Today was all about the Chorus. We breakfasted early and well, then headed uptown to the Cigale theatre, ready for our technical rehearsal: A half-hour session where we got briefed on the procedure for tonight’s performance and got fifteen minutes on stage to make sure we could all fit and get sound levels for soloist and backing track. I understand why these things have to be so short – with between five and fifteen choirs performing in any one day and all of them wanting tech time to prepare, the theatre staff must be run ragged – but being under the time pressure always makes it more stressful.
After the tech rehearsal, we had an hour and a half break before the vocal rehearsal, which was taking place some way away. The consensus was that we should all go together, as no-one was really sure where the venue was… however, instead of taking the Metro as I’d expected, whoever was leading led us off on a half-hour walk to the place. Now, if it had been a sunny spring day, that might have been rather nice, but it wasn’t. The sky was grey and the wind was from the north. When we got to the next venue we found a café, but had to sit outside because there were so many of us.
Eventually though, the time ticked around and we were let into the studio to rehearse. It was a small, airless box (well, at least too small for sixty singers and support staff!) Nevertheless we rehearsed well.
Thierry, our Chorus ‘Godfather’ from the host choir, the Melomen, was clearly very into our set and made a sweet little speech after it was all done, asking us to tone down the performance to avoid making the Melomen (who were scheduled to perform after us tonight) look like ‘prats.’ Naturally we made no such promise, but it was nice of him to be so complimentary.
There was some talk of doing ‘stuff’ after the rehearsal, but I think that most people, like me, just headed back to their hotel to take it easy and rest up ready for the show. I took the opportunity to prepare a gallery of photographs and sent the URL to the Chorus’ chat list, so the boys back home could see how we were doing. You can find them here if you are interested.
Brett, who wasn’t singing, went instead to watch some more of the choirs performing that day and we met up again for a rather basic dinner in Montmartre in time for our 9pm call.
Inevitably there was the pre-performance waiting around: Each of us preparing in our own way. Today I found myself running through the Bootylicious choreography with some of the others. Then, following a fifteen minute interval, the French version of The Krankies were on stage introducing us and, before you knew it, we were on stage giving it our best ‘tits and teeth’ performance.
The acoustic of the theatre was rather empty. We had been warned about it, but it still felt like we weren’t performing strongly enough (Brett assured us afterwards that the audience could hear us clearly, all the way to the back of the auditorium.) The show was being broadcast live on French television so we had the distractions of a roving cameraman wandering amongst the tightly packed rows as we sang, as well as the flashing of the ‘on air’ lights from the front-of-house cameras as the editor cut from one view to another. It didn’t take long to get used to though and, apart from a momentary lapse where some of the Chorus found themselves two beats behind the rest during Music To Watch Girls By, it was an excellent performance.
One of my favourite pieces is the Sondheim number, Our Time, where the solo was sung by one of our newest members, Michael W. He has a lovely voice and a very professional stage presence; he really sold the song to the audience. This was his first show, having only joined in March, and hasn’t really sung before so there were many congratulations for him later – although as he remarked, rather sanguinely, singing the solo in your debut performance means it’s all down hill from here…
After we had ended on a bang with our Bootylicious Medley (and received a full-house standing ovation for it!) we headed front of house to watch the Melomen’s set. The Melomen are the Parisian gay men’s chorus who were hosting the Various Voices festival, so theirs was the honour of performing the last show. While they were technically perfect in their singing, their show is much more ‘mellow’ than ours. They opened with the Flower Duet from the opera Lakme, which I love, but is a long piece and which they performed at about half-speed so it seemed to go on forever! They did do a haunting rendition of The Windmills Of Your Mind, though which was absolutely beautiful. (I gather we have asked if we can have a copy of the arrangement…!)
The show closed with various bouquet-giving and a short speech from the president of Various Voices inviting us to the party at the other theatre, the Trianon, where ‘every bottle of sparkling wine you drink, puts us less in debt when this is all over!’ so we duly set out to do what we could to help with the bottom line.
The place was very crowded but with the warm, familial atmosphere you have at these occasions. Brett and I indulged in beer initially, but when that ran out switched to the sparkling wine. Conversations were initially post-show reviews of how it went, but as more of the bubbly was consumed so we started doing what we enjoy most: singing and flirting.
On the singing front, I recall joining in Doh, Re, Mi and Eidelweiss from the Sound of Music and doing a full-voiced Stand By Your Man with a group of the LGMC boys. There were also brief attempts at The Time Warp and Que Sera Sera, but they didn’t amount to much.
On the flirting front, the most memorable story had to be that from Paul L, who spent a lot of the evening in the company of some Germans who seemed to like him a lot (he is quite a bulky, bearish guy, for all that he sings top tenor) and by the end of the night they had invited him and his partner to Munich to ‘play’ “…and then afterwards we can piss all over you. You will like that?” At this point Paul’s face glazed over and he made his excuses.
Unfortunately the wine was very free flowing and I was considerably more drunk than I feel I should have been. I’m not sure how much I drank, as people were constantly topping up each other’s glasses, but I know that by the time we left (about 2:30am) the world really was spinning before my eyes and I was having trouble with vocal coherency.
We shared a long taxi ride back to the apartment with Steve B & Nicholas B, who were in not much better state. Brett partly undressed and collapsed on the bed. I was compos-mentis enough to know that if I shut my eyes I would vomit, so I did my best to sober up. This wasn’t as easy as it usually is. Normally half an hour and a steady supply of water will see me in a fit state to sleep it off, but tonight it just didn’t get any better.
To kill the time, I spent a while in the foyer attempting to blog, but tripping over both my words and the fact that I was typing with the unfamiliar layout of an AZERTY keyboard, meant the result was almost incoherent and deteriorated as time went on.
I did end up chucking my load. Several times. Eventually found sleep around 4:30am: it was a deep and welcome relief from conciousness.
