Working on Hairspray has been a journey. Rehearsals have been in progress for 9 weeks. Part of me can’t believe where time has gone. It hasn’t quite hit me that we are in our final weeks of building, running, and cleaning. Yet, another part of me can’t believe how much my team and I have accomplished in this time. How many inevitable scrambles and mishaps and question marks we have encountered and approached and somehow managed to handle. I am so grateful for them.
This whole process sort of doesn’t feel real, but at the same time, I can feel the toll it has taken on my body and mind. Sleep has never sounded so good. I have yoga passes on yoga passes and haven’t made it to one class since rehearsals began because how could I get up and, I don’t know, relax, when I could lay in bed for an extra 2 hours in the morning instead? No late night study sessions or paper cramming could prepare me for the kind of constant mind churning and physical impact that I’ve experienced these past few months. Of course, I am so, so grateful to be learning every day with such amazing people in Muir Musical and to have endless cups of coffee and bagels with nutritional yeast and vegan butter to make the work process easier. It’s the little things. Plus, it is so special to be pouring my heart into something to the point where I can feel its effect everywhere I go.
One part of my work ethic that has been interesting to confront is the way that I make progress in the rehearsal room. I have always been a perfectionist, in my school and friendships and plans for the future and everything in between. For most of my life, classes and grades came before everything else. I used to regularly study until 2 AM on exam nights, wake up at 4:30, then review my material until I left for school at 7. I think about that now and can’t believe I put my body through that. The bottom line is, I had an absurd ability to put everything on hold in order to hyper-focus on what I wanted to accomplish at any given time. Now, it’s not so easy.
Maybe it’s because my objectives were so much more simple back then—get good grades so I can go to good college so I can be set up to have a good life—that the work I put in, no matter how physically taxing, always had an immediate outcome that reinforced what I was doing. This musical, however, has been such a different journey. My efforts do not always (usually don’t) have an immediate, tangible outcome. This has been particularly difficult to come to terms with because:
a) I’m a perfectionist
b) The kind of work I’m used to is a little more flowy flowy for lack of a better, more sophisticated term
c) I’m working with these amazing collaborators who have amazing skills including efficiency, which I have been learning I somehow lack on a very explicit level in the rehearsal room
Something that I’m realizing I’m still getting a hang of is balance. Maybe, I could have been more efficient and taught faster and built stronger if I had come in with a game plan every day that was 10 times more detailed than what I actually had. Some days I had entire numbers in mind. Most days I was counting my blessings for having my amazing choreographer by my side who could translate my visions into actual movements and command the room with a level of grace and power that I can only wish to develop. Truthfully, I have been juggling a lot that has made pure rehearsal preparation difficult. Beyond directing the musical, I serve as Artistic Director for the organization, and the producing work that I often find myself involved in is equally taxing (and rewarding). There’s also an honors thesis in the works, other student organization responsibilities, and that whole commitment to being a full time student. Part of me wishes I could have had the capacity to come to every rehearsal with hours and hours of preparation that I simply did not always have. But, I’m realizing that the work I am putting into this musical—contributing to a cast culture, making an effort to listen and show my respect and admiration for those around me, filling my Google Calendar with production and design and collaboration meetings—simply is less objective than what I have been used to for so much of my life. There is no real way to make a check box of “to-do’s” and “to-prepare’s” for this kind of process. It’s more like showing up every single day, regardless of what has happened throughout the day, powering through, and working to create something beautiful.
This has been a lot of rambling and gushy reflections to get to one ridiculously simple but exciting discovery that I made in rehearsal today. Throughout this whole process, I have been obsessed with anything on stage that has wheels. I have watched every musical number in Smash, picked apart dozens and dozens of musical numbers that I know are effective but I don’t know how exactly, and spent too much time on Pinterest looking up things that roll and that could presumably belong in any given location of Hairspray in 1960s Baltimore.
Now, there are a lot of numbers where things with wheels come on and off stage. Throughout rehearsals, these items are generally mimed. Tonight, my team dug up some costume racks from storage and hauled them up to the rehearsal room for our first full run through. Choreography with costume racks has been something that clearly existed but did not fully click for me until I saw them utilized in musical numbers tonight. It made a world’s difference. Seeing the pieces spin and glide across the stage was magical. I felt the show come together in a way that I hadn’t seen before. Two little costume racks.
Throughout this process, I have been reminding my actors that our work is like creating a 7 layer dip. This is something I shamelessly borrowed from Jen Chang, Head of Undergraduate Acting at UCSD and somebody that has taught me so much about theatre and directing. She would use the analogy of creating a 7 layer dip to get the basics down during rehearsal, reassure the room that we had not yet created the final product, and then add layers and layers to this foundation. I have said this over and over, but I’m not sure if I fully believed that I even had the ingredients to begin making the dip. Tonight, I realized that we have had them all along. We are building something. It’s not done, but I think if my team and I truly believed our work was done a month early, we would be in trouble. There is plenty of work ahead of us, but I am so excited about what’s to come and the ways that my cast, team, and I will grow through these next few weeks!