PERSONAL Can I Have A Rehearsal Without Being Frustrated?
The answer to that question is, unfortunately, no. Last evening, I had the "music rehearsal" for my new writing five show. In every other writing five show of which I've been a part, the music rehearsal has been half of the 3-hour slot. This is what the music director of the show (who does music for Second City and IO) normally does for his writing five shows, as well. Apparently this is not how my current director directs. She set up the previous evening's rehearsal (the aforementioned rehearsal) so that the entire 3-hour rehearsal was music. This shows a clear lack of communication between herself and the music director as to how the musical rehearsal was going to work. Had she simply asked Joe (the musical director) how much time he'd like, he would have said he only wanted an hour and a half.
Think that faux pas was bad? Get this... since she set up the rehearsal to be just music, she didn't show up. No director! I guess if you set up a rehearsal so that someone else is doing all the work, you can just skip the rehearsal without telling the actors or the music director that you're going to be skipping the rehearsal. Nice work.
Additionally, to further prove that this director has no idea what she's doing, she staggered the call times for the actors. No musical director I've ever worked with likes to start a music rehearsal without a full warm-up. And none of them wants to warm-up a cast twice... so they'll want the FULL cast at the beginning of the rehearsal to warm up. You know, it's a good idea to warm up before singing... some people know that and some people don't (don't=my current director).
So what ended up happening last night was that the music director and I sat around for about fifteen minutes-chatting-then more cast showed up and we sat around-waiting-and we finally warmed up about half an hour after we were supposed to start. The music director took a very long time warming us up because, he said, "We're apparently going to be doing a lot of singing tonight."
Needless to say, I am not impressed with the director of this show and, as I was walking back to my apartment after a second straight week of frustration, I day-dreamed about directing the show myself. Yeah... I would do better, thanks. Hell, I'd actually BE there... that's better right off the bat.