It's the day of the show y'all

Now that we’re here in Malaysia loving it, our presenters are asking a bit more from us. Since the show’s presales have been going so well, they’ve decided we need to open a day early! Our first performance will only be for special guests of Malaysian Airlines (our presenter), but it will be full like a real show. Because of this, I had my first Malaysian rehearsal on Thursday night.

After having this rehearsal, here’s what I’ve learned. A. The traffic in Malaysia is horrible! During rush hour, it’s some of the worst I have ever seen. The cars drive on the wrong side of road here, and the roads are as wide as the highways in LA… I’m talking at least 12 lanes across, with people weaving and merging like in China. It’s Nutso. B. People in Malaysia do not account for traffic. Apparently everyone in this country has the same idea as my dad and I. We think that if something is fifteen minutes away, we can get there in fifteen minutes. This helps to make us consistently late when traffic adds the extra five minutes. In Malaysia, no one accounts for the extra time in traffic, so they’re always late! When crew people were fifteen minutes late to our rehearsal, our stage manager Radar talked to them, and they were like, "uh, sorry, there was traffic." He was like, "Isn’t there ALWAYS traffic?" and they were like, "I don’t know, um, there was just some traffic". This is one of the reasons our shows here start at 8:30pm, because apparently the presenters said that if we started at 8 everyone would be late. C. Cab drivers in Malaysia are lazy. Whenever we try to get a cab here, you’re supposed to get them to run their meters. However, a lot of cab drivers won’t, so you have to bargain ahead of time about how much it will cost to get to where you’re going. Sometimes though, cab drivers will just not want to drive you where you’re going, especially if it’s the Istana Budaya (our theatre) and they will have to drive in traffic.

So after learning all that, we had our sound check and sitz probe with the orchestra. The funny thing about them is this: every time we arrive in a new city, our core orchestra starts rehearsing with the added local musicians two days before we open. Then when we have our sitz probe, they’re all ready. Here, the day our orchestra showed up to rehearse, there was no local orchestra at the theatre. One guy eventually showed up just to say that they had already practiced and felt ready, so they’d see us at opening. It made for a fun run-through right before we opened!

Honestly though, it’s all worth it. The theatre is absolutely gorgeous! From the outside it looks like a giant geometric flower blooming, and the inside is very Islamic. The house only holds around 1500 people, as opposed to the 3000 we’ve been playing to, and this makes it feel a lot more intimate. The space actually is used mostly for opera, and the acoustics are amazing. I’m glad to be back to having my star dressing room (hee hee) that I share with my ex-roommate Friesia (who plays Elsa). The best part of all though, is the audiences.

So all of this prepares us for...Opening night! "It’s the day of the show y’all!" We had to get to the theatre early this morning (early being noon) to run through the show and do our whole company soundcheck. We ran the show once, and then had a break. The downfall of the theatre is the fact that it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, and the only food around is from street stands that I would gag at in the US. So, before the big show we ordered Domino’s just like home. Everything combined to make our opening show a fantastic success! I don’t think we’ve ever had an audience that is so fluent in English, that laughs all the time, that claps so loud that it makes your heart swell, that stand so quickly at the end. Our first show was a joy because of all the new energy coming from the audience, and I can’t wait to keep playing Malaysia!