Made In China: The Saga Continues

Nicky Weinbach continues his push towards opening

Since my last entry, the Made in China cast and I have made quite a bit of progress with rehearsals. We’ve learned a good bit of new choreography from our choreographer, Alexandra Daily, and have blocked out a great portion of the play under the guidance of our director, Nick Dickson. Choreography is a hard thing to do with books in hand, so I’ve tried my best to prepare the actors musically such that they can easily memorize the music and lyrics on their own. It’s already hard enough to really get normal blocking going when actors aren’t yet off book, but attempting to do choreography with book in hand is pretty impossible. Luckily, the actors are inching their way closer and closer to memorizing a couple of songs each week, but it definitely is funny to hear them mumble the lyrics when they don’t know them completely well enough. At least, they’re pretty familiar with the music at this point. I meet with each cast member once every week to two weeks for about an hour and a half each session to work on the music. I don’t know if we’ll need to do that much longer, at least for a couple of the cast members. At this point, many of them might benefit the most from participating in group music rehearsals which we’ll start up next week. Overall, I think we’re in pretty good shape considering we still have two months to go before we open. I don’t want to get to confident because I know two months will pass pretty swiftly, but I have a pretty good feeling about all of this.

On the producer end of things, I’m pretty busy. I’m about to send out press releases for the show, tomorrow, I’m in the midst of setting up a Ticket Turtle account, and, every day, I’m having a discussion with someone else about how to approach building the set. We obviously want to take the most cost effective route, but, when you’re dealing with four to five doors, it’s pretty difficult. During Thanksgiving week, I took a trip down to Los Angeles (where I’m from), and I met up with a friend from college who’s quite the carpenter. He kind of sketched out the easiest way to have five doors onstage and still be able to change sets pretty quickly. It’s a little tricky designing a set when you have the placement of a pit orchestra involved, but my carpenter friend offered some great suggestions. He’s even going to help effectively design the set, which is also great. I’m looking forward to what he comes up with in the next couple of weeks.

By the way, check out the Word Press site for Made in China at http://madeinchinamusical.wordpress.com. This is not really a blog site for us but serves more as an actual website for the show. When you visit the website, you’ll be able to listen to music from the show, learn more about the play’s development, eventually purchase tickets (which go on sale Sunday, December 30, 2012), and just hang out, looking at pictures. Check it out when you get a chance.

Well, I think that’s about it for now. Everyone involved in this production is steadily pushing ahead, and I think we’re at a good place right now (I hope I’m not speaking too soon). Until next time!