Grinder's Grumblings

Always begin with a read-through. Some directors don’t do this, especially if they’re doing a classic – everyone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet, don’t they? While your budding star-crossed lovers may know the gist of the story they likely don’t know many of the details – bringing those to light is why ... (click here for the full article)

Falling behind is one of the most common pitfalls of rehearsing a play – it’s too easy to quickly become bogged down in pointless nit-picking or become so engrossed in the play at the outset of rehearsals that the last few days are spent rushing through the material at the end. There are many ways to divide up a play for rehearsal purposes, but simply having a rehearsal schedule on paper before you begin is... (click here to read the full article)

Running through the entire play over and over at each rehearsal is a crude and inefficient way to prepare a play for production. It can have merit when you’re working with a very inexperienced cast, and you will need a few run-throughs at the end of the rehearsal process before tech week to help everyone get a sense of the flow of the piece, but you can bring out a lot more truth and comprehension in the play if you can explore small sections of it in depth. But there are many different ways to divide up a play. A common way is to divide the play into “French” scene – each time a character enters or exits it marks a new scene, and you simply schedule rehearsals to work on the one or more scenes that feature the same group of actors. This can get a bit confusing, especially... (clicker here for the beats of The Constant Lover)

The technical analysis of The Constant Lover is available here.

All theatre, be it community, professional, educational or anywhere in between, has a bureaucracy, an imperfect organizational structure that everyone involved in a production must participate in to some degree in order to do their jobs. Unfortunately job titles and the duties assigned to them vary wildly from company to company, and of all the jobs listed...(click here to read the rest of the article)

Production Schedules are vital to the success of any production. They provide everyone with an “at a glance” view of the entire production. Despite the temptation to do so in smaller companies, Production Schedules and Rehearsal Schedules should not be economized into the same document, as this tends to be confusing for actors who... (click here to read the rest of the article)

How you analyse a script has a lot to do with what job you’re doing on the production. This analysis is meant for stage managers and technicians, and should form the starting point for their work on the production. The break-down below shows a common method of organizing the information gleaned from the script. These lists can be added to or modified...(click here to read the rest of the article)