Hell week

Hell week is finally over.  Six performances in six days!  There's always one point where I start wondering, "Why can't I just get sick for the next three weeks?" (I imagine that's a common feeling.) Of course, for me the hardest part isn't performing onstage but waiting in the wings.

At the Don Giovanni dress rehearsal Tuesday, at the point where the devils come out onstage to drag DG down, nobody came out!  The people in front were indecisive, and the ones behind got stuck.  (Some of us were late coming up from downstairs--including me!-- because this year the stage manager didn't have an assistant to remind us.) But we got it right in the later shows.

In the first scene of Masked Ball, there's a moment when we hand our scrolls to Ricardo, but we kept doing it late!  I eventually realized that was because we were supposed to hand them over while he was still singing, so we had to overcome the chorister's instinct not to get into a soloist's space while he's performing his number.

I bought the second volume of Shigeru Mizuki's history of Japan at the time of World War II. (This volume is about the period from 1939 to 1944.) I was reading it downstairs on Saturday's Don Giovanni, and it was so fascinating that I was late coming up and missed the "Che Piacere" number!  Nobody died.  Mostly, I've been reading Our Mutual Friend backstage.

Moira and Puitak came to yesterday's Masked Ball show.  She says it's one of our best productions.  They were late opening the place, so some of us had to wait outside in unusually cold weather! (I was only a few minutes early.)