Douglas woke slowly, peeling his eyes open and turning his head to peer at the clock on his bedside table. The glowing numerals shone through the half dark of his bedroom: 7:30. Rehearsals normally started at ten but Carolyn wanted him in early today. It was their new tenor's first day and Douglas knew she wanted the introductions and niceties to be over with quickly so they could get into the initial sing-through of the first major work MON was performing this season: Tosca.
Douglas was playing Scarpia and had spent the past week learning his part, the Italian lyrics flowing easily off his tongue. He felt uncharacteristically nervous as he pulled himself out of bed and into the shower; he'd never sung the part before and he badly didn't want to make mistakes in front of their new member.
Douglas spent a good fifteen minutes in the shower, enjoying the hot water and warming up his mouth and throat with lip trills and some agonisingly slow scales, squeezing every last drop of breath out of his lungs. In Douglas' opinion, bathroom acoustics were something that not even the Royal Opera House could rival. He shut off the shower, dried himself and got dressed, taking care to shave properly and choosing his favourite shirt.
Breakfast was next in the order of the day, scrambled eggs on toast with orange juice, not chilled so that it didn't cool his vocal cords too much. Then to the piano for another half an hour warm up, this time singing a few lines here and there from his favourite arias, before finishing with some good old fashioned Gilbert and Sullivan to take his mind off the stress of the upcoming morning.
Douglas' reputation in the opera world had taken a nose dive five years ago when he'd been shown the door at the English National Opera after turning up to a performance drunk. Luckily his understudy had been able to take over after a couple of scenes and the incident went unnoticed in the general press- however Douglas knew that it was unlikely that any other person, be they performer, director, back stage crew or front of house had missed the gossip that had flown through opera circles in the six months following his dismissal.
He'd managed to ignore most of it as he had been busy wading through the wreckage of his disintegrating marriage, but eventually he had gone back to counselling, sobered up and even begun to work on compiling an album and auditioning for small opera companies. Finally, he was successful at MON and took up his place as their lead baritone, a position that he'd held ever since, and a position which he actually enjoyed far more than the glamorous globe-trotting lifestyle that he'd had with ENO.
MON was a family business and didn't take itself too seriously. Douglas hoped that the new tenor would fit in. He also hoped that he had never heard of Douglas Richardson, even though he knew that was sadly rather unlikely. He collected his phone, wallet and keys and left the warmth of his flat for the short commute across central London to the small but well-respected theatre that MON used as its base, trying to ignore the rather amateurish butterflies in his stomach.
