Friday, May 26, 2006

Charleston, Post 4 - Festival Opening

Today is the official opening of the Spoleto Festival. The opening ceremony was at noon down at the Old Exchange Building. Apparently Philip Glass wrote a fanfare for car alarms, but I got there too late to hear it. I'm not too sad about this, as I hear it was highly anti-climactic.

Last night was the preview performance of Don Giovanni (which just means it was a performance before the official opening of the festival) and tonight the festival really gets swinging with the first performance of Romeo et Juliette. This entire past week has been piles of dress rehearsals for both shows - there's always a piano dress/tech and two orchestra dresses for each show. It's exciting that we're finally into performances, because those are much more exciting - having an audience can really transform a performance.

Doing both operas really eats up time - Don Giovanni has seven performances, and Romeo et Juliette has 4, which means that there are very few days off (or more importantly, evenings off) to go see other performances. All performers in the festival get free admission to any performance they want, as long as it's not sold out, and since there are so many performances, very few things are sold out. One of my favorite performers last year, Mike Daisey, is coming back, but I sadly won't be able to see any of his performances as I have performances at all the same times.

The make-up and wig call is in half an hour, so I'll sign off here. (I am wearing a black wig. I look rather like a wax-work person in it, since I'm so pale.) It's hard to know what else to say about the festival - give me help. What should I post about?

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