Jo Caird: Nearly Showtime!
So, the Showtime Challenge adventures continue. Woke up this
morning with aching feet and dragged myself to the West End for technical
rehearsals of The Boy Friend. My exhaustion wasn’t helped by
the sight of revellers still out from last night parading around Hackney and
making a mockery of the fact that I was out at such an ungodly hour on a
Sunday.
While yesterday and Friday evening we were based at Pimlico
Academy, a brand spanking new school with lots of fancy dance studios, today
we’re in Her Majesty’s Theatre (home of The Phantom of the Opera) itself, teching the show in preparation for the performance at 7.30pm this evening (tickets still available, I’m reliably informed –
buy them here).
We started at 8 o’clock this morning with notes from last
night’s dress rehearsal in a room at the top of the theatre called ‘Reggie’s
Folly’, a sort of faux medieval banqueting hall complete with wooden
chandeliers (it’s amazing what you find in these old theatres). Picture a crowd
of 80-odd bleary-eyed people, still half asleep and with unwashed hair and no
make-up (to make it easier for the hair and make-up teams later in the day),
all desperately glugging at cups of coffee, and you’ll have an idea what it was
like here early today. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for everyone to wake
up and we were running through our numbers by 9 o’clock.
We’ve got just over three hours til showtime and it’ll all
getting there eventually: everyone’s now in costume, with immaculate hair and make-up, and the tech is going swimmingly. They’re doing the end of the second act as I type, which means that I’m on soon to do
my party thing in act three. I’ve been practising my steps all day, but it’s still pretty hit and miss. My only hope is that I don’t fall over and cause a huge pile-up of dancers and ruin the show for everyone. Fingers crossed, eh?
Wish me luck…
