So it’s Friday – we had our first preview yesterday, with one more tonight before our press opening on Saturday. The life of this show is an amazing thing – every performance seems to grow and change, and an audience one night may get something different than an audience another night. As we add audience into the mix, we are feeling out just where to break for laughs, or where it is appropriate to forge ahead. It is an amazing experience to get in front of people and share our story. You can rehearse and rehearse, but there is electricity between the actor and the audience that you just don’t have in rehearsal. The audience is the last element to our show, and if the crowd last night was anything like what we can expect throughout our run, we should consider ourselves blessed.

Honestly, I am just happy to have the day off! Our rehearsal schedule had listed a TBA rehearsal from 1-5 today, so to take the entire day for me is VERY welcome. In fact, as I look ahead – I am going to have a boat load of free time over the next few days. With the exception of shows tonight and Saturday, we are off until Tuesday evening. Sweet. You may wonder what it’s like to be a rich and famous actor and have nothing to do all day. It’s kind of awesome is the answer. I get to spend my days doing fun things like blogging, going to the gym (the theatre set us up at this awesome Gold’s), shopping, reading, watching movies, and staying out way to late at night. I can say it’s pretty much the life – just thinking about it makes me wonder why everyone doesn’t become an actor . I am blessed – at least for the next six weeks. That being said, I am one of those people who feels worthless if they are not being productive, so I try to find cool things to do to fill my time. Video blog? It might be in our future.

My parents are coming up from St. Louis to catch our opening on Saturday, and I was considering going back home to celebrate Easter and take Monday off, but I think our cast is planning a massive Easter egg hunt, plus I don’t feel like spending $40000000000 to fly back to Indy, so I’m probably going to pass. I hit the jack pot with parents; they are incredibly supportive of the sporadic lifestyle that comes with acting, and I thank them for not having an agenda for my life. I’m eager to hear their thoughts on how our production has changed since our premiere.

As I promised, I’ll give you guys the low down on the Treasure Island tech. Let me begin by saying that our fearless, amazing, words can’t possibly describe director Marc Robin has the most amazing philosophy on tech: “Tech is FUN!” (Incidentally, he has the same philosophy on life… brilliant man – go figure, right?) Anyways, Marc explains that the idea here is that since so many elements of a show are coming together, there are bound to be sticking points. If we expect for things to snag, we are setting ourselves up for happiness when things operate smoothly. I couldn’t agree more with Marc’s mentality here. We are not curing cancer, and as my wonderful teacher and friend Jen Waldman might say, “We are professional clowns!” The less seriously we take ourselves through this process, the more fun it is, and we all do this to have fun!

With “Tech is fun” in mind, we set out to tech this beast of a show – which went remarkably smoothly. Oh yeah… there was the computer that crashed after our first 10 of 12, resulting in losing our entire act one cue set, but that’s neither here, nor there. Paul Black, our amazing LD, his master electrician Brian (whose last name I have forgotten, sorry Brian), and a ton of others worked tirelessly to get us up and running again, and our show looks incredible. We all could have freaked about having to recue about 10 hours of material, but hey, TECH IS FUN, and we got the opportunity to make it even better the second time around! Way to go everyone!

As life in the theatre goes, our fearless leader Marc leaves Indy today to do The Producers at the Walnut. Words can’t possibly describe the profound impact this man has had on my life, through this show, but mainly through his zest for life! I’ll miss Marc, but I’m looking forward to coming to Lancaster and seeing him and Curt after we close.

Alrighty, that’s all for now, folks. If you are in Indianapolis, come join us at Rock Bottom tonight. It’s off of 86^th close to Trader Joe’s and Beef & Boards. The theatre is having an opening party for us and I’d love to all the TI fans come out in force!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Rick.