Getting Preppy: The Start of the Process

I spent this week in Kansas City doing the part of the job nobody puts in the program: prep week.

Prep week is a particularly important part of the early rehearsal process in opera. Before the singers arrive and rehearsals officially begin, it gives the assistant directors, stage management, costumes, props, scenic, music staff, and everyone else involved in the production time to make sure we’re all talking about the same show.

Of course, the production hasn’t actually started this week. Garnett Bruce, who’s directing this La Bohème, has already been working with the company and designers, and the company itself has been planning for it long before I showed up in Kansas City. Depending on the opera, that process can begin years before the first rehearsal. Prep week is just the point where those plans start becoming very practical for those of us who are going to be in the rehearsal room every day.

This Bohème is a revival of a production Lyric Opera of Kansas City last did in 2019. We’re using the company’s scenery, and the costumes are rented from Seattle Opera. So part of the job this week has been going through what already exists and figuring out what we need to know about it before we start putting people onstage.

For me, that mostly means the score.

I’ve gone through mine a few times now, first getting Bohème back into my head and then getting increasingly specific about what actually happens onstage. Who enters where. Who needs what prop. What has to move and when. Where the set gives us options and where it doesn’t. There are tabs everywhere, several different kinds of pencil, and enough highlighters on my desk to suggest that I have very strong opinions about highlighters.

I always forget how much stationery is involved in making opera.

There’s also a lot of paperwork. I’ve been building scene breakdowns and blocking pages, tracking entrances and exits, props and furniture, and generally trying to organize the information I’m going to want at my fingertips once we’re rehearsing. A lot of prep is simply trying to answer a question now rather than spending rehearsal time answering it later.

Meanwhile, stage management has been doing all of that while also dealing with chorus music rehearsals and fittings for the chorus and supernumeraries. Since the costumes are rented, there are racks of clothes made for the people who wore them in another production that now have to work for the people wearing them here. Costumes has been fitting, pinning, altering, swapping things around, and keeping track of all of it.

There have also been meetings. Lots of meetings. Production meetings, department conversations, questions about props and scenery and costumes, and plenty of things that seem incredibly important for fifteen minutes and, once solved, will hopefully never be thought about again.

That’s really the purpose of the week. Not to make the production before rehearsals start, but to get enough of the practical work out of the way that we don’t have to spend the first rehearsal figuring out where a chair starts or whether somebody has the right coat.

Because those aren’t really the questions I’m interested in.

I’m much more interested in how cold that garret actually feels to the four of them. How long we can let the boys be ridiculous. What changes when Mimì walks through the door. And, eventually, what it costs her to climb those stairs in Act Four.

Those are questions we need the singers for and they arrive next week.

We open September 19 at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City.