Meet Chicago's finest pre-college classical musicians.
Show #1 is Dunzo!
Hey all,
We're off to the races! The first show went swimmingly and it was super-duper fun to boot. Yes, I did just say "super-duper." In any case, for this first post-show blog, I thought I'd talk about what all went into preparing for the first show. I thought about to most accurately describe it and the best analogy I can come up with is likening this first week to being fired out of a cannon.
Step One: Gathering the Materials
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and even Thursday were pretty uneventful on my end. But for the series producer, David Polk, the beginning of the week was about as far from uneventful as you can get. He spent those four days preparing the show, preparing sample interview questions, deciding the order of pieces, writing the script, figuring out which Interviews I was gonna to do and which interviews Lisa was gonna do, and finally, putting all that together which he sent to us in an e-mail on Thursday. Phew.
Step Two: Packing the Cannon
Friday, Lisa and I show up at the studio around 4PM for a photo shoot. There was a photographer there taking general publicity photos of us for the show and to appear in the WFMT magazine. So we do that for about 45 minutes and then it's down to business in rehearsal with David and Steve Robinson, the Executive Producer. We stumbled through the script once just to get a feel for it since we've never gone through it together. Then we started polishing some- figuring out which jokes were funny and which ones weren't (most of them were, thankfully), seeing if the segments flowed together in real life as they did on paper, and other stuff you can only figure out by actually going through it. We also used that time to get used to the performance hall where we were broadcasting from. This whole day took about 3 hours.
Step Three: Lighting the Wick
Lisa and I show up to the studio between 9:30 and 9:45 for one last run-through, incorporating the changes we made the night before. We also got to meet Molly and talk to her a bit before the show. The 20 minutes before 11AM were definitely the most exciting 20 minutes I'd had all week. You know, I've done a lot of Musicals and Operas but the time before we go on stage is often times pretty relaxing. Our makeup is done, our costumes are (usually) well fastened, and we rarely go on right at 8PM because there's bound to be at least a *few* older people (older = over the age of 30) who are still shuffling in at 7:59. In radio, there's no stage manager holding the curtain- once 11AM hits, it's show time.
Step Four: Blastoff!
11AM hits, the two commercial spots air, I get the signal from David, and there's no turning back: WFMT's Introductions is on the air.
*BOOM*
I have to take a second to give a shoutout to one listener, Amanda a.k.a. DMBGurl11, from Sherman Oaks, California. Yes, you read that correctly: CALIFORNIA! We're officially, coastal. One of my friends' friends showed me her friends blog (take that, Kevin Bacon!) talking about how she got up at 9AM on Saturday to listen to "Introductions." If you're interested, the whole blog post is here (I doubt she'd mind me sharing her blog url):
http://dmbgurl11.blogspot.com/2008/04/classical-music-is-cool-apparantly.html
So I hope you enjoyed this little window into what it's like putting together a radio show. Make sure to tune in next Saturday at 11 for your weekly dose of pure, unadulterated awesomeness.
-Raja
We're off to the races! The first show went swimmingly and it was super-duper fun to boot. Yes, I did just say "super-duper." In any case, for this first post-show blog, I thought I'd talk about what all went into preparing for the first show. I thought about to most accurately describe it and the best analogy I can come up with is likening this first week to being fired out of a cannon.
Step One: Gathering the Materials
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and even Thursday were pretty uneventful on my end. But for the series producer, David Polk, the beginning of the week was about as far from uneventful as you can get. He spent those four days preparing the show, preparing sample interview questions, deciding the order of pieces, writing the script, figuring out which Interviews I was gonna to do and which interviews Lisa was gonna do, and finally, putting all that together which he sent to us in an e-mail on Thursday. Phew.
Step Two: Packing the Cannon
Friday, Lisa and I show up at the studio around 4PM for a photo shoot. There was a photographer there taking general publicity photos of us for the show and to appear in the WFMT magazine. So we do that for about 45 minutes and then it's down to business in rehearsal with David and Steve Robinson, the Executive Producer. We stumbled through the script once just to get a feel for it since we've never gone through it together. Then we started polishing some- figuring out which jokes were funny and which ones weren't (most of them were, thankfully), seeing if the segments flowed together in real life as they did on paper, and other stuff you can only figure out by actually going through it. We also used that time to get used to the performance hall where we were broadcasting from. This whole day took about 3 hours.
Step Three: Lighting the Wick
Lisa and I show up to the studio between 9:30 and 9:45 for one last run-through, incorporating the changes we made the night before. We also got to meet Molly and talk to her a bit before the show. The 20 minutes before 11AM were definitely the most exciting 20 minutes I'd had all week. You know, I've done a lot of Musicals and Operas but the time before we go on stage is often times pretty relaxing. Our makeup is done, our costumes are (usually) well fastened, and we rarely go on right at 8PM because there's bound to be at least a *few* older people (older = over the age of 30) who are still shuffling in at 7:59. In radio, there's no stage manager holding the curtain- once 11AM hits, it's show time.
Step Four: Blastoff!
11AM hits, the two commercial spots air, I get the signal from David, and there's no turning back: WFMT's Introductions is on the air.
*BOOM*
I have to take a second to give a shoutout to one listener, Amanda a.k.a. DMBGurl11, from Sherman Oaks, California. Yes, you read that correctly: CALIFORNIA! We're officially, coastal. One of my friends' friends showed me her friends blog (take that, Kevin Bacon!) talking about how she got up at 9AM on Saturday to listen to "Introductions." If you're interested, the whole blog post is here (I doubt she'd mind me sharing her blog url):
http://dmbgurl11.blogspot.com/2008/04/classical-music-is-cool-apparantly.html
So I hope you enjoyed this little window into what it's like putting together a radio show. Make sure to tune in next Saturday at 11 for your weekly dose of pure, unadulterated awesomeness.
-Raja
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