Show minus five days

This time next week it will all be over and we’ll be heading off to celebrate at the after-show party.

But that is still a week away and today we were rehearsing hard. We were at the Primary School venue near Seven Sisters again, sweltering in the un-ventilated school hall.

Today started with various musical polishing, followed by trying out a couple of variations of the staging for some of the numbers, followed by a full run of the show. Despite the polishing though, there is still one number which is a bit of a mess that I really think to get right we need to work through several more times as a choir; Silence Equals Death is one of the commissioned numbers and is written in half-a-dozen different time signatures and without any words, just vowel sounds. It’s not an easy piece to commit to memory.

There was also a lot of mucking about as the production team tried to work out how to get a conductor on stage, when most of the stage has people moving over it for most of the time. They really need to get a webcam on the MD at the piano and play the feed on a monitor on the front of the balcony. It’s the way that the West End theatres do it.

Ping, who is effectively the author of the piece, was crying through most of the numbers. He gets very emotionally invested. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hug him or slap him, but some of my fellow choristers felt it was inspirational to see our performance making such an impression.

At the end of the day though, both Brett and I were absolutely drained. We slogged it home on the tube and train and collapsed on the sofa in front of the TV. Knackered.