10pm –4pm with one burry eyed break around 230pm, we have found our cast. The bar was set very high early on, and we knew that ‘real good’ was now going to have to be ABSOLUTELY GREAT! That’s just what we’ve got.
Rehearsals begin, and the script is powerful!
New revised lead sheets are complete. Ayhan did a beautiful job! The musical finally has music! What more could we have asked for? Oh yes, a Musical Director…
After a list of 6 potential options grew into a list of those who were totally booked, just booked, available all week but not the day of the show, available for one of the two show’s, didn’t like to work late (wrong business), didn’t like the short time frame, into names of names of names of the same name, we ended up calling 32 people. Honest to Ubu, 32!!
Music rehearsals pushed back and back to the point of almost having to teach songs the day of the show!
As we didn’t want to let on that we were panicked, twitching in a notorious Kinko’s (sorry, we mean FedEx Office) copy line waiting for the music that, without a teacher, might as well still be in its reams, ‘assuming’ that something would happen soon, HAD to happen, because it’s Sunday for Pa’s sake, the voice on the other end of my cell produced such an adrenaline rush in me that 10 espressos seem like a (cliché) bullet scene from the Matrix. The voice simply said, “Yeah, let me see what you got”.
After only about an hour of nail biting, link sharing, schedule blocking and MP3 demo swapping, we found him. The lucky man, whose 29 hours of free time would make or break the possibility of rehearsals going past one day (very Ubu, if our show closes before it opens), is the talented and highly accomplished Robert Grusecki.
We met today at Ayhan's studio. Brantley, Tony, Ayhan, Robert, and the wonderful percussionist Bernice “Boom-Boom” Brooks, sat together for three solid hours and went over every note. “What’s your take? What’s the tempo again? Oh yes! Really? Perfect. One more time.” Morale has found another step up today. Though we are not skipping along, the weight has shifted and made the soles of our tired trucks feel less wear and tear. As the cast meets the dotted pages of scatological lyricism tomorrow, it seems that our UBU, trapped in our brains for so long, is truly is rumbling to life!
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