well, i made it to los angeles! or somewhere near it! mostly what i have seen is the inside of my hotel room and the inside of our rehearsal studio and (very briefly) the inside of a trader joe’s! i am told los angeles is somewhat nearby, though! i just couldn’t tell you for sure!
i have not stopped moving in days (and also kind of in weeks), so if you are wondering why i haven’t texted or called you lately, please accept my sincerest apologies and know that it’s not due to of lack of thought, but lack of time. i’m… not sure when that will get easier. i’m working 12 hour days and i’m not even in tech yet!
the good news is i’m feeling unbelievably grateful to be working on this show with these people. (see more under “making.”) just trying to soak it all up and do the best job i possibly can and also remember to feed myself and sleep. will keep you posted on how it’s all going as best i can.
reading.
my incredible friend emily wrote for defector about iconically being the final person to finish the berlin inline skating marathon this year. i’m obsessed with her.
at some point i will actually read intermezzo and not just writing about intermezzo.
paola bennet on the parent trap.
some anecdotes from some of the many actors and artists who have worked on fiddler on the roof over the years.
one of my favorite substackers writes about love.
i love this tweet and i pull it up every time i’m being productive.
seeing.
love is blind, season 8! can’t keep me away from this garbage show, baby!
did we all remember that bradley whitford played carmen’s dad in the sisterhood of the traveling pants?
how many times can a girl watch fiddler on the roof in japanese? i must hold the record. (it’s the closest thing we have to an easily accessible video of the original robbins staging.)
hearing.
making.
rehearsals have officially begun for fiddler on the roof starring jason alexander, directed by lonny price (and associate directed by me!). as previously mentioned, it has been absolutely full on. i do not know how anyone else on this show is completing their basic life tasks. i’m writing this as i eat a microwave dinner at 9pm pst and try to respond to texts from friends who are now asleep.
day 0. did a ton of pre-pro in the morning, filling my script with blocking diagrams and post-it notes. i have so many documents to cross reference for this show. trying to distill my system while still being thorough. met up with lonny (director) and jordan (assistant director) and headed over to check out the rehearsal space. our stage management team (john, lisa, and kathryn) had set it up beautifully, and were able to warn us about some of the quirks of the space (2 single-stall bathrooms for our team of 40+ people, no air conditioning in several studios). it really is something to see a space set up for this many people! and it’s one of the great gifts of alternating associate roles on big-budget projects with my indie theater shows to feel fresh gratitude every time i arrive to a rehearsal space that’s already been lovingly set up to begin work. after seeing the space, lonny and jordan and i did a big trader joe’s run to set ourselves up with food for the week ahead. i also bought myself a little plant to make my hotel room feel more like home.
day 1. meet and greet! god, this show is huge. we have 31 people onstage, and so many more off. got a tiny bit of the scoop on the unique position of the la mirada theatre for the performing arts, where we’ll be presenting fiddler. basically, it’s the only theatre in the country that’s fully funded and operated by a municipality. it’s like we’re in europe! (not really, but still.) we taught music before lunch, then read and sang through the show after lunch. material just doesn’t get better than this. i cried at “sunrise, sunset” and “do you love me?” like a sap. somehow an exhausting day, even though most of what the directing team did was listen. i made personal contact with as many people as i could, but didn’t get to everyone. in the evening, after weeks (months?!) of hard work, i got to share my dramaturgy packet with the cast. if you’re curious… (it still feels far from complete to me, but i’m glad i at least have this much to share with the team.)
day 2. today was utterly wild. the morning was an utter dream and the afternoon was a little bit of my own personal nightmare (but it will be fixed!). before lunch, the choreo team started staging “tradition,” while lonny and i took jason into another studio to work on “if i were a rich man.” truly: jason doing this song is worth the price of admission. i was actively trying not to pinch myself. watching lonny and jason work together, crafting bits, refining staging, tweaking jokes, is like the greatest musical theater master class of all time. i felt so unbelievably lucky to be in that room. and then, once the staging was sketched in, lonny and jason gabbed — and i got to hear some truly incredible showbiz stories. most of them, i can’t share… but one of my favorites was that during rehearsals for jerome robbins’ broadway, one of the bottle dancers in the fiddler sequence asked robbins a question.
bottle dancer: what’s in the bottles to keep them from falling off our heads?
robbins: a pink slip.
in the afternoon, we started staging “to life” and found that there were some discrepancies between our groundplan and our model photos, which meant we had less space than we needed onstage. did some quick on-my-feet problem solving for a band-aid fix and dedicated myself to detective work for a while, trying to figure out where communication had broken down. nothing like trying to figure out why you’re missing four feet of stage depth as a cast of 31 stands around watching you! stayed late after rehearsal to redo the act 1 scenic model photos so that they were as up to date as possible.
day 3. another wild day. came in and immediately realized i couldn’t redo the model act 2 scenic model photos because i needed to prep a totally different space for one of the scenes we were blocking today. the scenes where the family is preparing for the sabbath have a truly bananas amount of props, and i am in charge of wrangling them all and figuring out who touches what at what point in the scene (and how it all gets on and offstage). luckily, we have a truly incredible props designer in kevin williams, who has responded at lightning speed to all of my questions and curiosities. lonny staged “now i have everything” and the scene that leads up to it, and we got to do some excellent table work with our hodel and perchik. (it was so nice to see that my dramaturgy packet had been helpful to the actors!) we also worked on “do you love me?” with jason and valerie (our golde). if that song makes me this emotional at my age, i can’t imagine what it will do to me when i’m the same age as the characters. then lonny and i slipped back into the main space to look at choreography for the nightmare sequence. afterwards, we reviewed “to life.”
me: you’re all very lucky i’m not playing lazar.
jason: i’d like to see your lazar. i think we could all learn something.
i managed to slip outside for 20 minutes during lunch to walk around “the block.” (la mirada is the polar opposite of a walkable neighborhood. i did a huge loop through various parking lots and trucking pathways.) after lunch, lonny had me steer communicating the staging of act 1, scene 1 — the first scene that takes place inside tevye’s home, while the women are preparing for the sabbath. felt really good to be trusted to do it, and i hope i communicated clearly enough. (again, it’s a million props.) lonny had the cast listen to “we’ve never missed a sabbath yet,” a cut song that became a book scene, and it was so cool to see how the energy of that song had been transfused into the written dialogue. we moved from that scene right into “matchmaker,” and i ended up putting a lot of the staging that lonny had prepped onto the actors. we’re still missing a button for the number, but the chemistry between our sisters is so lovely that the whole song is a joy from start to finish. i stayed late again to try and prep for the next day’s staging, then went home and copied all the blocking changes we made today into my script.
outside of the world of fiddler, i got some scheduling updates on my next gig that will hopefully give me a second of breathing time between jobs. then i thought about how i don’t actually know what’s coming up next after my next job finishes in december. i should really be texting and emailing some directors i work with to see if they need an associate, but i’m going to need to muster some strength first.
