Romeo and Juliet - Rehearsal 20

Before our run of act 3 today, we worked a bit on 5.1.  In one of the last opportunities I have, I wanted to make sure that this moment with Romeo was just right.  It also gave me a chance to work a bit with Brian on his Apothecary, though, to tell truth, it didn't need much work.  We focused in a bit on Romeo's "Then I deny you stars" moment.  It's such a weird flip in the script that it was coming off sounding to big for the moment.  It's not, of course, but the trick here was to up the moments after the line rather than worrying about what came before it.  It worked like a charm.  Now the moment doesn't seem so out of place with the following moments rising to meet it.  We also did some detail work with Romeo (Johnny) and the Apothecary.  I only today realized, by the way, that Romeo has a knife on him when he's attempting to come up with a solution for killing himself.  Strange, right?  Johnny made the excellent point that because he's desperate and a little out of his head, the obvious solution is not the one he thinks of; it's the most obscure.  We also did a little work with Brian to flesh out the Apothecary just a little.  And, on Katie's (my a.d.) suggestion, we now have Brian going back into his house to get the poison rather than having it on him.  It's a small change, but it also says that the Apothecary doesn't just carry illegal poisons on him all the time.  All in all, nice work.

Next, a run of act three.  I would have loved to run more of the show in the space this evening, but 4 out of my eleven cast members have class on Tuesday evenings.  This means we didn't even start the run of the act until 9:15pm.  A little late to run more than one act. However, I got even greater confidence in my cast from this small run.  They jumped into the middle of the play brilliantly; didn't even miss a beat.  I realize only now that making them do the middle of the play without the beginning is a little odd and rather difficult, but we needed to run something, and this is the part of the play that (previously) had needed the most work.  With the run on Monday and this run tonight, however, this part of the play is humming along.  We ran it in under half an hour today, which is dead on for timing and it looked good!