Room Service Rehearsal, Day Two

Prior Reports:
Day 1 - Sunday, 29 June: Read-Through and Act One Blocking

Monday, 30 June: Act Two and Act Three Blocking

Hello! Eric Silvertree again, with the second installment of the day-by-day backstage blog of Room Service, the madcap comedy opening July 10 at the Tibbits Opera House in Coldwater.

Tibbits Summer Theatre is part of the summer stock theatre tradition, which means that the actors, carpenters, electricians, costumers (and so on) don't put on just one show, we put on a whole season: two plays, three musicals, and four children's shows, one right after another. Some actors may not be here for the entire summer - and musicians only work on the musicals, of course - but by and large everybody in a summer stock company is working on more than one show at a time.

This makes it impossible to rehearse an upcoming show on the actual stage, because the set for the current show (in this case, the musical Little Women - three shows left: July 2, 3 & 5 - bring the family!) is already there. Instead, Jefferson Elementary School graciously allows Tibbits to use its gymnasium for rehearsal space.

The walls and doors are laid out on the floor with lines of tape, with the same dimensions the set will have when it's erected on stage, and folding chairs stand in for the furniture. It's not as hard to get used to as you might think - and if there's a serious problem with how the set will work for the show, it can usually be spotted and corrected here, while everything is still being manufactured in the scene shop. For example, one of the doors on the Room Service set that was designed to open into the room will have to be re-designed to open out - but it's much easier to make the change now, before the set is actually installed.

Today we continued blocking, moving forward through the show. We worked on the first half of Act 2 in the morning, the second half in the afternoon, and the first half of Act 3 in the evening. We don't have any props yet, and we're still carrying our scripts as we work - not only because we're all still memorizing our lines, but also because we're jotting down notes to ourselves about where and when we move.

The quality of the acting is not our top priority during blocking. That comes during the later rehearsals. We're definitely thinking about the acting, though - figuring out what our characters feel at a given moment, trying out different ways of delivering tricky lines - like the line drawing an artist will sketch on the canvas before he actually starts to paint.

Creating the blocking for a show is one of the director's hardest jobs. He or she has to make sure the movement makes sense and doesn't result in traffic jams. Charles Burr, our director in Room Service (on the right in the photo) has a well-deserved reputation for the quality of his blocking, with well-balanced, interesting arrangements of the actors in the performance space, connected by engaging movement that springs naturally from the characters.

Tomorrow, on day three, we'll finish blocking the second half of the third act. Then we'll go back to the beginning and start working our way through the show again to reinforce what we've already done and start building on it. See you then!