Most people believe that casting a show is the most difficult part of the directing process, and this may be true. However, the hardest work comes from rehearsals where the ideas you’ve been planning for months come to life (or die a graceful death as you realise that it isn’t going to work like that, the actor can’t sing that high or there aren’t enough people to make the shape you wanted to). This is probably only true in amateur dramatics but it can be difficult to plan ahead because of unexpected changes.
One of the most difficult things to work around are cast members missing rehearsals- there’s a myriad of reasons why this happens and we all have our daily lives to live, after all it is only a show. But ensemble work needs repetitive rehearsals and hard work to get it right. In 2014 we were lucky enough to be nominated for the best chorus singing category in the NODA South West Awards (incidentally we won best set design) and this came from a lot of rehearsal, learning and hard work- there’s no reason why we can’t be nominated again for this production as the score is challenging and our MD Ian is hard at work preparing practice tracks and playing for us live at rehearsals. We’ll get there, but these first few weeks are always a struggle as there’s a lot to learn and not much time to learn it in!
Meanwhile behind the scenes there are plenty of meetings still to be had with costumes, make up, set building and planning ahead to next year’s Pantomime and variety show. You wouldn’t believe it but usually by this time next month we’ll have a script and director in place and we’ll already be booking up our Open Evening and performance dates. On Monday we had our last meeting with the 2014-15 committee and following our AGM a new committee will be elected for 2015-16, exciting times for us and lots of change and streamlining of processes as more Pantos draw closer.