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!