Day Two -- April 24

Well, after a month and a half of auditions and callbacks and network tests and work sessions and table reads and rewrites, with all the days of waiting and wondering and hoping and planning, today was finally the first time that it was just plain fun. No executives to please, no suits evaluating and scrutinizing every line and every joke, no pressure to sell the material so that the network gets behind it. Today, it was just us, and it was just a plain, old-fashioned rehearsal.

We started with a table read of the new script. The show had been quite a few minutes too long yesterday so a fair amount of material was gone. Even one whole actor, Diana Maria Riva, was gone. She was only in one scene and that one scene was cut completely. (If the show gets picked up, she will most likely be back in the role, but for now, she has suffered the worst rewrite fate.) A lot of the good material was still present, though, and a few new jokes had been added that were quite clever. It was very promising and very fun.

director Andy Cadiff

We then took a couple of hours to take a slower pass through the script. We sat in a tighter circle and re-read the show scene by scene, taking time after each one to talk amongst ourselves, the director, Andy, and the writer, Alan. It was a chance to voice to Alan some of our questions and concerns about the characters and about the relationships. Over the course the next week of rehearsing, he's going to be off in an office all day working on the script, so this was our sole opportunity to work with him. It was helpful for us to hear some of Alan's ideas, and I think it was helpful for him to hear some of ours. I have never been in a situation like that, where the writer and actors are having a dialogue, and I think it was beneficial all around. It was even quite fun. And done. We took a tour of the nearly compeleted set, which is looking gorgeous, and we were wrapped for the day. Tomorrow we get up and start rehearsing the scenes. Oh yeah, and did I mention, it's really starting to get fun.

Go on to Day 3

Day by Day | Oh Grow Up | Ducey on TV