Arts

Because the scene begins and ends with the show’s theme song, everything had to be precisely synchronized with the pre-recorded music so that the actors hit their marks just in time for the final reprise of the chorus. Over and over they started, only to falter on a line, miss a dance step, come up short on a cue. They would break, gulp from bottles of water, restart the scene from the beginning. Then the director, Ford Flanagan, would stop them to make a slight change in staging. They’d start again. Another stop, another start. Soon they were breathing hard, fanning themselves with their scripts during the breaks.

Flanagan has directed this show twice every year for nearly 15 years, but he betrayed no impatience as they paced through the scene over and over. He focused intently on the stage. He asked the actors to rework a few steps of choreography, change the inflection of a line, turn a foot outward. Even with 15 years’ worth of notes, he says, he still reshapes the show every time with each new cast.

Taking up perhaps five minutes of the actual show, the opening scene consumed most of the morning’s rehearsal. By the time Flanagan called the lunch break, the actors flopped gratefully, wearily, onto any handy surface—the floor, a wooden box, the edge of the stage. After lunch, the afternoon would call for more singing, more dancing, more stops and starts, because everything had to be nailed down, buttoned up and polished smooth before they launched the tour the following week.

A month later, however, the scene went off without a hitch on the cramped stage of an age-worn urban elementary school. By now the cast had set up, performed and dismantled dozens of times. They’d traveled from hectic Fairfax to faraway Highland County. They’d performed on gym floors and on school stages, coped with lousy lighting and worse acoustics. They’d consumed a lot of coffee. “When I sleep, I really sleep now,” said actor Brittney Slater, who also admitted that even in her offstage hours she found herself responding to other people’s comments with the big, peppy “Yeah!” of her onstage self.

If they were tired though, if their voices were strained or they’d grown weary of loading and unloading and assembling and disassembling the set day after day, it didn’t show. They captured their audience with the opening number, and the kids ate it up, laughing at the funny bits, oohing and aahing when the set was magically transformed with a few flips of the flats, staying focused through the more serious moments, and, after the final applause and the question-and-answer session, crowding eagerly around the actors full of questions and curiosity.