Down to the Wire

Okay, so I have a confession to make. I'm still working on the show.

...yes, tonight's show. The show we're doing tonight. That show. Still working on it.

This is not an ideal position for me (or the show) to be in. In a perfect world, everything would have been cut and dried and etched in stone two weeks ago, and Sarah and I could have spent the last several days relaxing in front of a roaring fire and exchanging witty bon mots about Leopold Auer and Eduard Hanslick while sipping hot buttered rum and pretending that we'd never heard of wind chill.

This is not a perfect world. It's fifteen below zero. And I am still. working. on. the show.

At this point, the work is largely cosmetic, since any major changes would have needed to be made before Tuesday morning's rehearsal with the orchestra. I can't cut any of our demonstration excerpts, or change their order, or write a whole new draft of the script or anything. This is a great relief, since I've been doing all of these things more or less constantly for three weeks now.

But even after the bulk of the work is done, there always seems to be more to do. Tuesday night, after an hour-long discussion that took place entirely inside my own head, I determined that it would look strange for me to have my full script on a music stand in front of me during the show (because, see, Peter's going to be standing where I normally stand during these concerts, which creates a bit of a logjam at the front of the stage, and if I have a stand, I'll be stationary right in front of the first stand of first violins, which seems wrong somehow, and blah blah blah) and ran off to buy a pack of 4x6 index cards (with which to create a fully portable, handheld script) before my local Target closed. (Side note: Target really shouldn't ever close. There should be a law. If I need reasonably priced jeans, a furnace filter, and PEZ dispensers in bulk at 2am, I should be able to get them.)

Then there's the need for special versions of the script to be prepared and double-checked for accuracy. Some of these versions go to our long-suffering stage crew, who need to know what doors need to be opened and closed, when exactly we want special lighting cues to happen, which microphones need to be hot at what times, and when we need all the mics shut down so that they don't start picking up bits of the orchestra and amplifying them to the entire hall. Any member of the orchestra who is participating in the show in some way other than by playing his/her instrument (think David Wright's turn as the Kastchei in November's Firebird concerts) needs what I call a "scriptlet," which isolates their moment in the sun and tells them how to know it's coming and what to do when it does. Finally, there's a last-minute insert to be stuffed in every orchestra musician's folder, reminding them of a certain cue that they'll be getting late in the show which could bring the whole production to a grinding halt if it's missed.

The last few bits of prep actually won't take place until this afternoon, mere hours before we take the stage. After we finish playing two performances of the Young People's Concert that Sarah wrote about yesterday, I'll dash off to a local costume shop to pick up a couple of rentals that we need for tonight. Later in the afternoon, I'll gather the few props we're using for the show and distribute them to the people who need them along with any final instructions.

Around dinner time, I'll give every copy of the script that's still in my possession one last read-through to be sure that my computer hasn't accidentally deleted a page or substituted an earlier draft for the final one. At some point during this process, during which I'll likely be pacing around backstage at Orchestra Hall like some sort of deranged freak, Sarah will appear, looking completely composed and fabulous, and instruct me to calm the hell down. Since I always do what Sarah tells me to, I will.

And that's really the key to this whole thing, I think. We spend an ungodly amount of time and energy getting these shows ready for prime time, but the reality is that whether a given performance sinks or swims is less dependent on absolutely everything going exactly as we planned than it is on all of us having a good time while we're doing it. And neurotic as I may sound right now, less than twelve hours before we drop the puck, I know that I'm going to have a great time with this show.

I hope all of you do, too. See you at the Hall...