First Preview

First of all, thanks to everyone who made it out for our first preview performance!  It goes for all theatre - but especially the commedia dell'arte sort - that the final cast member to join is the audience.  We had about 35 daring folks join us for our very first foray with that "cast member," and we learned a lot from the experience.  Primarily, we learned that including the audience as much as possible is going to be key to this show's success.  We had a lot of enthusiasm from last night's crowd, and that was incredibly exciting.

We also had a lot of gaffs.  That's what preview performances are about, after all.  Pleasingly, all the gaffs were technical ones, which is the aspect of the show that's had the least rehearsal.  One sock puppet got put on upside down (the next puppet show I direct may feature exclusively sock puppets with eyes on their bellies), a giant bag puppet needed about a minute to find its way to the stage and we were flat-out missing a plot-central sound cue.  What was rather inspiring about the whole thing was that because the show is semi-improvised, all these gaffs brought us to exciting and useful discoveries about the show.

And our stage manager, Marybeth Langdon, deserves a Tony for delivering the missing sound cue verbally in her inimitable style.

I'm very much looking forward to tonight's second preview, and can only hope it brings in an audience as varied and generous as last night's.  Official opening is this Friday, and I actually feel a little bad for the folks planning on attending then.  The show will be so slick by then, they'll miss some of the developmental fun...