Pete on Tour - Part 5: Opening Night!

What a week, good people!

Opening night is only a few days a week and so we come to the part of the process that many dread: tech week. The tech week was very full on: 12 hour days, leading straight into previews with notes and refinements and then on Wednesday we had our Press Night/ official Opening Night.

It feels like we really accomplished something just to be on. With London venues and shows being cancelled before their opening nights, it seems like our stricter Covid measures have paid off. I feel honoured to even be performing on stage at all right now. 

It’s truly exhilarating to do a show, but it also makes you realise how you are a  small piece of the whole thing.

Think for a second about all the people working on a show: the crew, creative team, light, sound, set design, costume, music are all amazing and are contributing so much. It all comes together to make this one thing called the musical, the play, the piece. But really it’s a lot of separate bits presented in such a way that human brains go “aha a story!”

We go to such lengths to deceive our perception in a way that makes us feel something, good, bad or to be thought provoked! It really struck when waiting in the wings on Opening Night. My characters are on and then gone. The audience knows this, they know that we are actors and are just behind a curtain or wall to the left and when we come back we pretend as if things have happened in-between with our characters. We create a whole background of life in our minds to explain this. It’s an enormous and joyous hoax. 

Theatre is magic. It has to be otherwise we would look at it and say: “There are some humans standing around, saying some words, wearing clothes, walking behind a curtain and coming back in different clothes.”

But we don’t,  we say “Ahh that’s Mary, and she loves Lydia, but can’t work up the courage to tell her because of her own dark secret, she is ashamed and can’t live with the guilt.” (Spoilers btw) We’re all psychologists you see. When the audience enters they should be given a chaise longue and a pipe. Or perhaps we are all simply obsessed with ourselves. The human condition.

Hugs, 

Pete x