Monday, April 28, 2003

Felt a bit better this morning after a good night's sleep, but still not really up to eating much. Spoke to my brother and his wife in England and caught up on some of the news, then went for lunch with Jenny and made myself eat something, which was fine.

Met Joe and we went into the rehearsal department so we could do some work. As I had a run through of the opera in the evening we just did some gentle exercises to warm up the muscles.

We drove home to pick up Brian and more car trouble reared its ugly head. The car was over heating but we made it home before anything too terrible happened, I hope, but then had the problem of getting back to the theater for the evening rehearsal. As we were about to call a cab one of our neighbors, Rachel, arrived home from work and offered to take us in, which really saved our lives, especially as there had been an accident on the highway and she had to take a back way that a taxi would probably have not known. Arrived in time to have a drink before getting into costume. It had been a few weeks since I had the fittings and it was all now finished and looked great and felt very comfortable. I was the only one in costume but was happy I had an extra chance to get used to it.

As this was the only rehearsal with the orchestra before the dress rehearsal so we didn't rehearse the dialogue until the end of the rehearsal and just sang through the musical numbers. It always takes a little while to get used to singing in a new theater and we discussed with each other how we all felt about it and the general feeling was that after a few minutes it was fine.

We had no set, but just stood in more or less the right place and concentrated on the conductor to make sure everything is together musically. This was a rehearsal in which the conductor makes the decisions as to what we do, and piano rehearsals are the domain of the director.

At the end of it all I was exhausted, having not really eaten much for almost 5 days, so Doris, one of the artist's aides very kindly drove us home and we got a bit to eat before a little TV and a very welcome bed.