I am sure if you went back to the days of ‘My Fair Lady,’ they would have had one public dress rehearsal, and that is it. And in a way, I would like to go back to that.
The level of sacrifice in the world of dancing is incredibly intense, that work ethic if nothing else – get up, go to class, rehearsal, performance, get up, go to class – that’s your life, and it’s like that for a finite time, usually.
When you’re working on a film, it’s not theater; you don’t have a few weeks of rehearsal. A lot of times you are showing up on set, and you’ve never been to the place; you’ve never met the other actors you’re working with.
Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I’ve had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.
‘One Tree Hill’ was my first television experience, so naturally I was nervous initially. There is no rehearsal, you get your script a few days ahead, and you work. I was also the youngest actor, 13, on set at that time, but it was amazing to be able to ‘learn the ropes’ with such a supportive group of people.
To pay 60 musicians for rehearsal and performance is quite something, and I decided I wouldn’t be able to handle that kind of situation financially again, unless somebody else was taking care of that end of it.
I love to argue and share bright ideas in a rehearsal room, and when you live with somebody who is working on the same show, the delight can go on all evening!
You can’t work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.
I was very lucky: I started acting in this highly subsidized German theater world, so there was not so much job insecurity. We had great working conditions, long rehearsal times, well paid.
But when I started playing in bands, everyone would just have a couple beers at rehearsal, at the shows, or whatever, and alcohol is a great equalizer. It’s a great way to make friends and interact with people.
When you’re young and starting out, the big hurdle is to relax enough in rehearsal so that you don’t feel intimidated. The more work you’ve done, the more you can experiment in rehearsal and not have to worry about getting the sack.
I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal.
One of the things I realised as I learned to manage a rehearsal room is that the best idea always has to win, and it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from.
Theatre is all about the process and the sense of community that is created. You have weeks of rehearsal, time to explore your character and get to know the other actors. There is opportunity to try off-the-wall ideas, to find layers and nuance over weeks. You become like a second family with your cast.
I’d say most stuntmen are injured working with horses. They have a one-celled brain and change their minds right in the middle of a stunt no matter how many times they do it right in rehearsal.
I demand minimal for paid rehearsal and not always six weeks either.
‘Olive Kitteridge’ is the only thing that I’ve done on camera where we had a day of rehearsal before we shot, and I’m so glad that that happened, because I was so nervous.
I would go into a place that was quiet and isolated and think about how my character would feel in the situation, considering who he was and what he had been through. I would think about that even up to 30 minutes. And when I felt the character was in my body and I had left, I could walk onto set or into rehearsal.
‘Birdman’ is basically ‘All About Eve’ – the 1950 comedy about rehearsal rivalries in a Broadway show, and another Best Picture laureate – reimagined as a Batman suicide mission. The movie couldn’t be actor-ier.
I was a ballet dancer and that kind of bled into musical theater. I was constantly in rehearsal for one thing or another.
In general, I don’t even have the luxury of rehearsal time on most films that I make. It is just a scene-by-scene full cast read through. It’s very much just doing the rehearsal sometimes the day before, at the end of the day, but just on the spot as the scene unfolds.
I really miss the rehearsal process of theater.
It is a lot cheaper to spend eight hours in a rehearsal hall than in a recording studio.
In terms of the series, we worked separately, getting together in rehearsal to beat out the material.
For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It’s the creating of the story.
A band requires so much rehearsal and travel logistics. I didn’t mind it when I was younger, but there’s not much motivation for me to do it now.
I feel like a lot of bands have done amazing covers, but whenever we start working on it, whenever we try it in rehearsal, it never feels right for me to do the song.
The rehearsal time is almost my favourite part of being an actress, particularly if you’re working on a play that hasn’t been done before.
I learned to understand the distance a character can be from yourself and how important rehearsal can be to creating a person that feels like a person that isn’t you.
When I am in rehearsal, my tracksuits are carefully placed to disguise parts of my body. I’ll think, ‘My bum looks big today, so a cardigan will hide it.’
We have different personalities, but in a harmonious way, I’d say. Anyway, we were booked to play at the festival as a duo; and we decided we wouldn’t have any rehearsal.
Being a director, whether you’re in rehearsal or you’re in auditions or you’re in a creative meeting, is so much to me about being present in the moment. There’s a sense of time stopping.
I did quite a lot of the arranging, fitting different sections together, tempo changes, all sorts of things like that. I actually acted as a bridge between Robert and Ian. Not so much composing, rather presenting musical ideas at each rehearsal.
Life is not a rehearsal.
Toward the later days of Sabbath, instead of going in and knocking out what songs we did in rehearsal, we would polish them to death.
Edward Albee, the premier dark playwright of the American theater, would show up at rehearsal and quote his favorite lines from ‘Auntie Mame’. He would stand at the back of the theater, not facing the stage, and sort of conduct the music of his play.
I would rather play Hamlet with no rehearsal than TV golf.
Plays are a pretty big commitment. It takes a minimum of three months out of your life, really. And if you have family or kids, then at least during the rehearsal period for five or six weeks, you kind of say goodbye to everybody.
During my university years, I was doing a lot of theatre acting. I would be skipping school for rehearsal. We were rehearsing at night – we finished at midnight, and I had to go to school at 8 A.M. It was very tiring.
Japanese orchestras are generally playing at quite a high level on the first day of rehearsal, but they don’t improve very much from there.
But you really – I always think that a director has got to adapt to whatever the needs of the actor are. You know, so if you take someone like Eddie Murphy, who is not a big fan of rehearsal. You know he comes out of stand-up. He comes – it’s all about capturing the moment – in the moment, you know.
I think, for different types of things, more rehearsal is very important.
For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it’s not about performance.
There’s actually something interesting about having no rehearsal time – you have to just walk in and go with your gut, which is exciting.
You need to make mistakes in rehearsal because that’s how you find out what works and what doesn’t.
‘The Luminaries’ is such a different book to ‘The Rehearsal.’ There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there’s a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there’s patterning.
We just started filming, and after every scene was shot, we had a rehearsal for the next one.
When I go into rehearsal rooms and meet with bands, they’re genuinely excited to be with me because of what I’ve done as an artist, not because of anything else. There’s that whole celebrity rock star thing, and artists are into artists who have been able to achieve success their way.
I never want to be anywhere else than in the rehearsal room. I mean, it’s so lame to say, but it makes me supremely happy to work with people and to talk and invent and laugh.
I have a big family and had to move them all from the coast of Oregon to New York three times for the workshops and for the actual production itself, which had about a four month development rehearsal schedule.
I’ve done a lot of fight scenes, and I always find that it’s better that they be meticulously choreographed. You want them to look as real as possible, but you don’t want anyone to get hurt. So I believe in really working it out in rehearsal, and when you get to the set, just go for it 100 percent.
The first thing that was intimidating was when I started rehearsing to play Riff in the London company. That first day of rehearsal, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to learn this. I’m too slow.’
When you perform in front of an audience after only two days of rehearsal, you’re flying by the seat of your pants – particularly when they’re rewriting the show right up to the moment the camera goes on.
