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January 23, 2010

Small Wonderful iPhone Moment

I call this: phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 9:03 am

This afternoon during rehearsal I got an email from Hunter, who runs the accessibility program that provides a variety of ways for audiences with disabilities to experience Guthrie shows. He wanted to get a transcript of our preshow and intermission announcements so they could be added to the captions for our performance tomorrow night.

I had an older version of the preshow announcement, but they both had been somewhat improvised when they were recorded, so I didn’t have anything with the exact wording of the current announcement.

During the preshow sound check I asked our engineer, Jake, to play both announcements for me while I used the voice recorder on my iPhone to record it, so I could later write it out for Hunter. It so happens, as I was doing so, Hunter came into the house to prepare for the sign language interpreters we had tonight. He saw what I was doing, and said that if I just sent him the audio file he could handle it. So right there, with a couple clicks, I emailed the file to him, and was done.

It’s not the most exciting thing ever, but it was just one of those really simple cases where something can be handled so much more elegantly than ever before with modern technology.


5-Show Weekend

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:53 am

Now we enter the heart of a 5-show weekend. That term can make any theatre person cower. But for us, I think a lot of us are looking forward to it, because it means we don’t have rehearsal for a few days, and can focus on one show for a while. It’s still a long day, maybe longer, but it feels more straightforward.

After the whole week of early matinees and late rehearsals, we switched it around today and rehearsed for 5 hours during the day and then had a show at night. We also got our swine flu shots, courtesy of the Guthrie, prior to rehearsal. We had our regular flu shots in New York, way back in October, before our contracts began, but the H1N1 shots were not available until now. I’m glad we were able to get them before heading out on the road.

The weather has been unseasonably warm here for the last couple weeks. Tonight after the show it was actually raining a bit! But the downside of that was that the entire city is covered in a slick sheet of ice.

Tonight Nick and I had drinks after the show with Ashley and our intern from last year, Meaghan, who just arrived to visit for a few days. It was great to see her again and catch up. As we left the bar, Nick showed me the back way back to our apartments, which winds through alleys in the industrial neighborhood we’re in. I’d say we live about 5 blocks from the bar. It took us 15 minutes of skating, shuffling, and carefully choosing our path over the ice to make it home — and we didn’t fall once!


January 21, 2010

Morning Matinees

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:47 pm

This morning was the last of our 3 consecutive 10:30AM student matinees this week. Some people might look at that and think that after getting over our morning sluggishness, we must be enjoying our evenings off at least. Well no. We have been back in the rehearsal room, working on the 2nd and 3rd of the shows we are doing this year: Alice in Wonderland, and the 1-Hour Romeo and Juliet, which will be performed for student audience that are too young, or for whatever reason are not going to see the full-size show.

After our early shows we have a lunch break, and then 5 hours of rehearsal, until 8PM. So we’re certainly not resting on our laurels despite the fact that the theatre is dark in the evenings.

As for the morning shows, it’s been very hard to get up in the morning. A morning matinee is very hard to prepare for if you haven’t done one in a while. I was thinking this morning that I have no idea how I’m going to deal with 7:30AM bus calls and 8:00 load-ins when I can’t handle a 10:30 matinee.

It’s definitely an acquired skill. The one good thing is that when we have the bus, it’s easier to get out of bed when our beds come with us. If we have some free time during the day, it’s usually just a few steps outside the stage door, where we can take a nap in our own beds, so that makes it easier to get up.

We’ve been working on Alice for two days, then spent today on the 1-hour for the first time. Tomorrow at noon we have more Alice, and 30 new pages of revisions based on exploration we did earlier this week, which just landed in my inbox as I got home. In the evening we have a regular performance of R&J, which everyone is very curious to see the effect of, now that we’ve gotten accustomed to this strange routine of performing in the morning and rehearsing in the evening.


January 19, 2010

Two Households

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:16 pm

Crazy story from rehearsal:
Today we had a morning matinee of Romeo and Juliet, and then began rehearsal for the second of our three shows — a development process of a new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that will culminate essentially in a series of staged readings around the country.

After doing a read-through of the first draft, we began with some physical exploration. One of the exercises required the cast to be broken into three groups. The usual way this is achieved in such exercises is that everybody counts off numbers from 1 to 3, in a circle based on wherever they are in the room at the time the director decides to do so — creating more-or-less random groups.

When everyone had counted their numbers, and moved into a corner with their respective groups, we were amazed to discover that they were divided into the Capulets and the Montagues, with the third group being the neutral characters (Friar Laurence, the Nurse, the Prince, etc.). There was only one person out of the 13 who was out of place.

Like last year when we began rehearsing our second show, it was really fun to hear everyone that we have grown to know so well take on new roles. It’s especially refreshing because this show is very different in style than Shakespeare, and even for the actors that I did two shows with last year, I’ve never heard them perform contemporary language, so I’m experiencing part of their talents that I’ve never been able to see before. After a very early, very long day, many of the actors remarked on how good it felt to get to exercise different acting muscles.


Snackting

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:54 pm

What happens on headset stays on headset.

Unless it’s really funny and not insulting to anyone.

In our show there’s a scene where Romeo and the Nurse are talking for a while and Perrin (our combined Capulet servant character) is hanging out on the staircase for the whole scene. Today I noticed she was eating something, or appearing to at least, so I asked Nick and our local prop person, Sara, what she was eating. Neither of them knew — apparently it’s a personal prop that was added just before we opened.

Nick suggested, “maybe she’s schmacting” — i.e. only pretending to be eating.

To which Steph (our light board op) says, “Well if she’s pretending to eat, wouldn’t that be ‘snackting?'”

Not bad at all for a 10:30AM show.

Incidentally, I hear the term “back acting” a lot (in the context of when it’s OK to turn upstage in a scene), but never hear it called “backting.” If nobody has beaten me to it, I hereby coin the term.


Teaching the Database to Speak

I call this: tech — Posted by KP @ 2:40 am

I have to tell you what I learned tonight. I must caution you, there is some geek-speak below, in as plain terms as possible.

I was watching a screencast from Filemaker, about the fun new things you can do in Filemaker Pro 10. This isn’t really news to me, as I’ve been using v. 10 for months, and the last version I owned before that was v. 7. But this particular screencast began by talking about the ontimer script feature. That’s not something I’ve really worked with much, except that I have a Filemaker clock that I found online, and basically tinkered with just enough to add it to my database, without exactly understanding how all of it works.

This screencast explained it (it’s actually really simple, it just executes a specified script every however-many seconds), and suddenly I figured out how to do something that I knew was theoretically possible, but thought was outside my programming knowledge: to get the performance report to remind me to make calls based on what time it is.

The report already has an “intermission calculator” where I can enter how long I want the intermission to be, and based on the end time of Act I, it displays what time I need to call 5 and places (assuming it takes 3 minutes from calling places to actually being able to start). It does the math for me, but it doesn’t help to remind me in any way, I still have to keep watching the clock.

Well using the ontimer script, which I have running every 10 seconds when the performance report is loaded, it records the current time as a variable, and then goes down the list of possible calls (30 minutes, 15 minutes, 6 minutes, and 2 minutes before the scheduled start time, as well as the “call 5 at” and “call places at” times from the intermission calculator), comparing the current time to those times.

I added a series of fields to each report that corresponds to each call that needs to be made — by default the value is 0 (the call has not been made). The script looks through each of the possible calls whose value is 0, and then looks to see if the current time is greater than or equal to the time one of the calls is due. If so, it says — out loud — the call (i.e. “Half hour please”) and then displays a pop-up window saying “Call half hour now!” Once this window is dismissed, the call field changes from 0 to 1, and from that point on, the script no longer worries about that call.

It’s absolutely hysterical. But most of all, it’s going to be very handy. From here pretty much anything is possible. Now I’ve got it to send me a text message when it makes a call, so even if I’m not in the booth I’ll get the call wherever I am (except for the places calls, where I should already be in the booth). At the end of the script it checks to see if all the calls are marked as “1” and if so, it ends the timer script.

I can’t wait to start using this tomorrow!

I’m so excited I made a movie demonstrating how it works. I suggest watching it at Youtube where it’s in higher resolution.


January 18, 2010

Another Amazing Genius Bar Experience

I call this: mac — Posted by KP @ 2:58 pm

As someone of a geeky persuasion, I have an inherent dislike of seeking technical support. Under no circumstances will I do so except in a case of obvious hardware failure where I have no choice. And then I fear the series of questions from the technician, who expects (or his employer expects him to ask) that what ails my hardware can be solved by rebooting it, and that I haven’t tried that, and every other possible solution already before seeking help.

I have had a rather unfortunate number of opportunities to visit Apple’s Genius Bar in Apple Stores all over the country, and at this point have had so many pleasant experiences that rather than thinking of it as a dreaded last resort, when I reach the moment of acceptance that my hardware is broken, I’m comforted knowing that as soon as I’m somewhere with access to an Apple Store they’ll make it all better.

So my battery in my Macbook Pro (the one I got as a replacement when we were in Pennsylvania on tour last year) has been showing defective performance for at least 3 months. But when I gathered my paperwork to take it in, I realized it only came with a 90 day warranty. Which is pretty lame for a battery, even if it was free. So I held off doing anything about it, but took the receipt with me on tour, in case I wanted it when the battery inevitably decided to become completely useless.

That day came last week when I was in an informal meeting in the cafe at the Guthrie, and right in the middle of editing our Google calendar, my computer spontaneously shut down after about a half hour off the charger, while still showing a 50% charge. With the meeting at a temporary stand-still, I closed the lid and said, “well, I know what I’m doing on the day off.”

I thought about just buying another battery, since I knew I was out of warranty, but $130 for something that is obviously defective, and my non-fear of the Genius Bar, was enough that I was willing to take my chances and make an appointment. Maybe they could give me a discount at least.

So today I went, and the genius’ eyes popped out of his head when he saw how bad the battery’s stats were. Then he ran the diagnostic, which I blogged about last time, and if possible, it showed even more red commentary on just how bad it thought my battery was.

So the genius went to the back to discuss the situation, and came back and said they would replace it for free because of how many bad batteries I’ve had, and because I paid for one of them (plus the one the computer came with). I was very pleased that they were able to be flexible in their policy based on the circumstances.

So then I brought up my secondary question, which is that a couple days ago (after making my Genius Bar appointment) my iPhone cable broke — the cable split, exposing the wires right where the cable meets the plug that goes into the phone. I have a general awareness that that’s usually something they consider wear-and-tear (though those cables wear out way too easily), but I thought I’d take advantage of the fact that my iPhone is pretty much the only piece of hardware I own that’s under warranty, and bring the cable along in the hopes they would cover it. They did.

So I spent nothing and got about $150 in new accessories that technically they weren’t required to give me. It was a very worthwhile day.

And now yet again my trusty Macbook Pro gets a new lease on life, and between that and the new hard drive, should be running like a spring chicken until I can afford to replace it. We just won’t talk about the video problem it had on the night of the first preview. It must have been a solar flare or something…

Tech Details

For those who track things like battery failure stats… I did some research before taking my computer in, since I know (from personal experience!) that these batteries fail at a higher-than-normal rate (this is the original MBP 15″ battery). What I found from perusing the Apple support forums is that the batteries made by Sony seem most prone to failure, and those by SMP are apparently better. My old one was a Sony, and I’m glad to find that the new one is SMP.

I didn’t bother recording the exact stats of the battery, because they were so awful there was no question it wasn’t normal degradation of a rechargeable battery, but it was at 8% health after 80-something charge cycles, which is FRIGGIN TERRIBLE if you’re looking for comparisons.

And while I am fully aware that this particular model of Macbook Pro suffers from battery issues, most models of computers have one common flaw where they are most likely to fail, and the battery isn’t such a bad one. That being said, the whole issue is moot as this model is obsolete, and Apple has been employing new battery technology for a while now, so it doesn’t make me nervous about future purchases. I’m actually really looking forward to getting an upgrade in six months or so, mostly because of the more reliable, higher-capacity battery. There’s not much else in the unibody MBPs that excites me, although there are rumors that there may be a quad-core model coming soonish, which would be worth waiting for (although I expect it will be out before I was ready to purchase).


The Education Tag

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:03 am

You may notice a new icon on the top of the blog’s sidebar: the Education button. Clicking this will take you to all posts marked with the “Education” tag.

One group of readers that I’ve noticed increasing in the last year or so is students and teachers of theatre, or stage management in particular. As of right now this site is one of the top hits in a Google search for “stage management templates,” “rehearsal report” and that kind of thing, which I think has something to do with it, and also people I meet in my travels have started passing the site address on to their professors, students and others who might be interested, which I very much appreciate.

This all got me thinking that there should be a way for people who come to the site for real-life examples of what a stage manager does to find the posts that are the most rich in that content, and to be able to skip the ones that are about something funny I wrote in my script, or the national monument I visited before the show.

I’ve been using the tagging feature for the first time recently, to make it easier to find content by more narrow criteria than just the major categories the site has always had. I’ve been going through old posts, but I’m sure I will find more as I peruse the archives. I hope some of you find this link helpful!


Callboard Envy

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:59 am


This is our callboard at the Guthrie. We pretty much set it up according to how it’s already laid out. Actually I have no idea how it got there. I think Ashley did it. Or maybe Nick. Certainly I had nothing to do with it.

My good friend Josh and I have a bit of a running joke about how I don’t take callboard aesthetics seriously enough. I do care a lot about how my callboard looks, I just don’t always have the time or energy to see that time is spent on making it look pretty.

A month and a half ago when we arrived in Minneapolis, I went on a shopping spree to Office Depot to get a few supplies. While there I found some really awesome pushpins. I bought some awesome pushpins last year, but these were awesome enough that I wasn’t concerned about pushpin redundancy.

On opening night, I switched to my favorite of the two varieties I purchased, these orange ones with cube-shaped tops, and banished all non-awesome pushpins to the side of the callboard that will belong to Macbeth when they start tech.

I took a picture of our pretty callboard and sent it to Josh. He then sent me back a picture of the callboard from the Wicked tour, which I hope to best when Nick and I actually make our own signage for the tour.

Aside from making an otherwise bland callboard look good, I find unique pushpins useful because we play a lot of venues where we use an existing bulletin board, which may or may not have some of its own pushpins, but usually never enough. By having our own very distinct pushpins, we know exactly how many we put up, and can ensure that we take them with us when we load out.


January 17, 2010

Review: Altec Lansing Orbit MP3 Speaker

I call this: computers,tech — Posted by KP @ 6:08 pm

This week we had a Skype conference scheduled between our cast and the NY office.  Nick and my reaction to this was kind of like, “um… uh… OK,” cause we’re not really set up to have video conferences with 14 people on our end.  But being the technological type, we set our computers up, and reserved a good room to have the call in.  But we knew our laptop speakers would not be loud enough to let a room full of people hear well.  I travel with a cheap external speaker, but it’s barely louder than the laptop’s own, and I’ve been looking for a while for other options that are small enough to tour with.

I came across the Altec Lansing Orbit MP3 speaker at the Apple Store, and took a chance on it.

It’s about the size of a doughnut, and comes in a cute carrying case with a carabiner, so easy to travel with.  The short cord curls up under the bottom and the 1/8″ stereo mini plug snaps into place to hold it in.  The bottom also has little rubbery feet, which is nice.  The overall build quality feels very good.  It’s not lightweight for its size, but it’s also not made of cheap materials.

It’s an omnidirectional speaker, so you can place it on your desktop with the speaker pointing up, and the sound will fill the room.  The speaker takes 3 AAA batteries (included), and only works when powered.  My old speaker would produce a tiny bit of sound when unpowered, which was handy for listening without batteries to devices that don’t have their own speakers, such as older iPods and CD players.  But that’s really not something that has been an issue for me too often, so I don’t really mind losing it.  I haven’t had it long enough to get an idea of the battery life, but the power button supposedly also indicates when the battery is low.  There is no volume control on the speaker, so you must use the built-in volume on your computer or music device.

For basic tasks of making computer sound audible to a larger room, or having better sound while watching video or listening to music, I find it works very well.  I think at $40 it’s a fair price for the features, and the accessories are of surprisingly good quality.

There’s also a USB version, which is good because it doesn’t need batteries, but it’s not as flexible because it can only be used with a computer. It’s also $10 more.



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