For some reason, whenever our normal show boss leaves town to work on the tour for any length of time, obstacles take root and start to grow around our ad interim boss. Our second is phenomenal and as usual, and her solutions cut the fizz out of the shook soda can. So she sequestered my new adorable hero in a separate rehearsal with a stage manager and acting coach to just run lines.
The near quarantine situation gave her incentive to step up her game. Maybe she realized the high par for this show and understood the height of the stakes. Because that night after rehearsal, she took her exhausted self home and began the arduous process of committing to those words on the pages of the script.
The interesting part is that memorization for her required that she write things down. The transferrence works better for her from the page to her head when she does so. By the time she was done with her homework that late night, she'd written down half the script. The next day, she came into rehearsal clued in and ready, acting feet constantly shifting weight to better box down the opponent, which at this point was time (with a week back home coming up, she had only two weeks of rehearsal total before her first performance).
And today she showed that she'd risen to the occasion, like a champ. I now have a sneak preview of how she surfaced the muck of drugs and career drama to look and sing the way she does.
She still has a moment or two she will never live down. My favorite: When Ceelie crosses toward Harrpo's house and Soffia comes on stage to deliver the most famous line in the entire story (play, movie and book), my girl entered and said with conviction, "Why you tell Busta to beat me?"
We had to stop and laugh with her; she was certainly not above laughing at herself. One of the actors asked her if she calls the wrong man's name out in the bed. This, along with the resulting laughter, derailed the rehearsal for a good five minutes.
It's all funny and forgiveable now though because we're out of the woods, thank God. And I still want to grab her up and take her with me.
Lift
This time I had a justifiable reason to walk over to her and grab her and take her with me. Nobody in stage management had figured out how to get her to do the big lift with Harrpo in his duet with Sofiea. As cooperative as she is, she's been tentative about this particular moment (our last Sofiea was too). I decided to have a shot at it.
Now I'm not completely crazy. I know that she is notorious for cursing folks out. I understood that to do what I was about to do meant risking theater-wide embarrassment since the elite choice of base words she'd use to annihilate me for having the nerve to think we were familiar could turn into a legendary anecdote. But at this point, I was so in love with all that hair and the body beneath it that I was fine with a good whatfor. Curse me out baby. If she added a pitch during the experience I'd blog about how she was in good voice that day.
But having developed enough rapport, I thought I could get away with it. On the next break, I asked if she had a minute.
"Sure."
"Okay are you ready?"
She smiled the broad trademark smile.
In less time than it took her to process it, I wrapped her small waist and picked her up. With instinct, she wrapped her legs around my body.
"Done this before huh?"
"Well, not with you but yeah I've done this before," she flirted. Then, "This isn't so scary, maybe - you know I could do this."
By this time the stage manager had made it over and realized the plan.
"You think you may want to try it with Harrpo?" she asked.
"Yeah. I don't know if HE's ready."
We'll soon see...
