Lining Up

[plumtreeblossom]

Rehearsal was big fun last night. *slaps the booties of kalliejenn2 and mangosteen.* Also, beowabbit got to sit in and watch part of it.

I have a very easy role to memorize this time. I have 30 lines, but most of them are like "Hi!" or "What?" The longest is about 7 words. I'll be off-book by my next rehearsal. It's going to be a blast.

Some roles have been doozies to memorize, though I actually managed every time. Of all the Theatre@First mainstage and non-mainstage productions I've been in, the memorization challenges from hardest to easiest were thus:

1) Murder In The Cathedral (can I hear a Chorus of AAAARRRG?)
2) Philip Glass Buys A Loaf of Bread (a difficult word-fuge quartet play, but we nailed it because we rock)
3) Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare...you know how it is)
4) You Can't Take It With You (should have been easier, but I was going through a stage-fright phase)
5) Cabaret 2005 (two solo songs, not too hard)
6) Cabfare For The Common Man (officially easy)
7) Cabaret 2006 (just a non-singing Elphaba and "Seasons of Love")
8) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (no lines, just blocking)


If I counted plays/shows before T@F, I'd need to include all the one-woman shows I did (I can't believe I memorized all that, but then, I wrote it); as well as Othello (Emilia); all the blocking and dancing for musicals like Pippin, Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, Godspell etc. The performance art was easy, as you might guess.

I pretty much got off-book on my bus ride this morning. Very excited for this one-act festival, I am. :-)

Comments

[gilana]

1) Murder In The Cathedral (can I hear a Chorus of AAAARRRG?)

Here let us stand, close by the mother-fucking cathedral...

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

...here let us eat our own flesh and gather dead fish and everything the hell else we did in that damn show!

[gilana]

Clear the air, clear the sky, clear these lines from my mind please god...

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

You see? You have a photographic memory. I don't think I could summon up any lines except that first one. Oh, and "gathering faggots at nightfall" and "sticky dew!"

[gilana]

It's not so much photographic as sticky :) It does take some work to get things in there, but for lines at least, once they're in there, they're in there. Don't know that I could do all of Murder, but I bet I could do My Boyfriend's Wife pretty well. And I still remember my lines from the one play in which I had a speaking role in high school -- but since the lines were "fine" and "yes, sir" that's not too impressive :)

[wellstar.livejournal.com]

I still have my lines memorized from the first real play I was ever in. (Playing a witch in the Halloween play in kindergarten doesn't count.)

My lines were, "yes," "no," "Merry Christmas and thank you Uncle Badger," and "goodbye Uncle Badger."

Of course, at the time, I also managed to memorize the entire script and recite it ad nauseum during my family vacation the weeks following the play. I don't think my parents will ever be able to read or watch The Wind In The Willows again!

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

Long story, I take it?

[gilana]

Long play, more like...

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

In our Murder In The Cathedral, the role of Chorus was played by 10 actresses (Gilly, me, Jude, Kerri, etc). The sheer amount of text we had to memorize was staggering. Any because it was spoken in unison, it mattered more if you screwed up, so it was important to get it just right and we had to work extra hard to memorize it word-perfectly.

All that, and we delivered most of those lines from the dark asiles of the house. I hot to play a drum though, which was cool.