{"id":1689,"date":"2012-10-14T23:21:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T07:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.wordpress.com\/?p=1689"},"modified":"2012-10-14T23:21:32","modified_gmt":"2012-10-15T07:21:32","slug":"he-had-it-coming-at-sea-10112012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=1689","title":{"rendered":"He Had It Coming – At Sea \u2013 [10\/11\/2012]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Three weeks you rehearse and rehearse
\nTwo weeks and it couldn\u2019t be worse
\nOne week will it ever be right?
\nWhen out of the hat is that big first night…<\/i><\/p>\n

The thing about dinner theatre of any sort is that it\u2019s never the same twice. Unlike a traditional production on stage, when you\u2019re working in a dinner theatre atmosphere you have full interaction with your audience. You can never ever drop character. \u00a0From the moment you sit down at your table, you ARE someone else. Oh, and forget about ever trying to eat, because you\u2019re not going to have time. Not if you\u2019re doing your job right. If you have time to pay attention to your food, you\u2019re NOT paying attention to something more important.<\/p>\n

So it was with PWYF back when I did professional dinner theatre, and so it is now with the shipboard murder mystery evenings.<\/p>\n

The murder mystery dinners during the world cruise are geared strictly towards non-actors. They\u2019re 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\u2019s propped on a music stand at the front of the room where all the scenes take place. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t even know these existed. Imagine everyone\u2019s surprise when a twelve-page stapled pamphlet arrived in our pigeon holes in the office. There, on the title page, in bold print:<\/p>\n

A DEADLY FEAST: SCRIPT, CHARACTER GUIDELINES, RUNNING ORDER<\/i><\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t a staged reading. This was a show.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m 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\u2019t 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\u2019t used to it either<\/i> (I had at least done it before, the others on the team are great team players, but they\u2019re not trained actors, and there\u2019s a knack to the whole I-can\u2019t-have-a-life-or-sleep-or-do-much-of-anything-because-I-have-rehearsal<\/i> mindset), it made for several exhausting nights.<\/p>\n

But we somehow managed to pull it all together, though I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I was the killer…again. The staff at the specialty restaurant are starting to think it\u2019s something in my blood \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

To say the show went well would be an understatement. Unlike last year, this actually felt<\/i> 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\u2019t an easy one to placate.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

When it was all over and I\u2019d 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\u2019t working with a handheld microphone), we all came back in for the inevitable bows.<\/p>\n

We may not be the best actors in the world, but I think we have the most fun<\/i><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Shaughnessy, seriously good job. Your \u00a0acting…you\u2019re good. You\u2019re 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..<\/i><\/p>\n

And I felt myself quirk a half-smile, and heard myself say thank you.<\/p>\n

And finally got the reminder that yeah, this is what I do, it may not be what I do right now, but it\u2019s still what I do. And I\u2019m still really bloody good at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three weeks you rehearse and rehearse Two weeks and it couldn\u2019t 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26,15,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grand-asiaaustralia-2012","category-performances","category-theme-events"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-rf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}