He Had It Coming – At Sea – [10/11/2012]

Three weeks you rehearse and rehearse
Two weeks and it couldn’t be worse
One week will it ever be right?
When out of the hat is that big first night…

The thing about dinner theatre of any sort is that it’s never the same twice. Unlike a traditional production on stage, when you’re working in a dinner theatre atmosphere you have full interaction with your audience. You can never ever drop character.  From the moment you sit down at your table, you ARE someone else. Oh, and forget about ever trying to eat, because you’re not going to have time. Not if you’re doing your job right. If you have time to pay attention to your food, you’re NOT paying attention to something more important.

So it was with PWYF back when I did professional dinner theatre, and so it is now with the shipboard murder mystery evenings.

The murder mystery dinners during the world cruise are geared strictly towards non-actors. They’re written for the specific people on the team, and used nowhere else on the fleet. For those there is no memorization required, no real room for a lot of character development and the script is visible to the audience as it’s propped on a music stand at the front of the room where all the scenes take place. It’s more a staged reading than a show. This is what we were all expecting when we jumped in to stage a Murder Mystery Evening on the current Grand Asia. Even I was expecting that.

It wasn’t that.

It soon became clear that we were not working with the world cruise scripts (such as they are), but the scripts written for use throughout the fleet. I didn’t even know these existed. Imagine everyone’s surprise when a twelve-page stapled pamphlet arrived in our pigeon holes in the office. There, on the title page, in bold print:

A DEADLY FEAST: SCRIPT, CHARACTER GUIDELINES, RUNNING ORDER

This wasn’t a staged reading. This was a show.

As I went through the script with my traditional pink high-lighter, I noticed something that made me more than a little nervous: there was an awful lot of pink. Somehow, I ended up with the character who had the most lines. Every other scene had her in it! Having not had to memorize anything for nearly three years, I had to swallow a golf-ball sized lump in my throat when I came to the realization that somehow I was going to have to live up to my old confidence.

Though I climbed back onto the horse and got my lines memorized within the first week, I was much slower on the uptake than I used to be. I’m rather out of practice. I was still scrambling at dress rehearsal the night before. Of course, that could have been because I was so exhausted. I haven’t put in a full day of work followed by a full night of rehearsal in a long time. And when the rest of the cast isn’t used to it either (I had at least done it before, the others on the team are great team players, but they’re not trained actors, and there’s a knack to the whole I-can’t-have-a-life-or-sleep-or-do-much-of-anything-because-I-have-rehearsal mindset), it made for several exhausting nights.

But we somehow managed to pull it all together, though I’ll admit it felt like we did so by the skin of our teeth. Last night found me standing in front of the mirror, biting my lip as I applied a super-hot curling iron to my hair, with the soundtrack to Chicago blazing out of my speakers as loud as I dared without disturbing my neighbors (the only downside of living in a pax cabin is that my neighbors have the power to get me in trouble over such things) to transform myself into a petulant valley girl who was literally trying to get away with murder.

Yeah, I was the killer…again. The staff at the specialty restaurant are starting to think it’s something in my blood

To say the show went well would be an understatement. Unlike last year, this actually felt like a show. It felt like I was actually working again, not just taking a small pretense and trying to turn it into something. Kat actually was a character, I gave her a background, gave her a personality, gave her a damn good brain. Which was good, because the table I was sitting with wasn’t an easy one to placate.  It helped of course that the character I had the most competition with was sitting at the table across from us, the cat-fight got surprisingly intense at some points.

When it was all over and I’d been dragged off to the brig (the one time I got to use my fully projected stage voice because it was the only time I wasn’t working with a handheld microphone), we all came back in for the inevitable bows.

We may not be the best actors in the world, but I think we have the most fun

In the course of my socializing circle around the room, I was waved over to the table in the corner where the HM, EM and various other ships staff (and partners) were seated

Shaughnessy, seriously good job. Your  acting…you’re good. You’re really good. I actually believed you. You had a character, the way you interacted with the others, it was more than just a line here or there..

And I felt myself quirk a half-smile, and heard myself say thank you.

And finally got the reminder that yeah, this is what I do, it may not be what I do right now, but it’s still what I do. And I’m still really bloody good at it.