rehearsal day one

Yesterday afternoon we had a sing-through with full cast minus-one (last minute casting change, couldn't get the new one here in time).
If anything, this opera will sound great.

And that's pretty much what it needs for this kind of Mozart.

If tenor1 and sop1 can't kick the crap out of their arias, the dramatics fall flat, if tenor2 and sop2 can't be the sweetest smartest sidekicks AND sing all the high notes as well, the show is boring.

Well- happy to announce that we've got a wonderful cast (I'm actually the only person who is new to my role---kinda sorta---sop1 has sung my role before and is movin' on up to a more dramatic fach---)and everyone is comfortable. No scary high note moments. No ensembles that need tweaking.
Even after the first read it sounded crisp and "Mozart".

In the evening we had a dialog read in which we thankfully scrapped a bunch of lines that were a bit cheeese-filled, and rewrote things to make more dramatic sense and be funnier.
We also have carte blanche to continue to adlib and just see where the scene takes us.
Yay!

Everyone here seems VERY laid back. In the best of ways.
Because I'm still not used to the time change I've been waking up really early, YES, working out (ok, I did yesterday. Today I SHOULD, but haven't yet---chill out--it's 9:20am!), looking at OTHER music that I need to learn, and of course looking at current music to make sure that I know it.

At dinner with two castmates last night I noticed how, at the beginning, and well into the middle and end, this business is still about- oh, you know that person? I know them too.

And I wonder about that.
IS it because we have SUCH unstable lives, travel everywhere, can't really say that our next-door-neighbor is our best friend who comes over, we confide in them, our husbands know each other, etc... that singers do the name-game so much?
Do we find some sort of comfort that another person ALSO knows a friend of ours--and ARE they really a friend, or are they someone we have worked with in ONE production, TWO years ago, for ONE month?

I mean, of course everyone I've worked with is a "friend".
But in this day of the "update/mass" email, the rarity of a phone call, the status button on AIM and facebook, aren't we just all living vicariously as 'friends', and really just reading or hearing about someone else's accomplishments and maybe dropping them a 'congrats' email once in a while?

And is that wrong?
I mean, COULD I actually keep in touch from 35 singers from summerYap1, 40 singers from summerYap2, any number of castmates and resident artists from the past-yearYAP, PLUS the "real" people like directors, conductors, coaches--who it is actually VERY important to keep in touch with?

It seems impossible. And so, most singers that I meet play the name game. The where have you worked game. The, oh, yes, we did a Flute 3 years ago game.

And that makes us feel like we're part of a small small world of circulating working singers. When really perhaps what we want to feel is that we have a community of close-ness, not unlike what we saw as children, when our parents and whole family lived in one (well, for me much more than one-- but still) location, knew the neighbor's and walked their dog, babysat for the kids down the street, and had a sense of what friend really meant.