Day Three

...and the first performance.
I got the morning off to chill, though this was hard to do considering the fact i knew so much still had to be done. As a natural early riser, these extra hours of chilling meant to me extra hours of standing around and worrying.
Arriving at the school a mere half an hour before the first performance, I realised that an accessory for a costume I was wearing...was unsuitable...in more ways than one. It is a lady's belt (don't ask) and when I clip it on, the excess belt that remains tends to flop down into a rather inappropriate place in a resemblance that would perhaps cause a titter or two. Two minutes before I was on stage, I was desperately hacking off the belt I did not need to avoid this happening.
The first performance was for tweedmouth chav school, so this, in effect, was just a rehearsal for a difficult audience. We missed a few cues but we managed to cover up for eachother. SOmeone spilled a prop over the stage (water resembling a potion) and then had to collapse over the same place, effectively soaking his groin area. And the make up girls had put FAR too much deep red lip gloss on the female lead...hence my kiss with her lead to a bit of a smear on my face.
It went quite well, actually. Not well enough to give us confidence for the next perfromance, but well enough that we weren't kicking ourselves.
The evening performance started off well. The first musical number is fast paced with a lot of cues to fit in around the music. So the instrumental is vital for us to say our lines. Just 20 seconds into the routine, the musical director manages to knock her keyboard 'off' switch. This, as the rest of the band were meant to follow her, led to chaos...then silence. We kept going on stage, but there was not much we could do lines wise so just had to continue dashing about doing spaceship things. Turning her keyboard back on, the musical director went to hit the volume dial...only to use the wrong one and make it sound awful. This put her into a panic and this convinced us that she started mindlessly hitting keys afterwards just to make some sounds. It was a disaster...but I don't think the audience noticed however. It was a marvel. The musical director was obviously having a bad night. There was barely one song she didn't muck up. At one point, she was so engrossed in the action of the play that she missed her cue. WHile we all stared at her waiting for the music to start, it took her a further few seconds to change her dreamy expression to a d'oh expression and start playing.
Remarkably, the audience adored it. We got heaps of cheers, applause and laughs and awwws came in the right places.
By the end of it though, we were all in more states of nerves than when it began!