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MusicManD
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Quote MusicManD Replybullet Topic: Working within schedule conflicts
    Posted: 8/13/11 at 1:50am
I do the bulk of my directing in a high school.  We're a small enough school that my students do EVERYTHING.  As I'm looking at my rehearsal schedule for the fall musical, I noticed something odd, but first a little background.  I can't rehearse on Wednesday or Friday nights due to the unofficial "church night" and football games, so I have to make due with Monday, Tuesday, Thursday with the occasional weekend rehearsals (weekend rehearsals are not well attended and parents complain, so I generally reserve weekends for work days and emergencies).

Mondays are always JV football.  I don't know if I'll have any students on the JV squad this year, so this may or may not be an issue.  Tuesday and Thursdays are soccer and volleyball.  When soccer is home, they come to rehearsal on time.  When away, they may or may not be able to come in at all.  Ditto with volleyball, except when home, those girls are still tied up until 8 (our rehearsals are 7-9... I'd love to start earlier, but all sports are in practice until 6).

Looking at the schedule, soccer players (which will almost certainly include some students who I want for leads) will miss or be late for 7 rehearsals in the first 6 weeks, including 4 consecutive Thursdays.  Volleyball (which includes at least 4 promising students) takes away 6 rehearsals in the first 6 weeks.  We lose three rehearsals to music concerts and a rare Thursday night home varsity football game, and I have to fight hard to keep my rehearsals on parent/teacher conference nights (both on Tuesday and Thursday).

THIS is why I have to run such ridiculously long rehearsal schedules.  This time it will be 11 weeks, but it equals out to only 24 or 25 rehearsals before production week (depending on whether I make them come in on Halloween).  Of those, only 9 will have the full cast!!

If we were a bigger school, I could demand a larger time commitment of my kids, but I realistically only have a pool of about 30 people from which to pull my entire cast (the school has about 300 but a lot of kids don't get involved).  If I were to put my foot down, some kids would choose the show, but I'd lose a huge talent base (and get a ton of complaints from parents).  Thus, I get to figure out how to rehearse Seussical when the Cat in the Hat and JoJo won't see each other in rehearsal for four weeks... Smile

What's really frustrating is that once I spend a few hours poring over these conflicts and drawing up a complicated schedule that maximizes rehearsal time, kids will sometimes decide not to show up or get confused as to when they rehearse.

Sometimes I wish I directed more in community theater.  You guys don't EVER have to worry about actors who are too involved in other things, do you?  Wink
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jayzehr
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Quote jayzehr Replybullet Posted: 8/13/11 at 1:24pm
I don't know if this applies to your situation but...I usually direct a CT play with a large cast in the summer. I take everyone's schedule into account and devise a rehearsal schedule based on the conflicts. However, what I believe happens is that most of the actors aren't aware of the details and some take this as an opportunity to miss rehearsals they hadn't listed as conflicts at auditions. As in "Joe wasn't there Thursday so it should be OK for me to take off Tuesday for XYZ."  If you've worked out a complicated schedule to maximize rehearsal time this can absolutely kill you. I may be going to the plan where you make the rehearsal schedule before auditions and then announce that you either come to the rehearsals or you won't be in the show.
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MusicManD
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Quote MusicManD Replybullet Posted: 8/13/11 at 6:02pm
I've done it both ways.  Last year for the musical I planned meticulously (especially the first 6 weeks), and had people showing up who weren't scheduled at rehearsal, AND people who were scheduled forgetting or deciding not to come.

So for the spring play, I decided to try the other direction- everybody come when you can and I'll rehearse you.  Worked okay sometimes, but we ended up spending a lot of time on the big chorus scenes and very little time on smaller scenes with some of my leads.  It all came together fine, but was also way too short of a show to come down to the wire like that.

So... I think I'm going to go back to the idea of a complicated schedule.  I do want to try it so if you come in, you're there for the whole rehearsal.  I didn't have much luck with, "Rehearsal starts at seven, but you don't need to be here until 8:30-9:00."  A lot of my kids are driving 20 minutes to get to the school, so 30 minutes of rehearsal is a slap in the face... OR they run late, leaving another actor in that same scene waiting.

I'll just have to figure out the best way to do this... and, of course, you have to make that entire up in the day or two between the auditions and the first rehearsal...

Heck, if I didn't have
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Majicwrench
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Quote Majicwrench Replybullet Posted: 8/14/11 at 12:40pm
 I do not try to figure out that complicated rehearsal schedule. Would drive me nuts. Would be OK, if everyone would stick to it, but like you said, it gets all mixed up. I have other things to do.
  At the middle school I direct at, most sports practices are over at 5pm, and so is the after-school program, so MOST of the kids are around at that time, except the kids gone for sports.  So I set my rehearsals for 5pm. The kids know (or they learn fast) that they need to let me know if they are not going to make it. I always have a few what I call "Universal Understudies" who fill in for those missing, and can take parts in shows if it comes to that.
  And I always have SNACKS, and seriously, it keeps the kids coming.
 
And yes, CT is the same way, sometimes worse.
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jmausser
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Quote jmausser Replybullet Posted: 8/15/11 at 2:17pm
I'm not sure this will help because my situation is a little unique but here goes... For ten years I directed (usually two per year) plays at a rural high school. A very large percentage of our students ride school buses and coming back to evening rehearsals would be very impractical. So, after school rehearsals have been the rule which had made it impossible to include actors who are participating in sports. The conflicts are just too great. I put my bigger play (the musical) in the winter where the sports conflicts are the fewest. Yes, I know it's sad to exclude those athletes but I just never found a good way around it. Even without athletes it is amazing how busy the actors are with dance classes, voice lessons, pianon lessons, and club activities (speech/debate is big at our school). I do develop a detailed rehearsal schedule around these latter conflicts. Sure, things come up but overall it works well.
 
Hope this helps.
Director in Leavenworth
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MusicManD
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Quote MusicManD Replybullet Posted: 8/15/11 at 11:49pm
I used to teach in a much larger school where after school rehearsals were perfectly acceptable.  There weren't a lot of kids who excelled in more than one or two areas.

In my school, however, my singer/actors are among the most involved kids in the school.  If I exclude the athletes, I also exclude some of my most dedicated and talented students.  I suppose I would have some who would choose theater over sports, but I'd also have many who would choose the latter (and I suspect more parents would insist that sports are an "experience" that their child needed to have).  My musical last year had about 25 auditioners... about 15 of which were involved in other activities.

Our musical is in November because we have a "dead week" mandated by the state between the conclusion of fall sports and the beginning of winter sports practices.  Our play is traditionally in March, right at the beginning of spring sports season (there's no dead week in between those sports).
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Quote avcastner Replybullet Posted: 11/12/12 at 8:23pm
Originally posted by MusicManD


In my school, however, my singer/actors are among the most involved kids in the school.  If I exclude the athletes, I also exclude some of my most dedicated and talented students. 
 
I'm in the exact same boat--including no rehearsals on Wednesdays for church (not really a big deal to me, because I love church), and I've given up ever having Friday or Saturday rehearsals except in extreme circumstances, because the parents schedule weekend trips or there are big projects due in the coming week that the kids have to do over the weekend. 
 
And, then after having really late rehearsal schedules to accommodate the sports team, it really hurts when the athletics director won't reschedule a game on a performance day and says, "Who is to say they will pick drama over athletics?"  Just frustrating!
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