The Midnight Train Crossing

This was sort of like seeing a play, so it gets a report :)

My very cool theatre teacher "snuck" me into watch a tech rehearsal for Merchant Of Venice for about an hour or so, mostly just because I wanted to watch it and see what it was like.
I don't know anyone's names. I figured out what characters they are by looking up about Merchant of Venice on Sparknotes (Wonderful website) After I see the show I'll be able to give actor names.
My instructor told me it was partial costumes, which seemed to mean shoes and shirts and some of the hats, like one character had these feathers in her hair.
She (Nerissa) was enjoying playing with them. She bounced a lot and ran around just to make the feathers bounce.
Otherwise, most other people were just wearing the costume shirts and shoes... Shylock had a cape.

I was there for about an hour and forty-five minutes afore I had to leave to go to Spanish class (Which I was very tempted to skip, but didn't!) and I saw them work on two scenes.

In the first scene, (Act 3, Scene 4 if anybody cares) the heroine Portia has just sent her husband off to help his friend, who is in jail because he owes money to Shylock, the merchant of venice. Another friend of Portia's husband by the name of Lorenzo tells Portia what a wonderful person she is.
Portia decides to leave the care of her house to Lorenzo and his girlfriend Jessica while she goes away to pray for her husband's safe return.
But instead, Portia and her lady-in-waiting, Nerissa, go off to pretend to be men and go to visit Portia's husband

So that was what they were working on when I came in, that scene and the end of the one before it - what they were really working on was the transition between the two scenes.
I now understand why it is said that tech rehearsals are rather boring for the actors - they wouldn't get very far before the director or the stage manager would stop them to try and figure something out (Usually with the lighting).
I thought it was kinda neat how the director gave a direction to the actors that sounded a little cryptic to me but aparantly they knew what he was talking about. (It had to do with where they were standing)
It was also entertaining to watch the actors while the director and the lighting person were trying to sort out the problems, because they were all kind of amusing themselves on stage while trying not to move.

It's going to be cool to see, because I can already see that the performers who play Lorenzo, Jessica, Nerissa and Portia have really good expression and delivery. The actress who plays Nerissa seems to be an entertaining person in her own right :)

After that scene, they went into the next scene which has Jessica and her servant Lancelot (who was in full costume). They tried to do a scene which is basically the two of them talking but they never made it through more than a few lines before someone called out "Hold Please" (which I figured out meant "stop")
It took them a long time to sort out Lorenzo's entrance, and to get it so that he stopped shaking the backdrop.
When they were working on this scene, the director also kept changing the blocking and the lighting. They tried it like four different ways, and there was really only like four lines that the actors had to keep doing over and over again

I can see why I've heard that tech rehearsals are not fun, even though I had a lot of fun watching it.

So the show looks to be very cool indeed and I'm looking forward to seeing it next week
(Of course, there shall be a report)