Sky’s Musical Corner – Reflection on CHESS

If you have read the performance post on Tuesday you know that CHESS is over and yes I’m still sad. It’s like you fall into a little hole, not knowing what to do with your life besides work. Of course that’s not true, because I read and blog and do other things, but during the days right after the derniere I always feel a bit melancholic.

CHESS was an amazing experience! I enjoyed every minute of it, even though it was exhausting at times, especially the get in week. Read about it HERE.

I fell in love with the music of the musical once more and I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to sing some of them and perform them on stage. It was once again time to learn all these movements and lyrics by heart and it wasn’t a challenge for me at all. I guess you get used to it and I would advise anyone to just sing and go through the song as often as you can and then suddenly it’s there.

Working with the cast has been an absolute pleasure, there are some wonderful people I got to know and rehearsals have been so much fun. Spending time with them backstage and after the show is just fab, I will miss them!

The audience has been great and I loved hearing all the feedback from friends, colleagues, family and people I don’t even know. When you hear thing like “Next sop London” or “it was like a broadway” show it seems surreal, but at the same time we all felt so honoured.

For this production I was responsible for social media, especially Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is not a big thing in Switzerland, unless someone has a blog or does photography. I started posting rehearsal pictures, promoted our website, articles and much more. At one point one of the cast members came up to help me and we created the section HUMANS of CHESS, where we interviewed the cast members and introduced them day after day on Facebook. In between there were the other posts as well. It got to a point, where I got a bit fed up with the whole thing though. Our Chess Facebook site has less like than our theatre group’s facebook site, but the Chess site, got many more views, which was a good sign for me, people didn’t see it that way though. They thing because I have 4000 twitter followers or because they share everything on their Facebook site, people here should do the same. It took me a long time to get that many followers and I’m sorry if I’m not spaming my friends with a cast member everyday. I agree that the feature was a great idea, but it got a bit one-sided towards the end and my other posts were way more successful. All in all, I think this was the hardest part of the production for me, because nobody sees the work you actually do and working with people who have a different opinion is not always easy. All in all I can say that I learned a lot through this experience.

I don’t want to let this spoil the whole thing though. CHESS was such a wonderful production and experience and I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.