BWW Blog: Journeying Into BRIGADOON as an Assistant Director

Hello everyone and welcome to my first blog with BroadwayWorld! I am so excited to be giving you an inside look into my life as a college student studying theatre!

My name is Ellen Powers, and I am currently a sophomore at Muhlenberg College, where I am pursuing a B.A. in Theatre. Specifically, I am working towards a directing concentration, as well as a minor in Creative Writing. During my freshman year at Muhlenberg, I was lucky enough to direct two one act plays as part of the Red Door Play Festival, Muhlenberg's student-run One Act Festival. At the end of this past spring semester, I applied to assistant direct one of the mainstage productions for this current fall semester, and I was overjoyed to receive the news that I would be one of two assistant directors of Brigadoon, the musical for the year. I was so honored and excited to start working on Brigadoon. Before Brigadoon, I hadn't worked on a musical since the winter of my senior year of high school, and to be working on a production of Muhlenberg's highest scale. Of course, this meant that I needed to be as prepared as possible when auditions started during the first week of school.

Over the summer, I got ready for auditions by familiarizing myself with Brigadoon. I listened to the studio cast recording, watched the movie, as well as trailers for different productions of the show, and began making notes of the casting types for each character and their vocal ranges. During auditions, I took notes, sorted resumes and headshots, and occasionally offered my input on the students auditioning.

Our rehearsal process was long, sometimes stressful, but all in all, extremely rewarding and informative. Our musical director and choreographer would run vocal and dance rehearsals respectively, but our director would run scene rehearsals that the other assistant director and I would be able to sit in on. During the first few weeks of rehearsals, we didn't begin blocking the different scenes. Instead, we sat around a table, and the actors read from the different scenes. Our director had a vision for the show, but the other assistant director and I were able to occasionally provide input on how lines should be delivered and eventually, how scenes should be staged, which was really interesting to see.

The whole rehearsal process was extremely informative. Even if I wasn't actively doing something in a rehearsal, I was still able to observe our director or our choreographer run a rehearsal and stage different scenes. I had never seen the "behind-the-scenes" aspect of rehearsals for a musical before, and I realized how much goes into the creation of a musical. As the rehearsal process continued and we started running the show, the other assistant director and I would write down the notes our director had. This process was particularly helpful to me because I was able to see what sort of things our director noticed, and at this point in my education, they weren't things that I realized the importance of. I was able to learn how much I'm going to have to consider as a director when I direct shows on my own again in the future. I was able to do a lot of this note-taking during tech week, which allowed me to see how all the elements of a show come together. In high school, our tech weeks were never that intense, even for our musicals, so I had no idea how stressful and intense our tech for Brigadoon would be. However, seeing everything come together in our final run before performances started was so incredibly rewarding, and I was so proud of the cast and how far they had come throughout the last two months.

Now, we are in the midst of our first weekend of performances. To sit in the audience and just watch our incredibly talented cast put on the show after all of their hard work has filled me with so much joy. Seeing the audiences' reactions to the show has been intriguing and even amusing at times. I've loved seeing what the audience laughs at, and I like hearing their general reactions to the different moments of the show. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the second weekend of performances brings!