Up on Its Feet: Week One of Bohème
The singers arrived this week, which means we are officially in rehearsal.
We started Monday with a music sing-through with the principals. After spending prep week looking at the score, talking through the production, and getting everything ready for rehearsal, it was so great to finally hear the piece sung through. Boheme is one of those pieces that as you return to it time and time again, you find new details.
That evening, we went straight into staging the Act Two chorus.
It’s a slightly unusual way to start. Most of the time, you begin with the principals and work your way out toward the larger scenes. This time, we started by putting the Latin Quarter together with the chorus before most of the principals were added.
Act Two is busy. There are vendors, children, soldiers, café patrons, people coming and going, and a lot of individual activity that has to somehow read as one big crowd. So much of the work is simply figuring out who everyone is and giving them something specific to do. Where are they coming from? Where are they headed? Who do they know? Why did they stop? Once all of that is in place, the principals can enter a scene that already feels populated rather than having the crowd built around them later.
We also have a few singers arriving later in the process, which has meant that I’ve spent part of the week walking roles. Not singing them, thankfully. I stand in for whoever is missing, make their entrances, take their props, and walk their blocking so the other singers have someone to work with.
I actually really enjoy doing it. For one thing, it gets me out of my chair. But it’s also useful to physically walk through staging instead of just watching it and writing it down. Something that makes perfect sense from across the room can feel very different once you’re the person who has to get from one side of the stage to the other in eight bars while carrying a prop.
When I’m not walking a role, a lot of my job as assistant director is recording the production in my score. Entrances, exits, crosses, props, chairs, coats, glasses — basically anything that happens onstage needs to make its way onto the page. The goal is that by the end of the process, the production has been documented well enough that we can come back to it later and reconstruct what we did.
Today puts us one week away from our room run, the last rehearsal in the studio before we move into the Kauffman Center. It will be the first time we run the whole opera from beginning to end without stopping, and it’s usually the point in the process when you get a much clearer sense of what you actually have.
There’s plenty to do between now and then, but we’re in good shape and moving quickly.
We open September 19 at the Kauffman Center. You can learn more about the production and purchase tickets here.
