Pimp My Hotpot: Dress Rehearsal

There's many a slip twixt cup and lip, but if last night's dress rehearsal is anything to go by, tonight's 'opening night' show should be a corker. Even when I was singing on a weekly basis I've never felt as comfortable on a stage as I did last night. Admittedly, I was singing my own material, and there wasn't much of an audience to speak of (a few other cast members and the crew), but even so I had a blast. Hopefully my familiarity with the songs and the venue will help overcome any nerves that are bound to crop up when I'm faced with a real, live audience. If the singing accountant can use his nerves to focus his singing, I'm sure I can. He's balder than I.

As far as "the other" part of my involvement goes - the first-act compère - I've developed a delivery style that gives me lots of pauses to let the memory flow. At the outset I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew, having written a 2-minute (or so) monologue in the style of Leonard Sachs (in his The Good Old Days persona) I ended up packing it with so much polysyllabic alliteration that I thought I'd never be able to memorise it. However, perseverance has paid off and - so far at least - I've been pretty close to word perfect at most rehearsals, and bang on last night.

That's not stopped me from engaging in more practice today though. I'm all too conscious that I could go blank at any moment, so I need those six paragraphs fresh and at the forefront of my mind until Saturday.

I wrote "the other" part of my involvement above, but of course there's one more role that I traditionally perform on dress rehearsal night: the taking of the production photos. This proved physically impossible for those parts of the night where I was in front of the camera, so I was grateful to have a deputy to take over for the ~25 minutes when I was on stage or in the stalls. Most of the photos are available already. The ones of the "Hurly Burly Burlesque Queens" are awaiting vetting by the Queens themselves. When you're dancing it what is essentially underwear, it's only fair to have a veto over what images are made public!