Tuesday 26 February 2008

After Show, Aftermath

I'm slowly getting over the events of the past two week. Slowly. I spent last week in a trance as I was so run down from doing the show the week before and I still had a busy evening schedule. Nothing ever really changes. I was also in quite a bit of pain due to a mishap at the aftershow party so that was quite draining and depressing too. More on that later.

The rest of the show run carried on without any drama until the final day. It was Saturday, we had two shows to do that day and most of us singing solos were lsoing our voices. I wasnt too bad as I didn't have a big chuck of solo bits to sing and my throat was in not as bad a state as some other, but I was still extremely worried especially as my friends were all coming to the evening show to see me, including Kelly who was flying in from home that afternoon to see me. I got through the matinee (one of the othe cast member's songs had to be cut to save her voice for the later show), I sang my song and I managed to croak out something half respectable. A few people backstage told me it still sounded good so I felt a bit comforted by that.

Then came the evening show as it really was quite unbelieveable. I had such a good run up to then and felt I gave good performances, however everything seemed to go wrong in my scenes on that final show. Props didn't work so we had to improvise, doors wouldn't shut that needed to be shut, some old woman fell flat on her face during one of our song & dance numbers, I messed up my lines a bit at one moment and had to recover from that. I felt quite annoyed at myself for jumping to the next line and did feel like tearing up in the interval, but it's something to learn from. I must remember to forbid my friends with big booming laughs to laugh when I am onstage as this can be quite distracting! I guess it all had to go wrong for me in at least one show, it will be something I can look back on and laugh about. The important thing is that the audience, unless they'd been to a previous show, didn't notice the mishaps so we seemed to do a good job or working around them.

Like with my play in December, we had another all night aftershow party. Cheesy music, alcohol (cola for me) and outrageous dancing. It was there I did myself a mischief. If doing a backward bend and falling on my head wasn't enough I then threw myself into doing the splits, however as I was wearing no shoes this time, I slid down faster than expected and pulled a hamstring. The rest of the night was spent with me limping around in pain and the odd outburst of freaking out about what my personal trainer would say. By 5:30am the party had definitely died down into a group of drunk people just biding their time in the theatre until the tube opened and we could all go home. Yet, by the time us sober/semi-sober people tidied and cleaned the theatre and rounded up everyone else, it was 8am when we finally left. After making it home with Kelly I passed out on the sofabed and snoozed for a couple of hours before getting up again, determined not to waste the day.

I took Monday off as I was in no state to work and on Tuesday I made my way to my personal training session waiting for my punishment. Lots of upper body work and a good hamstring stretch-out and the advice "don't be the hero" followed. Luckily now my leg is feeling much better (although I won't officially recover for another fortnight) and I'm getting back into my training schedule. I need to make up time out of action last week and with no show to do now and more time on my hands it's going to get a lot tougher. Help!

Pics of the show will follow as will a lot on pondering on what to do now, what to read, what acting course to take, should I try creative writing etc. I'm on a roll and I want it to stay that way.

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