At the beginning of this week our music director, Charlotte Evans, held the first orchestra rehearsal so that the musicians could rehearse all the music before playing with the cast. Our orchestra is comprised of two violins, two reeds, and a trumpet player. The week ended with a sitzprobe. What is a sitzprobe?

Sitzprobe (n.) is a German term used in opera and musical theatre to describe a seated rehearsal—the literal translation of Sitzprobe—where the singers sing with the orchestra, focusing attention on integrating the two groups. It is often the first rehearsal where the orchestra and singers rehearse together. (Definition from Wikipedia)

That is exactly what happened: the orchestra played through the score of the show and the actors stood up when it was their turn to sing!

I confess: I have a type. Some people are always the romantic lead, or the ingénue, or the child. I am always cast as a crazy older woman. Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Dotty from Noises Off, a gender-swapped Man in Chair in The Drowsy Chaperone: these are all batty women of a certain age whom I have played and loved. It’s a niche of Johns Hopkins theater that I have been happy to inhabit for almost four years. 

When I was cast as April in Company, however, I was suddenly thrown out of my dramatic comfort zone. April is a flight attendant. She is, according to Bobby, “cute, original and odd.” Whether she possesses these qualities is, perhaps, up for debate. However, she is most definitely young. As someone who has always enjoyed the weird sense of freedom that comes with playing older people, there is something daunting about April’s relative youth. She recently dropped out of Northwestern University, and is attempting to date in the romantic hellscape that is New York City. For a college senior, this hits far closer to home than, say, a cannibalistic Victorian pie-maker. 

When Company premiered into 1970, musical theater was primarily used as an escape. Most musicals avoided any real relevance to the lives of their audience. The sweeping romance and happy endings of Rogers & Hammerstein seemed incongruous with the complicated sexual politics of the seventies. Company was one of the first musicals to address this new world of adult relationships and dating. Sondheim himself said, "Broadway theater has been for many years supported by upper-middle-class people with upper-middle-class problems. These people really want to escape that world when they go to the theatre, and then here we are with Company talking about how we're going to bring it right back in their faces." I, too, have always seen musical theater as a form of escape. It’s fun to revel in the excess, the solos, the silly costumes and gratuitous dance numbers. It’s fun to play a batty old lady, because I get to escape the anxieties of my own life. For that reason, Company is a challenge. Instead of allowing us to disappear into a world of tidy happy endings, we have to delve into the psyches of people who have doubts and worries, who are “sorry-grateful” about the paths their lives have taken. We have to be vulnerable and petty and young people loving and not loving other young people in big cities. We’re having our problems brought right back in our faces, because in the end, we’re playing versions of ourselves.

One of the cool things about working in a black box theatre is the flexibility of onstage and offstage space. Backstage space is needed for entrances/exits, scenery and props storage and, for the musical, a pit! Our set designer Raidizon has decided to use curtains to create backstage areas. Through the use of 8 curtains that he worked into his set design, he was able to create spaces on stage that are not visible from an audience seat.

In these  pictures you get to see what hanging curtains is like in our space. Two people are on the ground and two others stand on our 18-foot-high tension wire grid. On the grid there are cleats with ropes wrapped around them. The groups on the ground and in the grid determine where to drop ropes from the ceiling, then the ground group ties the rope to a pipe that will be used as a curtain rod. They then tie the curtains to those pipes, and the grid group raises the apparatus until the bottom of the curtain is just above the ground. Ropes secure the curtains to the cleats, and the curtain is now hung!

The cast put on their dancing shoes last night to learn some choreography for the second act's opening number, "Side by Side." During the song, the main character Robert gets to dance with each of the couples, so our director chose a different dance style for each couple. Some of the dance styles include the polka, the mambo, ballet, and the Charleston!