The Freedom Train has almost arrived at the opening of the season. We have our last rehearsal tomorrow and our first show on Wednesday. This is the point where I start getting nervous. In any theatre show I get excited and nervous for the opening, because you often find that in front of an audience things happen that have never happened before, and you accidentally get into the wrong costume or forget lines you haven't forgotten for weeks. It's scary and it's out of control and it's magic. But in a touring children's show, you've also got such huge variations between performance spaces and between different audiences (based on their age, the type of school they go to, the type of event they're at, etc.) to deal with. Derrick and I do a spectacular fight scene as escaped slave and slave-catcher (yes, that's the one with the whip) and that's the part I am particularly excited but also worried about. Specifically, I'm worried about smacking my head on either the ceiling or the floor, because I did that a couple of weeks ago in rehearsal and it wasn't fun. Especially when I called Hope Stone to explain I couldn't teach that day coz I'd just injured my head and the woman I teach with, Gayla, told me there was a chance I could die. I freaked out big time, and Shemica enjoyed calling it my "white girl moment".
Not having died, I decided to go and see a play in Spanish last night. One of my friends from Express, Benito, directed a play called Circulo Vicioso de un Cuarteto Amoroso (Vicious Circle of Four Lovers) that is on at Talento Bilingue de Houston. He's an excellent Stage Manager at Express, but I wanted to see his creative work. And Lucas and I both really enjoyed the play, despite not understanding any of the dialogue except for a couple of isolated phrases and picking up three out of the four characters' names. It was the kind of show that we could still enjoy (for starters, it wasn't interactive, so we could just sit in the audience and let it wash over us), and it didn't rely so heavily on the dialogue that we couldn't still follow the broad strokes of the plot. There were only a couple of short moments that were uninteresting to me, because they were conversations that seemed to be purely about the exchange of information. Also not following the dialogue made us focus on everything else about the play - the body language, the tones of voice, the visuals, the music, the business - and it was well directed and acted enough that all of those things told us stories too. And then we took Benito out for a drink afterward and asked him questions about all the plot points we didn't pick up (and there were some pretty major ones!)
We're taking it pretty easy today, and tonight I'm singing at a cabaret run by Rachel, one of my fellow-reindeer from Rudolph. Tomorrow is an audition, rehearsal and then dinner at Nick & Bekah's; Monday is another audition and my second out of four classes in Shakespeare I'm taking to prepare for some upcoming auditions. Also someone's coming to fix our dishwasher. Since it's been broken, the semblance of household order we have just managed to maintain has completely gone to the dogs.
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