Director's Notes Act 6: Rehearsal Schedule

By Michael Critchfield

Once auditions are over, and you’ve chosen who you want to play which part, you’ll also need to take some time in preparing an exact rehearsal schedule, which you will use for the months to come. This will take some effort to construct. It will mean reflecting on those of your cast, and estimating how long it might take to learn certain pieces, and certain scenes. When I made my schedule up, I looked at each scene and musical number, and then tried to estimate how many rehearsals and how much time would be needed to prepare the cast in time for the performance.

There will be a certain amount of available time before the show dates, and which then must be appropriately divided, among all areas that need attention and practice. Also, it’s wise to schedule spot-rehearsing to finish a few weeks before the show goes up, so that you can go over any trouble spots, if needs be. Doing this will also allow you to go over the entire play several times, before the actual show dates, which is very important, and very calming for that matter!

In general, the songs, ‘I Love My Things’, ‘Here Waiting’ and ‘Life Could Not Be Better’ for example, require more time to learn, than say, one of the duets. This should thus be reflected in the schedule. Depending on the complexity of the piece (and the raw talent of the cast), I decided to schedule anywhere from 3 to 5, 1-hour rehearsals for the musical numbers. I then scheduled 4 rehearsals for each of Scenes #1, #10 and #12 (scenes involving the majority of the Primary cast). For the musical numbers including complex blocking (‘I Love My Things’, ‘Here Waiting’ and ‘Life Could Not Be Better’), I spent 40% of their allotted time going over ONLY music. The rest of the time was spent on blocking. On blocking days, we’d still go over the music, but only a couple of times. Those pieces that are less complicated and require less time for preparation, were spent mostly on music.

Within each of those 1-hour singing (non-blocking) rehearsal blocks, I scheduled a 5-minute vocal warm-up. After, and, at least in the beginning, we started off listening to the vocal tracks, reviewing the piece 2-3 times. We then switched over to working with the piano. We would go over the music at a speed that the cast members could follow, and spot rehearse the tough parts of the piece, including sections of harmonization. Once the piece was learned fairly well, we switched and began rehearsing using the minus track. After a couple of rehearsals, practicing only music, we moved on and spent the rest of the allotted rehearsals going over the blocking, but being sure to sing to the pieces at the beginning of each blocking rehearsal. Even though blocking rehearsals had less singing, we still added singing and music to the small section of whatever we learned during that hour. So it ended up being kind of a blend of music and blocking, with a fluctuating balance between the two, depending on the area of concentration needed.

On the posted rehearsal schedule, beside each of the scenes and musical numbers, I listed those that were expected to be at rehearsal for that 1-hour block. You can imagine that having the guards and the servants present during the first of the ‘I Love My Things’ rehearsals, wouldn’t really have been necessary, which was why I didn’t schedule them to be there until the times when they were actually needed. This I tried to do with each number, so as to be most effective with everybody’s time.

Amongst these rehearsals, I also scheduled meetings with both the executive committee AND the stage crew (stage manager, props, set, and costume). These meetings were separate to begin with, but as the show date approached, I began to schedule them to meet at the same time, as well as schedule them in greater frequency.

I think it’s important to say that once this schedule was made up, I held myself and everyone else to it. I was very strict at starting and ending on time. I thought it only fair.

No. 10!

The Murray High School Drama Club in Salt Lake City is the 10th group committing to stage "The First Christmas" this year. I can't tell you how heartened I am to see that two groups (Kanab High School is the other) have the courage to stage this Christmas production in public high schools this year. Merry Christmas, indeed! 

Promotional graphics

We have uploaded some promotional graphics that you can use for posters and flyers. They are available in two different formats (PDF and jpg), two different sizes (8x10 and 42x27), and design (with white box at the bottom and with just an empty space at the bottom).

The "without box" option is the poster with a plain background at the bottom for those of you whose computer skills are such that want to put your own text over the bottom. The "with box" option is similar to the above poster, but features a white box at the bottom of the poster that may make it a little easier to insert your announcement (audition notice, general invitation, etc.).

You can view them by clicking on their names below. To download them, you can either save them to your local computer after opening it or you can right click on the links below.

Here are the links:

Option 1: 8x10, no box, jpg (3.7 MB)
Option 2: 8x10, no box, pdf (3.7 MB)
Option 3: 8x10, with box, jpg (3.4 MB)

Option 4: 8x10, with box, pdf (3.4 MB)

Option 5: 42x27, with box, jpg (2.4 MB)

Option 6: 42x27, with box, pdf (2.4 MB)

Option 7: 42x27, without box, jpg (2.5 MB)

Option 8: 42x27, without box, pdf (2.5 MB)

Additional music available now

Additional music for stage versions of "The First Christmas" is now available.

There are 19 music cues available. These can be used in the production to enhance certain moments. Whether you wish to use these in your production, and if so at which points you wish to use them is completely up to you.

We've also uploaded an alternate minus track version of the song, "Everything We Need." This version has more of an intro so the actors have more help in knowing when to come in.

Also, some of you may have received a CD that was missing the minus track version of "Glory to God." We apologize for that. We are also making that available here.

Click here to go to download page.

You can preview any of the tracks by simply clicking on it. You can also download it to your computer by right clicking on it.

Flyers, posters

Joe from Tasmania reports that his group has had some walkthroughs with the cast and crew and that the excitement is building. He is requesting some graphics for flyers and posters to get the promotion going.

I will have a graphic designer adapt our poster (the one with baby Jesus' hand reaching up toward the star from the manger). My thoughts are to have him prepare an 8.5 x 11 version that has the graphic towards the top, with a rounded rectangle or some type of space in white below for our groups to add their elements. Maybe another version that is similar, but instead of a white space, has just no details down below for those of you who will want to have a designer to something different. I was thinking of making the above available as a pdf as well as a jpg.

I also thought of having him do another higher-res version that would be a larger file that might work for those who want to have it commercially printed as a 24x36 (or thereabouts) poster. Again, probably a pdf version and jpg version.

How does that sound? Does anybody have any specific requests beyond this?

I will try to get that ready in the next week or so. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,

Dennis

More music

Robert from New Zealand reports that rehearsals are well under way and that their church leadership has fully got behind it and booked one of the best Performing Arts Centres here. But he pointed out that there is no backing track on the CD for the song 'Glory to God.'

We appreciate Robert for pointing that out. We will work on making that available to each group. I will be contacting an audio engineer to work on preparing something. That song is tricky, because it starts with just the vocals for the intro. I'll have our engineer work on preparing some type of intro that will give the performers a sense of timing and pitch. But any suggestions from our group would be welcome.

At the same time, I'll have him prepare a variety of musical cues from the movie that our groups can use wherever they see fit, such as when Amelia is sneaking around the Christmas tree or the ending when she realizes she could also be having a brother.

But if anybody has any specific requests, please let me know soon so that I could have the engineer work on those all at once.

Dennis