and how was your Monday?!

"If your house is on fire, you concentrate on putting it out. You don't run around blaming your neighbors." --This is from the show we're working on. It applies to the response to the Holocaust: don't point fingers, just fix it and we'll deal with the cause later. I was thinking about it on my way home today because we had a bumpy rehearsal today. Well. Rehearsal went really well, but at five we had photocall, so we had to get the costumes from Southwark to Earl's Court, which is about 45 minutes to an hour via tube and 20-30 minutes via car. Not a big deal, really, only no one had a car. When the director found out that transport had not been arranged, and that I had sent an email to the cast asking if anyone had a car, she got very upset in a very short amount of time. I can understand if she felt we weren't being "professional" by asking actors to help out, but with a company this small, I thought people would understand. My theory is "all hands on deck" but I forget that in the real world, everyone has their own job to do. I ended up going to Southwark to help the costume designer bring things over to the theatre, and we got a cab since it was raining and there were a LOT of clothes. Well, when you're dressing a pope and a cardinal, you can't just have any old suit. The pope's cloak is a GORGEOUS hunk of white satin, but it was busily being finished--they didn't get a chance to put the collar one because the designer and I were literally pulling it out of their hands to get to the photocall on time. On the way over in the cab I was calling the producer to find out how to turn on the lighting board, and the photographer to make sure that he wouldn't get there before we did. Then when I did manage to turn the board on, I promptly overloaded a circuit and popped a breaker--and no one could figure out how to turn it back on. Luckily Kate had a friend in her cell phone who directed me to the breaker box and we managed to get in a good half hour of photo time, with the actors improvising scenes.

So it was really confused and stressful--more than once I had to summon up my favourite scene from "Shakespeare in Love"--but the important part was the rehearsal went off without a hitch, and the costume designer got to see some of the costumes on the actors and take a few notes. (ps: is it wrong to find an actor dressed as a priest incredibly hot?!) I tend to thrive on a little caos, becoming very focussed on one task and entirely goal oriented, because if I take on the responsibility, then it's no ones fault but mine if things go haywire. In retrospect, I don't think any one person was to blame for the jumble of today. I probably wasn't needed to go pick up costumes, but I thought up until i got there I would be helping to carry them on the Underground. I sort of feel now like...like...like Admiral Nelson spotting the French in the Mediterranean, getting all men to action stations and ready to engage and then suddenly becoming becalmed. Now that it's all over, I'm left wondering what went wrong, and realising nothing did. It's just live theatre.