Notes on Joseph

See, I'm making a blog post now because something is happening. As you can see from this ridiculous photo of me wearing an amazing technicolor dreamcoat, I've begun my fourth summer as PSM of The Reagle Players in Waltham, MA. Last year I did a whole fancy mini-blog about the whole season. I don't think I'm going to be quite as detailed this year, as it would just be more of the same, but I will post my thoughts as they come.

Some observations about our production of Joseph:

It's a very weird show to rehearse. There are only four principals, first of all: Joseph, the Narrator, Jacob/Potiphar, and the Pharaoh. Then we have the 11 brothers and their 11 wives. Oh, and the 53 children in the choir, but that's another story. Another thing we've been realizing is that the principals don't actually do as much as you'd think. The story is structured as a narrative, and what really happens is that the chorus is really moving the story along while the principals interject their parts. It doesn't really seem like that in the finished product, but it's basically impossible to rehearse for very long without involving the chorus. It's been a bit of a challenge to not have the principals sitting idle, because there's very little they can work on while the chorus is learning something else. It doesn't help that our principals are very quick learners, and some of them have played their roles on tour, so the little they can work on doesn't even need much rehearsal.

Things are going really well. The whole cast is both talented and nice, which always makes me really nervous, because that never happens and I'm always wondering when the problems are going to arrive, but so far so good. Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a very fun show, so that may be helping as well. I'm really enjoying it because it's one of the shows I grew up knowing every word of. Aside from Phantom, this is the first time I've done one of those shows that was such a part of my childhood. Some other people in the company also said that they had a similar experience with the show. We've decided that those of us that memorized all the colors in Joseph's coat at the age of 12 are biologically more disposed to remember them than those who are trying to learn them now as adults.

Reagle has done the show twice before, although apparently we're among the first (if not the first) company to do a new version of the show licensed by R&H. I hate hate hate the way the score is printed. First of all, since the show is through-sung, we didn't get scripts, just scores. Step 1 was to make a copy reduced to 80% and stuck in the upper-left side of the page so I have room to write blocking and other notes. To make matters worse, it's got the lyrics written so that multiple verses are written to the same bars of music (i.e. it wraps back around and you read the second line of lyrics the second time.) That's all well and good for a lot of purposes, but I think it's going to be a disaster to call a show that way. If the show were going to run forever the solution would be to duplicate the pages and white out the lyrics and cut and paste as needed to make it read in a linear fashion, but for 8 performances I'm trying to avoid that. I think it will depend how many cues I have in a specific section, and if I have to clean it up some other way I will. But it definitely looks like I'll have to be following the score the whole time, which reduces the amount of time I can look up at the stage. Basically I'm in denial about the whole issue until I see what a mess it is at the paper tech. I may try to schedule the paper tech a day or two early since all the cues exist from the previous production.

One other issue we're dealing with is that due to other events happening on our stage, we don't get the deck until the night before tech. It happens sometimes. It happens on every Broadway show, but in our limited rehearsal time it certainly helps to have done it on stage before tech. It also makes the cast feel good to have done a run-through on stage before tech starts, so they can see the big picture before we get bogged down in the details for two days. Due to the 53 children, we're thinking spacing may take most of our time and we may not get a run that night.

Stay tuned for more!