A New Brain is killing me.
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We had a practice on Monday: where the replacement reed player sight read the music (poorly); the synth player quit, and the drum player never showed up.
We had our first run through with the cast on Tuesday: the reed player completely vanished, a new drum player showed up (and thank god, he could sight read); Brian the musical director played the synthesizer with one hand and conducted with the other.
On Wednesday, after fucking up all my cues on Tuesday and realised just how exposed my cello solos are, I burrowed Brian’s CD, made a copy, and spent all of the night practicing like mad.
Tonight was the dress rehearsal, and it actually went well from my point of view – caught all the entries correctly, and I made sense of the solos after much deliberation over fingering:
But it looks like for the entire run, it’ll just be me, the pianist, the drummer, and Brian playing half the synth part. No winds (there’s supposed to be clarinet, oboe, piccolo, and possibly a sax, all of which ostensibly are covered by a single reed player), no bass, and no french horn. Which is a pity, because the cast members are really quite good and they deserve better. I must say though that they don’t seem to project that well over the din of the piano, but noone has made much comment about that so we’ll see if the audience can hear them.
Lugging the damn cello to Berkeley and back all of these nights is damn near killing my shoulder.
Tomorrow is the opening night, with two more performances on Saturday and Sunday. We’ll see how it goes.
