My Candle Burns At Both Ends....

I feel somewhat like the poor, deflated Santa in this picture, about the holidays, about my work, about my being so far from home.

The construction is still going on in front of my house, which is the first thing that puts me off every morning when I wake up with a headache from the jackhammers thumping and the concrete breaking. The other night I came home and they had completely blocked off all access to our house from every street. I parked in the middle of the street on the other side of the "caution" tape and lugged my bags over someone else's yard to my apartment. My landlord was home and excited to see me. "I was waiting for someone to come home so we could move our cars together." She led me out the door and I followed her in my car around the block to the caution tape blocking off our side street. She pulled over, got out of her car, walked over to the caution tape in her suit and tennis shoes, pulled scissors out of nowhere, and cut through the tape. We drove on through and parked along the side of my house. We weren't in the way of any of the work, and I delighted in the rule breaking! It felt a little like high school all of a sudden.

The construction is not the half of it, however. We started rehearsals on Tuesday for "La Fille Du Regiment," a Donizetti comic opera about a French girl during Napolean's campaign in 1805 who was raised by a regiment of soldiers and then, being found by her aunt, is taken into a rich home to be domesticated. I don't particularly care for the opera. I think it's a bit trite and sing-songy. There's one aria, "A Mes Amis," sung by the tenor, which is beautiful (mostly because of all the impossibly high notes he sings and holds), but everything else seems rather dull.

We have a great cast, and Dorothy Danner, our director, is an absolute delight, but the schedule (once again) is a nightmare. Despite being unencumbered by hurricane madness, we are trying to cram the entire opera into ten days of rehearsal before the Christmas break begins. I'm not sure how this is going to happen, though we've been plowing along rather nicely with several exhausting three session days. Opera rehearsals are generally done in blocks of three hour rehearsals, twice a day. According to contract, singers can only rehearse six hours a day, so this schedule allows any one singer to be at the entire day's worth of rehearsals. A three session day makes scheduling tricky because you have to make sure you are staggering scenes in such a way that every singer only works six hours. This comes down to some massive logistical juggling for Sherrie Dee and I, which puts a damper on the rehearsal process a bit.

The other thing about this show that's difficult is that there are huge chunks of dialogue. There are a lot of operas out there with dialogue (Die Fledermaus, Carmen, Magic Flute, etc) but this one just seems to have so much, and it's all done in French. Most of our singers are pretty good with their french, but a couple have been sweating bullets over these dialogue scenes. I'm proud of them as I listen to them rattle off in one of my favorite languages - especially when I see them going over the scripts with tension crawling all over their foreheads. We have a dialogue coach, Sandryne, who is really sweet and patient with them, so I'm sure that helps.

Anyway . . . we're working for ten days straight to get this show on its feet. I get a break, finally, on Thursday. It can't come fast enough for me. John is coming in from San Diego on Tuesday. Rehearsals will go faster when he is around to curl up with afterwards!