"Do you want to ride this at 50 miles an hour or 70 miles an hour? Both options are perfectly safe. Or, do you want to experience it at 90 miles and hour but you might wreck"
If you ride it at 50, the ride will last a little longer... you can experience the turns and loops a little more perhaps...
If you ride it at 70, you will still do the same thing but faster... and the ride will be shorter.
If you go at 90... well... it might be too fast and it end in a big mess.
I think most of us would pick the 70 mile an hour option. It's the same exact track... let me experience it as fast as is responsibly possible.
I think theatre is the same way. I like my theatre fast... not so fast that the story gets lost... but I'd rather see a show in two hours than the same exact show in two hours and fifteen minutes. I think the speed is exciting.
Right now our show is the 50 mile an hour version of the roller coster. It's a long show AND it's moving a little slow. There are some great moment in this show. Some moments where the whole cast just has to stop and watch... but our performance starts at 8:00 and right now it might end after 11:00. So, we need to tighten it up.
We're looking to do that two ways...
1) Eliminate the pauses... This is the best way. For every 10 pauses an actors wants to take, they only really need one. I know I have all sorts of pauses that I need to eliminate so I've been working on that.
2) We've gotten to the point where the director is accepting considerations for voluntary line cuts. Some actors will never cut a line on their own... they want to speak it all! I think our cast kind of sees the situation we are in and I suspect we'll see a touch more streamlined show in the coming days. This play is just huge. I never really realized how huge it is. And to attempt this big a show with such little rehearsal time has been very challenging... fun... but challenging.
Othello - 3560 lines
Hamlet is the biggest with 4024 lines. It's not all that far off from Hamlet.
Midsummer - 2165 lines
Macbeth - 2477 lines
Shrew - 2641
Tempest - 2275
Comedy of Errors - 1786...... 1786.... Othello is like doing Comedy of Errors TWICE in terms of lines.
Add up Othello and Iago's lines and those two alone have more lines than the entire play of Comedy of Errors. Wow... how's that for a stat?
So tonight I'll happily look to trim some things... find some cuts to my lines... etc.
As I was discussion with a friend last night, Shakespeare tends to repeat himself a lot. Part of the reason for this is because people were going in and out of the theatre during a show. I can definitely chop a minute or two off of the show with some cuts and probably another 30 seconds by tightening up some pauses. If the big five or six characters all do this... which I am pretty sure we all will... hell... that roller coaster just got a whole lot faster.
Today we did scene work. It's the final day for that. Now it is all runs. We had 30 minutes to work on the drunk fight which was real nice. It's up to speed now and is freaking fast. I'm in every move so I am honestly pretty out of breath by the end of it which is cool because that is where Cassio should be at that moment. The other fighters are all doing great work. They are consistently hitting their marks which makes my job so easy. There are a couple of nearly blind moves. What this means is that there isn't quite as much eye contact as we'd ideally like. But, the guys are really locked in to where their swords need to be so as I do this two sword 360 degree spin with various blade to blade contacts during the spin, the guys are right there every time. I'm going to have to slip them all a fiver or something because their good work makes Cassio look like a bad-ass fighter.
Speaking of which. I had to bring my sword to the hotel today. I had to take it to my costume fitting and then I wasn't going to keep it in my car. Anyway, I made sure to check in with the hotel lobby that I was staying on the 2nd floor and had a sword. The last thing I need is some poor hotel person to think some crazy guy is running around the hotel with a sword and call the cops etc. I've had two instances with police officers because of stage combat so now, I call ahead or check in with people. Even on campus, if I am walking from my office to the car with a sword, I call campus security first to tell them.
We open in 6 days... craziness.
A few pics of Cassio's baby...
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