Note E204

Rings and Cheeks

The Ring, is of course, a reference to the garnet Ring with which FFJ scars Nicholas in Niccolo Rising. We reread the book, and asked on the internet, but no one knew which cheek was scarred. So it didn't really matter. The stage direction "All on stage touch their right hand to their left cheek" is an example of how tied down things need to be on this kind of production where no-one meets until a couple of days before the show. Fo an ordinary play/operetta, you could decide which hand should touch which cheek during rehearsals. We didn't have time for that. People would be touching hands to cheeks in cars, trains, bedrooms, living-rooms on 4 continents and not together. They needed to have the hand and the cheek ingrained in their memory before they ever got to their first rehearsal.

Updated 06 Jan 2002
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