Before I Leave - tomorrow night is our first Preview Night ...!

It seems to have come around so quickly but now, after many weeks of rehearsal we, the singers in the Chorus of Patrick Jones's new play, are about to make our stage debut in front of an audience at the Sherman.

It's exciting, even though the actual stage part of our performance is relatively minimal, because the songs are great, and being part of a team of singers, building towards a show, has a momentum that has to be experienced to be appreciated. We really are all in this together, and it feels good!

However, it has to be said that the hours spent in rehearsal have often been something of an endurance test. Today, for example, we gathered as usual in the 'Orange Corner', behind the curtain, stage-right in semi-darkness, with a fuzzy picture on the monitor showing a small section of the stage - generally the wrong section - where the actors were doing their thing. Due to health and safety regs about 'stability' the monitor is also placed too low, so that no one beyond the second row can actually see the screen at all. The Orange Corner is generally very warm, and quite cramped, and the chairs are rather small.

Presiding over the members of the Chorus in the Orange Corner is our musical director and all round helpful person, Ben (Tinniswood) who makes sure we sing from our position in the wings at the appropriate moments, and also that we get up from our little red chairs and file in an orderly fashion onto the main stage when it is our moment to make an appearance there. This getting up business happens only twice in the course of the play, so we all make the most of it and sing our hearts out ..

Though I'm not entirely sure how we came to christen it the Orange Corner (the chairs are red, I'm sure) the term takes me back to my early teaching days when we put the infant children into 'colour' groups, in the vain hope that they wouldn't realise that the 'reds' were the cleverest children, the 'greens' slightly less clever, and so on down through the colours to the 'yellows', who were the slowest learners and who were sometimes the naughtiest too. All the children knew perfectly well that the bright, sunshiney yellow colour was just a cover, but they played along to humour the teachers anyway.

So I now see Ben as a sort of cross between a benign Chairman Mao, checking we are all in possession of our big red song folders (rather than little red books), and a chummy Primary School teacher, struggling to keep the restless Orange Corner kids in order.

We must all promise to be on our very best behaviour tomorrow though, because we have practiced long and hard and it's going to all come together beautifully.

But only if we pay attention to Ben. And I, for one, don't want to end up in Yellow group.

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Comment by Erin Martin on May 30, 2016 at 0:39

I now realise Ben's title in the context of Before I Leave is actually Choir Co ordinator. I'd also like to say how much I admire and respect his work with Dementia and Alzheimer choirs.

If you didn't catch it on the night (27th May) the Charlotte Church programme about voice on Artsnight, BBC 2, can still be seen on i player and features both Ben and Patrick Jones as well as some of the chorus and cast from Before I Leave. Worth a watch!

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