So, a week before opening night, we had our first rehearsal in the actual theater. The first thing we got to do was walk the stage – it’s a raked stage, which means it’s tilted so the back’s higher than the front. It’s great, visually, because you can have characters waaaaay upstage and still be able to see them, because the downstage people are literally downhill, not blocking sight lines. It’s not so great as an actor, because you spend your entire time on stage walking on a hill – not the simplest of tasks, particularly in heels! So we all got a few minutes to walk through our blocking while wearing our show shoes and petticoats (managing a floor-length skirt is not trivial!).

Then we did a run-through, discovering all the parts where climbing stairs takes longer than walking across taped-off lines, or where the space we used to stand was just a bit too close to the eight-foot drop to the orchestra pit. The tech people were working on their parts, too – but what they were working on rarely lined up with what we were working on, so the lights would be set for an entirely different part of the act, and the spotlights were totally unrelated to where the principals were standing. There was a point in the middle of the second act where I was in a spotlight for a few seconds, which was pretty disconcerting – like, “no, don’t look at me, I’m in the chorus!!!” There were also a few funny moments with the stage – we dropped an apple, which then rolled downstage and off, provoking our stage director to tell us “just don’t drop the apple!” which we thought was kind of unhelpful. There’s also a point where the tenor flings a stool over in a rage, and the stool started rolling downstage, so they tested several ways to throw the stool, which resulted in at least one run-through where he was raging around, then veeeery gently tipped the stool over, and went back to raging. Not so effective. By Monday, the stool was a rectangular one that wouldn’t roll.

Sunday was the sitzprobe, a word we’ve borrowed from the German, that’s the first time the singers and the orchestra come together. There’s no staging at this, just whoever needs to be onstage at any given moment. Hearing all the music with the orchestra for the first time was amazing, and it was kind of nice to have our director stopping not because of something we’d done, but because the brass needed to be louder, or the strings missed a rhythm.

Monday was our first dress rehearsal – half-dress, really, since we wore our costumes, but didn’t do hair or makeup, and we didn’t have the orchestra. This was when I discovered how hard it is to walk up stairs while carrying a tray and dealing with floor-length skirts and a petticoat. I was not the only one with this problem, provoking an actual, not-even-kidding, “skirt tutorial” with our wardrobe mistress. Yup, we had to be taught how to keep from falling on our faces with the skirts. It helped, though!

Tuesday was full dress rehearsal, which was when I discovered that part of wearing a wig with very short hair is getting your hairline glued back. Like, with an actual glue-stick. Luckily, glue-stick glue is water-soluble, but let me just note, if I ever need to spike my hair really well, I know what to use. I got a lovely auburn wig with a very silly hat. It has been a long time since I’ve had to deal with getting flyaway hair in my mouth, and I do not miss it even a little bit.

We had three hair/makeup experts, so to get your wig on, you’d bring your hat from the dressing room, find the head with your name and wig on it, and get in line – since all our principals had wigs, plus many of the male chorus (some of them got facial hair, too!), and most of the women, the line could get long, so choosing your time was an art. Once it was your turn, you’d hand off the wig head to the makeup person, get glued and pinned and properly attached, then shake your head to confirm that everything was secure – and if something slipped, it would get thoroughly pinned down, since no one wants a hat or wig to fly off mid-scene.

The full dress rehearsal on Tuesday went pretty well, though I think that was the night that our director decided that his assistant was going to run the women through our fast section every night, just to make it that much more likely for us to do it right – he didn’t stop us during our scene, but it wasn’t particularly on-tempo. The men did get stopped several times for one of their choruses, where there was a lot of on-stage action distracting them from actually singing. Whoops.

Wednesday was the final dress rehearsal, also known as student night, because local middle- and high-schoolers can come for $5. We had a pretty good-sized audience, which was great – hearing their reactions and energy made a real difference. We had a few minor bobbles during the run-through – someone tripped coming down the stairs and dropped a bolt of cloth, and one of the entrances took longer than it really had time for, but nothing major.

Then we had Thursday off, and performances started on Friday!

This fall, I’ve been doing something entirely new to me. On the suggestion of a fellow choir member, I auditioned for the local Opera Chorus. You know all those people in the opera, not the stars, no, the peasants or townsfolk or sailors or whoever, that make all the background stuff happen, who react to the actions of the principal characters? Yup, that’s what I’m doing.

Just getting the audition was an adventure – my fellow chorister had given my name to the director in the middle of the summer, but I hadn’t heard from him. So when she got the rehearsal schedule, she checked with him again – but still, I heard nothing. Then she gave me the opera manager’s contact info so I could check with him. Still, nothing. They had their first rehearsal – yes, the director needed more people, wanted to talk to me. I heard nothing. Finally, an email! We set up a time to meet. I got strep throat and had to cancel. Rescheduled for the next week, right before the third rehearsal.

On the way to this audition, I had a huge mental fight with myself. Why was I doing this? I don’t know any opera! I haven’t even acted! Well, okay I did that one musical in college, the one my friend wrote. But this? Not a casual college musical! Real opera! With audiences who actually pay to come! Exactly why did I think this was a good idea? Luckily, I was already on my way to the audition at this point, so I couldn’t back down.

The audition was very casual, which was great for me because remember, I don’t actually know any opera repertoire. The last singing group I auditioned for was during my first year of college, and I think I sang Non Nobis, a cappella, for that. Not quite what you’re looking for with opera. But despite my lack of operatic knowledge, the director seems to have found me acceptable, because he invited me to join! Well, actually, he invited me to that third rehearsal, with the escape clause that I could run away screaming if it didn’t seem like what I wanted. But that rehearsal was great, and only cemented that this was going to be an amazing experience.

I’d already missed two music rehearsals, but I caught up quickly – it’s always easier to learn a part when someone next to you is singing it correctly. We started with weekly music rehearsals, which felt very comfortable for me – I’ve been in enough choirs that learning music is something I’m used to. Lots of work on German pronunciation – euch, auch, für, ich, nicht… all sorts of notes on closed versus open vowels, not eliding our consonants, and keeping our Southern diphthongs out of the mess!

Also, there’s a passage in the women’s chorus that’s marked “Presto possibile” – literally “as fast as possible”. And it is ridiculously fast, with German consonants flying every which way. We were happy just to survive it the first time, the second time we actually all ended together, and the third time I may have said half the words correctly. Memorizing it was a matter of going over it again and again. And again. And then another time. You’d make it through cleanly once, and then the next time trip over your tongue and lose an entire chunk of it.

Then staging rehearsals started. These are held in what used to be a gym, now with tape on the floors to show where the stage is and the stairs/entrances marked. Getting everyone where they need to be can be tedious, and blocking is a continuous puzzle of traffic jams and planned interactions. I actually missed the first two staging rehearsals because of the juggling festival and then a book club, so when I got there for the first time, they’d already blocked all of Act II. Which meant I got assigned to a group, and I pretty much follow what they do – all while singing, of course. It requires a ton of situational awareness – where are other people on stage, where am I going, am I facing upstage (don’t do this when you’re singing!), am I blocking anyone else, who am I interacting with, is my body language right for the scene (even more difficult, since you’re reacting to things people sing… in German, so you’re either frantically translating in your head or just having to remember which reaction goes with which chunk of music…). I’ve never been great with kinesthetic stuff – knowing where I am in space – so it’s tough, but also really fun! Oh, and you’re not guaranteed to be anywhere near anyone else on your part, so you better have it well memorized. Most people make index cards for staging – just the words to your parts, and you can write down some stage directions to help jog your memory when you’re standing there trying to remember what comes next.

Also, this is professional theater. Which means we have a stage manager. And two assistant stage managers! They help run rehearsals, give us our cues, keep the room quiet when staging is happening (it’s pretty common to end up chatting while the director is working out a problem on the other side of the stage… and with 36 people in the room, it can get loud), and generally keep everyone on task. It’s amazing. And costumes! I went for my fitting last weekend, and that costume is going to fit me better than my actual clothes do – they did rough measurements weeks ago, and the fitting makes it tailored exactly to me. It’s also going to be incredibly warm – long-sleeved, full-length wool dress, plus an apron, hat, and shawl. Not looking forward to that part so much, but it’s part of the whole experience, I suppose.

Next post – tech week and what happens when you go from a gym to the actual stage!