Don't you give up walking cause you gave up shoes...

I know I told people that starting this week I would try to post every Sunday and Wednesday night, but I’ve been feverish, so, you’ll all excuse me this slip.

I was waiting for about a month for The Wiz cast to be announced so I could write about it here and now I sort of don't remember what I wanted to say. Maybe someone else wants to comment on the dancer as Toto idea? It's very Milky White, right? If Chad Kimball was the "IT Bovine," Albert Blaise Cattafi can so become the "It Canine." I can see the EW spread now...

One of my readers said, in response to my last post, that she believed it might be against Equity policy to make changes on shows after opening. Maybe the rest of you were thinking similarly? And it sort of makes sense that it might be. So I tried to research it using the exciting online contract guidelines. It does not seem it is. To the best of my knowledge, nothing in the Equity guidelines (at least as they pertain to the Broadway Production Contract) says that changes cannot be made post-opening. Now those guidelines do state that the maximum amount of post-opening rehearsal time is eight hours a week (more for emergency replacements or understudies, I believe), which limits the amount of work one can actually get done, but, that is another matter. Again, I could be wrong, I’m not 100% confident because I didn’t read the entire handbook; all I can say is that rehearsal time-limit guideline is the only pertinent thing I found.

Now, that got me thinking that there could be some SSDC rule that says that directors/choreographers should cease working at a certain juncture. So I asked a friend of a friend of a friend who used to be involved with SSDC and that does not seem to be the case either. (The SSDC person noted that many times directors and choreographers MUST move on quickly because of scheduling, thus meaning they could not possibly continue to work on a given project, which is of course a valid point.)

There you go—we can hail Maurice Hines without fearing he broke some kind of union rule. Though I’m sure he broke some etiquette rule when he rambled long enough during his final curtain call speech that his leading lady had to grab the mike from him…. Oh, well, that is beside the point.