Alice in Wonderland, vol. V

On every show I've ever worked on, there is a point during the process at which I stop sleeping. I was doing incredibly well for weeks and weeks on this show, which seemed miraculous considering the chaos of working with kids and the challenges of co-directing. I was able to, for the most part, leave my work at work...

We open in a week. I will probably spend 26 of the next 48 hours in the theater (crossing my fingers that it's far less than that, but you never know), designing lights, finalizing sound, finishing painting, and having as many dress rehearsals as we can manage, once everything is set.

Needless to say, I think I've stopped sleeping.

We've finally gotten a few full-runs under our belt, which is a relief. Big set pieces are done and being worked with, lines are NEARLY completely memorized, painting has begun, and sound is mostly designed. It's the tiny details, at this point, that keep me up at night. The parts of the process that I, inevitably, need to give up control over eventually. The fact that the show crashes after intermission is something that I hope will change with the next week of rehearsals, but it's also something I'm not positive about. The minutiae of cutting sound tracks to the seconds we want to use to underscore. The scenes that still aren't quite clicking. The blocking mistakes and dropped lines that are always made. It just feels a little bit like a crapshoot in terms of how much of this will actually get ironed out before Friday. I guess it always does.

As S wisely says, every show can benefit from another week of rehearsals, no matter how organize or prepared you've been. But we never get it. And the magical theater fairies always take over and everything seems to work out all of a sudden.

I'm just not sure magical theater fairies visit children's productions in quite the same way.