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.