Well, so that was the Generalprobe (dress rehearsal)...  Goodness, am I glad that there is traditionally MEANT to be a certain amount of confusion at such times.

I started off late into make-up.  I am NEVER late.  Pathological aversion to it due to a father who obviously at some point made a pact with the devil concerning finding parking places next to the theatre and sauntering in with two seconds to spare, and I also find it horribly unprofessional.  However sometimes you are faced with a choice of two evils, and I think it would have been rather rude to simply step over an injured old lady who'd fallen in the street and couldn't get up.

Luckily I didn't completely snarl everything up in make-up as the soprano kindly stepped in for me a little early, but it meant I couldn't warm up (I'm generally loafing around in a rehearsal room for half an hour or so before I get made up).  Not a problem really with such a small role, but still, felt a little off balance.  Literally - at one point am meant to move as if in a dream towards a wall, and sink down against it - I actually tripped and nearly fell, but caught myself.  (Interestingly, the director thought it was a neat bit of characterisation and I didn't disabuse him!)

Once I had finished singing - end of Act I in a three-act opera, I got out of my costume and into my dressing gown, and relocated to the canteen with a colleague in the same situation (there is no interval in this production, so we have to lurk around and amuse ourselves somehow before bowing at the end).  I'd arranged with the costume lady to meet her at a certain time, based on yesterday's rehearsal, to change back into costume for the bows.  Unfortunately both of us had forgotten that we'd started really late yesterday, and so I was in the awkward position, hearing the call to be ready for bows, of having to leap up from the canteen table, leaving my half-drunk glass of wine, and running to my dressing room at top speed.  I shed my dressing-gown at the entrance, grabbed my costume and shouted HELP!!! into the ether.  God bless all the make-up artists etc who came and helped me cobble together my buttons - albeit slightly crookedly (lot of buttons, LOT of buttons!), otherwise the bows at the end would have shown rather more than was seemly :-)

Still, I think this is a wonderful production, and am hoping really against hope that I can manage until Saturday's première without getting ill.  Fingers crossed!