Code 5!

I’ve really got too much going on at the moment. I should be coming home from rehearsals and getting on with an ever-growing list of non-Brass-related things, but life keeps getting in the way.

On Monday night, I just wanted to spend a bit of time with Nathan, watching Strictly and catching up on Bake Off. I feel everyone’s entitled to a night like that sometimes. We ordered pizza and I slowly drifted into a coma, truly knackered after my weekend in Belgium.

Last night I went for dinner with Michael in Liverpool Street. We caught up on everything relating to the world of 100 Faces, and I realised, with great horror, how many terrible clashes I have coming up in the next month or so. You know what they say about busses? Well, it’s that and some!

Rehearsals for Brass are ticking along nicely. For shits and giggles, I did a run of the show on Monday morning. We haven’t done any blocking, really, or very much choreography, but I wanted to stand the show on its feet to see how everything felt. They’ve done all the character work now, so the opportunity to put everything into context turned out to be rewarding for everyone, including me. I, personally, was able to see the areas of the show where energy starts to sag, and therefore where we’re going to need to work that bit harder to keep the audience engaged.

Six of the roles in the show are double cast so that everyone gets a fair crack at the Bosch (to use an appropriate metaphor.) For some time they’ve known which dates “cast 1” and “cast 2” are performing, they just haven’t know who is in which cast, which means their family and potential agents can’t book tickets. I’ve been watching them over the last week to see where the chemistry sits and have spent a long time thinking about the combinations which would best allow individual actors to shine. I hope I’ve got it right. I think I have.

A double-cast show is incredibly tiring to rehearse. You crack it with one cast, and then the work starts all over again with the other, just as you let your guard down and start to think you’re motoring forward.

The commute to Peckham is pretty full-on, and involves quite a lot of rush hour shenanigans, including a change from underground to overground at a highly-crowded London Bridge, which is the part I hate. They’ve obviously updated the “Mr Sloane” language they use over the tannoys to describe suspicious packages, suspected fires and the like. This morning I heard talk of one “Norman Gates” reporting to such-and-such a location “urgently.” Until the word urgently was used, I didn’t think anything of it, but the announcer sealed the deal by calmly adding, “this is a code 5.” Hysterical. I wonder how serious code 5 actually is...