The greatest feeling on earth
24/3/2007
On a far more important subject than the last post... The last time I talked to you about Les Mis was a week ago - we hadn't even had the dress rehearsal. Now, a week later, we've performed to 5 audiences (four real ones and the free primary schools' matinee), to around 1300 people. And it's been a more wonderful experience than I can describe. There's really nothing like performing (and performing well, I suppose) to build a natural high.
I think, although it's a difficult thing to say without boasting, that we were pretty damn good. Certainly every comment I've heard has been almost obscenely positive, and before our last night our head of music spent a good quater of an hour reading out some of the letters of congratulation that the headmaster has been sent - and even some early reviews from the (very local) press. And equally certainly it felt like we were performing as well as I could have imagined.
The only disappointing thing is that, of the four nights on which we did full performances, it was the only night on which anything went noticably wrong that was recorded for posterity. Staging Les Mis is quite an undertaking, mostly because you really need to have a rotating stage - at times you have to see both sides of the barricade that the revolutionaries build. Now, shockingly enough, this random school in rural England doesn't have a rotating stage, so instead, by the genius of our set designer/builder Dennis Lawlor, a revolving barricade on wheels was constructed - stage crew could then stand inside and push it round, and we'd have more or less everything that the west end production has. Of course, it needs to be able to be taken apart and got out of the way, so it was made in two halves, which swing up out of the way. On wednesday night, tho, as the barricade was being turned around, the two halves seperated. One half turned, and the other didn't. And the half that did turn almost fell off the front of the stage, onto the drummer.
We kept goin, of course, and from audience comments it seems like quite a number didn't realise anything had gone wrong. But from where we stood it was a pretty serious catastrophe... We knew what was supposed to happen, and so any time I watch that video I fear I'll be taken back to that horrible feeling that the whole show was falling apart. And that's a real shame, because it was a truly impressive production, as far as I can tell, and we put on three near flawless shows. Just it was the fourth that will be around to look back on in 20 years.
However, this is not allowed to turn into a negative post. I want to keep that last encore in my mind forever. I want those beautiful human persons who made up (most of) the cast and crew to be my Les Mis people forever. I want the show to go on. But of course it cant. After months of work, and one of the most emotionally, mentally and physically draining but rewarding weeks of my life, it's all over. And I'll never be involved in anything quite the same again. Hopefully there'll be other things as good, but never anything quite the same. Right now I am one big hole, where there should be Les Mis...
Comments update
24/3/2007
I've put a fix in place now, so hopefully you should be able to use apostrophes in comments - certainly I can on the dev page which uses the same code. If anything still isn't working, please do complain. Basically what the fix does is to use a bit of javascript to replace any apostrophes in the comment with the html special character reference for an apostrophe - ' - before the comment is seen by the code which tries to put it into the database. Indeed you may well see the change yourself, when you click "submit". A similar bit of code was already in use to replace new lines with "<br />", since new lines aren't preserved when stored in my database. This meant it didn't take a lot of effort, and I can be fairly confident that it'll work, since it's been working successfully in it's previous guise. Thinking about it, I may as well put the same code to work on the "name" field, since people might decide they want to use a name with an apostrophe in it - it hadn't been an issue before, since the name field couldn't accept a new line, but it can take an apostrophe so I should make sure that it can be processed.
There we go. Touch wood, people should be able to punctuate to their hearts' content from now on.
More teething troubles
21/3/2007
Just a brief apology on the subject of comments. They do work, but unfortunately I've just discovered that they don't if there are any apostrophes in your message. Damn. And looking at the error log someone was trying to say something complimentary about the new site, and comments in particular, and then was thwarted by the comment script.
A work-around for that is top priority now for the site - but for this week I wont have any time to push at it. Sorry again.
Downtime
19/3/2007
Apologies to anyone who noticed the downtime on this site for a couple of brief stints between 18:00 and 19:00 GMT today. There was a bit of a thunderstorm around, so I thought it was best to shut down the server to avoid any potential damage. After all, this server cost the enormous sum of £90, so it would be tragic if it were lost ;-).
Ciao for now. G
Catch-up 1: Les Mis
17/3/2007
As I promised, this is me trying to catch up on the stuff since I last posted a real news item. It's been a scarily long time since I posted anything - the last update was on the third of January, two and a half months ago... And while it made sense to leave my Cambridge celebration up for a while, it didn't merit being there at the exclusion of all else for the first quater of 2007.
The most major theme that's been running through all that time, since the very beginning of the term, has been rehearsals for our production of Les Miserables. Looking back at the old news posts it seems that I wasn't nearly as overtly excited as I should've been about getting the part of Jean Valjean :-D. I feel as if it's all I've been talking about recently, so everyone would be bored of me spending more time over it, but then I haven't said anything here at all recently, so I don't suppose that applies. Rehearsals have been great fun, and we seem to have improved hugely from the ragged bunch that existed in January.
One particularly good indication of that was at one of the recent rehearsals, when we were sitting waiting for something to happen, and one of the staff sat down to try to play through one of the trickier sections of the piano part we would later be asked to sing with - and most of the cast decided to join in straight away. The best thing was that this wasn't a big deal, it seemed perfectly natural. That perhaps doesn't sound as impressive as it should, but I hope that it will when you consider that singing has never been a huge part of our school, it's certainly never been socially acceptable to sing for no reason (hence why I've had to work so hard to persuade my friends that I'm not a weirdo...). I think I was in year 8 when they finally gave up trying to get us to sing in assemblies. But every two years a musical comes around, and for a short while it all clicks. It's there, it's just forced under the surface most of the time.
Yesterday we finished technical rehearsals (more or less... the stage crew is still a little sketchy, which, given that this is by far the most ambitious production I've seen at our school in terms of staging is a little worrying), and then there was a truly wonderful moment. For the past months we've been singing to a piano, or worse CD recording of a piano, but yesterday evening we held a band call for Act 1. Slowly around 16 professional musicians appeared from out of the woodwork, and on the dot of a little bit after 7 o'clock, I heard the first notes of the prologue, played properly by proper instruments in the hands of proper musicians. From that moment on the show was live in my head. We're actually going to do it. The first full performance is 3 days away. And it's really going to happen. At probably around £50 per person per night, the orchestra tend to be one of the biggest expenses for our musicals (even tho the budgets we go in for are quite terrifyingly large for a school production - £11,500 for this one, I've heard), but by god they're worth it.
That realisation of quite how close we are to the performance is, it's true, more than a little scarey. There's still so many things I worry about. But really none of them are my responsibility. I need to give up worrying about props, costume, what on earth they want me to do with my hair, and just wait til I'm told on those. Concentrate on being Valjean. That sounds so good - I get to concentrate on being Valjean. Go Me!
Explaining all the goings on of Les Mis (well, not really all of them by a long shot, but some of the biggest ones) seems to have merited a news post of it's own. I'll try to come up with another post to fill in the other blanks in a bit.
At long last...
13/3/2007
You thought it would never happen, but now I've proved you wrong. Ah ha ha haaaa! Alright, at times I thought it wouldn't happen either, so I guess I've proved me wrong too. Because here it is - the new look, sleek and clever website! Almost two and a half years since I first mentioned that I was planning a new site (in the very earliest page of archived news I've been able to track down).
It's been quite a while since I posted anything on either site, for which I apologise - I'll try to catch up soon. Much life has been occuring.
New Thoughts
11/3/2007
I've just added my first thoughts, initially inspired by REM's "Falls to Climb". Nothing particularly special, I don't think, but it's a start. They were actually written about 18 months ago now, but I've dated them for the new website...