Deborah Conway: Thursday 5th July 2001
Good morning everyone, it's another fine day in our nations capitol, blue sky, dew still white on the grass outside my window, long early shadows and just a few heavily dressed people going about their business.
I know I'm digressing from the real plot but Canberra really is a peculiar place, confused maybe. It kind of wants to be a village but with the dimensions of a suburban sprawl; then it has all the trappings of the seat of power of a small nation, but no buzz like anything actually happens here. For instance there is nothing that betrays the existence of a major shopping centre to anyone more than 30 metres from it's portals. I mean perhaps I'm just hopelessly unobservant but I've been to this town a zillion times and stayed in this hotel on a number of visits and I've never noticed the Canberra Civic shopping mall (with Grace Bros AND David Jones AND a serious supermarket, not to mention all the other mall standards) literally across the road, so carefully is it camouflaged. Is this where modern capitalism is heading? The circle is being drawn, it all feels strangely reminiscent of my visit to East Berlin in 1986, without the bullet holes of course. Don't get me wrong, I like it, it challenges my preconceived ideas about prerequisites for fun.
Blah, blah, blah...
But back to the theatre. We knocked off at 11.00 last night and my feet were mashy pieces of pulp. I am in the service of rampant shoe fetishists let loose on this production who tell me that Patsy wore heels even when she was doing the ironing. But I put my foot down (excuse the pun) when he wanted to put me in high heel slippers; I’m now barefoot in that scene. As for my wardrobe, lets just say it’s extensive, not always... necessary but always... varied.
The inner ear monitoring is appalling, but there seems little way around it. The catch is that I have to sing off a head mic ( taped under my wig) which feeds back violently every time I go near a standard monitor. (You only make that mistake once.) So I’m stuck with “buds” shoved in my ears; with earrings on as well my ears are rivalling my feet for pushing the pain barrier. And the final insult, just in case some of you still think it’s all glamour, are the 3 battery packs that have to be concealed around my body. When you’re sitting in the theatre marvelling how you’d never know I was wearing 3 boxes under that tight fitted skirt, imagine where they might be. I like to call it my clacker pack.
Yesterday we got most of the way through a tech run, which means the show stops and starts to facilitate light plotting and whether anyone is going to kill themselves going down steps in heels in the dark, etc, etc. I would liken it to labour prepping you for birth, ie tech runs are, long, painful, people lose their tempers and become immoderate, but it should all serve to make opening night effortless by comparison.
We hope. Tonight’s the night. A press call, one dress run and we’re on. Wish us luck out there in cyberblogland.
dc
added Thursday, 5 July, 2001
