Room Service Rehearsal, Day One

Sunday, 29 June: Read-Through and Act One Blocking

Hello! I'm Eric Silvertree, a member of the Tibbits Summer Theatre acting company. As part of your backstage pass to professional theatre at the Tibbits Opera House, I'll be giving you an actor's-eye-view of the rehearsals for Room Service, from the first cast meeting through the last performance.

You might be surprised to know that the rehearsal period for a main-stage show at Tibbits is only about ten days. Compared to (for example) a community theater production, which may have a six-week rehearsal schedule, that may not seem like very much time.

However, community theaters usually rehearse only four or five nights a week, for about three hours a night. At Tibbits, we rehearse all seven days a week, with three three-hour sessions a day: morning, afternoon, and evening - except Sunday, when we take the morning off. Doing the math, it actually works out to almost exactly the same number of hours spent in rehearsal.

This Sunday, the 29th of June, we began rehearsing Room Service for a 10 July opening. This show is a farce, first produced on Broadway in 1937, and released as a Marx Brothers film in 1938. Unlike most of the Marx Brothers catalog, for Room Service they worked themselves into a pre-existing script instead of building an original story around the Marx characters - which probably explains why the show was a big hit on Broadway (over 500 performances, in an era when 125 performances was a solid run) but one of the Marx Brothers' less-successful films.

The first session began with a read-through. A read-through is just what it sounds like. The cast all sit with their scripts in front of them and read the show out loud from beginning to end. Besides giving the performers a chance to listen to each other's voices and get a feel for the rhythm and texture of the language, it's also an opportunity to ask about the pronunciation of unusual words, or get an explanation of unfamiliar cultural references in the script.

The read-though is also where the actors start to make choices about technique. Technique, in this case, refers to things like vocal volume, speed of delivery, and any special character voices or accents. For instance, during this afternoon's read-through, I had a scene with an argument with another character. Back-and-forth arguments have to build in volume - each line louder than the last - or they sound flat and unrealistic on stage. I started off with a little too much volume, which meant that by the end of the argument, I was shouting much too hard. Now I have a mental note for that scene: start off lower, so I have room to build without risking damage to my voice.

Farces move fast - very fast. The read-though only took up ninety minutes of the first three-hour rehearsal session. The other ninety minutes were spent getting a head start on blocking the first act. Blocking is the process of mapping out the actors' pattern of movement on stage. Comedies, farces in particular, benefit from lots of quick, energetic movement - almost as complex as dance. In fact, the only real difference between blocking and choreography is whether or not the movement is timed to music.

After dinner break, we returned for the evening rehearsal session, and by the time the workday ended at 10pm, we had the entire first act blocked. That's twenty-four pages of movement and dialogue. Tomorrow morning at 10am, we'll start the second act. See you after tomorrow's rehearsal!