Time to Open!

We had our “last” rehearsal for the Great Puppet Musical Tuesday night. We’ll continue to have rehearsals throughout the run, but this was the last one before opening.

We ran “skeletons” of two shows at rehearsal. What does that mean? Well, we did a bare bones version of the first act making sure to include the three most important songs: Opening song, the protagonist song, and the point-of-view Act I closing song. The opening song sets the tone for the show and focuses on the central theme that we’ve in some way gotten from the audience. The protagonist song establishes how the protagonist feels about their life and may delve into what they want deep down. The point-of-view Act I closing song involves several characters, the protagonist being one of them, each singing their point-of-view of the events to that point in the story.

Then we talked through the second act and did a closing number, which hopefully is a reprise of the opening number. I say hopefully because it’s really hard to reprise an improvised song. But we do what we can.

Now you may be thinking… That’s cheating. They know what songs their going to sing! Well, we know what types of song we’re going to sing, but we don’t know the music they’ll be sung to, the words we’ll sing, who will be singing them, or what characters we will be playing. So you see, it’s mostly up in the air.

And in case you're wondering, how we tend to structure musicals at Un-Scripted owe's a lot to the work of Kat Koppett. Many members of Un-Scripted worked with her when she lived in San Francisco and was a member of BATS Improv. (And yes, she is related to the late Hall of Fame sportswriter Leonard Koppett.)

We have yet to run the entire show from start to finish in a rehearsal. In fact, we rarely ever do that. The first time we’ll try to do this for a full 2 hours will be tonight in front of a paying audience. It’ll be an adventure!