Although I’m very disappointed by how badly my photos of the show turned out, I managed to find some which were taken by someone in the audience, which turned out considerably better!

After 4 months of rehearsals and performances, Wonderland has finished!

On one hand it’s sad, since the cast and most of the crew have all become quite good friends, but on the other hand, cabin fever would have set in if we’d had to do it for too much longer, and that’s never a sign of good things to come!

The final show was really good. It was our biggest audience, although the theatre was still nowhere near full, which sucked, but it’s so huge that I suppose it’s not surprising.

As is *somewhat* traditional in closing performances, someone played a prank. In one scene, I hand Emma a notepad and pen. Most other nights the page was either blank or just had whatever she scribbled down in the previous show on it, but this afternoon it said "EMMA SMELLS" in huge block letters. I saw it as I picked it up and immediately thought "Oh no! Here we go…"! When she saw it she started smiling, quickly pretended to write something anyway, and then, as she turned around to give it back, gave me this look like "WTF!? Did you do this!?" Obviously I didn’t – I was just as surprised as her! We never did find out who wrote it, but evidently they thought they were hilarious!

Brooke and Jenny came backstage afterwards, which was good because I was so busy taking photos and trying to make sure that none of the thank you cards for the crew had gotten lost that I wouldn’t have had time to take my costume and mic off and go and see them otherwise! I missed Lorraine, but I talked to her on the phone later and she said she was really surprised by how well I could sing! Yeah. I think I’ll wait until I see the DVD before I make up my mind about THAT! LMAO!

So far as I noticed, nobody in the audience threw anything at me, not that they needed to – I created my own problems! After one song, a group of us run down through the audience to exit. Every other night this was fine, but today my shoe fell off! This is because one of my feet is size 9, while one is 8.5, so one shoe is always slightly loose. This is a particular problem with the plain black pair I often wear in shows. They don’t have straps or anything to hold them on, so when I stumbled on the carpet, off it came!

There was nothing I could do, so I just kept running and when I got backstage I went to the SM and was like "Nelly!! I have a problem!! My shoe is in the auditorium!!" She was like "WTF!? How the hell did that happen!?" and asked Gordon over the headset to see if he could find it for me! Amusingly, Lorraine said later that the shoe had ended up right in front of her, but that she didn’t realise what it was and when she saw Gordon creeping up the aisle she wondered what was going on!

Photos are slightly delayed. ALL OF MINE SUCK, so I’m going to ask a couple of other cast members if they’ll send me theirs, which hopefully turned out better! GAH! I hate my lack of photography ability! It FAILS! I’m rather disappointed actually, but I’m ordering a DVD, so hopefully it’ll be of good enough quality that it’ll be worth taking screenshots of.

A free cookie for anyone who can tell me what the subject of this post is from!?

3 more shows down since I last blogged, yay! I wanted to write something earlier, but for some reason my site (and WP admin panel) was down, so I couldn’t.

Friday night was a bit better than opening night I think, probably because we’d gotten used to the timing of everything and people were less nervous. I managed not to whack the backs of my legs on the wall as I fell off, which was good, I have enough bruises already and didn’t need to add to my collection!

I think certain crew members are now finding it greatly entertaining to watch me during this scene and see whether or not I manage to hit the wall on the way down. I can’t SEE them in the wings, but I can hear them sniggering away! Hopefully the audience can’t.

Tweedles Dee and Dum also ended up with body mics by Friday night. They’re 12 and 14 (I think) so although they’re good singers, their voices definitely benefited from the extra volume boost!

It was funny, because when we first started rehearsing for this, Janine, the sound operator, had said that no mics would be used at all (aside from the ones rigged generally around the stage), but now 4 of us have them! Also during this show, Gordon, our lighting guy, decided that the very end of the show, as the whole company was singing the final song, would be a good time to crack out his bright green glowstick! All the lights go down and way up the back of the house we see this little green glowstick waving away! LMAO! 

It was strange during the Saturday matinee because as soon as I got onstage to sing the prologue, I immediately noticed just how many really little kids there were! Way more than came to the evening shows! One waved at us and was like "Look! There’s people!" which I thought was really cute!

Overall the show went well, up until the very last scene. This is where Alice breaks back through the "mirror" out of Wonderland and into reality again. The mirror is really a frame carried by the boys who plays red and white knights. As she jumps through the frame, various sound effects go off and a cyc comes down in the middle of the stage, separating Alice from the rest of the Wonderland characters, who are now behind the cyc and slowly obscured from view due to a change in lighting.

In the past the fly crew have had some problems with children standing underneath the cyc as it comes down, because it’s big and heavy and has a big metal pole on the bottom to make sure it hangs straight. It would hurt if it hit you! The kids are warned about this nearly every night and instructed to keep well back from the blue line on the stage to indicate where the cyc will be brought in.

During this show, I was standing waiting to go on for the curtain call and talking to Nelly (stage manager), as this scene was happening, and we watched the knights bring the mirror in and Alice jump through, RIGHT as the cyc starts to come in above them. At the same time, one of the kids playing a pawn sticks their hand/arm out underneath it! I have no clue what they were trying to do, but they were extremely close to being hit!

Luckily whoever was operating it realised what was happening and stopped bringing it down, which resulted in it being extremely crooked, touching the ground on one side, but still 6 or 7 feet in the air on the other side! It was kind of horrible for us to watch backstage, because we could see exactly what was about to happen, but couldn’t do anything to stop it! Luckily nobody’s mic was on, otherwise the audience would have heard some language not appropriate for children!

Gah. The problems of working with small children and large set! Glowstick also made a reappearance during this show.

Glowstick was there AGAIN on Saturday night! I’m surprised it hasn’t died…maybe he gets a new one for each show!?

We also concluded that Wonderland is not really a dream at all, but more of a drug fueled hallucination. Someone in the crew suggested that I was clearly smoking something every night before the show because "Look at you! Look what you’re wearing! You’re an egg!" Yes. Yes I am.

One to go! Jenny, Brooke and another friend of mine are all coming today. They’re threatening to throw things at me, but considering they’re in row H and the stage is miles away from there, I don’t think their aim will be good enough! HAH!