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Fringe 2010 Blog - 2Rehearsals and a wedding singer - Saturday, 10 July 2010It's a bit of a problem when an actor doesn't enjoy rehearsals. I mean, they're somewhat of an integral part of what it means to be an actor. You can't be one without the other. It's like having a footballer who doesn't like training or a politician who doesn't like spending public money on personal expenses. It's not that I don't enjoy rehearsals, it's just that I tire of them rather quickly. I just want to get on with it and get on stage in front of an audience and discover things there and then. I begin to long for the reaction of a fresh audience every time I run the play. For one thing they don't give you notes afterwards... Having said that, these rehearsals were great. To start with, I could walk to and from home every day. This was quite pleasant at first, but became increasingly annoying as the weeks wore on. However, we'll count it as a plus. Rehearsals were in West Hampstead, a lovely part of town. Our rehearsal room, whilst being hot and stuffy, came with a beautiful garden in which we could relax during our lunch breaks. The rehearsals themselves were also very easy going. I put this down to the working atmosphere created by the director Lotte, the assistant director Cecily and our movement director Angela. They worked swiftly, smoothly and calmly. Best of all, there was a great sense of exploration and honesty about the way they worked. For example, they'd pick up on things you'd do in rehearsal and build on it without trying to force their own preconceived 'vision' onto it. They quickly established an element of trust between the actors and the directors. That's a wonderful thing to have. It's such a relief to work with a director whom you trust implicitly. The play is under an hour long and the scenes are very short. It was easy to work through them. It was also lots of fun. All the actors know what they're doing and are excellent at what they do. The only downtime came whenever we'd present our research findings. At the beginning of rehearsals, everyone was given a topic related to the play to research. We then presented our findings to the group. These 'show and tell' sessions were invariably rather depressing, due only to the nature of the topic and the lack of things being done in relation to it. You see, the play is about sex trafficking. It is a huge business in the world. In fact, it is so huge, that it is the second largest business in terms of profits, beating the arms trade and second only to drugs. It is expanding at an alarming rate and is happening under our very noses. Literally thousands upon thousands of people are being sold illegally for whatever reason - servitude, prostitution etc. It is the 21st century's slave trade. Unfortunately, police resources and funding are woefully small and stretched and despite the best efforts and intentions, very little is being done about it. So not a comedy then, but still a play with laughs. Not wishing to have their audiences commit 'hari kiri' halfway through watching our show (a sure-fire way of losing an audience) the writers of the play wisely decided to inject as much humour as possible into the script. What? Humour? Jokes about sex trafficking? How can that be? Well it's not exactly Noises Off, but certainly humour can be found in the worst of things. Think of the film La Vita e Bella for instance. So yes, it deals with a very heavy subject matter, which it takes very seriously, but the presentation is rather user friendly. However, what could have been a very easy-going rehearsal period turned into a rather stress-filled one for me. The first couple of weeks were filled with personal problems related to my own production company, which I will not go into here. The final week of rehearsals was filled a different source of stress. It all began with a tantalisingly innocent text from a girl called Claire, whom I only recently got to know. It read, "Would you like to sing in a wedding band?" Well, yes! I pestered her for more details and soon found myself driving down to Hampshire for an audition. I say audition - it was more like a chat and a singalong. I had called up the band leader the day before and he had asked me a series of questions along the lines of "So can you carry a tune, sort of?" and "Do you enjoy dressing up and being silly?" Somehow I got the feeling I wasn't about to audition for Il Divo. Far from it. The set list consisted of songs like I'm a Believer, Sweet Caroline and (I Would Walk) 500 Miles. Popular, cheesy and lots of fun. I got the job and had to return for a rehearsal on Thursday. That gave me exactly two days to learn all the songs. There's a thing about song lyrics. You think you know them, but you don't really. Seriously, test yourself. Try singing Crocodile Rock. Go on. It's a very well known song. How about Johnny B Goode? Or Take On Me? On first instinct, you'd think "Yeah I know that, easy" but actually, you probably don't. Can you really sing the song alone - not singing along to the original single, or watching the words turn purple on a karaoke screen, but to a backing track for instance? No help from anyone but your own knowledge of the lyrics? It's much harder than you'd think. Especially when the lyrics make no sense, like in Take On Me. Look them up. If they make sense to you, please email me, because they don't make sense to me! It's as if they were written by a Norwegian (which they were). Wednesday was spent desperately trying to learn lyrics. Thursday night was the rehearsal. Whilst I knew the songs, the lyrics escaped me. I just didn't know them well enough. I needed to know them inside out. Saturday evening was my first gig. It was at a wedding. It was also my very fist time singing with the band. That's right, my one and only rehearsal was singing along to the accompaniment of a single acoustic guitar. As any singer will tell you, singing along to a full band is a completely different experience. I needed to know the songs pretty well to not screw this up royally. In short, I was bricking it. Thankfully, Saturday's Fair Trade rehearsal was mostly spent waiting for the set to be fixed and sorted out. That gave me plenty of time to learn the lyrics to Irish Rover (a song about an Irish ship that sailed in 1806 to New York carrying, of all things, 2 million barrels of stone). After rehearsals, I drove to Henley to meet the band for the first time. We were to play on a small stage under a marquee in someone's back garden. We quickly went through the set list. I had taken along a small folder with the lyrics printed in large font that I could place on the floor to read in case of emergency. It quickly became evident that it wouldn't work. I don't ever recall being so nervous before walking on stage. To make matters worse, just before we went on, someone in the band whispered to me that Will Young was one of the guests at the wedding. Even though I don't rate him to be the best singer in the world, he's still a better singer than me! It makes no sense I know, but hey, gimme a break! After the cutting of the cake and the newly weds' first dance came show time! The first number was I'm a Believer. As the drums kicked in, it took me a second to recover - they were so loud! The song sounded so different! I sang the first verse. My senses were reeling. So many new bits of information to take in. The music, the lyrics, the bouncing microphone... it was all a bit too much and I missed the second verse. I came back for the next chorus and held it till the end. No rest for the wicked, we launched into Crocodile Rock which in turn went straight into Great Balls of Fire. From then on in, I was OK, apart from a few issues with the microphone (the stage was bouncing up and down, causing the microphone to wobble all over the place and it kept hitting me in the face!) Once I'd warmed into it, it was great fun. Also being forced to remember the words really helped. I hardly ever stumbled on the lyrics (and made them up when I did!) Of course the band were extremely helpful, especially the other singer who kept mouthing 'verse' or 'chorus' whenever a song arrangement was different to the original. I drove home that night an exhausted but very happy and relieved guy. I had pulled it off and could now look forward to my part-time career as a wedding singer! |
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