So the first question is, is this working?

Your Daily Lex

So far so good.

It’s nice to start an episode and have the recording actually sound like me.

What can I tell ya?

Last night was the first rehearsal for Same Time Next Year, which as a recap is a two-person show.

It opened with Charles Grodin and Ellen Burstyn on Broadway, and then Ellen Burstyn was also in the movie but with Alan Alda in that part.

And the movie had more people in the cast, but the play is just the two of us.

And I’m not doing it with Ellen Burstyn, she was not available, but I’m doing it with a nice woman who I had never met before.

I like the director and there’s a stage manager and it’s literally just the four of us at these rehearsals.

Two actors and then two people watching us.

So first rehearsal last night went well.

I’ve already started working on memorizing, and as I’ve talked about on the show before, the way I work right now to memorize my lines is I start by recording them all and then I listen to them all the time.

I listen to them in the car when I’m going to and from rehearsal, I listen to them other times, and because I’ve been having issues with this Mac and recording audio, I had to do some re-recording today and that was all very annoying.

And it’s fun when you’re recording an entire act’s worth of dialogue, you don’t know if it’s going wrong.

Because I don’t want to keep stopping it, I want to just keep going when I’m in a flow.

And then you play it and it’s like, hey, it all sounds like this, and that’s not good.

But I believe I have it all now.

And yeah, last night we did Act 1 Scene 1, which is something like 18 pages, and tonight it’s Act 1 Scene 2.

Good stuff.

There’s so much to memorize.

And a lot of the dialogue works, you know, like the line that you hear triggers what you’re going to say.

Sometimes my character especially speaks not exactly in non sequiturs, but he ignores what’s been said.

So George doesn’t reply to what’s been said, he starts saying the next thing that’s on his mind or a different thing that’s on his mind, and it’s odd, and it can feel goofy.

It’s hard to memorize.

And then there’s multiple phone conversations for George.

I think one for Doris.

But these phone conversations are intimidating as well, because it’s just these giant, multiple paragraph conversations where you’re only hearing my side.

And that’s tricky, so it’s a lot.

I hate being scared of the memorization side, and I am.

I always figure it out, and so I continue to know that I will figure it out.

I’m confident that I’ll get the confidence I need, but it’s still scary.

I wish it were as easy as it was when I was a kid.

I was talking to Sierra about that, and she’s like, no, it’s hard for me now.

And I’m like, no, it’s not great.

But I remember as a kid growing up, I would just read my script, read it again, read it again, now my line’s memorized.

Can’t do that.

Certainly not in a play with this many lines.

But it’s reading it and listening to it and thinking about it and listening to it.

And there’s times where you want to listen to something else, right?

There’s times where you want to listen to a podcast or to music, or you want to watch a show or you want to play something, like you want to do something fun.

It’s like you got to do the work.

Now, I do these things.

I do theater because I love it.

I really enjoy doing the show.

I mean, it’s very exciting to do a two-person show, right?

Like you can…

Obama is among the presidents to talk about how you have to have a big ego to do that.

I’m not the president, as you may or may not know.

I don’t know who is.

But you do theater in part because like you want the applause or you like being on stage or whatever.

Like for me, I think it’s really fun.

And I like when people tell you, you did a good job.

I like that part of it.

So this is a burden, in quotes, that I’ve put on myself, right?

I don’t have to do the show.

I’m choosing to do the show.

I’m really excited about it, like really, really excited about it.

But it is hard.

And this director who we’re working with is really particular about blocking.

Like he told us at the final callback that he’d already blocked the entire show.

And he showed us last night at the first rehearsal, he had a book with the script on one side and his set design on the other on every page.

And he had little drawings with me in one color and the woman in another color of exactly where he wants us to go.

And he knows on what words or what lines he wants us to move to different places.

I’ve not worked exactly that way before.

I have no objection to it.

As long as I can make it work, as long as it can, you know, feel natural, that’s great.

But it was such an in-my-face reminder last night that it’s two things, right?

You have to memorize all the lines and you have to memorize all the blocking.

None of this is news to me, but it’s just, it’s even more work.

Because you need to be totally comfortable with each to be comfortable with both.

That barely made sense, but I knew what I meant.

And what I’m trying to say is like, you need to know all the lines so you can learn the blocking.

You need to know all the blocking and have the lines come along with it effortlessly.

And it’s all tricky.

It’s a lot to do.

So I think sometimes it’s easy to forget when you watch a scripted show, particularly a live performance, how much work goes into all the itty-bitty mechanics of it.

And I have said to you and to others in my life, to you, dear listener, I don’t always love doing a musical where I don’t know anything at all because you have to learn so much, the music and the lines and the choreo and all of it.

But in some ways, music is a little bit easier to learn because, you know, we can learn songs a little bit faster and we can learn dialogue.

And there’s just so much dialogue.

So I’m excited for this challenge, but I want to make no bones about it.

It is a challenge.

It’s hard.

I would say that I know roughly 50% of Act 1, Scene 1 and roughly 0% of the rest.

I’m really, really bad on Act 2.

I’ve listened to Act 1 several times, but I only recorded Act 2 today.

So yeah, lots and lots of work to do.

We don’t have to be off book until December.

The show is not until mid-late January.

But I have this dream of being off book for at least Act 1 by the end of October.

Can I do it?

I genuinely don’t know, but I’m going to try.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a wonderful Tuesday.

And I also hope that this episode actually recorded successfully.

Goodbye.