Music to my ears
Other than me flubbing a rather important line (fortunately I did manage to make a full recovery) and Joe being distracted by an unscheduled guest appearance by Georgie in his first scene, opening night of A Divine Comedy could not have gone better.
As I said the other day, the strangest thing about performing live on Zoom is the lack of an audience in the room. No rapturous applause at the end of the show – just the cast waving for a few seconds then curtain.
No milling about afterwards with the people who’ve watched the show, no basking in their praise.
There was a slight variation on that last night.
During the show my computer kept pinging. Not a lot I could do mid-performance, so I just ignored it and hoped it wasn’t too distracting for the audience.
When I checked after our play I discovered that the head of the local arts council had been sending me a series of texts while she was watching us. These read:
- Okay, your play rocks so far.
- Joe’s eyebrows are awesome. (They were.)
- Can I love these people any more?!?!
- You’re killing it.
- It rocks.
- WHO is the Queen? (Queen Elizabeth is being played delightfully by Catherine, an older friend. As her character says in the opening scene, it is “a role I was born to play”.)
- Nice work!
Reading this right after the show did, as Richard imagined Shakespeare imagining the Archbishop saying, “warm the cockles and” (slightly less appropriate) “stir the embers of my thrice-ten years dormant member”.
In the feedback form sent to everyone who watched last night’s performance, one person commented that A Divine Comedy was so good they planned to watch it again when they are sent a link to a recording of the show.
Music to a playwright’s ears. Music to a director’s ears. Music to an actor’s ears. In this instance I am all three and it was indeed sweet music.
So looking forward to this!
Indeed, sweet music! Congratulations, my friend!