10/14/2026
Sweeney Todd goes into tech a week from Monday, so this is the right week to say something I say to families every October.
Twelve years ago, when I was teaching in Loudoun County, we didn't call it tech week. We called it dress week, and the model was simple: run the show, notes, run the show, notes, run the show. Monday through Thursday, the whole thing, every night, and then the cast sat on the apron in costume while an adult read a legal pad at them.
I ran it that way for years, because that was what dress week was.
I don't anymore. Here's the week we actually run:
Monday is Act One. Tuesday is Act Two. Wednesday is fixes, and only fixes, with no run at all. Thursday is one clean run of the whole show. Friday we open.
One full run before opening night instead of four. Splitting the acts more rest for everyone during an overloaded time.
The other thing I want you to have is the answer to the question I get by email: why is this taking so long?
Because almost none of the evening is rehearsing. They come straight from a full school day and they have to eat. Then costumes, hair and makeup, which for a full company is an operation. Then microphones, fitted and taped and numbered and checked, every pack, every body, every night. Then lighting checks. Then safety checks, walking the deck and the set and the dark spots. Then fight call or intimacy choreography if the show has either. Only then do we start. And when it's over, it all comes off and gets hung and reset and cleaned for tomorrow.
And yes, the schedule changed more than any of us wanted in the run-up. Every one of those changes was an attempt to stop your kid being called for three hours to work for twenty minutes. I know it doesn't feel like a kindness when it lands in your inbox at nine at night. It's meant as one.
That's our Sweeney company in the photo, a few weeks out from all of this. Which is the other thing I'd like you to know about tech week: it is supposed to look something like that.
Wrote the whole thing up, including why we stopped giving notes out loud:
https://novapa.org/blog/tech-week-is-not-hell-week-tony-cimino-johnson.html
— Mr. CJ
