ABSTRACT
Actors are like athletes or musicians. They need to keep up to scratch by constantly practicing their craft. A professional golfer acknowledges that she will be below par if she has not played for a while, as will a solo violinist. The problem of a long rehearsal period is of not peaking too soon, for there comes a time when a performance needs its audience. In the old days, actors did not rehearse for very long; in fact in Shakespeare's time they did not really rehearse at all. In Restoration times, an individual actor would rehearse one-on-one with another actor by getting them to repeat a certain way of delivering the lines. Stanislavski famously spent a long period getting his actors to a high level of achievement, whereas Broadway and other centers of world theatre were spending about three weeks in preparing those great productions that have become classics.
