Prodigal 2011 – Day 13

Our juvenile lead was unavailable for the first hour of the day as the future called and he had an audition.  This gave Matt and Mark a chance to work the score with the rest of the actors.  Mark is truly a gifted pianist and plays our music in a way that no-one beside Matt

Prodigal 2011 – Day 12

First lap completed.  We finished today with the final first block (the half-completed Luke coming home into “Love Them and Leave Them Alone”) – appropriately tense and vile.  I said goodbye to all, and then Adam said “what about the four lines after the song?” I had forgotten, as I always do – that Kane

Prodigal 2011 – Day 11

The morning and the afternoon were quite different today.  Anne and Ed worked on the pub scene to start – where Celia goes to Luke and suggest keeping mum and coming home.  Always seems a simple scene, but to find the right variety, we worked for two hours on it.  Then into “Where Does It

Prodigal 2011 – Day 10

Four days into blocking and we ran the first hour of the show.  I warned the designers who’d turned up to watch that it would be more of a stumble-through than a run, and really didn’t expect too much.  The morning was spent with Ed finding a shape for “Run With the Tide”, his first

Day 9 – Prodigal 2011

Any day that ends in Ed Grey and Adam Rennie pretending to screw on a kitchen table can’t be all bad.  And, in fact, much good work was done today.  Andy came in again to finish off Happy Families, which is looking terrific – or at least will when the actors can do every little

Prodigal 2011 – Day 8

This was the day I got behind.  We were working on the always tricky Maddy meets Luke scene – so we were marrying getting the energy and tone, figuring out what of my 11 year old dialogue was unplayable/unnecessary, marrying real performance art and then the general story arc of “Luke has his eyes opened,

Prodigal 2011 – Day 7

A full house, finally!  Ed turned up, looking remarkably fresh-faced and somehow managed to invigorate all the non-jetlagged people in the room.  Luckily that’s what his role is in the show as well, so – good casting!  We had choreographer Andrew Hallsworth, my dear friend and collaborator on Priscilla, Drowsy, Officer, Britney and Newley come

Prodigal 2011 – Day 6

In our actual rehearsal venue today – The Entertainment Store in Balaclava.  An inauspicious beginning as Chrissy and I decided to have amazing vegetarian and coffees at Monk Bodhi Dharma as we’d given ourselves half an hour before rehearsals to do so.  They assured us it would be fine, though seemed slightly scattered about what