Day One

First actual day of rehearsals and staging. I thought it was going to be really difficult and intimidating, but it wasn't too bad. Two hours of first-act musical run-through, then an hour in the practice room for my art songs, then a couple of hours for break, and then four hours of staging the first act. Being cast in the chorus for my off days (i.e. days where I'm not my titled character) is actually kind of a blessing. My part is pretty much the same for both characters, so I'm memorizing the music a lot faster and I'm getting extra time to practice. We're encouraged to go to all the musical rehearsals we can, and I fully intend on taking advantage of at least three hours of musical rehearsal (each cast, A, B, C and D, gets one hour of musical rehearsal in the morning, my titled character is in cast C, and I'm chorus in A, B and D).
Same thing goes for staging today. Each cast got at least an hour to block some of the first act, and repeating the chorus part and watching my parallel "ladies of dishonor" made learning the blocking a lot easier. Unfortunately the brooms we're using as "weapons" are made of genuine hay, and made everyone including myself cough and sneeze. I've been battling some breathing problems lately and the hay definitely didn't help. All in all, by the end of the four hours we were able to run through everything we did with minimal errors. I think it's great that we're fast-enough learners that we can pick this stuff up so quickly :D
On a side note, I've taken to doing my laundry in my sink instead of waiting to do it in the washing machine upstairs. I've gotten spoiled in the last year or so by doing my laundry in my apartment for free with a washer and dryer, and doing my laundry in the sink isn't so bad, I just wash what I wore that day or the day before and hang it up to dry outside (it's warm enough outside that things dry quickly). The effort is worth it, to avoid having to buy laundry tokens.

Tomorrow is a fairly light day. I have a half-hour voice lesson in the morning with Professor Constance Rock (University of Connecticut) and I'm pretty excited for that. I've heard good things about her from the people that had voice lessons today, so I'm ready to learn awesome things to take back with me. Then I have four more hours of staging in the afternoon, hopefully without brooms to make everyone miserable. I'm going to try and do some sight-seeing around the town on my down time and take some pictures, so keep an eye out for those!