Today was interesting. We performed in Stratham, NH, at the Cooperative Middle School. I of course wondered if there was another middle school somewhere on the other side of town that was less helpful. (Hey, don't blame me--sometimes they just write themselves and I am powerless to stop them) This school certainly lived up to its name, with a crew of 5 8th graders helping us unload the truck and set everything up. While we were all crammed into a tiny little room off the band room (not IN it, but trust me, when the band started practicing, it felt like we were really there....) the school also provided us with a table full of breakfast foods, including bagels, cream cheese, little Clementine oranges, a fruit plate of pineapple and melon, huge doughnut holes of varying flavors, and two types of mini-muffins. And considering the fact we loaded in at 7 for a 10:30 show, we actually had time to relax and enjoy ourselves prior to the curtain. Which in retrospect probably explained the just slightly off nature of today's show. That and the three-day weekend. It wasn't anything major--nothing that anyone who wasn't us would've noticed. Well, save maybe for the bench not being set for Tell-Tale. You know, the bench the Inspector has to sit on while I go slowly and not so subtly off my rocker. Thankfully, Bob just brought it out with him for his entrance. What can I say? The old man's eccentric and doesn't believe in furniture. You want to visit, you have to bring your own. Or the piece of wood that folds down from the proscenium during the Necklace to hold the curtains back that refused to fold down as we were starting, o my curtains didn't get held back until I spent some time futzing with it while another scene was going on. The irony of that is the holder had been just falling down constantly ever since we hit the road. It refused to stay up. Well, Levitt apparently fixed it. The problem was I didn't know about it, and have not been checking it before the Necklace starts because it always falls down. Ah, live theatre.
We also had a pretty vocal crowd today, which is always fun. From whistles and borderline catcalls for Carol when she comes out as her Vice-Principal character at the top of he show to try to intimidate the kids into behaving, there were very audible comments made about the action on stage. I think my favorite was during the Monkey's Paw when I come in and inform the couple their son is dead. The mother asks me, "Is he hurt?" I reply, "Badly hurt, but he is not in any pain." As soon as I said, "But he is not in any pain," I hear an incredulous, "What?" from the audience. Silly, and probably not in the spirit of Carol's curtain speech: "Talking, or making noise of ANY KIND distracts the people around you and the actors on stage." Yep, nothing like telling them to just sit on their hand and whatever you do, for god's sake, DON'T LAUGH! Lots of reaction at the end of Necklace, which is always refreshing. Nice to see cynical 11 year olds can still be shocked by something. Of course, the Necklace was the scene of two other major faux pas. (How does one pluralize that? I mean, there's an s on the end of it in the singular, and faux pases just looks silly.) First, Bob put Mathilda's old lady shawl on her shoulders upside down, so it was impossible for me to put the cowl up over her head, thus resulting in a mini-ballet of her and I trying to nonchalantly readjust the shawl in the middle of the scene in ten seconds, neither of us knowing exactly what the hell was wrong. Oh, and the lights all went out. Yep. Apparently all the onstage lights were plugged into four outlets that were all on the same circuit. Up until that point in the show, we never had a sufficient number of lights on at once to trip the breakers. But then, near the top of Necklace, damn near every light comes on, and POW! All of our onstage and upstage lights go dark. All we have are the two light trees in the audience serving as our front lights, which thankfully were on a separate circuit. So the rest of Necklace, and all of Frog were a trifle...dim. But we managed to get through it, even though it meant we had NO lights upstage behind the proscenium, so we were making entrances and exits in complete blackness. I am very impressed that no-one got hurt. But it's just one more thing to chalk up to experience when dealing with performing in a school with a theatre' worth of equipment. Oy.
We also got fed here, and while I do love the schools for being sweet enough to feed us, and they do get high marks here at the Cooperative Middle School for going above and beyond by providing us all that lovely breakfast food (which, by the way, they did NOT offer to pack up for us....) Dudley's title of Greatest School Lunch Ever is in no danger of being stolen. We ate in the cafeteria today, and our choices were a box of iceberg lettuce with a tomato and a bunch of cheese on it, a hot dog bun with Tuna fish, or an ice cream scoop of pasta with meat sauce. (And they wonder why kids eat at McDonald's....) Suffice it to say, we stopped a couple of times on the way to the hotel afterward to get something akin to food. The ride to the hotel was nice. I didn't have to drive anything for a change so I sacked out i the back seat of the van for awhile, and then just sorta zoned looking out the window. Saw something quite pretty actually, and I really only had the ability to form this type of thought because I wasn't driving. The sun was down behind the horizon, but there was still light above it, so the entire countryside was backlit, making all the trees we were driving past (and there were a lot of them) look like flattened out black silhouettes, and I found myself thinking they really did look two-dimensional, like construction paper cutouts against the refrigerator door of the evening sky. That's the way my mind thinks. I may do something with that, I don't know. I'm also rolling around the idea of a one-man show about touring, or children's theatre in general. I don't know. But they say write what you know, and I know kid's theatre....and vaguely childlike poetic images of the New England landscape. Thank goodness I have something to fall back on! See honey? We'll be okay!
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