Re: Contra Costa Musical Theatre, Walnut Creek, CA - Oct 13-Nov
Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2017 11:52 pm
As I'm sure you are all aware, for privacy and copyright reasons, there is limited information that can be shared about the production process.
Here is some of what I can share:
The Lesher Center is owned by the City of Walnut Creek, and the main theater seats about 785, almost all of which have been opened up for sale, and sales are going very well as you could tell from the ticket seating charts.
There are a few "returnees" form the Berkeley production, although this theater is much better suited than the Berkeley venue.
The set will be custom for the stage, although there will be the traditional kitchen/bedroom mobile unit.
We started rehearsal last night. For those of you unfamiliar with musical theater rehearsal process, the first rehearsals are music only, with no staging. I might be biased, but I think we sound really good (For reference, I mainly since with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, some of the south bay opera companies, and occasionally some musical theater.)!
Of course the first thing after the administrata and introductions was two hours of dialect coaching. We are going with a Durham, not Geordie, accent, as it is easier for US ears to understand, but still sounds appropriate to the region. We have a fabulous dialect coach.
One cool thing is that one of the staff works for SHN, the main organization that brings Broadway tours to San Francisco, and they got these (appliques/tattoos/transfers/whateveryouwanttocallthem) that SHN used for guerilla marketing back in 2011 when the US tour 2.0 came through (its last venue before shutting down and being reorganized into tour 2.5, which was the final tour that ended in Sao Paulo). Evidently SHN was just going to throw them away!
Ironically, right next door to the rehearsal space is this shop:
And this is what finally made it set in that I'm actually in the show!:
Here is some of what I can share:
The Lesher Center is owned by the City of Walnut Creek, and the main theater seats about 785, almost all of which have been opened up for sale, and sales are going very well as you could tell from the ticket seating charts.
There are a few "returnees" form the Berkeley production, although this theater is much better suited than the Berkeley venue.
The set will be custom for the stage, although there will be the traditional kitchen/bedroom mobile unit.
We started rehearsal last night. For those of you unfamiliar with musical theater rehearsal process, the first rehearsals are music only, with no staging. I might be biased, but I think we sound really good (For reference, I mainly since with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, some of the south bay opera companies, and occasionally some musical theater.)!
Of course the first thing after the administrata and introductions was two hours of dialect coaching. We are going with a Durham, not Geordie, accent, as it is easier for US ears to understand, but still sounds appropriate to the region. We have a fabulous dialect coach.
One cool thing is that one of the staff works for SHN, the main organization that brings Broadway tours to San Francisco, and they got these (appliques/tattoos/transfers/whateveryouwanttocallthem) that SHN used for guerilla marketing back in 2011 when the US tour 2.0 came through (its last venue before shutting down and being reorganized into tour 2.5, which was the final tour that ended in Sao Paulo). Evidently SHN was just going to throw them away!
Ironically, right next door to the rehearsal space is this shop:
And this is what finally made it set in that I'm actually in the show!: