Get Out Your Tap Shoes, Frances

Halfway through 42nd Street, the show, once in peril of closing, is saved - they decide to take to the road and try it out in other cities before hitting New York. The chorus girls are no longer unemployed, joy breaks out, and Chorus Girl #4 yells "Get out your tap shoes, Frances!"
And so it begins.
Although I did not pack up a bird cage and a hat box while singing "Getting out of town! hachachachaaa!" I have, in fact, gotten out of town. The day after we finished scraping all the leftover carpet tape goo off the cement flooring of the Atlantic Stage 2, I dragged my incredibly nervous and grumpy (seriously - that carpet tape was a pain in the ass. thank you, ptp) self down to an opencall audition I saw in Backstage (sort of like a job listing magazine for theatre/film etc). Three rounds of callbacks and five monologues later, I was a member of "America's premier educational theatre company" (their words, obvi.)

I had a week to pack up my life before heading to Boston for rehearsals. Now, I love clothes. I have a lot of clothes. I love shoes. I have a lot of shoes. I bid most of them a fond farewell - seriously, I only have one pair of heels on me. ONE. But I have a pretty rockin' giant old man tweed suitcase/garment bag, pluss a rolly strawberry printed Betsey Johnson duffel. You know, when life gives you lemons, buy new luggage.

The show: five dramatic adaptations of short stories (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Necklace, The Monkey's Paw, and The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County) all done in 1 hour and 45 minutes, in theatres that can seat from 1000 to 4000 kids. Yeah. Much, much bigger than the lovely little black box of the Hepburn Zoo.

There are three different tours of the same shows - each has 2 actresses, 3 actors, and 3 techies. We all rehearse in Boston for a month, then head out on our separate loops. My tour is in what I am thinking of fondly as America's heartland - Illionis, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland...Kalamazoo and Saginaw, here I come!

Now, unfortunately, the West Coast tour - (glamorous California, lucky ducks) lost an actor due to illness and replaced him with one of ours! (in all fairness, they do leave earlier) So we're a man down. We will be getting a new one on Wednesday, but it means that we're really behind on the blocking, AND we may have to reshuffle the casting, so everything's really up in the air until we do a read-off for the producer on Monday. This means that if i DON'T do well enough, they will take me out of the part I already learned the blocking for (and which I have since become somewhat emotionally attached to) and replace me with the other girl. Obviously, this is extremely anxiety-producing. Especially because there's a mean little voice in my head that keeps saying that if I had been doing the part better, I wouldn't have to read-off for it, even though I know it mostly has to do with the new guy moving people around. Hopefully all will go well, but I don't want to go into too much detail on the show until casting is finalized. Hopefully they won't fire me altogether, or this would be the shortest, saddest little blog ever.
Regardless - the show will go on.