How I got so much stage time....

Double click the photograph to see an extra at work.

At the end of the meeting that first morning, the director announced that the cast would be divided into three groups: singers, dancers, and actors. Each group would spend each day during the first week of rehearsals working in separate locations to concentrate on the musical or dance numbers or the dramatic basis of each scene, and then each evening the entire cast would meet at the theatre for rehearsal. The dancers left for the dance studio at Flagler College, the singers left for the choir rehearsal hall of Memorial Presbyterian Church, and the actors stayed in the theatre, including me.

The night before had been a late night with most of the 80 members of the cast arriving during the day, those who did not live locally were assigned their rooms in one of the 20 apartments at The Coral Sands, and then spent the afternoon settling in. Into the evening after most had gone out for dinner, exploring the town for the first time, many gravitated to the apartment in which I was living, # 2 Mulvey Street, Apartment 2. There was a good bit of Mateus being consumed and a fair share of Budweiser and the gathering continued long after midnight.

The common greeting that initial getting-acquainted evening, after names were exchanged, was: “Are you an actor, singer or dancer?” My answer was equally consistent: "I’m an extra.”

This being the first time I had worked in theatre and only the second time I had ever been on stage, calling myself an “actor” seemed presumptuous, but then I was certainly not a singer or dancer. I was in the actor-third of the cast.

So when the three groups split up and the dancers and singers left, there were only the actors remaining consisting of about a dozen principles and one extra: me. All the other extras, people who just wanted to be a part of the production, willing to be in the background, were local residents. They were at their local daytime lives, but would attend the rehearsal that evening. Since I had no other life, having traveled to St. Augustine just to be in the production, I was the only extra attending daytime rehearsals.

The director called out the few principals appearing in the opening scenes and instructed the others to go to wardrobe to be fitted for costumes. Then he commenced blocking the show by having the principals come onto stage. He had barely started blocking the first scene when he said “Ok, we need a guard to stand here at the door when Menendez and Lopez talk,” and he looked around into the audience seating, saw that I was the only person there, and said, “You...stand here.”

Throughout that first day and all week long I continued to be placed in strategic locations because I was the only extra available. I went from being a prison guard to a member of the royal court to a settler to a soldier to a settler again and a soldier again...all in the first act. In the second act I mostly bounced between soldier and settler ending up as one of the few surviving soldiers after the big battle in the show’s penultimate scene. I had no lines except for crowd cheers or crowd moans or crowd mummers, but I was on stage in all the big scenes and many smaller ones. I had a dozen costume changes during the two hour show made possible only because of snaps instead of buttons, pre-positioned wardrobe parts in various locations backstage, and the ability to run and undress and get dressed at the same time.

With six shows a week, that amounted to 72 costume changes. So, even at my salary of $20 a week, I had as much, if not more stage time than nearly anyone else in the cast. All because I was available.

Or, as Woody Allen said, Eighty percent of success is showing up.