Making the Most of Mic Check

Welcome to this week’s edition of Summit Stages News! I’m Rebecca Burnham and this is where you get weekly updates about musical theatre that promotes wholeness and belonging; learn about visionary creators, producers and others; and discover some mighty stories that need to be turned into musicals.

I’m on a collaborative mission to give cynics reason to become connectors, drifters hope to become builders, and enemies understanding to become friends, all through musical theatre. It’s a task that’s way bigger than I am and this newsletter is my effort to gather with people of vision, heart, and skills so we can do that work together.

Our small-town production of The Little Mermaid opens one week from tonight. I should actually call it a small-towns production, because the cast comes from a handful of municipalities, all within about a 45 minutes drive. That presents a bit of a challenge when you’re trying to build a united cast. And for many, including me, unity and belonging together is what makes theatre magical.In the last couple of days, we’ve had a big breakthrough. One of our cast members offered to bring a fish bowl and a bunch of coloured paper fish, on which cast members can write notes of appreciation for each other. The plan was to read 5 notes at the end of each rehearsal. But I underestimated how enthusiastically the cast would participate. Last night, the fish bowl was more than half full. When our King Triton started reading the notes to the cast, the room started to feel magical. Even though it was late and everyone wanted to get home, the cast didn’t want to stop at five notes and enthusiastically clapped and cheered for each other.

Our only problem then was how to make time for the reading of all those notes, after every rehearsal. They’re profoundly important and the public sharing of them creates esprit de corps in a way that reading them privately cannot. But we open in a week, every minute of rehearsal time is precious, and even our mic checks right now are painfully slow.

We solved that problem today, by having our cast read the rest of last night’s notes about what wowed them, while they were getting their mic’s checked. It created the smoothest and most focused mic check I’ve seen. And it added enormous value to an exercise that used to feel like a necessary evil.

What other ideas do people have for encouraging a strong and supportive esprit de corps that helps cast members approach opening night eagerly, and with a sense of each others support?