OPENING NIGHT!!

I am speechless.

Basically, most of my day was a blur.
Today I did a live television interview with CHAT TV News, our local TV station, for their noon news segment. And I HAD A BLAST. Those guys are so much fun, and are HUGE Evil Dead fans to boot. It was fantastic. Of course, that whole 'paying job' thing was also in the mix today, thankfully, I had many jobs that kept me busy for most of the day. Thank you to my patients that picked the perfect time for me to be stuck in the lab swamped in custom jobs all day, so that my brain was focused elsewhere!

Okay. I have been on stage MANY times. I have been a lead actress MANY times.
I have never felt the nerves and the panic as I did today, on any opening night EVER. I was a wreck. Mostly, because my OCD needed to take a back seat, because as of today, the show was no longer 'mine'. It was in the hands of the cast and crew that I had so maticulously selected. And although I have complete faith in each and every one of them.... I was still a paranoid freak. I was mostly okay until I peeked through the bar curtain and saw strangers in line. The gravity of the fact that I had a real, live audience hit me like a tonne of bricks. Whoa. We're DOING THIS.

BUT....

WHAT A NIGHT! Aside from a few panicky technical glitches, we have ONE HELL OF A SHOW! I have to remind myself that the audience probably wasn't the wiser, and that whatever I deemed as a catastrophe, was actually solved efficiently and quickly. A character's mic wasn't working for the first 2 scenes.
The bulb in my spotlight burned out, and during intermission we had to scramble to set up our old backup shitty spotlight. etc. etc. etc. These are all minor problems in the long run, that really had no lasting effect on the quality and pure awesomeness of the show. (And yes, I just used the word awesomeness. In fact, I found out that it's officially the International Day of Awesome. And this certainly held true in the CTAC tonight.)

The audience loved it. They joined in on the familiar lines. They cheered, they 'awwwed', they applauded.....


Ladies and Gentlemen.... we have done it. It's one hell of a show. And already, the rave reviews are flooding in on the Facebook event site.

This is the best theatrical experience of my life.
Hey..... I've got an idea!!! LET'S DO IT AGAIN!!!!!! TOMORROW!!!

IT'S TIME!

Holy shit. "The time has come", The walrus said.

No more rehearsals left. Opening night, is tomorrow.

Are we ready? Can we do this? Is MEDICINE HAT ready? Are we going to be applauded? Brushed off? Branded and flogged?

Although I do have to say, we had 4 dress rehearsals in total. 3 of which we ran with the blood formula. I thought it was important to do so, so that we know where the splatter was going, how much of a chore it was going to be to clean, and if the costumes were going to take the abuse we were about to put them through. Am I ever glad that we did!! It got gorier and messier each night, and we learned from our mistakes. For example, we have now perfected the art of making blood packs, and discovered the sheer awesomeness that urine bags, ketchup bottles and syringes can provide!

So, I decided that to be fair, I would sit in the front row of the splatterzone so as to be a part of the bloodshed. Not only so that I could personally place myself in the audience's sticky shoes, but to give my dear cast members a taste of revenge for putting them through all of this! And they got me back. Boy, did they ever. In fact, at one point, I had an entire dismantled sprayer dumped on my head. I was sticky, I was wet, I was cold, I was red, it was in my eyes, my mouth, my hair, between my toes, in my butt crack.... and I LOVED EVERY SECOND OF IT!!! TOTALLY worth the extra $6 to sit there!! The Splatterzone is in for the interactive treat of their lives!

I've also been busy with more promo interviews! We have every radio station in our city talking about us (with the exception of the Christian station... go figure!), not to mention a province-wide radio station, newspapers covering our city and the rural areas surrounding it, both local television channels are doing multiple segments for us... We have certainly created one helluva buzz around this conservative community!! Of course, with all of the coverage and excitement surrounding it, comes added pressure that if we're gonna do this, we had better make it bloody good! I have all the confidence in the world that I have a kick-ass show ready to rock Medicine Hat.

I get the feeling that I will not be getting much sleep tonight. We have a night off before opening night, but of course, in my world, "night off" means heading to the CTAC to tie up loose ends, paint the stage floor, prep the actors' clean-up area, clean the 'dressing room' and sort out what we will be doing for more splatterzone prep. No rest for the Evil Dead!

BLOOD LUST

A lot has happened since my last post. This is because I have basically lived at the CTAC, and haven't had time to blahg. Why am I doing this again? Is anyone even reading my incessant ramblings? Oh well. If the answer to that is NO, then at least I'm getting shit off of my chest in a non-destructive manner.

The last few days have been hectic. And by hectic, I mean 'surgically remove my eyelids with a straight edged knife to keep me awake' hectic.
Started out with a giant miscommunication regarding the giant Necronomicon that needed to be built, and subsequently projected. Yes, there's a huge Necronomicon on stage, that opens on it's own, and then the writing in blood is projected on to the pages. It was originally designed to be on a remote controlled wheelchair base, and wheel itself offstage. However, after it was built, and seeing that, considering that it's HUGE and the splatterzone is right there in it's pathway, we nixed the remote controlled idea. It worked, it ran, but the worry about it smacking audience members in the face, and taking out a couple of legs was too much of a risk. Although, they ARE paying extra for the interaction.... We said SPLATTERZONE... your own blood should be sufficient, don't ya think?

So yesterday was certainly my 'Directorial Mental Exhaustion Day'.
It was Night Of The Living Dead... only she was directing a show. Bear in mind, that the majority of nights this week I have been at the theatre until at least midnight. Then it's up early for my 'paying job' (where I do nothing but think of Evil Dead, much to my employers' dismay), and back to the theatre. Last night..... ooohhh... I don't believe I have ever been that exhausted in my life.

When the majority of the cast and crew ask you what's wrong and give you a hug when you haven't said a word, it's a bad sign: Fact.


But, we plowed forth with our first dress rehearsal, and aside from me feeling like Tommy Chong at 4:20, it was AWESOME. We did the rehearsal using water, to see where the sprayers would hit. Water is insufficient.

BRING ON THE BLOOD!
After a glorious 6 hour sleep before meeting the construction crew at the theatre for breakfast, we got to work for tonight's dress rehearsal. There are SO MANY little things that take up a lot of time, yet are SO small, but important to my vision of the show. But, we got them done, got all of the movable parts up on the cabin walls, and prepared the SplatterZone for the ultimate in grueling terror! Which essentially means, turning the CTAC into a condom.

Thanks to our props lady who's family runs a greenhouse, we had huge rolls of black poly donated to us, which cover the floor.
Chairs dressed in industrial sized garbage bags.... squirt bottles prepared, sprayers ready, and blood mixed.
We flung blood. And it was great.

The best part is this corn-syrupy detergent smell that catches your nostrils when you get down there. It smells like a few hours of happytime. And that's what it was.

And really, my major note from tonight?

MORE BLOOD.

I LOVE THIS SHOW.