A-Roving Performance Day!

Finally the day arrived, the performance day for A-Roving We Will Go, the product of months of work for Katharine and myself and an intensive rehearsal week for our 9 actors. Thankfully, unlike the day before for the second dress run the day could not have been better - sunny with patches of cloud, so it was not too hot but it was warm enough for Alana's short's without her being cold, the only change was Peter's scarf which we decided he shouldn't wear as it would be too hot. The other character I had concerns about was Declan in terms of getting too warm but he assured me that he felt perfectly comfortable.

Tanya, on hair, make-up and dressing, and myself had given the actors their call sheets for hair, make-up and costume with guidlines of do's and don'ts at the dress run the day before. Our day started at 10:15 with myself and Tanya arriving to make sure that all the costumes were laid out for the performers as we had left them the day before. I set about ironing the items of the smarter characters to fit their more well turned out persona's while Tanya set out the make-up and hair supplies in preparation for our first actor at 10:30, Alana arriving with Hannah, the first two for hair and makeup. We went through the actors with, where possible, the actors having their make-up done first, followed by costume to avoid any make-up being dropped down the costumes, followed by hair. A few had to be put in their tops and t-shirts first but for the most part it went as planned.

There was a minor hiccup schedulewise when all the male actors, travelling down together, got stuck trying to find parking and ended up being 15 minutes late pushing the schedule to the limit, but we remained calm and kept them going when they lost focus and were soon back on track.

One of the roles we were taught is important for long costume days is that the actors can lose energy quickly, and all of us having performed for a film shoot in our first year we all had experience of this. This being the case it has become general practice for us to bring a range of sweets - nothing chocolate, sticky or powdery - to long costume days to keep the actors going and keep morale up on what can be a quite boring process for them. The night before myself and Tanya had visited a local sweet shop and bought a wide variety of sweets for the actors, which helped tremendously during hair and make-up and importantly between the two performances when engergy dipped dramatically. However with sugar, sandwiches and encouragement energy was soon high once again and they were set for the second performance.

There was one slightly more pronounced costume issue between the two performances when Jesamine, in getting out of her dress and putting it back on accidentally ripped the bodice of her dress on the broach that was holding the top together. Thankfully myself and Tanya were able to repair the worst of the tear and by also moving the pin it was not noticeable.

The performance went off perfectly in terms of costume, as did the performance itself with an incredible  audience turn out far better then the day before. The idea of Declan, James and Jay's travelling performance being to ask people directions and ask them to follow worked amazingly well, with much more audience participation in actually responding and following so that by the time they got to the performance space they had a fantastic following. I estimate that they had in excess of 200 people watching by the end of the performance.