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April 13, 2009

We Have a New Bus!

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 8:01 pm

Somewhat candid photo of us watching TV just now (taken with Photobooth on my computer):

Bart parked the bus at a hotel in Nashville and then went to sleep, so when we arrived we had to explore the bus on our own and figure out how everything works. It was pretty funny. I felt a little bit like lab rats placed in a new environment with hidden cameras to study how we adapt and discover how things work. I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We figured out how to tune in to the second satellite feed so the rear lounge TV can watch a separate channel from the front. Then our internet went down, and it seemed like the router needed to be restarted. On the old bus, the router sat on a countertop in the open. Well we looked all over the bus and couldn’t find it. In hindsight I suspect it might be in one of the luggage bays, but I stopped looking because we connected into it through a browser and looked up the default password for that model of router, which thankfully was unchanged. From there we could reboot it, and all was well.

Updated list of good things about this bus vs. bad things, as presented in a Harvard outline:

I. Good Things:
A. front lounge feels larger, has more windows
B. larger kitchen
C. nicer bathroom
D. ice chest in back lounge is easy to open
E. mirrored ceilings with accent lighting all throughout the bus
F. two fridges!
G. DVD players in bunks have softer edges so we won’t whack our heads as hard
H. pouches for our phones, wallets, etc. on walls of bunks

II. Bad Things:
A. bathroom door lock is broken
B. trash chute door is too small and has a weird ledge so things don’t easily fall down the chute
C. bunk mattresses seem thinner
D. no foot rest on the seat next to the driver

E. the power outlets in the bunks are at our feet, not near our heads
F. we hate the bunk curtains
1. they are too short, designed for when the bunks are stacked 3 high
a. light spills into bunk
b. lack of privacy due to 5″ gap at bottom of curtain
2. they have single snaps, not full-length velcro to keep them closed. The snaps don’t line up in 2-bunk tall position, so they are useless
3. curtains, which are unable to be snapped shut (see above) slide open with movement of the bus (update: we have taken to gaff-taping them shut from the inside)
G. we can’t find the router, which seems to always be giving us trouble (update: we found it, sealed behind a panel behind Bart’s head, which had to be screwed off to get to it. we have since run the power cord out so the router is now on the windowsill in the front lounge.)
H. door handle is acting like it’s going to break any minute

I. only one outlet at the front lounge table (!!!) which we have rectified with a power strip


April 5, 2009

The Acting Company Crew, Circa 1940

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 7:14 pm

While wandering in Tucson, I found a railroad museum.  Inside I found this photo of a sleeper car from the 1940s:

I immediately recognized this scene as a typical day on our bus, at approximately 7:30AM on a load-in day, as everyone rolls out of their bunks and puts their shoes on.  It would be pretty cool if we had a crew train instead!


Phoenix & Tucson

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:06 pm

In all the chaos surrounding my computer breaking, I haven’t gotten a chance to say much about Phoenix and Tucson. This is sort of the low-stress portion of the tour. We have back-to-back sitdowns of one week each in these two cities, which are less than two hours apart from each other. Both venues are run by Arizona Theatre Company, which is obviously a high-class professional company, as opposed to, say, a community college. We have had great experiences at community colleges as well, but it has been very comfortable to be in two venues run to such a high level of professionalism. In fact, I suppose technically you could say they are more professional than us. During these two weeks, all the Equity members are bumping up to the LORT B salary, because that’s the level at which ATC operates. And that, I declare, is very cool. We are now in Tucson, and two performances away from our week’s vacation. Here’s our theatre:

Even more so than Phoenix, we have been having a great time here. Probably the biggest reason is that our hotel is truly walking distance to the venue, which frees cast and crew from being tied down by the schedule of bus or van calls (we don’t actually have our buses here, just two 15-passenger vans). Unlike Minneapolis, where we were walking distance to the Guthrie and said walk would make your skin bleed and your nose hairs freeze together, this walk is warm and breezy and incredibly pleasant. We are also in the downtown area with lots of great food.

Spending a whole week in each city has given us the opportunity to explore what there is to do in town and outside town. Some of the activities have included hiking, a dude ranch belonging to relatives of one of our actors, the Titan Missile Museum, and spring training baseball games. Throughout the tour I have pretty much laid back and gone wherever I was taken when it comes to recreation. The Titan Missile Museum was my first foray into taking over as cruise director for a day, and planning and arranging our activity. Five of us went, and all agreed it was really cool.


March 31, 2009

The Ongoing Adventures of a Geek Without a Computer

I call this: computers,mac,On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 10:24 am

Day 5 without computer. The 4″ iPhone screen is feeling extremely claustrophobic. I don’t mind it so much for reading web pages, but for any page that requires input and typing (blogs, forums, etc.) it can be really frustrating to use, and usually doesn’t render properly.

I’m currently using Nick’s Macbook. It’s load-in day, and we’re basically done after an hour, as usual. So I’m grabbing this opportunity to bogart his computer once again. It’s kind of comical how many copies I have of my “TAC” folder with all the show stuff in it. It’s still on my computer somewhere out there in the bowels of Apple repair world, it’s on my backup drive, on Nick’s computer, and on two thumb drives. The only thing left for me to do would be to hide the two thumb drives in different places — like put one of them in my suitcase. Which is probably a good idea since normally all three of my thumb drives live side-by-side in my computer bag (which I suppose should now be referred to as “bag”).

We’re loading in in Tucson, where the Arizona Theatre Company has another venue. A lot of the department heads are the same folks we worked with in Phoenix, so it’s been very easy. The theatre is not quite as fancy, but it seems very nice so far. I took some video of our truck driver, Scotty D., backing the trailer at a crazy angle to their loading dock.

Well I must move on and do all the other things that one does while one has a computer.


March 27, 2009

Tour Stop: Telluride, CO

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:19 pm

You may remember way back in September, I made a teaser post about my upcoming job. It basically consisted of nothing but a picture of a small town nestled among towering mountains, indicating that this would be one of the destinations of the mystery job. That town was Telluride.

I had my concerns about taking this job — the timing wasn’t great, I wasn’t sure if being on the road was the best thing for me at the moment, I wasn’t sure how I felt about doing a play. But when I saw pictures of Telluride I became more convinced that this was an experience that would be about more than “x” amount of dollars for “x” amount of work for “x” amount of weeks. I’ve always wanted to go to the Southwest, and this tour spends a pretty good deal of time there. So as I think I’ve said before, this leg of the tour is the one I have been looking forward to most.

The drive from our last venue in Baton Rouge to Telluride was a very long one (about 1,400 miles), with a day spent at a crappy hotel beside a highway in Wichita Falls, TX, while Bart got his sleep. We then pulled out around 11PM and drove for 14 hours straight to Telluride. Most of us were awake before 10AM, anxious to wake up and get out to the front lounge to see as much of the scenery as possible. It was really beautiful and fascinating. We passed a lot of isolated ranches with some cattle or horses. Very rarely did we see any people except the occasional car coming in the opposite direction. At one point we stopped briefly at the side of the road where some horses were grazing down a hill. After a few minutes we realized that all the horses had kind of gathered together to stare at us. I guess if you were a horse in the middle of the Rockies and some noisy giant gold tube-like thing stopped a few hundred meters in front of you, you’d probably wonder what it was. So Joel opened the window, stuck his head out and flipped them off. That seemed to confuse them more.

The drive was mostly on narrow roads with one lane going in each direction, with lots of twists and turns. Stuff was flying all over the bus. Pretty much every few seconds, someone was catching something falling off a table or countertop. Someone’s coffee thermos thing must have fallen off the kitchen counter at least four times. I think it took me a half hour to get dressed and ready in the morning because I kept having to stop what I was doing to hold on. Thankfully the bathroom isn’t that big, so there wasn’t really anywhere to fall to. Tonight when we leave I am going to make sure everything in the kitchen and front lounge is stowed somewhere where it can’t fall over, since we will be asleep for the reverse trip. With all this going on in the bus, we wondered how our truck was faring. Thankfully because we had loaded it on an incline, it had more load straps between items than it normally would, but we still managed to demolish one edge of a flat, and had some pipes come loose from their cart.

The cast had a tight schedule for their arrival in town, and actually arrived later than their required hour-and-a-half rest period before half hour, so we had to get dinner ready for them at the theatre.  The venue very kindly provided an oxygen tank for them, since they had not had any time to adjust to the altitude.  I really think any place where you need an oxygen tank in your dressing room just to breathe properly is probably not the best place to do theatre, but it sure is beautiful.

Some photos from our drive:



The dots in the sky are not UFOs, just the reflections of the overhead lights on the bus.

The load in situation was kind of crazy.  In a addition to not having sufficient oxygen for physical activity, there was no dock, and a large downhill slope leading to the loading door.   Having loaded the truck in Baton Rouge on a slope, we had no desire to unload it on an even steeper one, so we parked the truck flat at the top of the hill and then pushed the stuff down the ramp, and then down the hill.  It was actually not as hard as it seemed at first.  And somehow, under those conditions, the Telluride crew broke the record for load-out set by the Baton Rouge crew, who had the advantage of a full dock.  They also did it without gasping for breath, as all of us were!

I had a really hard time adjusting to the image of giant picturesque mountains as the backdrop everywhere we turned.  I realized that I don’t think it’s at all special or unusual to see the Empire State Building sticking up down the street, but the idea of seeing a mountain is completely insane.

View from the gondola over the mountains:


March 17, 2009

Back on the Road, Baton Rouge

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:38 am

I apologize for not writing my usual load-in day post, but I completely messed up my computer that day, so I spent the entire day reinstalling the Mac and Windows partitions of my hard drive.  So here’s a recap.

We (the crew) left New York last Friday, and flew to New Orleans, where we were met at the airport by Bart and the same bus we had for the first leg of the tour.  We were hoping for the mythical “orange bus” which is reportedly the best one that Pioneer has, but our bus is pretty cool too, so we were happy.  The broken microwave has been replaced, and although all the pocket doors between rooms still don’t lock open, and slam shut when we go around corners, it’s home sweet home.  Soon after getting on the bus, we were en route to our destination, Baton Rouge.

We weren’t actually getting per diem for Friday, it was sort of a voluntary vacation day that we requested, so we slept on the bus.  We wanted to arrive a day early so that we could go to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Baton Rouge.  Bart drove the bus over to the parade route sometime early in the morning while we were still sleeping.  We were able to see the parade pass by without even having to leave the bus.  Which was good because I’m not much for St. Patrick’s Day, or mingling with the drunken masses.  Unfortunately the party outside migrated onto the bus a bit too much for my taste, so I finally packed my bag and walked the mile and a half to our hotel and checked in early.  Nick, Daniel and I had a nice dinner and margaritas at Chili’s down the street, while the rest of the crew partied at one of Bart’s friends’ houses until who knows when.

The next morning everyone was surprisingly awake for our 10AM load-in at Baton Rouge Community College.  The theatre was really nice — a loading dock and plenty of parking for the buses, which is always the first step.  The dock was on an incline, with the stuff coming off downhill, which is something we’ve never really had to deal with before.  The stage management workbox was actually first off the truck this time, so I don’t really know how hard it was to unload everything else with all the weight rolling downhill, but it presented some challenges for packing the truck at load out.  We had to put ratchet straps between every two rows of road boxes so there wasn’t so much weight wanting to roll back off the truck that a person couldn’t hold it back.  Joel has a funny picture of about four of us holding a wall of boxes back while waiting for a strap.

The show went well.  We restored some of the original staging that had been changed for the New Victory.  It was nice to see it again.  I was a little worried about the dreaded “traitors sequence” which is probably the hardest thing in the show to call.  The cues were totally different at the New Vic, so I basically had not called it in almost four weeks.  It went fine.  It’s just one of those things that you have to have the whole thing in your head before you begin and know exactly what comes next without needing to think about it or look at the script.

The Baton Rouge crew had obviously been told that the record load-out time for Henry stood at three hours, and decided early on that they were going to try to beat it.  The city that set it, Glenn Ellyn, IL, had about the same setup as far as onstage space and proximity to the truck.  They had a great crew, but we may have had some more bodies here.  I thought it was possible, but it could be tight.  With the truck being packed uphill, that could add an additional challenge.  One thing we had going for us was that our plywood cart, which broke during our 3rd load-out back in early February, was finally fixed, and for the first time since then, we had a venue with a loading dock.  It’s just too heavy to go down a ramp, so it often means the plywood deck has to be loaded one piece at a time (there’s about 30 pieces).  So that saved us time.  After sending the show report and packing up the stage management stuff, I took up my usual place at the front of the truck and began packing the walls in.  We had a really nice truck pack this time.  We altered the middle area of the pack recently, and I think Daphne discovered a few great breakthroughs this time.  When all was said and done, we had soooo much space in the back of the truck.  The final load bar was put in two hours and 44 minutes after the show came down, breaking the record by 16 minutes!  The crew was rightly very pleased with themselves, and that load bar now bears a commemoration in Sharpie, reading “Baton Rouge 2:44 Baby!”  I got to do the honors of handing out our swag, Acting Company bottle opener keychains.

Now it’s the next morning and we’re on the bus for our big cross-country drive to Telluride, CO, a distance of about 1,400 miles.  We have to load in on Thursday morning, so the timing will be pretty tight.  It looks like we have just arrived at our prospective stopping point in Wichita Falls, TX.  The cast has just left Baton Rouge, and will arrive here later today and spend the night.  We will hang out in town and get a crew room to shower in while Bart gets some sleep, then when he’s ready we will hit the road again.


March 13, 2009

Sort of Week Off in New York

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:16 pm

Well I ended up being sick for almost all of our time off between the New York run and the continuation of the tour.  It was really sad, but on the other hand I survived two months in Minneapolis, many load-outs in freezing temperatures without a jacket, and never got sick when it mattered, so I couldn’t complain too much about losing my free time.

I had planned to do two performances of Phantom during the four days off — one to deck and one to call.  Since I was sick, I was only able to do the Thursday one, which I called.  It was very nice to be back.  The funny thing was that I kept getting similar reactions from many people when they would be told, “Karen’s calling the show tonight.”

2nd ASM: (maniacal laughter)

1st ASM: “Are you serious?”

Conductor: “You’re kidding!”

Automation Carpenter: “They’re letting you call the show?” (this doesn’t really count because he says this in response to my check-in every single time I call)

I was fully confident that I was ready to call, but yes I did have some butterflies.  Most of all, I wanted to stretch different stage management muscles than are required on Henry.

I once asked a sound man friend if his show was difficult to mix, and his response was, “it’s three hours long, it doesn’t matter if it’s an easy show, three hours of concentrating on anything makes it a hard show.” I find the same to be true of Henry. It’s not hard to call at all, and it’s not so boring that you can lose your place entirely, it’s just hard to have the stamina to care about every cue, and stay interested and engaged.  So I found it funny at Phantom when I reached intermission after a first act that clocked in at 1:13:45, and felt more exhausted than I ever have after all three hours of Henry, with almost half the show left to go.  By the end I was wiped out, but it felt good, like after a hard workout.   It was a good show, and thoroughly uneventful,  except for a report from the cast of conspicuous picture-takers in the fourth row, which I relayed to the house manager.   Then the next morning I got on a plane to continue our tour.


March 7, 2009

New York, End of Week 2

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:51 am

Well it’s getting to be that time. Since yesterday, people are starting to think of our stay at the New Vic in the past tense. Conversations revolve around airline reservations, packing of luggage, and what people are bringing from home to put in their road boxes so they don’t have to carry them to Baton Rouge. When I look at my belongings at the theatre, I’m always making a mental list of what can be packed when.

The run here has been absolutely perfect. Every day Joel pops into my office at least twice and says, “Is everything OK? Need anything?” and every day I have absolutely nothing to say. I don’t think there has been anything unexpected or undesirable that has happened during the run except that our center footlight went down early in the first week. The folks here, and the well-designed facility, have definitely spoiled us, but it will also be fun to get on the road again and see what new experiences await us at each venue to come. It helps that this leg of the tour coming up is the most comfortable and the most scenic, so that’s some motivation to get up from our cozy place here at home. We’re only out for four weeks before we have our vacation week, so it’s not even too much time away from home.

The cancelation of the performances in North Carolina next week also affords us some extra (paid) free time in New York, which is pretty amazing. I will be doing two shows at Phantom, as well as spending a day visiting my parents. It’s amazing how much there is to do when you haven’t been around in a while. I was expecting to have a lot of down time to just sit at home and sleep, but everybody wants you to come see their show, come have a drink, come over and watch a movie. I haven’t been able to fulfill all those requests because I’m really trying to take it easy and take advantage of this time to rest before our life of 20-hour work days begins again.


March 4, 2009

Rambling Post of New York, Week 2

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:26 pm

I have some time to kill hanging out in my office at the New Vic. Can I mention enough times, I have an office? Not like a little corner and desk in the production office, I mean an honest-to-goodness private office for the visiting company, in the hallway between the dressing rooms and the greenroom, with full paging and comms, coat hooks on the back of the door, everything.

Anyway, I am sitting here after a student matinee, waiting for a package to be delivered by UPS to the Acting Company office. In this package is the new bag I have purchased spent way too much money on, the Booq Python Pack. Ever since my main backpack got into a little scrape with the underside of our truck in St. Louis, I have been thinking seriously about replacing it (that and the fact that the plate that holds the shoulder strap pivots was already cracking and will no doubt one day come completely apart). Despite many things I don’t like about my current bag, I have never found one better (and trust me, I look for new bags like it’s my job). I bought a Jansport sling bag in St. Louis while I attempted to clean and repair my bag, but that one, while it will be very cool for some things in the future, is not designed for
a) laptop travel
b) large items
c) organizing many accessories
d) comfortable wear of 30+ lbs of stuff

all of which are my requirements for my main bag. And also, I will never again buy a bag that has a black interior. It’s just stupid. I think we as a species should recognize that a bag with a black interior serves no purpose, and stop making them.

So I did some research, and I have decided this Booq bag fits my requirements, although I have some fears — I think it may be too nice. My current bag is big and decently organized, but carries like a basic backpack. It compacts pretty well and is lightweight, and it doesn’t give the impression that there’s anything interesting in it, so I have no fear of leaving it lying around in relatively secure places with my laptop in it. This new bag is made of rather fancy fabric, and is heavy, and I worry it may not flatten well when empty. Most of all, I worry that it looks like a $300 bag, and anyone with a mind to notice a $300 bag might wonder what’s worth putting in a $300 bag. If this disrupts my life too much, I may have to settle for a less-nice bag that allows me to actually get things done. I ordered it from ebags, who have a free refund policy, so I feel OK about taking the risk on buying it without being able to see it in person. I will check it out while I’m home and if I’m not happy with it, I’m going to return it before we leave. Of course I will do a review of some kind.

The show has been going well. I’m afraid we may be getting spoiled from sitting here so long. It’s easy to get used to 1-nighters when that’s just the way life is, but now that we’ve been comfortable back home it’s going to be hard to go back to doing real work. This leg of the tour is the most glamorous, though, so it will be a good way to get back into it.

We’ve had a lot of 10:30AM student matinees, which is always hard to adjust to, but the nice part is that a lot of them are the only show of the day, so it gets me out of bed and then I feel like I have a whole day and night left to do stuff.

I still haven’t done Phantom. I had too much work to do at home last night, and enjoyed the productive time so much I just can’t do it. I plan to do two shows in the half-week before we leave, when I have the time to prepare and enjoy them. It wasn’t just the idea of adding performances to an 8-show week, it was also the approximately 2 hours I would want to spend at home reviewing. I did a little bit of review of the Journey on Monday night, which went pretty well (I can usually tell by doing that and a couple other scenes how much time if any I need to spend looking over my script). I still intend to do a pretty much real-time calling of the show in my living room, even if I don’t need to be that thorough, as it has been probably four and a half months, though it feels a lot shorter than that. If I have a specialty as a Phantom sub, I’d say it’s the ability to come in after weeks or months away and call the show as well as if I’d never left. Unfortunately, I get lots of opportunities to practice that, so I have a large bank of experience to draw on, and can tell with a quick 2-5 minute section of the show what my level of comfort is if I had to call the show at any given moment, and how much review, if any, I need.

OK, this bag is really taking a long time to get delivered. I know the office tends to get packages late in the day, around 3PM, which it is now almost 3:30. I’m feeling pretty sleepy, especially since I haven’t really had a full meal today. I hope it comes soon!


February 26, 2009

New York, NY

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:26 am


Here we are, running at the New Victory in New York. I’m having a really great time here. Much has been made of the fact that it’s “on Broadway,” but I have learned in my career that the address of your theatre has no correlation to the level of professionalism, quality of production, or size of your paycheck, so I really wasn’t buying into that hype. But I’ve been pleased to discover it actually feels something like a Broadway show. The theatre is beautiful, which I knew, but it is pretty well-appointed like a Broadway house, has a Local 1 crew, and in general feels kind of like a shrunk-down Broadway show. And by shrunk-down, I mean like 80%, not like 50%, assuming we are talking about a play here.

A few cities before we arrived I talked with the staff by phone and they gave me the option of calling from stage left or from the booth, which I was warned was “miles away.” I’ve called from miles away before, but I figured this may be the only venue where I have the option to call from backstage, due to the fact that our set is a full 180-degree wraparound wall, and calling from backstage would offer zero visibility without color and infrared monitors, which we don’t travel with, and which most of our venues don’t have. The Guthrie had a rather nice camera setup, although I also had a very oddly-placed window to see most things in real life if I needed to. This is my first time calling without any real view of the stage, but it’s working fine since I spent the first month of the run calling off monitors at the Guthrie. It’s a lot of fun to be backstage among everyone else, and it’s so much easier to get around without having to trek back and forth from a booth. We even have paging at the calling desk and in our office (we have an office!). It really does feel like Broadway! So I’m having a good time, and I’m missing home a little less.

Speaking of home, I stopped by Phantom for about an hour before their show last night, after our student matinee and tech rehearsal. All is well, there’s new carpet in the stage management office and SR quickchange room, and other than that things seem the same. The in/out sheet had at least 10 understudies on it, so it was a fairly normal day. At some point before we leave town I’m going to do a couple shows there, even if I have to do them for free. The stage managers offered to trade shows with me for the next two weeks, which I gladly accepted, but they rescinded their offer when I described calling Henry as “calling the rooftop scene for two hours and 40 minutes, and then the last 20 minutes is like calling ‘Wishing’.” It makes sense if you know the show. I think “recoiled in horror” is a better way to describe their reaction.

OK, people keep coming in and asking me questions. See ya!


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