HOME

April 29, 2012

Triassic Parq

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:37 pm

I’ve had some big news recently — in the midst of stage managing three shows at once, I got promoted to PSM of the third show: a new Off-Broadway musical called Triassic Parq. The show won Best Musical at the Fringe in 2010, and will be running at the Soho Playhouse this summer, with hopes of a longer commercial run.

In brief, it’s a musical based on Jurassic Park, as the name implies, but it’s not a straight musicalization of the movie. It’s actually the story of what the dinosaurs are doing when they’re not eating people. It’s very funny and surprising. I started reading it on my commute and actually had to be careful not to bust out laughing in public a few times. It’s also a script where the stage directions are really funny and sarcastic, which I always love, as it gives insight into the minds of the writers. I haven’t met most of the creative team yet, but I can tell this will be a fun room to work in.

Since my promotion, I’m just starting to get caught up with the basic things I need to do. We almost have a calendar. I have successfully scheduled a production meeting that almost everyone can make (a miracle!). I’m planning to put contact information into the database tonight, which sets me up to start getting actor conflicts. And I’ve got the rehearsal script ready to be turned into our master stage management script whenever I can get to it (currently planned for tomorrow).

I don’t have much to say (and I’m insanely busy because I overbooked myself not knowing I was doing Triassic, and failed to back out of any of the jobs in time, not knowing I would be PSM of Triassic!) But this has the makings of a show I will write about a lot. Not to put the cart before the horse, but I’m approaching this as if it’s a show I will have to maintain. At any rate I’ll have to maintain it for over two months. I have penciled in the first day I want to have understudy rehearsal for July 2. The important thing is that if the show isn’t well-documented from the start, it becomes much harder to work with it later, so I want to be very meticulous about everything, for my own sake.

The other great thing is that the director shares my love of new technology (and iPads!), and we are considering using the new Stage Write software to document our blocking. I’ve never felt comfortable with any method of digital blocking I’ve seen, and my main gripe with this app is that you can only export as PDF, not share the actual app data so that multiple people can edit it (I have emailed the developer, and this is planned for a future version). The exciting thing about this process is that being surrounded by a bunch of young, technology-friendly creatives, I’m much less afraid to try to reinvent theatrical paperwork, knowing we might have some growing pains along the way. This is going to be a show for imaginative problem-solving (and I’m thrilled to have already been able to contribute some ideas for staging), so I think I can dream big when it comes to how we use technology to create and maintain the show. I just wish I wasn’t so damn busy with other shows right now, so I could sit in my apartment and just meditate about software and paperwork all day!

We start rehearsal in two weeks! Stay tuned!


April 23, 2012

Eating Crow on Straight Fives

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:54 pm

It is April 23rd, and as promised, I have returned to tell you what ended up happening with the rehearsal schedule for Marry Harry. In this post, I described a little of our first production meeting, and the fact that we were planning to do straight 5-hour rehearsals, which made me really happy. To which I said:

Pro tip: if your rehearsal schedule looks too easy, that’s usually because it is, and while you may be the only person to think that in pre-production, and the producer may say, “nope, this is really it — we’ve booked the studio time,” the director will realize it eventually in the middle of rehearsal and that booking will be changed. Let me tell ye: we shall see.

I promised to return once we were in tech, to answer whether as predicted, we ended up extending the rehearsal day. Let me tell ye, we did not. Nor did we deviate from our 11:30-4:30 schedule, once it was decided on during the pre-pro week. As I said, I was very happy to be proven wrong, and to stick to a nice predictable schedule.

I should also mention, lest you think straight fives are a cakewalk, that Brian and I have gone home totally exhausted every day, much to our amazement. As is typical in our profession, five or ten-minute breaks usually contain somewhere between zero and two minutes of actual not-having-to-work, and it’s hard doing that for five hours straight without a meal break to rest, eat, and catch up on paperwork or prop maintenance so that you’re not rushing to keep up in rehearsal. That being said, it was awesome and well worth it to get up long after sunrise, and get home long before sunset every day.

Honestly, once we got down to the last couple days, I almost wished we had done one or two long days, only because five hours is not long when you have a show in development and the writers come in with new material which needs to be rehearsed, scenes and musical numbers need polish, and then you want to get through a run. Once you’re running the show, the benefit of working for a longer period of time at a stretch becomes more important. However, this being a fairly easy contract, we were limited to six-out-of-seven hour days, in which you gain an extra hour of rehearsal, but sacrifice the loss of focus that comes with breaking for lunch. So it’s really not much overall gain over the straight five.

In addition to our awesome schedule, things have been going really well. I haven’t been saying much, but I have a backlog of some things I’ve been saving to talk about, especially how my iPad has been faring in its first production.