Les Miserables Fifth Performance-6/18/14

In case you didn’t figure it out, we got it approved to do an additional Wednesday performance! We managed to sell this one out as well!

The chorus girl I had mentioned who got sick ended up getting food poisoning, poor thing, and she’ll be out the rest of the run. So I’m taking up a part of her track for the rest of the run.

Speaking of illness, our poor Madame Thenardier had a bad reaction the white harlequin makeup she wears for “Beggars at the Feast”, so she came back to the second weekend a little worse for wear. Poor dear. Thankfully one of our cast members is a doctor and he fixed her up. Now she wears a simple baby powder for that sequence.

But she really is a champ pushing through like that. Despite all that, this “Master of the House” was the best it ever went. The audience cracked up in all the right parts, and the energy was just all around fantastic.

And of course, right before the show, my baby box decided to attack me and I started having cramps like nobody’s business. I’m talking, the kind where it hurts to even stand up. And I had a headache before the show, so I’d already taken ibuprofen so I couldn’t take any more until intermission. But in a way it actually worked nicely for “At the End of the Day” and “Look Down” where I’m supposed to be desponding and in pain. As Aaron Tveit would say “A little more method than I like to go, but….” I mean, that wasn’t pretending, I was TRULY in pain, truly crawling and trying to just make it through without collapsing.

But for me, the best moment was before the show when our Enjolras let me try on the xylophone vest. And I took pictures. And it was marvelous, I was hypervenalating the whole time! (And yes, I did try to “Enjolras” in it, but there wasn’t enough room anywhere in the dressing rooms so that didn’t happen.) But it was still magical.

Backstage the ceiling is leaking, so we have a bucket to catch all the drips. Unfortunately our Major Domo, who is also Grantaire, tripped and splashed the cold water all over himself on the way to his quick change back into Grantaire for the Epilogue. Poor dear, but it was still hysterical. There was also a minor mishap during “Lovely Ladies”, when one of the prostitute’s bracelets flew off. Thankfully it landed right by my knee and so I picked it up and gave it back to her.

And of course, the information about the changes to the Into the Woods movie had just been released, so we had a lot of interesting discussions about that between all of us. And earlier that day I had learned for the first time that Claude Michele-Shonberg had played Courfeyrac on the French concept album, which I think is freaking cool, and I told our Courfeyrac about that and he was all “NO WAY!”

During our encore, I got to stand in front again, this time between Fantine and Jean Valjean. I had this incredible wall of sound around me unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and of course I cried.

I got to talk to several of my friends in the audience afterwards, including a good friend who came up to me bawling her eyes out and hugging me over and over. Apparently she wouldn’t have known about the extra show if she hadn’t seen my Facebook post about it, so she was incredibly grateful to me, as well as just awestruck over the show.

Also ran into another good friend of mine I hadn’t seen since spring break. One of the first things she said to me was “Okay, can I take that Gavroche home with me?” And I said “I don’t blame you honey he’s pretty precious”.

So thankful I got another chance to work and play and interact with this amazing group of people.