a poor player

I’m a little frustrated at the moment of writing this, because we are in the final week before Carmen opens, and people are becoming a little edgy. Last night’s rehearsal was something of a disaster, because the conductor came in with a schedule which nobody else knew about. I was expecting to come in, work with the Children’s Chorus (all 43 of them) for their short sequences, and then move on to the rest of the opera. Instead, the conductor just barrelled right in, began with a completely different scene, and nobody knew what was happening. So now I have 43 children waiting in the wings, nobody knows what’s going on, singers haven’t arrived yet because they thought their call was an hour after the children’s call, the chorusmaster is trying to get the conductor’s attention, the producer is trying to calm down the Children’s Chorus director, parents (some of whom drive an hour to get their kids here) are confused. The the conductor calls the children out hurriedly, moves through their numbers in 15 minutes, herds them offstage, and moves on. It’s begun to get crazy. I just go home after about an hour because there’s nothing for me to do in a sitzprobe anyway. It’s better to go home and have a drink and wait for the shit to come downhill the next day.

So tonight I am off, musing mostly about why artists have to be so tempermental at times. No good answer for this, I think; maybe it just comes with the territory. Is art really that terribly important that people forget to be civil? Really?

Of course, my whole problem with this particular production is that it is supposed to be a concert version. Now, in my book, a “concert version” is something where people come in dressed in tuxedos, stand by music stands, sing well, sit in chairs when they are not singing, and we all applaud and leave. But this is really a fully-staged version in a concert hall. I have costumes, lights, choreography, a guest flamenco dancer, some stage fighting, a 53-piece orchestra, a 50+ voice chorus, a 43-voice children’s choir, and a double cast of principles. This is not what I bargained for. And it’s 3 hours long.

So you’ll excuse me, those who read this blog, if I do not appear for the next week or so. I have every confidence in the reality that it’s going to get worse before it’s all over. Like going through Dante’s Inferno, my only way out of this one may be to crawl through the devil’s asshole. -twl