(photo credit Graeme Braidwood)

Today we ran a dress rehearsal of The Cardinals. It’s difficult to assess if the changes we have made qualify as a whole new O.S. upgrade (2.0.4) or if we have merely been de-bugging the original (1:3.4). The biggest outstanding question involves the interval – with or without? Following consultation with venues we are currently with, though my suspicion is that it should probably be without. It will be interesting to garner some audience feedback tomorrow at Warwick Arts Centre; which I believe is pretty much sold out.

The Cardinals cast are doing the equivalent of a line run for a show without words “then I do this”, “and I do this”, “this comes in”, “that goes off”, “I change the music”. It’s a lot quicker than doing the actual show.

It is taking a while but slowly and surely we are making The Cardinals significantly better than it was. There are no massive changes, just tweaks, tightenings and adjustments; moments and glances inserted here and there. Things that were held together with sellotape and hope now screwed down and nailed on. It’s fun to do. Hopefully it will be fun to watch.

Yesterday Graeme Braidwood was in taking some snaps of rehearsals – he is a master of his craft. The one above is one of his (savagely cropped for our site’s cinema-scope format).

After four days work, on Friday we were finally in a position to attempt a run through. To say it went smoothly would be to overstate things, but it wasn’t as far off as we had feared it might be. Fortunately we still have five days of rehearsal to go.

Whilst the audience view of The Cardinals is fairly well documented on video and with a familiar spreadsheet style script, logging props, movement, costume changes and script, we now realise it would have been valuable to have recorded backstage action equally diligently. The team are currently trying to work out how key props are concealed and revealed.