Holiday Stage Fright?

My first Holiday Concert is tomorrow afternoon, and I'm am completely stressed out and nervous about. I'm the 'Expressive Arts Specialist' at a school for Special Needs children and I am more nervous about our Holiday show than I ever was about performing in Professional Theatre.

Perhaps it's because I myself am not performing, and I am not directly in control of what actually happens onstage. Am I a control freak? I've directed shows for theatre companies before and I believe I was very trusting of my casts and able to 'let go' when the time came.

I am still fairly new at my job here, I am exploring lots of approaches to dealing with my students, and I am finding out what does and does not work with each student. Unfortunately I am having a harder time nailing down the staff. Some staff are very eager to help, and extremely accommodating and then again some... are not so much. We rehearse our chorus once a week, in 4 different sessions. This Friday will be the first time we've been able to assemble the entire chorus in the same room at the same time to go over our show. I also cast several students in the show, giving them speaking roles and hoping to stage a few scenes between Holiday songs. Unfortunately I have never been able to rehearse with all of my actors at the same time. The scheduling conflicts, school wide assemblies, forget fullness of some staff members, and other unforeseen circumstances have made the rehearsal process a nightmare. Couple this with the spacing restrictions of our stage, and I have had to scrap the script all together. Instead the few students whom I have been working with will introduce each Holiday or celebration to the audience before the songs.

Every actor/performer has the same nightmare to a certain degree. In this horribly stressful and all too reoccurring dream the actor is thrust onstage for a performance of a show. The catch is that they do not remember rehearsing for the show at all. Maybe there's a instance of forgetting to attend rehearsals, caught completely unaware, or even that the actor just hasn't kept up with the demand. The actor is completely unprepared, unfamiliar with the script, and caught up in a whirlwind of frenetic energy as the performance goes on around them and they stumble to keep up appearances and deliver a convincing performance. I myself have suffered from this nightmare many times.

"What if the audience knows? What if they see through me? What if they figure out that I am a phony? What if they think that I'm awful?"

That's what it's all about, I think. The dream is all about being discovered; of exposing your weaknesses. The dream is all about insecurity.

"I could've done more! I should have done more!"

We'll have to wait and see how the show goes over. I'm more leery of the parents than I ever was of Lawrence Bommer or any other 'critic'.