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March 16, 2010

The Crew

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:54 pm

Nick has already done his crew post, but I’m going to do one too.

Left-to-right in the photo:

Bobby – Technical Director
Bobby is the boss of the crew, and also takes care of most things involving our travel, like bus calls, hotels, and collects the money for crew rooms and the bus driver’s tip. Bobby spends the entire load-in instructing the local crew in the construction of the set, and at load-out supervises taking it down. He doesn’t have a show track, although he has done the ASM track for a few performances, and did the one move the second props track has when we were short-handed.

Olivia – Props Supervisor
We called Olivia by name as “Props” for a couple venues, when it was discovered that that was her billing in the program (as opposed to everybody else who’s “Lighting Director,” “Wardrobe Supervisor,” “Sound Supervisor,” etc.). That got straightened out when we got to New York, where she was then “Properties Supervisor,” which we all then said in a haughty voice. Now she seems to just be “Props Supervisor.” Naturally, she’s in charge of props. She’s also our truck boss. She and I keep the truck pack paperwork updated as things change.

Devon – Lighting Director / Balcony Safety Test Dummy
Devon supervises the preparation of the lights during load-in, but spends most of his time on his Macbook Pro, creating a custom light plot for every venue, that takes into account how many instruments they have (and what kind), how many dimmers are available, and what kind of lighting positions exist. Basically every venue gets their own lighting design that recreates the original as much as possible with what’s available. Because he spends so much time looking at each venue, he’s often the first to catch potential problems and warn me and Bobby when we might need to prepare for something.

He is also the Balcony Safety Test Dummy because he is often the first person to stand on the balcony when it’s installed, before the stairs are attached to it. A lot of our focus can’t be accomplished until the balcony is up, so Devon is usually chomping at the bit to get on it as soon as it’s “safe.”

Me! – Production Stage Manager
I do all the PSM stuff of course — I call the show, write reports, make sure the cast has whatever show-related information they need (since I don’t travel with them, the company manager handles their day-to-day schedule, aside from rehearsal or show calls). During load-in, I look over the space with Nick and do some basic set-up stuff (claiming our office space, printing any additional signage needed), and then go help Devon with focus for the next few hours. During load-out I’m on the truck crew, and maintain the truck pack paperwork.

Jason – Wardrobe Supervisor
Jason also served as Assistant Costume Designer on the show, so he’s been with the show longer than the rest of the crew. Naturally he maintains all the costumes and wigs, and he also has a full show track, which incorporates all the most difficult parts of the three wardrobe/hair tracks that existed at the Guthrie, so that the cast has a consistent person doing their most difficult changes. He is also on the truck crew, where he is immensely valuable for his height, long arms, and strength. Jason and I do the wall pack, which is its own special kind of Tetris with dozens of different-shaped pieces that have to go in the right way or else they won’t fit.

Nick – Stage Manager / Human Cue Light
Unless you’ve been blog-reading under a rock, you will have seen me reference Nick’s Tour Blog before. Nick has been my assistant since last year. During load-in he does most of the stage management stuff, such as putting up the callboard and directional signage around the theatre (using his signage purse), taping actors’ names over their dressing tables, distributing and collecting valuables bags, and using his trusty roll of white gaff tape to mark out which wings actors should enter from, and where obstacles exist backstage. He also assists Olivia with the setup of prop tables and the placement of Fred the Platform, which almost always requires some discussion. During the show he runs the deck. His track consists mostly of being a human cue light, cueing actor entrances (and a few crew moves) with hand signals. We decided this was easier and more reliable than worrying about actual cue lights, and unlike last year, his track is really simple, and without those cues he’d probably die of boredom. At load-out he’s on the truck crew, where his specialty is strapping all our stair units to overhead load bars.

Matt – Sound Supervisor / Stunt Carpenter
Matt loads in the sound equipment and mixes the show, as well as tying our wireless comm into the house system and making sure there are backstage monitors, and paging when available. He has one of the shorter load-ins, so he has taken on a role we like to call Stunt Carpenter, because he does a few specific parts of the set construction that are too difficult and/or dangerous to give to the local crew, most notably the attachment of the cornices (which are huge and waaaay heavier than they should be) to the top of the set. If he’s done with his Stunt Carpenter duties onstage, he usually joins the truck crew for the part of the truck pack where the cornices and other large objects are lofted up over the road boxes into the nose of the truck.

VIDEOS

Bobby has been filming our load out from various locations in and outside the theatre. He has compiled all these into a single video showing the entire process. Note especially the part of the truck footage where we occupy ourselves for the half hour we spend waiting for the walls to be down.

If you’re interested in seeing more, the videos are online in their entirety:


March 14, 2010

The Midnight Morning

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:43 am

Tonight at midnight, my alarm went off. In a more rational world, this might be because I accidentally set it for 12AM instead of 12PM. But no, I set it for 12AM. And I set my other two phone alarms for 12:45AM and 1:00AM. And my bedside hotel alarm clock for 12:45 as well. It is standard procedure for me to set four alarms for a load-in day. You’d be surprised how often I still nearly miss bus call.

Anyway, this midnight alarm was done totally on purpose. You see, yesterday was originally supposed to be our load in day. We have a 3:00PM show today, and when we start with a morning or afternoon show, generally we get in the day before and load in from 8AM to 6PM and then have the night off. Only in this case, there was some kind of beauty pageant at our theatre last night, so we couldn’t load in. Thus, we have to start load in with the same number of hours we would normally need to be ready for an evening show, which in this case means 4AM.

Adding further cruelty to this, it’s daylight savings day. So we are springing forward, meaning that sleep-wise, it’s actually more like a 3AM load in. I generally like an hour-and-a-half to get ready in the morning, because I like to have a little breakfast, drink my energy drink, read my regular websites, and then get in the shower and begin packing up to check out of the hotel. So since our bus call is 3:30 I would have to get up at 2AM, but since the time changes and the hour from 2AM to 3AM won’t exist, I really would need to get up at 1AM. If this is making your head spin, then you may understand why I decided just to set my alarm for midnight and see if I felt like getting up, so that I would be well clear of the whole time-change drama.

Sometimes, depending on my mood, I would rather lose an hour of sleep to have an hour of calm in which to spend more time reading the web, or as I am now, blogging. And since I woke up after three hours of sleep wide awake, I decided not to hit the snooze button. So now it’s 1:30, which will soon skip to 3AM, and I actually have a lot of time. But I did download the trial of Filemaker 11 overnight, so I thought maybe that would be fun to mess around with if I had more free time than I intended.

We had a 5AM load-in once before, in Fairfax, VA. I don’t remember much about it, except that it was very weird getting off the bus in what appeared to be the middle of the night. I was practically comatose, because it was one of the first nights of the Olympics, and I stayed up a bit too late watching speed skating, and then decided that I wanted to go up to the crew room to take a shower before bed. I still must have gotten more sleep than I did tonight, though. But sometimes being woken up by Bobby’s traditional “Good morning, sunshines!” 15 minutes before you have to start working makes you more groggy than waking up in an actual bed, in an actual room, with a shower, and not having to squeeze past six other people just to put your shoes on. There’s something to be said for being able to go to sleep anywhere and knowing you can sleep until 5 minutes before you have to start working, but I also like being able to organize myself and have some free time. I hope that I will have an easier time of it today.


March 13, 2010

R&J Turns 50

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:57 am

Yesterday we celebrated our 50th performance of R&J. This was our official 50th performance, not counting three previews and an invited dress.

As our run is something like 80-ish performances (we keep canceling and adding and it’s driving me crazy as the database is currently built to have performance numbers manually associated with dates — that is changing!) But as we are only doing 80-something performances, 50 is really the only milestone we hit.

The last time I had to deal with something like this was a few months ago, right before I left to start rehearsals, when I was asked if a curtain speech should say “9,000 performances” or “performance number 9,000.” (I said “performance number 9,000,” which I later read in the press is what was said.)

Anyway, milestones and anniversaries have been a common occurrence in my career, so I tend to see them and plan to celebrate them out of habit.

Last year we were doing a sit-down in Phoenix when we hit #50, and I had a little sign on the callboard saying “Happy 50th” and that was about it.

This year as I saw the numbers creeping up from 40, I counted ahead and at the start of the week said, “Our 50th is going to be in Hartford [Wisconsin], we should get a little something for the cast.”

I didn’t do the best job at remembering to pick stuff up on the one occasion I was in a store, but I did get some little candies, and it so happens the venue’s hospitality had a nice candy jar, so I combined them to make a cornucopia of candy, under my sign that I had prepared during some downtime earlier in the week.

I also took a page from Phantom‘s publicists, who are fond of including fun facts (usually spelled phun phacts) along with anniversary press releases (like “Phantom has used 43,520 pounds of dry ice” and stuff like that.) So since my sign was looking a little empty, I decided to compile a few facts that would still be interesting even with only 50 performances to work with. Since I was planning this a few days in advance, I threw together a layout in the database that would keep some of these stats updated so I didn’t have to do any math on the day of the event.

  • Total time in performance to date: 129 hours, 37 minutes and 30 seconds
  • Seen by 26,762 people!
  • “Banished” spoken 1,431 times!
  • Someone called “Ho” 530 times!
  • Animal life encountered [backstage or onstage]: bat, bird, mouse, beetles

Everybody seemed very happy with the candy, and intrigued by our fun facts (which are calculated up to the performance before the 50th, and include previews and the invited dress).


March 12, 2010

Dear Civilization: Please Help. Crew Starving. Send Interwebs.

I call this: On the Road Again,phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:54 pm

Here I sit, at the Fairfield Inn in Ottumwa, IA. Clinging to a single bar of Edge on my iPhone.

I know what you’re thinking: “why are you even looking at your phone and expecting it to work? — you’re in Iowa. AT&T has made it clear they don’t care about Iowa. You should be happy you have any signal at all.”

Well, about that. The Fairfield Inn is charging us $90 a night. What in Ottumwa is worth that much for a hotel room? I have no idea.  It must be something or else they’d be out of business.  All I know is it’s half a mile to the closest source of food, and this afternoon we had to have our bus driver drive us to the grocery store, and tonight he’s taking us downtown for dinner.  The bus driver, by the way, is not really supposed to have to do that.  His job is to drive us between cities, to the hotel, and to the venue.  Otherwise he should be sleeping, or picking up chicks, or whatever else bus drivers do when they’re off the clock.  Any other trips beyond that are just to be nice.

The bus internet, which uses Sprint, is struggling a bit here, too, which is surprising because it always does better than AT&T in places of dubious importance to wireless carriers.

No problem though. We have two days off here. We have hotel rooms. We can just sit in the hotel and use the internet all we want. WRONG.

THE HOTEL INTERNET IS BROKEN.

They don’t know when it will be fixed.

Let me recap what we’re getting for $90/night at the Fairfield Inn in Ottumwa, IA:

  • No access to food aside from the snack machine in the hall (I don’t know if it works)
  • Located in the middle of nowhere where both AT&T and Sprint don’t provide reliable service
  • NO INTERNET

Look at this smug little anthropomorphized ethernet jack. Lies. All lies. Now, a hotel advertising “high speed internet” almost always means that one time, about 10 years ago, their bandwidth would have been considered high speed. When I installed my first 56K modem I felt like I had put a rocketship in my computer too, so I get where they’re coming from. But seeing the little sticker on the wall when I checked in did not fill me with hope. I did kind of expect that there would be something coming out of it, though.

We’ve complained, but the manager won’t be in until tomorrow, so who knows how it will turn out. I wouldn’t mind paying half the price for a place to shower, sleep and do laundry, but we’ve stayed in nice hotels in the downtown areas of major cities for less, and they had internet, too.

If we were just passing through it would be one thing, but this is where we’re spending two days off. The cast, lucky sons-of-guns, are staying an extra day in our previous hotel, which was near a lot of stuff, including a fast food / ice cream joint called Culver’s, which I’d never heard of, but about which I will be fantasizing for months if not years.

I think I may be doing a lot of writing for these days, although usually when I write I do refer to the internet for things. I will get by with whatever I can eke out of my one bar of Edge. I can only imagine what a disaster my life would be right now if my phone wasn’t jailbroken and I couldn’t tether. You hear me, AT&T? I’m stealing the bandwidth I already paid you for — 1KB every second!

UPDATE

Well things worked out OK. An hour before we were supposed to check out, Bobby called to say that the hotel was going to take care of us and let us stay all night (we have a 4AM load-in, so we were going to check out at 1PM and then sit on the bus in the middle of nowhere until our 3:30AM departure). And on top of that, they just fixed the internet! So the ability to stay all day, time to grab some sleep before load-in, even shower again if we want to, and the access to internet while here, have made it worth the $90 (I consider that a day-and-a-half hotel stay, which works out to just about what the room is worth).

I had just settled in to spend my last hour in the hotel beginning to prepare graphic elements for the next version of my stage management database, which I will begin working on once the tour is over. I figured it’s the one project I can accomplish completely offline. I want it to share the look and feel of the website, so I began importing the graphics. Here’s what I came up with in the five minutes before the phone rang.

And this whole experience allowed me to return to my childhood, when you could click a web link, go take a shower, and come back to see if the page had finished loading.

In other news, their internet seemed really fast, maybe fast enough for gaming, which is what I usually hope to do when staying in a hotel for a day off, so I headed over to DSL Reports to see what the speeds were. One time it tested at about 100kpbs, and another in excess of 1MB. Anyway, I’m happy with whatever it is.


Hartford, WI

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:33 am

After our Adventure in Brainerd, we moved on to Hartford, WI, where we enjoyed hotel rooms and a day off.

Today we are enjoying a one-nighter, in a cute little theatre known as the Schaeur Arts and Activities Center. We are as close to the edge of the stage as the marley has ever been, which prompted an 8:05AM email to Corey and our fight captain Chris, but Chris determined all would be well.

Again we had a drivable genie. This one has a large platform that can hold more than one person. Again Devon focused himself, and greatly enjoyed scooting around the stage. At the end of focus, we were doing our very last onstage light, and Devon brought the lift down, drove it to centerstage, and then realized he forgot to put the gel back in the light. Making a happy occasion out of it, he offered me a ride in the lift, and let me drive it back to position for him to drop the color, and then back to centerstage. It was really fun.

The show looked fantastic, and the theatre with its bare-wood columns (it used to be some kind of factory — a cannery, I heard) and its wrap-around balcony actually suggested something like Shakespeare’s Globe. I didn’t get a great picture of it, but I did snap this one during load-out.


March 11, 2010

Cedar Falls, IA and Our Adventure in Brainerd, MN

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:10 pm

I’m a little behind. Here’s a wrap-up of our last two venues from earlier this week.

Cedar Falls

I barely remember Cedar Falls, which is weird because we were only there three or four days ago. What I do remember was our hotel, a Holiday Inn with an indoor atrium containing a pool and an arcade. The day we arrived there was some kind of convention. I think it was the Society for the Promotion of Screaming Running Children and Drunken Parents, but I might be mistaken. Anyway, the rooms had full-wall windows facing directly onto the atrium (mine formed one wall of the arcade) which didn’t quite get completely covered by the curtains, and the beds were closest to the window. So it was very noisy and a bit concerning to one’s privacy.

In comparison to the hotel, the venue (at the University of Northern Iowa) was a breeze. It was a very large theatre (1,600 seats) with the most amazing acoustics we’ve ever encountered. A little too amazing at times, as from my calling position in the down-left corner, I had to be really quiet because my calls could be heard onstage. It was a really beautiful and convenient space. The most unusual thing about it was that for our student matinee they had a big projection screen that flew in, on which they projected excerpts from the show and R&J trivia while the kids filed in and waited for the show to start.

Brainerd, MN

TRIVIA: Brainerd is one of the settings of the movie Fargo (it’s where most of the murders take place, and where the infamous woodchipper scene happens). This was one of those venues where we saw nothing outside the parking lot of the venue, so I don’t have any fun stories about that.

This one was an adventure, but one with a happy ending. When we arrived at 8AM for our load-in, there was no crew. By maybe 8:15 or 8:30 we had found somebody to let us in, and we had one crew member, Josh. Josh, while a big strong guy, was not quite capable of replacing the 15 people our tech rider requires. Without knowing what we were dealing with, we couldn’t even begin to start loading in. Some people were assembled from every corner of the college, but we didn’t have many (any?) people who could work the whole day — most could only work for an hour or two at a time between classes and other things. After some phone calls to the office, we determined that we would do the show somehow, though we definitely wouldn’t have time to attempt to put up the whole set.

Last year, you may recall, we performed Henry V twice without the set. On those occasions we did it on purpose, in venues that were simply too small to fit it. We also knew in advance that we would have to do the show that way, and weeks of planning went into it. It also required about five hours of rehearsal. Eleven hours before the show, we had no plan for how to do R&J on a bare stage, aside from our one-hour version, which could be adapted into the full version, but not without much rehearsal.

I’m going to talk at length about our decision-making process, because while I hope it’s a decision nobody else ever has to make, things do happen on the road and one of the most difficult and most important things about touring is being faced with a situation that looks impossible at first glance, and figuring out how to put on the best show possible.

At first we were kind of stumped. We sat on the bus and tried to brainstorm. The fact that it was 8AM probably didn’t help our minds to work any faster. We had several options immediately, none of which we really liked:

  • we could do the regular show on a bare stage, which would require a very long, probably painful rehearsal
  • we had the one-hour show ready to go, but people have paid to see the whole show, and it seemed like a cop-out
  • we could do the full show with costumes, but using the one-hour staging, but there are some significant differences between the two shows, which would have to be carefully worked out

One thing that we kept hitting upon was that the show can stand well on its own, but the one thing that Romeo and Juliet really requires, that audiences expect to see, is a balcony. Somehow we had to create a balcony, even if it was low to the ground. Jason, our wardrobe supervisor, I think had the idea of using one of our balcony pieces on its travel wheels (the balcony and the stair landing each have four giant casters with brakes that slide into the bottom corners so they can be wheeled for travel). That was the best idea we had so far.

In order to know what we had to work with, here’s a picture of our set as it normally is:

The staff was just arriving at the New York office (at 9AM their time) when we began our ordeal, but once we were able to fill them in on what was happening we began working amongst ourselves to decide what exactly to do. The first step was to call Corey, who is the staff director, and responsible for the artistic decisions on the road. I filled him in on the very quick-and-dirty version of what was going on — that we couldn’t put up the whole set and we had to decide what we could do, and it would probably involve a lengthy emergency rehearsal. Corey immediately began arranging for a cab to get to the theatre.

While he was en route, the rest of us continued racking our brains for a good solution. Bobby continued assessing how much we might be able to accomplish, as more workers showed up. We played off the idea of using the balcony landing on its wheels as the only real set element, but Bobby offered to put up the whole balcony.

“You could do the walls, and the platforms and the escape stairs?” I asked.

Yes.

Now we had something that was functional. Somebody else, maybe Olivia, chimed in, “that would also give us the hobbit hole.” The hobbit hole is the tiny door under the stairs, that’s part of the same wall set that the balcony door is in. Having both the balcony entrance and the hobbit hole would give us most of the distinct areas that exist in the show and help to distinguish the setting for each scene.

With the two farthest stage-left walls in place, the only other entrance we needed was the up-right door, which ideally requires access from upstage center. There was some miscellaneous masking hung, and I concocted a scheme whereby we took one of the curtains and essentially used it to form the rest of the wall between the balcony and the stage-left side of the up-right door, thus giving us an entrance that was identical in function, although it would not be enclosed on the stage-right side. Upstage of it would be a black traveler, which would mask the escape stairs. Because the “wall” curtain wasn’t angled like the set is, the offstage space was a little narrower, but the lack of physical walls upstage actually gave us more space because the area under the escape stairs was open for prop storage, quickchanges and passage by actors and crew.

As we were finalizing this plan, Corey arrived. We proposed our solution, and he agreed it seemed like a very good idea. My favorite part of it was that it didn’t change the blocking at all. Once the actors were introduced to the concept of “this curtain = this wall,” they could go about their business as usual. Corey and I agreed no rehearsal was necessary, and by the time he left had scaled back our estimate of bringing the cast in an hour early, to 15 minutes early. If all went well with the installation, it literally changed nothing.

The set construction went well, as did lighting focus, thanks to the cool drivable Genie they had, which Devon drove around like a kid in a Toys R Us commercial. The main problems we had to solve involved the fact that the proscenium is only 13′ high, and the drops are correspondingly short. Our set is 18′ high, which creates a problem: the drops don’t reach the floor before the pipe hits the set. By like, a lot. Like three feet. So we took some spare legs and pinned them to the bottom of the legs that were there, to extend the length of the downstage “wall” masking, and used some black fabric we bought for the New York run to do the same for the upstage traveler. It wasn’t as pretty as if they had been a single piece of fabric, but under stage lights they looked pretty nice.

We had one gap up-right where the side masking didn’t quite meet up with the upstage traveler, but it was better than some venues we’ve played. Unfortunately that was the side the dressing rooms were on, so cast, crew and dressers were going to be crossing through the gap all the time. We were brainstorming how we could build a flat out of our unused pieces when the venue staff offered to paint one of their stock flats black for us. Problem solved! They also built a very nice railing for us for the downstage side of our escape stairs, which normally don’t need a railing because there’s a wall. I was determined that we had to have some kind of makeshift railing at least on the upper half of the stairs, even if it was made out of spare pipes and cheeseboroughs, but what we got was much more sturdy and appropriate than I had hoped for.

In the late afternoon, when the set and masking were finished, I took this picture and sent it to the cast and Corey, with a basic explanation of how it worked, so they could begin to get used to the idea.

When the cast arrived they were great sports about it. Ray (Friar Laurence) saw that “his” side of the stage, including his favorite offstage chair upstage of the hobbit hole, were completely intact, and decided that as long as that was the case, all was well!

Christine (Lady Capulet), however, is a little more attached to the stage right wall of the set, which often represents the Capulet house, and lamented that somebody had burned her poor house down!

It took very little explanation for them to get used to the idea of the set, and nobody had any concerns to raise about things that wouldn’t be possible with it. Every time we arrive at a venue we do a walkaround right before fight call, where we quickly sketch out the parameters of how the show functions in the venue: which wings are dead, which have hazards like floor-mounted lights or cables, we confirm which wing Tybalt’s body goes off into, and where Fred the Platform (we have recently learned his Equity name is Frederick von Bedthoven) lives offstage. The boundaries of all the pieces of the set are drawn in paint pen on the marley, so I pointed out to the cast that they could look down and see these marks if it helped them with spacing. The process took a few minutes longer, but the cast is used to having to adapt somewhat for every space, and there are alternate plans in place for a lot of things, that we already have a shorthand for (i.e. “we’re using Guthrie masking,” “Fred is onstage similar to the Baruch position”).

And here’s a picture of the set under lights:

The happy ending to the story was that not only was the 284-seat theatre sold out, but they were turning people away at the doors, and crammed every last person they could into every empty seat that was unclaimed at curtain time. When that kind of thing happens, the lucky ticketholders see the commotion at the box office and tend to get really excited about the show they’re about to see. They really enjoyed the show, and were a more vocal audience than we’ve had lately. At intermission I was told that about 80% of the audience had never seen Shakespeare performed before, which was amazing to me given that they were following the show so well. At the end of the show we got a full standing ovation, which has only happened once before. So we left having had a great time, and clearly still were able to educate and entertain our audience.


Filemaker 11 Released

I call this: computers,tech — Posted by KP @ 8:07 am

My Twitter feed lit up the other day with news that Filemaker 11 has been released.

I use Filemaker to design a stage management database that does pretty much everything I need to do. Ever. So of course this is a big deal to me.

New Features

Charts is the one they’re really pushing in the marketing, but have you ever seen a stage management chart? I mean it would be cute if you wanted to look at trends, like have a little pie chart showing how many tickets you sold relative to capacity or something, but I don’t think a stage manager has ever needed a chart.

The two words that got my attention were “filtered portals,” which is one of those things I’m always shocked it doesn’t do already. A portal is like a window within a window, for lack of a better term, that pulls data from some other table in the database and displays it as a list. For instance, my venue information layout contains data about a single venue (name, address, union status, etc.) and within it has two portals — one for all contacts (pulled from the contacts table) that have that venue in their “company” field, and another for all performances that are listed in the event table as occurring there. So when I look at each venue, I see all the contacts associated with it, and all the performances that happen there.

However, my event table tracks rehearsals, previews and performances, which are indicated by a drop-down menu to choose which type a particular event is. Most of the time this isn’t a problem because we’re mainly doing shows, but for example at the Guthrie, we were rehearsing there for a month. If you look at the Guthrie’s venue entry, you’ll see all the rehearsals as well. There is currently no way to tell the portal “show me related records from the events table, but only the ones that have ‘Perf’ as their Type.” It seems like a really obvious feature, and one that always bugs me that it’s been missing. So for that alone I want to upgrade.

Upgrade Pricing

I have Filemaker 10. I paid $300 for it. Like six months ago. The upgrade pricing for Filemaker 11 is $179. The cost is high, but for apps like this I expect it. What makes it frustrating is that it’s $179 whether you own Filemaker 10, 9 or (for the first six months) 8. So basically there’s no incentive to upgrade to every version. Which for a large corporation is probably a good idea anyway, since changing the compatibility of your database every couple years would be a huge undertaking. But it would be nice if they threw a bone, even a small one ($20?), to people who care enough to want the extra features right away. Why are people who bought the program 5 years ago paying the same to upgrade as me who bought a version that’s only been out a year? Lame. Very lame.

Now instead of immediately hitting the “purchase” button upon the logic of “11 is better than 10” (I call this the Spinal Tap Theory of Software), I’m going to really have to look into the features to see if it’s something I will get significantly more productivity out of. And I may try to save up some Amazon gift certificates or get it for my birthday rather than buy it right away. If I didn’t need a new laptop, things would be different, but I’m being very cautious about spending any significant money until after the computer is purchased, so that I can examine how broke I am before proceeding with purchases that might become lower-priority in light of my brokeification.


March 10, 2010

“The Two Hours’ Traffic of Our Stage” and Other Dirty Filthy Lies

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:40 pm

Shakespeare, in general, is known (among his other accomplishments) as a writer of long plays. If you’re going to see Shakespeare you know it’s not a 90 minute / no intermission deal. That being said, Romeo and Juliet is not particularly known as being one of his longer plays. It says right there in the prologue:

“[really long run-on sentence about dead lovers]
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.”

I’m not much of a scholar of Elizabethan theatre, but I think this has perplexed people for some time, since we as modern theatre artists can’t seem to stage Shakespeare’s work without cutting it heavily or making it four hours long.

I spoke with a gentleman at a recent venue who was lamenting that we had made some cuts. Now some of our changes have to do with adapting to the size and gender makeup of our cast, but we have definitely made a lot of cuts for time. I explained all this, and he was still sad that we had felt the need to cut it for time. Our show is already three hours long. I refrained from starting and ending my argument by saying “BECAUSE IT WOULD BE FOUR HOURS LONG!!!”

I’m sure there are people who would love to pay to see a four- or five-hour unabridged (which is a tricky word with all the various folios and quartos) production of a Shakespeare play (hell, I might if I didn’t have to see it every day — or twice a day — can you imagine?), but there are overtime fees for actors and stagehands, there are time schedules to be kept between the end of one performance and the time it takes to drive to the next venue by 8AM, and the school groups have to go to class at some point in their day. Most people we encounter are shocked the show is as long as it is.

Anyway, a friend recently recommended I read Shakespeare by Bill Bryson, which debunks a lot of the myths about Shakespeare and lists the very few facts we actually know for sure about him. One of the things he talks about is the possibility that the printed versions of the plays might have contained additional text that was never performed, or perhaps never meant to be performed. So sort of like when they include deleted scenes on a DVD, or a bonus track on an album. It’s an interesting concept.

In my own mind I’ve always wondered if the acting style was much less naturalistic and they all just talked faster. I can see where, with different choices, an hour could be cut out of a show. If I had a time machine, the first place I would go would be to see a premiere of one of Shakespeare’s works, mostly out of curiosity to see if I’m right, and to see how much else we’ve gotten wrong in our assumptions about how his plays were performed.

But the idea that some of the scenes were kind of background material that audiences never saw live was rather shocking to me. It also goes against something that’s said a lot (and comes up frequently in our talkbacks), that Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed, not to be read. The only people who published them (we think) were unauthorized publishers during his life, and some of his collaborators who compiled the folios after his death.

Of course if I did a show, and years later the writer was hailed as a genius with almost a religious fervor, you can bet I’d be digging through my files for any old pages and music from cut scenes and songs, to provide an even more complete collection of his works, even if some of them never made it to an audience. I guess like us, maybe sometimes Shakespeare had to cut stuff in previews, so to speak.


March 8, 2010

Nick’s Signage Purse

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:15 pm


Nick’s signage purse deserves its own post.

During the few days that Nick was off the tour, I had the opportunity to do his job myself. One of the things I have always been dissatisfied with is how we have organized our signage. All our signs live permanently in sheet protectors and there are many different types, and they’re slippery, and carrying a bunch around, along with tape and a dry erase marker, is a huge juggling act. And carrying just a few is a pain because you can’t just make a path around the theatre, you have to keep coming back for more.

So I grabbed an expandable folder thing, which was used by our predecessors and filled with old signage, took out all the old signs, and categorized it for our signs. When we got to New York, I showed my rough creation to Nick, and we both agreed that it needed a shoulder strap, because holding the folder was only slightly less annoying than holding the loose signs. So we cut a bunch of tieline and sized it for Nick. At first he was not happy that the folder was pink, but soon embraced it.


March 5, 2010

Nap Day

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:24 pm

Just a quick day-in-the-life post.

Today we had a two-show day, in the manner that only an education-based company can: a 9:45AM matinee, and an 8PM evening show. It’s a good thing our bus is so awesome.

We were all exhausted this morning. I mean totally exhausted — cast and crew — without much explanation. I have never been so tired while calling this show. I had a Monster energy drink when I woke up at 6AM. Most of the rest of the crew had Starbucks from the hotel. And none of it helped.

During the first act, Nick and I were bemoaning how tired we were (I’m calling from backstage here). I mentioned that I hadn’t had breakfast, and maybe that was part of it. Nick earned huge bonus points by going to the bus (which was right outside the stage door) and warming up some Pop Tarts for me, and surprising me with a Mountain Dew as an extra treat. After eating I felt a little more functional, but despite now adding a Mountain Dew to my energy drink, I was still really sleepy. We all spent the whole show fantasizing about how comfortable our bunks would be as soon as the show was over.

In the final scene, after all the dead bodies have been discovered, and the Friar is explaining his tale of woe, I was really tired of standing up.

A word about my chair: I have a chair, but it’s a regular-size, kinda odd-looking folding chair that’s not tall enough to see over the calling desk, so while I sit down during the long speeches and stuff, a lot of the time I have to stand, or lean on the chair.

So during the Friar’s speech, the show is maybe 2 or 3 minutes from ending, and I’m tired, as I think I mentioned. I just wanted to rest my weary feet by kneeling/leaning on the chair, as I had done throughout the show. Well this chair is kind of unusual as folding chairs go, and clearly I kneeled on a part of it that’s not balanced to have weight put specifically on that area. The chair began to tip, dumping me over, and although I didn’t fall all the way to the floor, I couldn’t stop the chair from crashing back to the floor when I fell off it. As clattering folding chairs go, it was a fairly small noise, and as calling desks go, I was relatively far from the stage, but it was unfortunately very quiet onstage. I did not recover quickly enough to look up and see if the actors actually looked offstage to see what the noise was. God I hope not.

Storytime:
While ASM on Frankenstein I had an incident in which I was moving quickly for a cue and tripped with both feet over a prop bag which had been left in the walkway, and went crashing between tables, masking flats, and finally smacking full force into the floor during a quiet duet. I of course couldn’t see it, but I was shown many reenactments of what Hunter Foster and Christiane Noll did in response to the noise. Both of them separately left the stage after the scene and asked me more-or-less if somebody had died. Aside from ruining my pants and getting floor-burn on my knees that left a scar months after the show closed, I did make my cue.

Nick was standing right next to me when the whole thing happened, and the two of us spent the rest of the show gasping for breath from trying to stifle our laughter. He says I need to wear a spike tape “F” for “FAIL” for the evening show. I think that sounds fair.

UPDATE: Nick has dedicated a post to this event, with pictures of my “F.” It’s entitled PSM Fail.

Once the show was over, we grabbed a bite at the student cafeteria, and then all of us took a nice long nap in our bunks (between 4-5 hours for most of us, which is about as much sleep as we sometimes get overnight). In the last hour or so, we’ve all woken up and gathered in the lounge. We’re watching CSI right now. We have to go back in in about 20 minutes, and we’re all rather sad to have to leave the comfort of the bus, but we should be well-rested for load out tonight. We expect this one to be good — we have a loading dock very close to the stage, and an efficient local crew.


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