Wow, it is already Friday, June 29th, and I have so much to catch up on!
Today, we did our second public appearance. This one was at the San Jose Farmer's Market on San Pedro Street. We performed right in front of Theatre on San Pedro Square where we will open in just two weeks(!!!!!). Some of the tribe couldn't make it during a work day, but it was still pretty exciting.
Dennis Dentoni, who is the understudy for Claude, filled in for Brennan Whitaker, and Ester Selk substituted for Adena DeMonte as Jeanie and both did a great job! Sammy Rodriguez (Berger), and Michelle Wynn (Sheila) were in superb form and Lonnique Genelle was again fantastic as Dionne singing the opening number Aquarius.
The crowd was mostly walk-bys shopping in the street at the market, but we had a goodly number of people stop and listen. We handed out hundreds of cards and I am sure some of those will turn into ticket sales. People seem to like being handed something by an actor in a show. I guess it gives them a personal connection to the show.
I am way behind on how things have been going in rehearsal, but suffice it to say that over the past two weeks, we blocked the show in its entirety and yesterday we ran Act 1 in something I call a "stumble-through" (as opposed to a "run-through"). The name says it all.
Amazingly enough, this was one of the best "stumble-through"s I have ever done! The tribe pretty much new what to do, and while we did have to start-and-stop a number of times to rework things (pretty much expected after you have just done initial blocking) it didn't take long. The actual running time of Act 1 including start-and-stops, but not including the warm-ups, a mid-act coffee break and notes at the end was about 1:40, which is pretty good for an act that should take 1:20 when it is polished. We should easily achieve that!
In addition, the singing is getting better and better every day. Katie Coleman, who joined us a number of weeks ago as vocal director, has done a terrific job of bringing the vocals together. In last night's rehearsal and today's performance, harmonies were easily heard in most of the songs.
We got in a shipment of equipment this week, including our wireless hand-held microphones as well as some new-fangled LED lighting fixtures which are designed to provide colored stage washes (much like a cyc light) but using a fraction of the power. Our tech director Joey Brennan thinks they are really cool!
I am going to try (and I know I've promised this before :-( ) to blog every day the rest of the way and hopefully it will all be good news! Ticket sales, while still not astronomical, keep going up. We have almost hit $6,000 and 300 tickets sold, and that is good. As I mentioned in a previous post, we didn't hit these numbers until well into our final week before opening Tomfoolery, and our numbers are climbing at an increasing rate. We are hoping to head into the opening week (i.e., a week from now) already close to $10,000 in sales. More important, we want to sell out our opening performances (July 14 and 15) because those are the dates that word of mouth will really take hold. The more people who come to see the opening weekend, the better draw the show will be the rest of the run.
See you all soon at HAIR!
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