Staging Beggars Would Ride

We're now into the second week of rehearsals, and staging the play is well underway. Everyone is working away assiduously at her/his job, doing their best to get this show on the stage, costumed, lit, equipped with songs and music, and to promote and publicize it, etc. This is something that always makes me feel totally grateful, I suppose because I know that no one is getting paid what they should. That's a given, I guess.It's remarkable to me to think that this play began its life almost twenty years ago in Toronto as a dance-theatre piece. We had one tiny Canada Council grant to create and mount the piece. Scored for a cast of five dancers and two actors, it was set in a surreal restaurant somewhere. The dancers played the waiters and the actors two utterly spoiled and horrific customers. The text was fourteen pages long; in the intervening years it has grown to a two-act play for five actors with fourteen songs, and the script is nearly seventy pages long. Some pieces take a long, long time to find their rightful form, I suppose.I'm also always amazed at what actors find in the course of experimenting with a scene on its feet. I approach the work on a particular passage with what I think is the appropriate way to go, but often find that the actors know better from being inside the experience. Their discoveries become my own, and I'm astonished at how much I learn from them.