Archives for July 21, 2009

Monday’s dress rehearsal for The Letter went very, very well. This was the first time that we saw Tom Ford’s costumes on stage, as well as the first time that all of Duane Schuler’s lighting cues were run in sequence. The combination was…well, pretty overwhelming. The Letter really does look like a film noir, only in color and with a transfiguring touch of early-Forties glamour. Between them, Tom, Duane, and Hildegard Bechtler, our set designer, have pulled out all the stops: gleaming white suits, louvered windows, ceiling fans, muslin curtains that billow in the moonlight, dark shadows that criss-cross the stage.
I doubt I’ll be tweeting today–I have a frenetic schedule throughout the day, followed by the first orchestral rehearsal in the evening–but I’ll try to let you know how things went when I get home late tonight. For the moment, though, all systems appear to be go, and then some.

“No one really knows anything much about a play until it meets its first audience; not its director, its actors, its producers, and least of all its author. The scenes he has counted on most strongly, his favorite bits of fine writing–the delicately balanced emotional or comedic thrusts, the witty, ironic summing up, the wry third-act curtain with its caustic stinging last line that adroitly illuminates the theme–these are the things that are most likely to go down the drain first, sometimes with an audible thud.”
Moss Hart, Act One