Long days

It's been another incredibly long, but highly productive day which started and finished with string sectionals with members of the Brass orchestra, and found me flitting about from rehearsal to rehearsal in the middle. At some point in all of that I managed to write underscore and scene change music for the whole of act one. It was mostly a case of copy and pasting, but I still had to engage my brain, which isn't working too well at the moment.

I think we're all getting tired as we push into our final week of rehearsals. I watched one of the cast reaching saturation point in a rehearsal today. Poor lad simply stopped processing information without realising he was no longer functioning!

The highlight of the day was the first little sing-along with the cast and band. We did Barnbow Lassies and When You're a Pal, and everyone went bananas. It's amazing how exciting it can be to hear an orchestra playing a song you've only ever heard with a piano. The cast whooped and cheered and I felt terribly proud... again. I'm doing a lot of that at the moment. It must be my age!

The other highlight of the day was watching young Alex Cardell, who plays Wilfred (a character based on my Great Great uncle from Coventry) taking delivery of the vintage 1930s drum kit he gets to play in the opening sequence of the show. His enthusiasm for the instrument made our decision to find the oldest drum kit we could find absolutely worthwhile. We had a fabulous rehearsal, where we worked our way through the overture and Prologue and Alex proved himself to be a pretty decent  comic actor as well as a flippin' remarkable drummer.

There's not much else to write as I can feel my eyelids slowly closing. But if you're reading this, and you can get to Leeds to see the show, please, please do. It deserves to be seen by the world!