I do the bulk of my directing in a high school.  We're a small enough school that my students do EVERYTHING.  As I'm looking at my rehearsal schedule for the fall musical, I noticed something odd, but first a little background.  I can't rehearse on Wednesday or Friday nights due to the unofficial "church night" and football games, so I have to make due with Monday, Tuesday, Thursday with the occasional weekend rehearsals (weekend rehearsals are not well attended and parents complain, so I generally reserve weekends for work days and emergencies).

Mondays are always JV football.  I don't know if I'll have any students on the JV squad this year, so this may or may not be an issue.  Tuesday and Thursdays are soccer and volleyball.  When soccer is home, they come to rehearsal on time.  When away, they may or may not be able to come in at all.  Ditto with volleyball, except when home, those girls are still tied up until 8 (our rehearsals are 7-9... I'd love to start earlier, but all sports are in practice until 6).

Looking at the schedule, soccer players (which will almost certainly include some students who I want for leads) will miss or be late for 7 rehearsals in the first 6 weeks, including 4 consecutive Thursdays.  Volleyball (which includes at least 4 promising students) takes away 6 rehearsals in the first 6 weeks.  We lose three rehearsals to music concerts and a rare Thursday night home varsity football game, and I have to fight hard to keep my rehearsals on parent/teacher conference nights (both on Tuesday and Thursday).

THIS is why I have to run such ridiculously long rehearsal schedules.  This time it will be 11 weeks, but it equals out to only 24 or 25 rehearsals before production week (depending on whether I make them come in on Halloween).  Of those, only 9 will have the full cast!!

If we were a bigger school, I could demand a larger time commitment of my kids, but I realistically only have a pool of about 30 people from which to pull my entire cast (the school has about 300 but a lot of kids don't get involved).  If I were to put my foot down, some kids would choose the show, but I'd lose a huge talent base (and get a ton of complaints from parents).  Thus, I get to figure out how to rehearse Seussical when the Cat in the Hat and JoJo won't see each other in rehearsal for four weeks...

What's really frustrating is that once I spend a few hours poring over these conflicts and drawing up a complicated schedule that maximizes rehearsal time, kids will sometimes decide not to show up or get confused as to when they rehearse.

Sometimes I wish I directed more in community theater.  You guys don't EVER have to worry about actors who are too involved in other things, do you? 

I've done it both ways.  Last year for the musical I planned meticulously (especially the first 6 weeks), and had people showing up who weren't scheduled at rehearsal, AND people who were scheduled forgetting or deciding not to come.

So for the spring play, I decided to try the other direction- everybody come when you can and I'll rehearse you.  Worked okay sometimes, but we ended up spending a lot of time on the big chorus scenes and very little time on smaller scenes with some of my leads.  It all came together fine, but was also way too short of a show to come down to the wire like that.

So... I think I'm going to go back to the idea of a complicated schedule.  I do want to try it so if you come in, you're there for the whole rehearsal.  I didn't have much luck with, "Rehearsal starts at seven, but you don't need to be here until 8:30-9:00."  A lot of my kids are driving 20 minutes to get to the school, so 30 minutes of rehearsal is a slap in the face... OR they run late, leaving another actor in that same scene waiting.

I'll just have to figure out the best way to do this... and, of course, you have to make that entire up in the day or two between the auditions and the first rehearsal...

Heck, if I didn't have

I'm not sure this will help because my situation is a little unique but here goes... For ten years I directed (usually two per year) plays at a rural high school. A very large percentage of our students ride school buses and coming back to evening rehearsals would be very impractical. So, after school rehearsals have been the rule which had made it impossible to include actors who are participating in sports. The conflicts are just too great. I put my bigger play (the musical) in the winter where the sports conflicts are the fewest. Yes, I know it's sad to exclude those athletes but I just never found a good way around it. Even without athletes it is amazing how busy the actors are with dance classes, voice lessons, pianon lessons, and club activities (speech/debate is big at our school). I do develop a detailed rehearsal schedule around these latter conflicts. Sure, things come up but overall it works well.

Originally posted by MusicManD In my school, however, my singer/actors are among the most involved kids in the school.  If I exclude the athletes, I also exclude some of my most dedicated and talented students.