So far.... (from auditions to being off-book)

The rehearsal process so far has been incredibly productive! Our cast and crew is a fantastically diverse group, including freshman to super seniors, art majors to engineering majors, and a bit of everything in between.

We’ve now reached the point where the performers have to be off-book (memorized!), and are officially on schedule (and quite probably ahead of schedule.) After an incredibly productive work-through of the Act One with great line work and reasonable blocking, the cast was dismissed early – a great excuse for the production team to get a head start on work at Ally Cat (the 24hr coffee shop and unofficial post-rehearsal hang out.)

I was excited to be Stage Managing for Dustin before I learned anything about the show. The script alone has a slew of intense messages about life, personal relationships, and humanity. All of the design elements so far are pointing in the right direction to exemplify the meaning that Martin Sherman set up. The girls of the design team (+Dustin) are already deep in the design process and have been working solo, with Dustin, and with design mentors (thanks, Jesse!) to get their stuff off the ground. We also have some awesome support (Cory!) to help us move BENT into the Studio Theatre space.

Cast-wise, the script calls for all-males – a unique set up that you don’t see as much in educational theatre. Our cast of BENT does have one female: Alex plays GRETA, a drag queen who runs a gay club in Berlin. She will be absolutely phenomenal in the role, and I’m excited to see her show off her beautiful singing voice and knack for awesome make-up designs. I have a lot of faith in each of our cast members, because already we’ve started to see what they can do. Dustin was right: auditions are absolutely useless for determining the abilities of an actor! The first few rehearsals showed me that the freshmen and seniors alike in this cast have enough talent to pull this off.

Successfully producing this show will, of course, be a major challenge. Each scene possesses complicated emotions for multiple characters and relies heavily on the relationships that they have. Luckily, there’s a reason Dustin chose a directing concentration for his senior thesis! These relationships really started to establish themselves once Dustin broke the ice between the cast members (with a few rousing improv and concentration games) and we could finally make jokes and poke fun at each other.

Thanks for a great rehearsal tonight, boys-and-Alex, and here’s to another awesome evening of being off-book tomorrow night (or tonight, if you want to be technical about a.m. hour that this is being posted)!