FAULT LINES JOURNAL PART V

For Fault Lines Journal Parts I-IV, please see the respective blog posting

Opening night for the play "Faultlines" was Thursday March 11. After all the preparation and the fixing of the electricity and sound, I think everyone was pretty confident. The opening night was full of close friends of the cast and crew. It was not sold out, but it was a full house. The capacity for the play was, I think, 90 people. Comfortably, I think there were about 50 good seats, but we would cram in as many as possible up to 90 people.

It was amazing during the rehearsals, and as it proved out during the 10 performances, how the actors would subtly make little changes and variances--very similar to how we would do it for jams. The first night the actors were really live and excited. AND, the audience loved it. They laughed at almost every imaginable part. Very cool. The Ceremony music came off very well. The lights and sound were very good was eerie and loud and freaky--which is what they wanted. I thought PLUMP sounded mighty fine. We had assigned a number to each of the different parts of our underscore music, and we would look at eachother and nod and such to make sure we knew exactly what part we would be playing. I was in charge of watching the script, and cueing the band as to when we would come in and go out. It was slightly different every time, just based on where the actors were in a line compared to where we were in a groove. I caught the audiences head moving to the music a number of times, so I knew it was sounding pretty good. We had champagne after the first night, and every one was really happy--I think the opening night performance was one of the best nights of the run.

Friday night (Mar 12) the crowd was a little smaller than the Thursday night. They enjoyed the show, but they definitely did not laugh quite as much. Over the course of the run, PLUMP would have a quite a variance in the crowd response during the PLUMP part of the show, which was basically an hour of music before the play. Some nights the crowd really liked it. This particular Friday night, the crowd was a bit older, and I think we were too loud for what they would typically want to hear. I think many in the crowd wanted us to shut up. I think this partly because one particular gentleman stuck his fingers in his ears for the majority of his time in the bar prior to the beginning of the play.

On the first Friday night, near the beginning of the play, the actors ended up skipping about a page and a half of dialogue. There was even about 15 seconds on stage in which both actors were really struggling with what line to say. There dialogue descended to:

Jim--"You are crazy"
Bill--"No you are crazy"
Jim-- "No, you are crazy"

over and over again until one of the actors could remember a line that would get them on track. I could tell that the actors were really struggling, but the audience did not notice. It was actually kind of neat, for me, because I understood what was going on, and what they were frantically trying to do. Also, the whole time the actors were struggling with the lines, I was scanning the script because I needed to know when they would find a line to pop back in, so that if we had a music cue nearby that we would get back in. When the character Jim finally got a line that got them back on the script, luckily it was a line I knew, because it was about 10 seconds before we were supposed to go on. The band music got in correctly, thank God. Other than that, the show was perfectly fine.

Saturday night (Mar 13) was good. We had some sound problems during the PLUMP pre-show show, as the vocals were not going through the PA mains--the vocals were only going through the monitors. I am sure there was a big hole in the music from the perspective of the crowd.

We did a show on Monday May 15 as a "industry night", as all the people who work in theatre typically have Monday nights off, so we did a show so a lot of these people could check out the play. The audience, though smaller, loved it. This was definitely another of the best nights. I think because it was all friends and theatre people, the actors were more relaxed. It is a funny play, and if the crowd got to laughing early, the actors always responded with a really inventive performance.

We were all exhausted after spending the last 8 days together. We were in the Brewery Tap from 6 until about midnight from Monday thru Saturday, then Sunday off, but then again on Monday. We had Tuesday and Wednesday off, and the next show was Thursday night. But between doing the play and also working out day jobs, we were all really really really really tired.

Stay tuned for the Journal Part 6...