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September 30, 2007

Frankenstein Photos and Press

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:11 pm

Probably half the e-mails I’ve received in the last two weeks have been from our publicist, notifying us of the various press commitments that our actors have. This is the first one that I’ve actually seen the results of: Playbill’s The Leading Men column. The show should be getting a lot of coverage in the next three to four weeks. There was a great full-page ad in New York magazine this week.

The website also has put up some pictures from the photo call we did a few days ago. Here’s one:

These are just the photos for early publicity, no sets, no wigs, and not necessarily finished costumes, but I think they won’t look too out of place when compared with the finished product. The rest of them can be seen on this page.


September 25, 2007

Trusses! The Musical

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:10 pm


If you had walked into Theatre A at 37 Arts today, that’s what you would have seen. We have trusses. Lots and lots of trusses. Some of which are not hung yet, and some of which are out of the frame of this horrible phone-camera photo (I’m putting my real camera in my bag right now). No sign yet of the 90 Par Cans in a 12-foot square. Later in the day tomorrow the set starts loading in, which should also be very exciting. Our crew is working 8AM-midnight every day this week to get everything in in time for tech on Monday. Suffice it to say there’s a lot going on.

Meanwhile, in Theatre B, we didn’t quite stage Act II today, but we should be done sometime tomorrow morning.


September 23, 2007

A Run of Act I

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:41 pm

OK, I swear I’m going to post, and I have some pictures. As you might imagine, things have been busy since we started rehearsals on Frankenstein. We started on Tuesday, and finished our first week today. Towards the end of the day, we were able to run Act I. Well, OK, it was sort of a stumble-through, but definitely more running than stumbling. Considering we just started staging yesterday, it was pretty incredible to see so much of the show take shape.

The rehearsal period is very short, and there is a ton of music in the show. This made the first few rehearsals kind of scary because the cast had to learn the music before we could even do an effective read-through, so at first it was hard to see the bigger picture. Three days of running three simultaneous rehearsals (two rooms of music and one of table work) got us to the point where we could do a read-through (we had already done the meet & greet and design presentations in the preceeding days). Then we did more cleaning up of music before starting staging yesterday. From that point things took off rapidly. Yesterday we staged the first half of Act I and ran it, and today we staged the rest and ran chunks, and then the whole act. It’s amazing how quickly it went from something that happens in chairs around a piano, to a real show with props and some people at least partially off-book. Being on the deck, I see the whole thing backwards, so I don’t really have the same sense of how it plays out front, but I think it moves really well.

Being on the stage has been really helpful for me, as a deck stage manager I like to run things as early as possible like a performance, so I can start visualizing what my track will be like.

Here’s our finished floor:

The basic color scheme I went with is:
yellow = platforms
pink = walls
green = doors or traps
blue = stairs

The pink walls make it very clear how much offstage space there is going to be, which is very helpful for all of us to think about backstage traffic. One thing I’m being a stickler about is getting everyone to use their props, or any kind of substitute. Miming props is bad. It’s way too easy to forget the fact that you’re carrying something when it’s not convenient, or to imagine the item will be smaller or easier to carry. And most invisible props are assumed to have been taken offstage by the Prop Fairy when they are no longer needed — the reality of how something finds its way off gracefully is often something much different, and the sooner those questions can be answered, the better. I can make pretty much anything out of paper and gaff tape if I have to, just to have something that requires the actor to interact with it with specificity similar to the actual object. I also think it helps to get them used to picking up their props as early as possible, so it’s a regular part of their routine in the show, and not an afterthought that can easily be forgotten.

We have been lucky to be rehearsing on our actual stage, but not for long, as load-in begins tomorrow and we move to the smaller theatre upstairs, where I had to concoct a way-too-complicated method of scaling the important parts of our set into the space, varying the scale from 1/2 to 5/6 depending on the importance of the area, and considering vertical and horizontal scale separately. If someone asked “so what size is this relative to the real thing?” the answer would make their head spin, but the overall result looks surprisingly like our set. I’ll try to get a picture of it next week.

And in other news, our company is off to a great start fundraising for Broadway Cares. Today was the annual Broadway Flea Market, which is one of my favorite events, and unfortunately we were in rehearsal all day, so for the first time in about 10 years, I was not able to take my place at the Phantom table, except to help them set up from 8:30AM to 8:45. Things being so busy, there wasn’t much we as the Frankenstein company could do, having only been in rehearsal for a few days. But one thing we did have was a handful of posters that had been given to us by the producers, and some names in our cast whose autographs alone would have value, even though our show has not had a chance to establish a fan base. So yesterday afternoon I went out and bought some silver pens and got one of the posters signed by the cast and director Bill Fennelly.

While we would only have one item to sell, I saw that as an advantage — our angle was that this is the very first autographed Frankenstein poster, and currently the only one in existence. It was numbered “#1” with the date in the corner, and bore a sign advertising it as such. In the capable hands of the Phantom table, the poster sold within a couple hours for two hundred dollars!! I dropped by the table on our lunch break to see how things were going, and was told the good news. On top of that, the money was turned in to the BC/EFA powers that be on behalf of our company, not lumped in with Phantom‘s money. Word had obviously traveled quickly around the market, because by the time I got back to the theatre, Josh and Hunter had both heard from separate sources about the sale. The result was announced to the company on the first break after lunch, and of course everyone was very impressed with how much we’ve raised before even completing a week of rehearsal.

When I announced that we were doing a signed poster, I also mentioned that interested parties should start long-term thinking about a Gypsy of the Year skit. We have a long way to go before December 3-4, and thankfully about a month after we open for planning and rehearsals, but I just wanted to get people open-minded to it so that when a good idea arises it’s recognized for what it is. I was thrilled to discover that within our small cast of 13 we have many people showing great enthusiasm for participating. To my surprise, within a few hours we had a solid outline for the premise. That could all change as things develop and new jokes can be made, but right now we have a solid idea to work on.


September 13, 2007

Preproduction and Software

I call this: computers,mac,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:13 pm

Ooh, great, another one of those posts where I actually cover the full span of what this blog is about — theatre and technology, and how I use them together. We’ve been in meetings all week for Frankenstein, and I’m having a great time. As the ASM, my contract doesn’t start for another day or two, but I’ve been happily attending all the meetings with the PSM, as being in the loop is much more important to me than being paid, and quite frankly I didn’t have a lick of work last week and was bored out of my mind. So sitting in formatting meetings every day has been great fun, as we work through the show with the various design elements.

Monday and Tuesday were focused mostly on the set, with the director, choreographer and set designer, and us two stage managers. Wednesday was our sound day, with our two sound designers and the musical director. This is definitely a show where the sound design will contribute a lot, and I can’t wait to hear more about that. Today and tomorrow are all about projections, which will also be a key part of the show, and then we do lights and everybody together on the weekend.

It’s been very helpful for me to see the show take shape as everyone decides together how things will go. I have been taking notes on everything (using Pages), and have been using the very attractive comments feature to mark events that will likely be cues for me on the deck. See the drawing to the right for a sample page. I’m very happy that we haven’t even started rehearsal and already I’m thinking about what I need to be doing on the deck at any moment, and can look at the groundplan and plot my backstage traffic and ask the designer questions as they come up.

Some of the more artistic stuff is something I’ll probably never need to know as part of my job, but having grown up and gone to college wanting to be a director, I still find it really interesting to be in the room as the basic vision of the show takes shape and is altered through collaboration. The creative team is really great, and the mood in meetings is very positive and fun. It’s definitely one of those moments where I have realized how lucky we are that we get to put on shows for a living. Sure it’s serious business and all our jobs and rent depend on not screwing this up, but it’s got to be more fun than the vast majority of other professions.

A Clean Slate
Since I’ve been back from Reagle and lacking any kind of seriously demanding employment for the first month, I’ve taken this time to experiment with some technological toys that I wouldn’t risk playing around with if I was in the middle of production. Getting confirmation of the Frankenstein job with a couple weeks notice before beginning rehearsal, I have seen this as something of a clean slate to try a few things I’ve been wanting to.

Mail
I think I mentioned in my review of Pages that I see this latest edition of iWork as a possible precursor to me effectively removing Microsoft Office from my life. The big thing holding me back was Entourage, which I much preferred over the combination of Mail, Address Book and iCal. I shouldn’t say I much preferred, just that I stuck with the power of it, despite the vaguely Windows-esque feel of it.

Another part of this decision, less obvious at first, but lurking in the shadows, is the iPhone. I don’t want one now. I want a smartphone, and a phone that can’t open and edit a Word document or spreadsheet, or open an image file in its native resolution, or cut and paste, is not very smart. There is a litany of things Palm devices have been doing for five years that the iPhone can’t do. Third party hacked software has been helping this, but I’m not yet at a level of comfort where the iPhone is something I want. I’m definitely not jumping on the bandwagon until the second version, and I’m not too thrilled about AT&T on top of that. But I see that especially given how embarrassingly Palm has stagnated in recent years, there will be an iPhone in my future. And when that day comes, I’ll want it integrated as nicely as possible into my Mac. And that means using Mail and Address Book and iCal to get the full effect of the Mac experience. So being able to make this transition at a convenient time will save me trouble later, if and when I get an iPhone.

I also have been depending more and more on having access to my e-mail on my Treo. For years I have used SnapperMail, which is a very mature Palm mail client, but the version I own is only for POP mail. I am something of a pack rat, in real life and in my digital life. My goal is to keep every e-mail I ever send and receive in my life (excluding spam and advertisements and the like). Somewhere along the line I lost my earlier mail, but my current archives go back to the end of 2002. For this reason, IMAP mail has always turned me off. The idea of my mail residing on a server and maybe or maybe not being saved to my desktop client scared the hell out of me. But handling POP mail on my Treo while trying to keep complete records on my main computer was somewhat frustrating. I was willing to give IMAP another try, which meant using my .Mac account, which offered a perfect opportunity to give Apple’s Mail app another try.

I have been a member of .Mac for a few years now. I think it’s a bit overpriced and underdeveloped, and their servers are usually slow, but I use it mostly for iDisk storage and the ease of use and integration into OS X. I’m fully capable of doing things the hard way, but for what amounts to $8 a month, I don’t mind having Apple take care of most of it for me. With that of course comes an @mac.com e-mail address, which I have never bothered to use because I was never sure I wanted to keep the service.

E-mail
The next seemingly unrelated event in my life was that my parents moved over the summer, and on the day I returned from Reagle I went to their house and set up their wireless network. In the course of testing it, I noticed they were getting download speeds in the neighborhood of 12mbps. They have Optimum Online, on Long Island. Now I knew I was not getting anything near this from Time Warner/Earthlink. So when I got home I found I was lucky to get about 5mbps. It seems from my research this is the maximum speed of the network that people are reporting in NYC. This did not seem fair to me, and planted the seeds of discontent. However, ditching Earthlink would mean changing my e-mail address. I’m terrified of changing my phone number or e-mail, because I fear that someone I haven’t talked to in five or ten years will suddenly need to get in touch with me and will be unable to. Combine this problem with my interest in switching my e-mail to IMAP, and suddenly a plan was formed: if I used my .Mac account as my primary e-mail I could switch ISPs as often as I need to to get the best service, yet not have to worry about changing my e-mail address. Plus I’d get the cool and easy-to-type @mac.com address, which most importantly has much fewer letters than @earthlink.net.

So it all came together at once and I sent out an e-mail blast to all my friends and former coworkers advising them of the change, and created e-mail aliases for my other three addresses and updated the relevant sites and institutions about the change. And I have been using Mail ever since. The rules are definitely less flexible than Entourage’s, but overall I’m happy with it. Plus, Leopard is coming out in a month or so, and with that an update to Mail which might have some improvements.

On the Palm side, I have switched to Chatter, which is widely regarded as the best IMAP client for Palm OS. The developer has since been hired by Palm, hopefully to design something cool for their next mail client, so development on the current version has pretty much ceased. I’m not thrilled about paying for an app I know is no longer in development, but given the circumstances, I think it’s something I have to do to take advantage of IMAP. I find I’m using my Treo more for responding to e-mail because I’m not worried about it being in sync with my desktop. Just tonight on the train I wrote two e-mails that I normally would have waited until I got home to respond to.

Pages
I’m really getting to like Pages, the only dilemma I have is whether it’s appropriate in situations where I may need to share my work with others using Word. I think I’ve been pretty bold about using it for almost all my Frankenstein documents. I have been placed in charge of creating and maintaining the contact sheet, and today decided to go ahead and do it in Pages. I think first of all it will be much better for my sanity as I work with it, and I think the formatting will come out much cleaner and more legible. We have also decided to distribute it in PDF, which means I don’t have to worry about what Word decides to do with it. I will have a Word version, as some people will need to work on it occasionally, and I will keep an eye on the compatibility to make sure it’s not a disaster, but I hope that I will be able to do it in Pages without embarrassing myself. Anyway, so far Macs outnumber PCs in our production team 6-to-1 by my last count, so I doubt I’ll hear too much bashing.

Numbers
I like the feel of Numbers, but so far in my experience, and from what I’ve been reading, it’s not as sufficient a replacement for Excel as Pages is to Word. I guess this is to be expected, as this is the third version of Pages and only the first for Numbers. There are some things with formulas it can’t do, but for the most part working in show business, and being largely more concerned with the “show” than the “business,” I hardly ever use spreadsheets to crunch numbers. I received Frankenstein‘s prop list in Excel, and have since been editing it in Numbers, as it’s just a list and should export back into Excel easily enough if necessary.

iCal
I’m just going to come out and say I love iCal. I always have. I have always preferred iCal to Entourage’s calendar, it was just all the other baggage involved in switching away from Entourage that kept me from it. But now I get to use it every day.

My real work on Frankenstein began last Sunday when I got together with my PSM, Joshua, for a working lunch. One of the biggest things we had to tackle was to make some sense of the very short period of time we have for production and to propose a schedule, taking into account the needs of the production team and all the various Equity rules. I had been putting a rough sketch of the show schedule into iCal for my personal use, in a separate Frankenstein calendar.

Using the very clear and intuitive week view in iCal, we started dragging around rehearsals, dragging them between days, dragging them earlier or later in the day, of longer and shorter duration. It was very easy to see what we were working with and play around with it. While my version is not the official production calendar, it’s what we’ve been using whenever we’re brainstorming schedule changes. I couldn’t be happier with the way it’s working.

Address Book
The final piece of this puzzle is Address Book, and it’s probably my least favorite part. While the layout is very simple and easy to navigate and generally Mac-like, I’ve always found it a little too simple at first glance. Syncing contacts from any platform to Palm is always scary. If they don’t quite play nice together all of a sudden you’ll find people missing, duplicated, or all their e-mail addresses listed as phone numbers and all their phone numbers listed as e-mails. I’ve been backing up both ends a lot, just in case something bad happens. One basic thing I don’t like is that the Apple apps don’t deal with “categories” per se, in the way that Palm and the Microsoft apps do. iCal has calendars, and Address Book has groups, but they’re not exactly the same, especially in Address Book. See the problem is that on the Palm side, an item can only be in one category at a time. This is kind of Palm’s fault, since they haven’t innovated anything since about 2002, but in Address Book you can put a contact into multiple groups, and it’s quite difficult to tell you’ve done so, until you notice that on the Palm it’s not where you expected to see it. This is sort of a problem in Entourage as well, where you can assign something to multiple categories, but it’s harder to do accidentally.

Also, Entourage makes a distinction between categories, which are used to organize contacts, and groups, which are lists for e-mail distribution. I can have a Frankenstein category that contains everyone involved in any way in the production, and then separate groups for cast, production team, rehearsal report list, etc. so that when I send e-mails I have various pre-made lists to choose from based on who I want to contact. In Address Book the only form of organization is groups. If I want to send a mass e-mail to a bunch of people, I need to create a separate group with that bunch of people, which is a little confusing and clutters up my categories on the Palm end. I think having an iPhone or any device that behaves more similarly to Address Book would ease my concerns with this.

Overall I’m enjoying the new toys I’ve been playing with, and I have a few more to try out soon.


September 6, 2007

Why Phantom will Run Forever

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:29 am

OK, I figured it out. Go with me on this:
I was thinking this morning about my new job, and how I will consider myself lucky if it even opens. This is not because I think it’s going to be a bad show or anything, it’s just the way my career has always gone. Some people have problems where their shows never run long. My problem is that whenever I get an open-ended run, it doesn’t just flop, it goes catastrophically bad from the moment I get the job. There was my first open-ended Off-Broadway contract where the show cut down to a 3-shows-per-week schedule on the week my contract started, and was closed nine performances later. Then there was the Broadway-bound play that was canceled before it even started rehearsal. If Frankenstein makes it through the first week of rehearsal, it will be the most successful open run I’ve ever had.

That’s just the background. So how does this relate to Phantom‘s run? I was saying to myself today, “Why can’t anything I do have a decent run?” Then of course I had to admit, “Well, except Phantom.” That’s when it hit me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Man, every show that so-and-so does flops! Well, except Phantom.”

No one can explain why Phantom keeps running, in fact running so well that it’s keeping pace with every show except Wicked and Jersey Boys. They were talking privately about closing it just a few years ago, and here we are. Where does it get such good fortune? Obviously it’s leeching off all the good show karma of everyone who works on it, and when they go elsewhere there’s none left for their future endeavors.

I’m far from the only person whose career exhibits these symptoms, although my case does seem to be extreme. I do feel better knowing that my good show karma is somewhere, benefiting my friends and a show I love, which occasionally provides me some income, too. And if you’ve ever wondered how it’s possible for a show to run 25+ years, this is how it will be done. You heard it here first.


September 3, 2007

My Favorite Cartoon Ever

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:19 pm

I clipped this out of The New Yorker sometime in the early-to-mid ’90s and have held onto it ever since. I just recently rediscovered it and scanned it, cause I’m surprised it’s stayed in my life in non-digital format this long.