I can't blog...I have rehearsal

A friend of mine mentioned to me the other day, quite sarcastically, that he loves how often I update my blog. When I logged on this morning and saw that the last entry was in February, I was properly ashamed. Let's see if I can't get this thing back on track.

The last few months have been quite busy. I played Schroeder in You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown at Pull-Tight Theater in Franklin, TN and I am playing Charlie Davenport in Annie Get Your Gun at Towne Centre Theatre in Brentwood, TN. Incidentally, we open this Friday, June 6th so come on out and see the show!! (www.townecentretheatre.com for details)

Annie Get Your Gun is one of the classic Broadway musicals. All of the music is by the great Irving Berlin and the original show was produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The original production featured Ethel Merman in the title role and was followed by a film adaptation starring Betty Hutton (Judy Garland was slated to star and had begun filming before the personal problems that continually plagued her forced her out.), a revival once again starring Ethel Merman, a more recent revival starring, most notably, Bernadette Peters and then Reba McEntire.

It's this latest revival that we are doing at TCT. For this revival, the show was revised and restructured to be a show within a show. The audience is at Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show where we are telling the story of Annie Oakley and how she came to be a star of the Wild West Show and fall in love with Frank Butler.

Our cast and crew is in tech week at the moment, gearing up for opening night on Friday. Ah, tech week. That unforgiving, sleep depriving, punishing, yet ultimately rewarding and irrefutably essential monster week in the life of a show. Running the show every night, fine-tuning your character, putting those last polishing touches on dance numbers, developing and locking in to a backstage rhythm and routine that carries you through the run. It can be grueling and relentless, but it's worth it. It's worth the confidence that you feel when you step out on that stage opening night. It's worth that rush of adrenaline knowing that all the hard work comes to this - doing what you love, performing a fantastic show with people that you have come to love and cherish and doing it for an audience that has come to be entertained.