Hey theater-lovers,

We are less than 2 weeks away from the opening of "Flipping Channels!" This past week has been drenched by rain every day, and the cast and crew, being students, went through numerous stressful AP's, the SAT's, etc. However, luckily, we got to have some real fun at rehearsals.

Italian rehearsals does not mean rehearsing with an Italian accent-- it means to speed run the entire show with extremely fast cue pickups in different settings. "The Office" and "Scrubs" had the privilege to have this fun.

"The Office" is a very subtle comedy, maybe the most realistic one out of all four, featuring long awkward pauses and a slow speed. The cast was not sure what to do at first when Mr. Howard said, just run it really fast. One scene later, Mr. Howard suddenly said, "now say all your lines as if you have a crush on the other person." Everyone bursted out in laughter, and everyone was relaxed. Mr. Howard continued to give different "handles" (distinct character traits, as I featured in my last blogpost,) like "now you have a bad Russian accent," "now you're a character in a melodramatic BBC show," "now you're an overblown character from a video game where everything has a sound effect," and "now you're a character from a children's book."

Everyone had so much fun with the different "handles," and we could not help but laughed throughout the whole run. The Italian rehearsal helped us put together the whole picture of the show, and also made us realize how important our "handles" are, in order to help us elaborate more on our characters.

Eat, drink water, and laugh,
Maggie