Rehearsals - Week One

I experienced a very encouraging first day of rehearsals. Having just concluded a 4 day gig as a PA for a commercial shoot, I rushed from our shooting location to West Institute 301 to begin this crazy process. I met with the entire cast, minus Topher Rasumussen who's in rehearsals for Borderlands at Plan-B Theatre Co, and informed them all of why I thought the project was important.

The commercial shoot I was a part of was for University of Phoenix, the for-profit business university which has many distinguished graduates including the mayor of South Salt Lake. During the shoot I overheard many corporate executives from the UoP parent company talking about the death of the traditional university and the rise of online, personalized learning. They were all putting forth the argument that growing tuition costs and the long period of time necessary to complete a degree at a traditional university is not worth the investment and students were better off completing degrees in an accelerated degree program either online or at one of the UoP campuses. I respectfully disagree.

A traditional university offers a student more than just classes in their chosen career field and a diploma, it offers opportunity. I told the cast that the opportunity for me to create WOTW as my thesis project would not exist at a career college and that the resources allotted to me by the University of Utah allow me not only to learn about theatre, but also to practice it in my student years, before I ever graduate. A traditional university offers me resources in their other students which leads to opportunity to collaborate. In short, the University of Utah is allowing me to stage a professional production while I'm still in school.

After the introductions, my speech and a quick read-thru, we took a short break to snack on some first rehearsal treats courtesy of Sarah Young and some unidentified snacks that I stole from the craft table during my shoot earlier in the day. We reconvened to listen to the entirety of the original recording of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. We then broke for the evening and met again on Thursday for a singing rehearsal.

From WOTW

The first thing I will say about a singing rehearsal, "Make sure you have someone to play the piano for you."

From WOTW

Keir Schmidt, our wonderful musical director, is great at arranging and writing music but he isn't a strong accompanist. After a few minutes of trying to figure out harmonies and vocal top lines, it was revealed to us that one of our other cast members, Rebecca Shillander, actually plays the piano very well.

From WOTW

With that figured out, we ran into another problem. It turns out that Jeff Wayne, while a brilliant songwriter, isn't one for vocal scoring. The score, as sent to us by Jeff Wayne Music Group, doesn't divide the harmonies into separate lines. Instead, there are notes all over the same staff. This proved problematic in our first rehearsal but Keir managed to make us a brand new vocal score for the next rehearsal which made it much easier.

During these first two singing rehearsals some collaborative energy was beginning to flow. I told the cast that if they had an idea they should share it with me and thankfully they listened. It was my original idea to have the song "Forever Autumn" sung by Rob Shand who plays the Journalist. Rob however, felt it better that he did not sing it, because he felt it didn't make sense for his character. After some brief discussion, the song was given to chorus member, now soloist, Trevor Blair so that he may sing while Rob focuses on narration, which is his character's primary goal. It was exactly the sort of grass roots directing I was hoping for.

By the end of the week we had sung through all of the songs and gotten people their correct harmonies. I'm confident that if we needed to make the show nothing more than a staged reading, we could do that very easily.