Building and Polishing

Beginning of Week 5

Construction of the Set

Recording of the Score

Rehearsal Day 17: Stage Combat Sunday Polishing and more!

What a busy weekend for the Junction! On Saturday, a lovely crew of folks drove down from Chicago to help build the set in Joliet. Thankfully, the weather cooperated and we had a sunshiny, not-too-hot day to build a wall. Here's the story in pictures!

We began by fueling up at Popeye's chicken, solving the hunger emergency. Beau had a sunglasses emergency and found the nearby dollar store to alleviate said problem.

Danelle took charge of the sawing.

Luke, you've got to RIP IT! The lauan, I mean.

I know as a stage manager, I'm here for support, Bryan. But really?

Primin' the flats...

More priming

We may not have found the Golden Fleece, but we sure did find the Golden Wall!

Danelle looks pretty rad next to the graffitied wall. And this is just the beginning of the graffiti...just wait until the rest of the cast gets their hands on it. (My favorite touch is the Dante's Inferno/Boondock Saints reference over the door.) I may never order an Arnold Palmer though.

Fatties gotta eat! Finishing a very productive day with a floor picnic of Chinese food, Summer Shandy, and lightsaber iPhone apps.

Thank you to Bryan Campbell and Danelle for prepping the construction space with me and sticking around to build stuff, and thank you to Sarah Harmon, Luke Harmon, and Beau Forbes for bringing their mad building skills to the party. Now to just get it up to Chicago...

While we were being constructive on the set, Josh and Joe were being constructive on the score of the show. The songs the characters sing are done, but now they boys turned their attention to the underscore for the main action. Here's the fun they got into:

Joe is just jammin'.

Josh is just jivin'

And the skull ring plays the piano.

The music produced from Saturday sounds amazing under some of the scenes, but more on that down the page....

Sunday night brought us to another week of rehearsal, and a polishing of the fight scenes with Beau. Since all the tweaks and changes were made last week, the focus was on getting the movements fluid and slowly cranking up the speed. By the end of the night, what was supposed to be running through the fights at half speed turned into fighting at show speed and it was EPIC! Very intense, very fast, and always hilarious.

Beau had to depart early for a photo call, which left the rest of us Regs to run through Act 2 from start to finish! The little pieces are starting to click together for each scene as we (finally) run them in sequential order. The songs sound great, Josh inserted score where it seemed appropriate (including an amazing version that hearkens to the Firefly or Serenity sountracks). It's really all coming together! Not that there was ever any real doubt, but it is reassuring to see hard work pay off and become something that you can't wait to share.

We're headed into the home stretch over these next two weeks. We do nothing but stumble and run through the show until Tech Week, so wish us luck, courage, and copious amounts of caffeine!