Two Weeks to Open

There’s an interesting phenomenon that occurs within a 6-week rehearsal process. When a month or more stretches ahead, there is invariably a lackadaisical attitude among the cast which knuckles down only when the performers start to fear appearing in front of an audience unprepared. The newfound intensity changes and ups the game, and it always comes within the last 2 weeks of rehearsal. So it’s interesting to note that many professional theatres only rehearse for two weeks. For unpaid players, the 6-8 hours a day required to mount a show in two weeks would be difficult to manage in conjunction with their paid work, so in order to amass stage time more rehearsal days – and days off – are needed. One would like to think that having an additional 4 weeks to prepare a show would be a boon, but there are two powerful players absent in those first 4 weeks: urgency and intensity. Being a number cruncher at heart, I decided to do the math. How would the final two weeks of rehearsal for a community show – when the urgency is finally palpable – compare to a professional 2-week rehearsal schedule?

After two weeks of 6-hour days, performers at Nashville’s Barn Dinner Theatre will have put roughly 86 hours of stage time into a performance before it is seen by the public -- every one of those hours infused with “we open in two weeks” intensity. In the final two weeks of rehearsal at OnStage Playhouse, performers will only put in 48 hours of urgency-infused stage time before the production is seen. The difference is between one full-time work week and two. Oh! What a difference that second full throttle week would make!

Perhaps, with the hours we've spent getting to this point, our final 48 hours will be productive enough to narrow the gap. Ultimately, the hours that count most are the ones in which getting it right is most important to the actor -- when the least time remains to fix what is wrong. We're getting there, right on schedule. If this show were being produced at The Barn with plans to open March 11th, the actors would be meeting today to receive scripts for their first read-through.

It's interesting to note, too, that if The Barn had started rehearsals for this show on the same day that OnStage did, it would be in its 3rd week of performance rather than 5th week of rehearsal, scheduled to close on March 12th rather than open on March 11th. However it plays, if I get to stay in Olive Madison’s apartment with the girls until April 9th rather than tear it down on March 12th, I’m all for it!