Blast from the Cast!

Egad! Zoons! Hurrah! I believe our old pal the sun is threatening to break from its eight month slumber! The whole of Pitlochry is bathed in its glorious wonder! Shorts have been donned, the Pimm’s have been poured and the acrid smells of burned barbeques are drifting across the town. The only place that is escaping this mid April heat wave is the Pitlochry Festival Theatre stage, where we are hard at work exploring nineteenth century London in Trelawney of The Wells.

                        We are in the theatre today for one of our “On Stage” days which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. Instead of miming going through an invisible door with only some green electrical tape on the floor as a guide, we have an actual door. You can’t imagine the excitement this causes. The fun doesn’t stop there folks, we even have furniture, most of the set and if you’ve been a very good actor you may be permitted to wear a little of your costume. My hysterical sarcasm aside, these days are utterly invaluable and something I’ve not come across in other theatres. It gives one a chance to try out all the moves that you have assumed are going to work and instead of having to change them a few days before the show goes up, you’ve got time to return to the drawing board armed with a clearer idea of what is possible.

            Saying all that, I do find it amazing the way these days seem to coax the sun from behind the comfort of the clouds. I’ve already placed a bet on the weather forecast for the days running up to the 13^th of May. Blimey, that’s not far away!

Blast from the Cast!

Greetings!

My ramblings today are about an integral part of the whole rehearsal process. Line learning. More specifically a pastime that I have found goes almost hand in hand with it and I believe is scientifically known as “work displacement activity”. For those of you who are not familiar with WDA, cast your mind back to when you were in school sitting your final year exams. In particular, try to remember the cleanliness of your bedroom. I would bet my seasons wage that your room was the cleanest it had ever been and ever will be during that period of study. A time where you would rather do anything than sit down and contemplate the fall of Bismarck or work out if Hamlet is actually mad.

    This is the situation that I find myself in at the moment. I have in front of me the Trelawney of the Wells script. I have a good sized part, some beautifully written dialogue and nothing really that should be that hard to solidify. All the same, this morning I have already cleaned out the fridge, taken out the bins, phoned long lost friends, re arranged my DVDs, loaded, put on and emptied the dishwasher and made mayonnaise. Made mayonnaise for crying out loud! All of this to prevent myself from doing something I really enjoy! Even as I write this blog, I am trying to kid myself that because this has something to do with the theatre it could be considered work and therefore its ok that it takes the place of the bitty speech in Act 1 that I simply cannot learn.

    Now that I’ve finished this instalment, surely there is nothing else left for me to do apart from crack on with the script and cram it into my brain before the stagger through tomorrow? Just looked outside, what a superb day! I really must go for a run.

S.B x

P.s The Mayonnaise wasn’t even nice.

Blast from the Cast!

Hi Folks,

Back again to give you the inside scoop on the life of thesps.

Things are accelerating rather swiftly, we’ve broken the back of most of the big numbers in My Fair Lady, the moves in Trelawney have all been blocked and the casts of Henceforward and See How They Run tell me they are going well too! I’m currently blogging to you from behind a barricade of percussion, I am playing the drums in My Fair Lady and we are in the middle of “Get Me To The Church On Time”. This requires all sorts of entertaining noises, hence the great wall of wood blocks, cow bells, ratchets, triangles, mark trees, glockenspiels, bell horns and kazoos dividing me and the rest of the room. One of the most challenging aspects of rehearsing an actor/musician show is...well…just rehearsing. That may sound a little ridiculous and exactly why we’re here-so-stop-complaining-and-get-on-with-it, but at one end of the room I am doing my best ‘Animal’ from The Muppets impression and Chris Stuart-Wilson, our esteemed choreographer, is trying to put together a complicated routine. I’m sure you can imagine how amusing everyone finds this after an eleven hour day. I’ll report back soon, unless I am found lying in the Tummel with a tambourine rammed down my throat.

S.B x

Blast from the Cast!

Hello and Welcome to the “Blast from the Cast!” section of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre 60^th summer season blog! Here I will be trying (‘trying’ being the operative word!) to give you my account of how things are going in the lovey-darling-thespy end of the building. As rehearsals continue and the opening night of My Fair Lady looms ever closer I’ll be letting you know how calm, collected and perfectly rehearsed we all are. Of course I won’t be relaying the tales of how stressed, overworked, malnourished, exhausted,  underpaid, broken, anxious and perplexed we are, or at least, I’m sure at some point I will be!

You join us (or possibly we join you?!) a little late in proceedings, we’re already two and half weeks into the rehearsals and to be honest it’s all going quite well! For those of you who know how the rehearsal process at PFT works you will understand why this is a comfort. For those of you who don’t, here’s a brief outline: We generally have eight weeks to fully rehearse the first four shows, this doesn’t mean two block weeks for each show, no, no! We have an entree of My Fair Lady, then tuck into See How They Run, moving swiftly onto a side of Trelawney of the Wells and topping it all off with a helping of Henceforward, all devoured within the first two and a half weeks. This is then mashed together in a veritable Eton mess of a rehearsal schedule for the remaining five and a half weeks. Somehow at the end of this feast of work, we put them on the stage for you good people to (hopefully!) enjoy.

Anyway, enough of these silly, food-based analogies, its dinner break. I’ll be in touch soon! 

S.B x