A guest blog entry from Itamar Moses, one of the writers of Nobody Loves You, about the secret blessings of only have 25 hours to put together your show for the Festival.
There's a possibly apocryphal story that I'm too lazy to verify right now about a Russian director who was asked how long he wanted to rehearse a production of Chekhov. He said, "Two years." When he was told that that was impossible he said, "In that case, two days."
Actors will often tell you that their best performance in rehearsal is at the first read-through and that they spend the remainder of the rehearsal process gradually working their way back there, hopefully arriving by opening night.
All this came to mind when I sat down to write a blog post on the subject of presenting a musical with only a few days to rehearse, which is what you have to do when your lucky enough to have your musical in NAMT. Because having only twenty-some-odd hours of rehearsal is, in a way, not as big a burden as one might imagine. There's a spontaneity, an instinctive tendency towards surprising and daring choices, to which performers often have access early in a process that actually becomes more difficult (for a while) as those initial impulses are gradually complicated by the questions and alternatives that inevitably arise when you start to live with material for weeks or months instead of days. And while all of that exploration leads (ideally) to deeper and more nuanced performances on the other side, there's a long slog through the desert of murky confusion in between in the midst of which it's probably best not to make an audience sit through what you've got. That's why the (possibly fictional) Russian director's second choice after having all the time in the world was to have almost no time at all.
All of which is to say that there's something clarifying, simplifying, even useful, about having just enough time
