Dance Captain Stress
I'm a member of the chorus in a production of Pirates of Penzance that opened last weekend. This is fairly normal stuff for me; I like to perform. :)

One big difference between this show and others that I've done is that I'm the male dance captain. The way that it works is that the company hires a choreographer to create and teach us choreography for the show, and then the two dance captains (one for the women and one for the men) have to make sure that the members of the company learn it. I had to call and run some extra rehearsals, and a few times I even had to change the choreography.

For the most part this has been a solid learning experience and I feel like I've stretched myself in a good way that, until Sunday, wasn't too stressful.

We opened Saturday evening, and it wasn't perfect but we had a lot of energy and I think that we entertained people. Our second show was a Sunday matinee, so we showed up and prepared. The call for the cast was an hour and a half before curtain, so we had lots of time to do our makeup and get in our costumes and warm up and such.

At about fifteen minutes before curtain on Sunday, the stage manager came up to me and confirmed that I was the men's dance captain. I said that I was. He said that one of the men hadn't shown up and that I had to restage the show to work around his absence.

Okay.

So I scampered around and found out all the things Jim did in Act One (figuring I could fix Act Two during intermission), and had almost completely reworked the important bits of Act One by five minutes before curtain, at which point Jim walked in. So I was glad we didn't have to use my improvised fixes, but yikes!