC began to change the atmosphere and we had an excellent first run-through!

It's not pretty yet- but we're definitely get there and frankly, if it was too pretty at this point in the process I'd be worried about us 'peaking too soon'!

So, now, in our unique rehearsal process, I move on to Anything Goes for a week and the acting company on Smackheaded Peter brew/mull/digest the work/embed lines today in a rehearsal lead by our wonderful Stage Manager, Lauren Williams and our very capable Assistant Director, Andrew McNaughton.

I'm torn about today. If I could split myself in half, (and not frighten people), I'd do it. Half of me would love to be at The Grand, meeting stage management, the props department, the costume designer, our vocal coach, (Rick Kish), seeing Susan Ferley (my boss) and production manager in preparation for Anything Goes and the other half would be incredibly happy to be with the Smackheaded Peter company to build on the work we did yesterday. I'm frustrated to say the least- and also, what a wonderful problem to have- I can't be two places at once.

If my brain were hair (which thankfully it's not!) it would look a little like the drawings of Shockheaded Peter, the German character Struwwelpeter, or Shockheaded Peter. I hope though, that that is where any similarities would end... Struwwelpeter was a boy who had poor personal hygiene. According to the Wikepdias (the source of all extensive research!), "Literally translated, Struwwel-Peter means Shaggy-Peter. According to Ellen Handler Spitz, the book was intended as a highly exaggerated send-up of the pietistic children's books of the day in which good little children came to good ends, and the badly behaved did not."

Shockheaded Peter is definitely an influence on our play, The Sad and Cautionary Tale of Smackheaded Peter... but it's not about the hair or the hygiene! Promise...

Day 3- Drugs, themes and possibilities

We start the day with the two drug sections that Andrew and I investigated yesterday. Just a small group of people, me, Richard Stewart and Bryan Demore. Lauren Williams, our stage manager is there as well.

We hop in the pool and swim around with the conversation that happens between Peter, (when he's experiencing heroin for the first time) and a character that called "The Voice" in the script. I've asked Richard to be the lead speaker for this character- and I also believe that we're going to involve more of the company to create this scene.

We have lots of imagining and debate about what and who the character of The Voice is...and we arrive at a fascinating option: The Voice is The Voice of Invisible Possibilities, Wisdom and Forces that exist in the universe, unseen. It seems quite a grand idea to arrive at while still sipping on coffee, but it also seems to make sense. And Peter, (who is 14 year-old boy at that point in the play), is too frightened to grab onto the 'tail of opportunity', so it leaves. Until a couple of days ago I'd always thought The Voice was just the voice of Heroin... but this new interpretation makes more sense, considering the themes of freeing the poor and social revolution that are in the play... For a social revolution to take place, we need to believe that change is possible. And sometimes, in struggling with poverty, change just doesn't feel possible.

We've talked a fair bit in rehearsal about the physical experience of poverty- what does 'grinding poverty' feel like? I've had the experience of working with teens in under-privileged areas in the UK and it's awful when you meet young people who feel trapped by a lack of possibilities in their lives and trapped by a lack of money... This feeling of being trapped, being stuck in the 'sweet and sour misery' is one of the themes of the play... And freeing the poor from that dis-empowered misery is another.

So, we power through the second drug hallucination and it's all making sense now! We're ready to get this mamma of a scene on the dance floor and shimmy, (but that rehearsal is for another day).

The afternoon is more fun with Paul Tessier as Pollack the Lawyer- Pollack visits his client Smackheaded Peter in Wormwood Scrubs Prison. It's an old Victorian prison, in London, notorious in the UK for overcrowding... here's a picture from the Victorian era; the cells are still the same size, but have (at times) had four men in them, 23 hours a day.



After the scene work we have some excellent free play with Bryan's monologues (as Smackheaded Peter) and before we know it- it's time to go home.

A thought-provoking day...