And the show starts coming together

I got an update type thing here - please see below for Joe Janes' Wednesday blog entry, lovingly posted Thursday (we've all done it, so back off the guy! You try writing a sketch a day for a full year!)

We have been rehearsing for our upcoming show, Run Palindrome Nur!, and things have been going smashingly. Next week will be the first time the entire cast rehearses together. What's that you say? Doesn't the show open in 3 weeks? Shouldn't everyone in the whole cast feel connected to everyone else by now and be going out for drinks every night and sharing stories and holding hands?

One of the obstacles of producing a show that has 18 (technically 19) actors in it is how to go about rehearsing for the show. Being that RvD has produced shows before and all of the members have been a part of other shows around town we all realized that trying to get 19 + people all together at the same time, even on a weekly basis, would guarantee a complete implosion of the show. It might work for your local high school musical, but that type of coordination and scheduling ability in the sketch comedy world is essentially unheard of (unless you are working on something like SNL).

To keep certain doom from destroying the show we broke up the cast into 3 different groups. 2 members of RvD were assigned to direct each group. Most of the cast has not seen each other in weeks. Basically we did a read-through at the start of the process with as many actors as we could get (yeah, we couldn't even get all 18 people to the read-through, although we never expected to) and then said "All right everyone. Say goodbye to most of these people because you probably won't see them for a month." The groups have been apart ever since.

Next week we have our first all cast rehearsal, and we are very excited. It is very interesting not having seen essentially 2/3s of the show at this point. Will the 3 groups get along? Will there be turf wars? Will I be able to bring the whole thing together into one big well oiled machine? I say "yes", "no", and "Where in the devil is my bourbon!?"

Even though I really feel like everything is going to come together great, a little bit of me is still nervous simply because RvD and myself (as well as most sketch producers I would assume) have never tried something quite like this. I'm really interested in seeing all the different directing styles of the RvD members come through in each scene and meld together into the whole of the show. This is going to be a great example of true group effort, and I have high hopes for it.

There is an old saying that goes something like "Too many cooks in the kitchen make the soup turn sour". Well I say your soup can kiss my ass, ‘cause our soup is going to cure the common cold!

I may have fallen off a bit at the end there...