First Read Through

Today marked the date of the first read through. I was really excited, and my entire cast was really excited. I have started getting all my ducks in a row on the tech side of things. With Ryan Settle as my Stage Manager, Chris Golightly as my costume designer, Patrice Nelms as my set designer, Katarina Licameli as my sound designer, and Scott Barnett as my light designer. I am so looking forward to working with my entire design team as well as my actors. The read through went so well. It reminded me of why I chose them all in the first place. Sitting around the coffee table in my apartment, they began to embody their characters, complete with Lydia hoarding the bowl of Halloween candy and munching away while she read her lines. There were lots of laughs and jokes that are already starting to form within the cast and they are easily working off each other. They were all able to make bold choices vocally and I can’t wait to see what they do once we start blocking and we get this up on its feet. Already from the first read through I can tell that this will be a great show. It also feels good that things behind the scenes are coming together. I have my proof for the poster; it has a hanger with the words Five Women Wearing the Same Dress in pink below it, designed to look like a dress with fading colors of pink. It is simple, classy, and we did not have to go through the hassle of a photo shoot and trying to get that all together. The ground plan for my set is complete so we will be able to tape the directing studio tonight and get started immediately on blocking. The lighting design is a basic wash with afternoon light and a special at the end for the photo tableau. So the light hang should be relatively simple. I have already recruited Scott, Jacob, Thomas, and myself to assist with that. The dresses we are building because we had nothing in stock that we had enough of and would work, and Dee’s friend from SIU no longer had the dresses from when they did it. Therefore, we picked a pattern and fabric we had in stock and got to work. I really like the concept with the trimmings on the dark green dresses. The script mentions that the dresses look bad on most of the girls since the bride is no longer friends with them and they assumed that Tracey would want the bridesmaids to look worse that she did. I will be talking with Amber and Chris about the rest of the process for the dresses on Friday. Now that it has started, the adrenaline is going and the excitement is high. I am so happy that I get to work with these people on this amazing project and hope that I get to help them grow into better actors and better people. As Stella Adler said, to grow as an actor is to grow as a person.