Dance for Your Dessert

I know what happiness brings
It brings a brand new view
I know what happens to me
When I meet someone like you

—”Someone Like You” by Cliff Eberhardt

We are halfway through the rehearsal process for Folger Theatre’s The Taming of the Shrew. The play is blocked and the actors are walking around without scripts in their hands…most of the time. The first half of Sunday’s rehearsal was dedicated to some concentrated scene work with Kate Eastwood Norris (Katherine) and Cody Nickell (Petruchio) working with director Aaron Posner, while Thomas Keegan (Lucentio), Sarah Mollo-Christensen (Bianca), Marcus Kyd (Hortensio), and Rex Daugherty (Curtis) worked in a separate space with assistant director Cleo House.

Cliff Eberhardt

And what better way to spend the last two hours of the work week than doing a little dancing—or at least learning some moves that will hopefully look like dancing, eventually. Aaron’s plan for the end of the play is a full-company dance number, set to composer/musician Cliff Eberhardt’s rousing and heartwarming “Someone Like You.” To put it gently, the learning curve varies from actor to actor when it comes to dancing; but after a little sweat, hard work, laughter, and profanity, we were able to get through the entire song—well… the first verse, anyway. Fortunately, we’ve still got some time to learn the rest and practice our Texas two-step. Aaron was pleased with the progress made in the first two weeks of rehearsal. As a gesture of thanks and motivation, he rewarded the cast with ice cream bars at the end of the day—thereby proving that, in some ways, we are much the same as we were when we started making theater as children. After Cliff’s song and Aaron’s treat, the cast of Taming of the Shrew finished the week, smiling.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4Qi9-REDo]