Greetings from the belly of the beast. Cinderella is now about two thirds of the way through its run — we’ve done eight shows out of thirteen, with five remaining. But those five will go quickly, because we start another weekend marathon tonight. Five shows in 48 hours, followed immediately by strike. So Cinderella will consume my entire weekend, but then it will be over.
The run has gone well overall, considering the challenges that have faced us. One of my earlier posts stated that Sandi, who was supposed to play the Fairy Godmother, had the flu. I deleted that statement because it was incorrect (a mistake on my part). Sandi was hospitalized due to an infection that was apparently more serious than the flu, because they kept her for a week. I don’t know the details, but we were told yesterday that she had been released. We don’t know whether she’ll be returning to the play. I would be delighted to learn that she’s well enough to rejoin us, but if she’s still recuperating, a five-show marathon is probably not the best thing for her. Well, we’ll see.
Two of the Mouse Ponies were sick earlier this week, and one of the king’s pages. Fortunately, those characters only have to appear in a couple of scenes, so they were able to perform despite not feeling well. (And they’ve all recovered now.) Since I haven’t had a flu shot (and can’t get one now, because all of the doctors’ offices are out of them), I was a bit concerned about the possibility that I might pick up a bug from someone else in the play, but so far that hasn’t happened. I suspect that (with the exception of Sandi) all of these illnesses are the result of the same flu virus than hit me during Thanksgiving week, and presumably I still have antibodies for that one in my bloodstream. Not an ideal method of immunization, but if it gets me through the run I’ll be content.
In addition to helping Marie supervise the Mouse Ponies, Ruth has been busy with her own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which opened last night. It’s a good thing yesterday was the last day of school. I’m looking forward to seeing R&G, but I won’t have a chance to do so until tomorrow, after the 5:00 performance of Cinderella. It will be nice to sit in the house for a change and watch some other member of our family perform on stage.
Next week, after Cinderella has relinquished its hold on me, I think I might like to go see The Return of the King. And perhaps The Matrix Revolutions, even though no one seems to like that film very much. I still want to see it for myself, and I haven’t had time for movies since Cinderella rehearsals began. Heck, I haven’t even seen Pirates of the Caribbean — and Ruth already has the DVD of that one.
Oops, it’s 5:00. I’d better eat my supper and head for the theater. The curtain goes up in two and a half hours. Once more into the breach, dear friends!

Opening night went well. In addition to being our first official performance of this year’s run, last night’s show was also our celebration of Cinderella‘s twenty-year history. Before the performance began, director Haskell Fitz-Simons and Raleigh mayor Charles Meeker came on stage and made short speeches. Meeker announced that he had proclaimed December 12, 2003 to be Raleigh Little Theatre and Cinderella Day, and Haskell read a proclamation of his own that made the mayor an honorary member of the cast.
Sandi was still too ill to perform, so Becky joined us again as the Stepmother, and Jo continued as the Fairy Godmother. At the end of the show, over a hundred former Cinderella cast members joined us on stage to sing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” We then surprised Haskell with a song in his honor (“We Love You, Conrad” from Bye Bye Birdie, with Haskell’s name replacing “Conrad”), after which confetti cannons were fired over our heads. The cast and crew then adjourned to the theatre lobby for a reception to celebrate the beginning of Cinderella‘s twentieth run.
Weekends are the most grueling part of the run, because we do two performances on Saturday and Sunday. (This means that beginning at 7:30 Friday night, we perform five times in 48 hours.) The 1:00 matinee ends at about 2:30, and by the time we remove our makeup and change into street clothes, it’s 3:00. Since we have to start getting ready for the 5:00 show around 4:00, it’s not possible to go anywhere between the shows, so we don’t. A catered meal is served for the cast and crew between the shows. So I’ll be at the theatre pretty much all weekend.
I have to be at the theatre by noon, so I’d better go get ready. More later.

It’s been almost three weeks since I last posted anything. Anyone who is still checking this blog has undoubtedly concluded — quite correctly — that I’ve been so busy with work and Cinderella that I’ve had no time for blogging. When rehearsals for Cinderella started, I intended to keep up a steady stream of posts, chronicling the whole process from start to finish. And I managed to do that for a while, but eventually I lost my momentum and fell behind. So let me try to quickly bring you up to date.
In my last post on this subject, I described how week 1 of rehearsals was spent learning to sing the show’s musical numbers, and week 2 focused mostly on the dance steps. In week 3, we worked on the blocking of specific scenes, and in week 4 we put all the pieces together and began running through the whole play from start to finish. (It was at about that point that I fell behind on blogging, because run-through rehearsals mean that nobody gets the night off, so my schedule became more demanding.)
Week 6 should have been something of a breather, because we only had three rehearsals scheduled. Sunday (November 23) was a planned day off. Rehearsals were planned for Monday through Wednesday, followed by the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. But I started feeling ill on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning I was incapacitated by flu: coughing, sneezing, fever, and aching all over. I was too sick to go to work or to rehearsal on Monday or Tuesday. By Wednesday, I was able to get up and drag myself to work for a few hours, but the Wednesday night rehearsal was canceled. (I hoped to at least do some catch-up blogging from my parents’ house over the Thanksgiving break, but that didn’t work out either. Although I was ambulatory, I was still rather sickly and spent much of the weekend in bed recuperating.)
So week 6 of rehearsals was a total loss for me. I began week 7 not having been to a rehearsal for ten days. Not good. But I managed to catch up. The week ended with a makeup workshop on Friday for those who needed it (I did, since last year’s Cinderella was my introduction to stage makeup, and I was ready for a refresher) and a music-only session on Saturday to polish our singing.
Week 7 — this week — is the big one. Tech Week. It began on Sunday with Load-In, the all-day session in which we moved the whole production (sets, costumes, props, everything) to the Fletcher Opera Theater at the BTI Center in downtown Raleigh. Monday was the first dress/tech rehearsal: we ran through the play in costumes (but without makeup) with the technical crews (sets, props, dressers, lights, sound, and orchestra) for the first time. Tuesday we added makeup to the mix, and Wednesday was another full-dress rehearsal. Last night, Thursday, was the preview performance — technically a dress rehearsal, but in front of an audience of friends and family members.
The preview performance took place in spite of a rather serious setback. When we arrived at the theatre yesterday evening, we learned that Sandi Sullivan, the actress who plays the Fairy Godmother, was in the hospital with a fever of 104 degrees. But when the same show is staged annually for twenty years, it tends to build up a local reserve of actors who have appeared in the play before and can serve as understudies for the major roles. Jo Brown, the actress playing the Wicked Stepmother, has been in Cinderella every single year, and she played the Fairy Godmother for over a decade. For the preview, she became the Fairy Godmother again, and Becky Johnston, who played the Stepmother for three years, came out of retirement to step back into the role. If the audience reaction was any indication, the performance was a huge success. Jo and Becky both handled the last-minute substitutions beautifully, and the show went incredibly well.
Tonight is opening night, the first show for a paying audience. I’ll post more as soon as I can.

My mother e-mailed asking whether the Cinderella cast rehearses every day. The short answer is yes. But there are a number of exceptions, which depend somewhat on your role in the play. The cast of Cinderella breaks down into a number of groups:

• Cinderella and Prince Charming
• The Fairy Godmother and her two helpers
• King Darling III and his two pages
• The Wicked Stepmother and the two Ugly Stepsisters
• The Young Prince
• The Mouse Ponies
• The Ensemble

The Mouse Ponies are the six children who play the mice that get transformed into ponies to pull Cinderella’s carriage. The Young Prince is a boy who appears in a musical number in which the Prince reminisces about his youth and ends up singing a duet with a younger version of himself. The Ensemble is everyone else, the actors who populate the two big crowd scenes: the Prologue (in which the peasants celebrate Christmas in the town square) and the Ball. I don’t list the quartet as a separate group because it really has no separate identity after the song that starts off the play; the quartet members merge into the crowd of peasants and are not seen again as distinct characters. I should also mention that the Mouse Ponies and the Young Prince appear in the Prologue as the children of the town.
Everyone except the Ensemble and the Mouse Ponies is usually spoken of collectively as the Principal Characters — in other words, the folks who actually have lines. Of the 14 scenes in Cinderella, the Ensemble and the Mouse Ponies appear in only four of them. The entire rest of the play is carried by the Principals. So they definitely earn their top billing. But some of them are in more scenes than others, or are involved in more musical numbers. Cinderella appears in eight scenes, but the Fairy Godmother is in nine, and her two helpers appear in 13 — every scene but one!
What does this have to do with the rehearsal schedule? Well, the first week of rehearsal has consisted of learning and practicing the songs, which involves pretty much everyone. (However, the Mouse Ponies only sing with us on two songs, so we do those songs first and then let the mice go home. We also gave them Halloween off so they could go trick-or-treating.) But in week 2, we’ll concentrate mostly on the dance steps for the Ball, which doesn’t involve the mice. So they’ll get to skip those rehearsals. Moving into week 3, we’ll start to focus more on the blocking of specific scenes, and if the Ensemble or Mouse Ponies aren’t needed for those scenes, they’ll get the night off. For example, November 5 rehearsal will focus on the blocking of scenes 2, 3, and 4, which are Principals-only. So the Ensemble and the mice are off that evening.
In week 4, we’ll begin running through the entire play from beginning to end. This means that the non-Principals will spend most of the evening offstage, waiting. The adults in the Ensemble will chat, play cards, or read books, but what about the mice and the Young Prince? It’s the job of the Mouse Nanny (or as I prefer to call her, the Mouse Wrangler) to keep these seven kids corralled, quiet, and occupied when they’re not needed on stage. This year’s Mouse Wrangler is Marie, and I’ll write about that in another post.
There are several other reasons that we may not have a rehearsal on a particular day. First, that day may simply be listed as OFF in the rehearsal schedule for reasons known only to Haskell (the director). For example, November 20 and 23 are off days. Second, that day may be a holiday. This only happens once for Cinderella: we get the four-day Thanksgiving weekend off. Finally, the cast may be progressing well enough that Jane or Haskell decides that we can afford to skip a day. For example, at the end of yesterday’s rehearsal, Jane said we were doing great and gave us Sunday off! Hooray!
But I went to RLT today anyway. In fact, the entire family did. Schoolhouse Rock Live ended its run today, and the final performance (a matinee) was followed immediately by a strike. Strikes are all-hands events; the entire cast and crew is expected to participate, along with anyone else who is willing to help. Marie, Ruth, and I all worked on that show, so we reported for the strike, and Ben came along to pitch in. We spent the afternoon striking the props and costumes, dismantling the set, and stripping all of the lights from the overhead grid in the Gaddy-Goodwin Teaching Theatre. We also helped move the audience chairs, and the risers they had been sitting on, back against the walls to clear as much floor space as possible. (The Cinderella rehearsals will move into that theatre tomorrow, and we’ll need all the room we can get to practice dance steps.)
After the strike was completed, everyone adjourned to the Green Room for the traditional strike dinner. A good time was had by all.

Cinderella begins with a quartet of rogues coming out on stage and singing a song to the audience. The song is in four-part harmony, so one specimen of each vocal part (SATB) is required. Last year I somehow got picked to be the bass in the quartet, despite being a befuddled newbie who didn’t know the quartet dance steps and was terrified at being the second person the audience would see every night. The only explanation I can think of is that they were really short on basses.
The first week of rehearsals includes an audition for cast members who are interested in being in the quartet. This year’s musical director, Jane, was in the ensemble last year, so she remembers me. (And I’m the only one of last year’s quartet who came back.) On the first day of rehearsals, she asked me privately if I was planning to try out for the quartet again. I said, “Sure, if you need me.” It was fine with me if she picked someone else; after all, I’ve already done it, so I don’t have anything to prove. But the other bass candidates were all new to the play, so I had a distinct advantage over them (as soprano candidate Kerry pointed out when she saw that I was the only one auditioning without sheet music).
I suppose the result was inevitable. At last night’s rehearsal, Jane told me that I was in the quartet again. So this year’s Cinderella experience is shaping up to be exactly like last year’s: I’ll be playing the same part in the same play, singing all the same songs and doing the same dance steps. In fact, as I learned when I went for my costume fitting, we’re even going to be wearing the same costumes. Unfortunately, during last year’s production and the months that followed, I slacked off on my diet and regained about twenty pounds. I’ve held my weight steady since spring, but it hasn’t gone back down.
Well, I’ll have to fit into my old costumes. So I’ve gone back to a super-strict version of my diet and will try to shed ten or twelve of those pounds before the show opens on December 12. My resolve was challenged yesterday, when one of my coworkers brought a box of doughtnuts to a meeting I attended. I gritted my teeth and ignored them. And then, on my way from work to rehearsal, I stopped at the hybrid KFC/Taco Bell across the street — and instead of my usual 7-Layer Burrito and Double-Decker Taco combination, I ordered the KFC buffet and ate two plates of vegetables.
I’ve done this before; I can do it again. That’s my new mantra.