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.