Rehearsals

Today we held the technical rehearsals (we ran through it twice) for this fine little musical I'm co-directing at school, Grease. Tomorrow's the dress rehearsal, and that'll be the last rehearsal for it! After that it's all show show show show me the money!

Don't you love a good rehearsal? No? Well neither do I, but I fear a bad performance more than I dislike rehearsals, so I guess that about determines things.

You just have to practice. You just have to do something often to become good. Tonight, on an Ideas (CBC) program about genius, the writer used Paul McCartney as an illustration of the kind of "genius" that arises from so much repetition that, in McCartney's song-writing practice, there wasn't so much "practice" as a songwriter, as there was "existence" as a songwriter. McCartney wrote (probably still writes) songs all the time. Two or three a day. So much did song-writing permeate his being and his days that he wrote/writes songs in his sleep. The melody for "Yesterday," for instance, came to him in a dream. He woke up and sat down at a piano to play the chords and write them down. Then he wrote the lyric. He recorded it and it sits on back-side of Help!, the second-last track. And today it is distinguished as being the song most covered by other artists (according to Guinness - the book not the beer).

In his sleep! If you're going to be good, you have to be so rehearsed, so comfortable in your practice, that everything you do is both rehearsal and performance! You have to be so much immersed in what you do that the difference between rehearsal and performance is, simply, the presence of an audience.

And if that's the case, you have to rehearse so often, that the audience, when they show up, won't be able to tell that you're doing it. They'll think you're performing, and you are, but you're rehearsing too, because this thing that you're doing ... well that's the thing that you're always doing. And the more you're doing it, the better the doing becomes.