"Let's take that again."

Those are the words we heard all day yesterday as we added the orchestra in the theater for the first time, which always becomes a very frustrating day. We're working on balance issues and having actors in their places so they can actually hear — or not hear — what they need to. We had to run the opening number three times just to get everyone on the same page. It's always really difficult since we don’t have a monitor for the actors to see the conductor, so it's all done with feeling. That’s very tricky with a score like this because of the difficulty of the notes as well as the dense lyrics. So it was a long day of working through every musical section of the show — which is many. We have more changes going in to the rehearsals today before we do our first full run thru with the orchestra at 4pm. The final weekend is always exhausting adding everything to the production as we continue to make changes and fine tune. The day I dread most is Sunday. More on that later.

—ES