Piano Dress Rehearsal

For those of you not in the opera world, the piano dress rehearsal is the first time you get into costume, wigs, and make-up, and run the whole show, as non-stop as possible, with the piano playing the accompaniment. It's always a night of discovery and mostly awesomeness, from the point of the singers. For the people behind the scenes - wig and make-up artists, costumers, light designers, props masters, set movers, carpenters, directors, stage management - it's a night of discovery and hard work and sometimes a pain in the ass. But overall, I think it went really well. I know that for me, many things went better than they have up until now, which is great! Obviously, the rehearsal process should work that way, but it doesn't always.

Before all that though, I ran some errands and ate phở, which was totally delicious. 

Then I saw this sign, and laughed because I am a thirteen year old boy

After a luxurious day of lounging around my room (after an intense 2 and a half mile run,) cleaning up before housekeeping came, and then sitting here awkwardly while housekeeping came in and cleaned, I headed to the theater. Something I want to mention - this stage management crew is so great,  I have felt like they had my back the whole time. But last night, one of them walked through a particular bit of stage business with me, and he did it himself and realized why it felt so treacherous. He was SO great, he said, I see why you're nervous about this because when I went to do it, I was nervous, too. I have to kneel in a particular way, right by the edge of a sheer drop, without looking, and then I have to reach behind me to grab a prop, also without looking. It's tough and it feels dangerous. And he knew that, and found a way to try to help me do it while feeling as safe as possible. Awesomesauce.

At the theater, I have a little make-up table in the dressing room that is all mine, here are some photos of that and our dressing room and some of our costumes.

The blue is the Second Lady, the green is the First Lady.

Okay, then I went to the make-up room, and the following is the transformation!

Hee hee! Then they put the wig on...

And the final product -

I took a couple of close-ups, just to be kind of artsy *eye roll*

Part of our costume is these little mirrors that sit in the palms of our hands, the idea being that as we do our various Hindu hand gestures, the mirrors will catch little flashes of light and look like we've got super power hand gestures or something. So I tried to take a super deep photo of my face reflected in my hand, ooooohhh....

Right! So we did the show! As I said, it mostly went well, but there's always place where you realize, oh, with this wig/costume I can't do what I rehearsed. There is a quintet in the second act where Papageno and Tamino have blindfolds on and The Ladies remove them. In rehearsal, we just slipped the blindfolds off the top of their heads, no problem. But with the guys wearing wigs, that wasn't going to work, so they changed the blindfold to velcro attachments....but no one told the Three Ladies. :-| (Someone should have told us, oh well.) So The First Lady pulled and pulled at Tamino's blindfold until she pulled it off...along with his wig! And at first, you all try to keep going, in you're brain, there's a tiny part that is saying, you have to keep going, what if this happened in a show? You would deal with it. So they tried to sort of shove the wig back on, but pretty soon everyone was laughing their heads off and we had to stop and get the wig crew out to fix him up, and then start over. Oh man, we were DYIN', yo. Too funny.

Side note - I was discussing with some of the cast and crew the other night - this show, and really this whole company, is pretty drama-free, which is HUGE in the opera world. We were appreciating that and singing the praises of this company and this cast. But it kind of makes for a dull blog! Wouldn't it be great if there was some bitchy diva that you thought might stop the show from happening? Or ridiculous in-fighting? But no, none of that nonsense here. The only tiny hint at drama is that a couple of the cast are feeling under the weather, but that's hardly news, since the show doesn't open for several days. Maybe it feels bigger to them, though, so my apologies if you are reading this and thinking, Bitch, see how YOU feel when you can't sing at your rehearsals!

I got a few more shots of me in full regalia. I am not crazy about my facial expressions, but here you go.

And here is Monostatos, who looks friggin' great!

And then of course you have to take off all the gunk, so here's a post-show, half un-made-up face. Looks a bit like a victim of abuse.

Foxeh!!