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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.


January 18, 2010

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

Talkback

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:33 pm

The Guthrie has several different kinds of talkbacks. The ones we do most often are for student audiences. Every student performance concludes with a talkback, which is always really interesting because the kids naturally have questions about the play they saw, and especially for those who have an interest in pursuing acting or other work in theatre, it’s a chance to talk to working professionals about how they got where they are, what kind of training or experience they had, and so forth. Sometimes the conversation takes unexpected turns, but a student talkback usually lands on a more predictable set of questions because there are certain constants in their circumstances — they’ve been studying the play in school, they’ve been brought here by their teachers, and usually have some experience in putting on plays themselves, or at least in performing scenes from the play in class.

I always find it fascinating to have talkbacks with regular audiences, because it’s much more of a mystery about who these people on the other side of the footlights are, what interests them, and how they came to be sitting in a theatre, and why they decided to stay after the show to hear more.

It’s kind of an amazing thing these days that we have a forum where a random bunch of people, outside the context of a school or any organized educational environment, can come together in person and have a discussion with a bunch of strangers for nearly an hour, about the process of theatre, the changing nature of families, love and marriage in the last 500 years, and the impact of Shakespeare on our idea of what it means to be human. This was probably the longest talkback I’ve ever done, but it was really cool in that it wasn’t just a question-and-answer session about “what’s it like to be an actor?” It was really a discussion about the play we all just saw, and the larger issues that it raised about our world today. I think it’s a great thing that such a program exists, and that people care enough to attend.

If you’re nearby and interested, here’s the link to the Guthrie’s page on the post-play discussion program, of which there is one more date for our show (Jan. 30th matinee), and for all their other upcoming shows.


Game Day

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 1:03 pm

Here in Minneapolis we’ve been living 2 blocks from the Metrodome through most of football season. Today as I walked to the theatre I was greeted by a sea of purple going the other way.

Here’s the view from the crazy yellow windows on the Guthrie’s 9th floor, just before kickoff.

I enjoy watching football but I don’t have really strong allegiances, so I’ve been rooting for the Vikings all year, knowing they would be my “home team” for the second half of the season.


January 16, 2010

The Booth Window

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:46 pm


This is my view from the booth window at the Guthrie. It’s pretty comfy. Tonight I moved our printer up here, and now I can do all of our end-of-night paperwork and phone hotline recording from here, instead of having to office-hop all over the building at the end of the night.


Gold Star for Actors

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:08 pm

In my own mind, I award gold stars to actors who perform acts of extraordinary technical assistance while onstage. Today we had several worthy candidates.

In the party scene, Romeo dropped his (thankfully plastic) champagne glass, which is filled with diluted tea. Almost as soon as it fell, several party guests and servants were wiping it up with their handkerchiefs. One of the things I find most important with a new company is figuring out which actors have a special awareness of these kind of things and will take the initiative to fix onstage mishaps.

When Romeo threw his coat on the back of a bench and it slid off the back, Friar Laurence (Ray Chapman) picked it up and dusted it off completely in character, and laid it back on the bench nicely, which saves the scene change at the end where Romeo needs to grab it quickly.

And finally, Benvolio’s hat somehow got stuck onstage just upstage of a bench centerstage, where it would be very difficult to get it off through most of the very dramatic scenes in Act II. I didn’t think it was worth trying to get it off for the next half hour or so. Myxolydia Tyler, who plays a combination of Capulet servants we have compressed into one character named Perrin, had a plan, though, so I said she should try. What she did was the greatest act of sleight-of-hand I have ever witnessed in a career filled with actors trying to nonchalantly get incongruous props offstage. She hid a HAT, while also dealing with a serving tray and two (real) glasses filled with liquid, while standing, sitting, and then standing again and exiting. It was amazing.

I also have to give credit to Penny, our director, as during the rehearsal process when these kind of things would happen, she would stress to the actors the importance of dealing with unexpected events in a realistic manner, both because it makes sense to the audience, and because it’s often necessary for technical reasons to get things off the stage that shouldn’t be there. I very much appreciated her emphasis on that.

This was the first show where we really had to deal with these kind of problems, and I’m very impressed with how the cast responded.


In the Run

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:00 am

We’ve now done 3 official performances at the Guthrie. The day after opening, the rest of our out-of-town collaborators took off, and now it’s just the traveling company here in Minneapolis, along with visits from some of our local creative team — such as Andrew Wade, our vocal coach / guru, who has continued to surprise us by showing up in person to conduct his famous pre-show warm-up, when he has had free time from Macbeth rehearsals downstairs.

But for the most part, this has become like another stop on the tour. Everyone has gone home, and Corey and I are now maintaining the show. We don’t yet have our touring crew here (mostly because there’s nothing for them to do because we’re in a union house). They will show up a few days before we leave to learn their tracks and then load the show out.

To catch you up on what’s been happening since we started previews…

We’ve had great houses, and our notes from each preview were minimal, and the rehearsals during the day very easy-going. We were still tweaking things here and there, but there was no great rush or panic about it.

On the night of the final preview, Nick and I took Ashley to dinner as our official thank you for her help throughout our process. However, she hasn’t been needed that much for Macbeth, so she’s still assigned to us for the time being. In addition to helping us as we go back into rehearsal for Alice in Wonderland and the one-hour version of R&J that we will perform for younger audiences, she’s going to observe as much as possible of calling the show and Nick’s deck track (neither of which are particularly challenging or unusual, unfortunately).

Opening night was fun. We had just a few hours of rehearsal, but the rest of our time was taken up with preparations for the opening night events, and organizing and distributing the opening night gifts for the cast and creative team. It was kind of fun getting to play Santa Claus, sneaking into all the dressing rooms while everyone was out to dinner and leaving the bright red Acting Company tote bags, with two luggage tags and an Acting Company frisbee inside.

On Fireworks

On the day off, Laura (who plays Juliet) went to speak to one of the schools that came to our invited dress. She revealed that their favorite part of the show was the fireworks in the party scene. I found this absolutely hysterical since I think of the fireworks as some sort of stage management torture device, rather than something I should be patting myself on the back for. Basically instead of the lights and sound being programmed with a delay so they execute together, the sound cue of the rocket whistling up and then exploding is called first, and then I call the light cue to create the flash with the explosion sound. I managed to get them to put a delay on the first one because it executes with another sound cue, making the rocket almost impossible to hear. The first time I called the show from the booth was during the invited dress, where I realized I needed a dedicated monitor with just sound effects in it to call it well. It was nice to find out that the kids thought the fireworks looked good, even when I couldn’t hear what I was doing.

I had to go through this exact same thing last year with The Spy, in which several military flares were sent up in identical fashion, except it was even better because we only did the show like once a month, so I had even less time to get good at it! This show has about 8 fireworks effects more-or-less back-to-back, and based on my experience from last year, I’m getting decent at it pretty quickly. It’s pretty much the only thing I do in the show that’s difficult or in any way flashy from a stage management perspective, so hearing that it was memorable makes me feel good.

I know that all of my contributions help tell the story and elicit emotion in the audience, but it can be an adjustment to go from cueing falling chandeliers and towering pillars of flame, to calling nothing but graceful scene change light and underscoring, that are most effective when the audience isn’t really aware of them happening. So I do look forward to the fireworks as the one point in the show where everyone gets to admire the cool technical effect.

As the show settles in, I can now take time to start working on the finer nuances of my cues and really fitting them into the way the show breathes. There is an art to that as well, although it requires a little more patience to reap the rewards of it than the immediate positive feedback of getting a chandelier to explode perfectly on cue. I’m looking forward to really starting to work in depth on making each cue perfect.

Student Matinee

Yesterday we had our first student matinee, which went really well. We also had our first talkback after the show. I absolutely love doing talkbacks, so I always look forward to this. Corey did a great job moderating. He had also done a pre-show session with the students, so he had given them things to think about and discuss after seeing the show. I’m always very impressed how well the kids are prepared when they see the show, which is a testament to their teachers and the people in the education departments of the Acting Company and the Guthrie. On another note, it’s also fun to do talkbacks with a new company of actors because you usually learn new things about your coworkers by listening to their answers.


January 14, 2010

Evening Off

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 6:06 pm

Today is one of the rarest events on the tour — an evening off. We had a 1PM student matinee, followed by a talkback with about 100 of the students. By 5:00 I was home. Tomorrow we have a Skype conference with our publicist in New York at 3:30 and then a show at night. Between all this is something that might almost be considered a day off.

Earlier today I began supposing that the errands I had to run at the Mall of America might be easily done tonight, saving my day off for true rest. Most of all, the weather is really nice today. When I was done with my paperwork I raced home, threw off my Guthrie badge and hoodie, and tore the hood off my winter coat and grabbed a small knit hat that my aunt got me for Christmas. What weather is this that has me skipping through the snow with such abandon? Why it’s 29 degrees! Who knows when we may be so lucky again, and by golly I’m going to take advantage of it.

So with my light rail ticket in hand, I’m off to enjoy an hour or two of daylight and get some shopping done.


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