Murder on The Dance Floor
Created | Updated Jul 1, 2004
What goes around...
In the 'all together
There we all were, the full cast, gathered together in this little church hall, for the first time in a couple of months. The director starts announcing a few important changes to the show.
'You've gotta have a gimmick is now here,' he says, 'which means that you, C, can't be in the Sondheim routine straight after.'
C, who is standing beside me, expresses relief as she is in so many other numbers already.
'Lucky' he says to me, 'will you take her place?'
I assent undemonstratively, not wanting to appear too immodest in front of the huge audience.
'Good' he says, 'Cos I've written your name in already!'
Damn, is my eagerness that obvious! Yeah, course it is....
He then goes on to announce that another of the big numbers (that I wasn't in) has been cut. While I feel sympathy for those who've been through 3 different choreographies so far, I feel a somewhat phyrric sense of triumph that what I had lusted after is now not going to see the light of day.
It's hard to wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the evening.
Get yer kit off!
The costume designer is there armed with tape measure and Excel spreadsheet (and piece of string...) I take my turn in the queue, having watched her do all these strange measurements to the other girls, including a worrying 'girth depth' one, involving measuring navel to coccyx, by the shortest route.
Later, one of the male dancers declared
'D'you know, she measured ALMOST everything!'
It's my turn, and I point out that I'm wearing a skirt1.She tells me to go away. I offer to see if I have anything suitable in my dancing bag, and retire, tail between my legs2.
I head off to the loos, and rummage amongst my belongings to find a leotard, which I struggle into. I'm a bit wary of revealing my white flabby thighs to the full cast, but am glad of that bikini wax! Luckily, B is there, in a pair of cut-off jeans. I bribe her with the promise of a pint if she will trade me her trews for my skirt, to which she, as a fellow Irishwoman, agrees.
Rehearsing the intro to the show, half the cast are on one side of the stage, and the rest on the other. We have a long wait before our cue, which gives much opportunity for mucking about and general carrying on. I'm facing B, and - me still in her trousers - do a 'what has it got in its pocketses?' over-dramatic mime search. All I find is a lighter. She reciprocates, but bottles out when she discerns a packet of drugs in my skirt pocket. OK they turn out to be soluble aspirin, but she had the kindness not to produce something which might have been a packet of Prozac or Viagra
Eurospeak
The director has an adorable German accent when he speaks English, and an amusing creativity when it comes to words he doesn't know. One of my faves is 'approximatively'. Anyhoo, into the Circus finale, and the girl beside me is puzzled by all these 'white clouds' and 'coloured clouds' being ordered around the stage, until she realises that the word is 'clowns'. And that's before he starts giving directions to the 'panters3'...
And in the best showbiz/Eddie Izzard tradition, we finished with a glass of champagne! Congrats, L, on your new job!
Murder on the Dance Floor
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