Rehearsal #2: A Little Bit of Everything

For our second rehearsal for Let It Snow we did a little bit of dancing, a little bit of singing, and a little bit of improv. Sort of an overview of the entire show.

I got lead my favorite name-game warm-up exercise for the firs time with this cast. Since we didn’t do the exercise during the auditions, this was several cast members first time playing. Even so, it went very smoothly. We made it all the way up to four patterns. It went so smoothly in fact, I kept thinking I was doing something wrong in leading it.

Mandy and Susan want everyone in the cast to experience being a choreographer. At every rehearsal three people have to teach a group of 3-4 other cast members some sort of choreographed dance. I was one of the choreographers this week. We had to choreograph a minimum of 16 counts, so that’s what I did. It was mostly stepping and jazz hands with one complicated turn. In any case, it took me the entire 10 minutes to teach it.

Then as we watched the other groups perform their dances, I was astounded to see how complicated and long other people’s pieces were. I should have done more, but at the same time I showed all you really needed to do was 16 counts. Still, good to see how far people are willing to push things.

Then we worked on the Verse/Chorus song structure we’ve been experimenting with. Instead of starting a song with a chorus, we start a song with a verse. Then the second person to sing sets the chorus. It’s more like regular songs, but can be tricky. Still, it went well. We followed that up by singing duets. Mandy and Susan had everyone pair up and sing a duet all at the same time. That way everyone got to sing 3 songs.

Finally we did two show-starts. Susan had printed out some brief info on small towns that we used as suggestions and then dove into the first three scenes of a show. We did Genoa, NV and Cranbury, NJ. I was in the Cranbury one and played a not-so-swift hardware store employee who confused “asphalt” for “screws”. There was some good word play in that scene including Susan saying “I think you’re screwed” and Dave singing a song about it not being his “fault” they were out of “asphalt”.

The take-aways, I think, were to look for themes to develop (“Nevada started here in Genoa, so we’re going to start something”) and to remember small towns do have upper to upper-middle class residents (we tend to only ever play working-class folk). We also saw perhaps the first scene in a Let It Snow rehearsal or show ever to take place in someone’s garage. Lisa also did some kick-ass space object work establishing the hardware store.