Show Chaos!
Today has been a crazy day. We had a morning show of Cinderella … barely. two people in the show who play pivotal roles, the stepmother and the fairy godmother, were heading back from a trip to New York early the same morning. The woke up at 6am to have plenty of extra time … just in case. On their trip back, they were making record time, until they discovered a vital road on their journey back was closed. Our call was 11am and they knew they were in trouble at 10am (more than two hours away). The show was supposed to start at 11:30am. The stage manager, who is also a talented actor, was already going to cover another part in the the show. That cast member has caught laryngitis. We have no true understudies for the show, so we had to think on the edge. In case they did not make it, we had two ideas. One idea was to have the stage manager (male) go in as the stepmother - leaving the other part he was going to cover - and the director (female) was going to cover the Fairy Godmother. The second idea was to have me step in as the stepmother and pull a cast member from our other show to play a mute and dumb stepsister. How did things end up?
Well, the girls somehow arrived 15 minutes late (he held the show) and got ready in minutes.
Insane. I was not upset and really disturbed by all of it. if anything, it put us all on our toes. Live theatre. This is another reason why I love live theatre so much. You never know what it going to happen!
