I have an idea for a new feature: I will pick one note that I write every day (either in the blocking book or elsewhere) to highlight what’s going on with the show.
Today’s Note:
[Line] 2063 – Blows giant tuba
December 21, 2008
December 15, 2008
This Should Not Happen. Ever.
Part of my interest in touring is to spend more time outside Manhattan and see regions and climates I’ve never been to. One of the things I have learned so far is that this planet of ours is crazy. In the grand scheme of things, New York and Minneapolis aren’t that far apart, and yet at the same moment in time there is a difference in temperature of 70 degrees!!! Another thing someone pointed out is that the position of the sun in the sky here makes it always look like it’s about to be sunset. I noticed it especially today as I was walking to the train around 2PM, and was blinded by the sun low in the sky over the street ahead. I don’t really understand why that happens, as it’s only 4 degrees more north in latitude than New York, you wouldn’t think it would be a noticeable difference.
Well today was our first day off here, and of course the temperature dropped about 40 degrees overnight. It was our first real sub-zero day. A few of us went on the morning grocery run provided by the Guthrie, which was very cold. Then I set out alone to take the light rail to the Mall of America, which was incredibly convenient, and I had a good time and got all the items I set out to find. I probably saw less than half the mall, but it was very nice. It’s not really that different from most malls, except for the giant roller coaster in the middle, and the fact that it’s so big that many of the standard mall stores actually have two or three locations within the mall.
December 14, 2008
Stage Management Stardom
I must blog about the fact that Nick’s blog got blogged about. Yesterday Nick discovered that his blog is rather prominently linked to on the front page of the Guthrie website. Apparently my blog just isn’t good enough. But I think Nick has been posting a little more frequently than me, and his blog is dedicated solely to the tour, so it’s probably a good choice. Anyway, it’s nice to see a little stardom for the stage management team.
December 11, 2008
TOUR STOP 1: Minneapolis
Minneapolis (or “Minnennapolis” as our flight attendant said, over and over), is not really a “tour stop” per se, but where we will be spending two months rehearsing and opening Henry V, before setting out on the real heavy touring. It is home to several of our cast members, as part of the co-production with the Guthrie it was agreed that many of the cast would be actors drawn from the Guthrie’s talented pool of actors and former students. Those of us not from Minneapolis, or who have not spent time studying or working at the Guthrie, have lived in terror for at least a month at the very thought of suffering through the infamous winter weather.
Although we arrived in a snowstorm (which resulted in our plane aborting landing several seconds before touching down), I think we are all pretty much agreed that it’s not as bad as we thought. I don’t think you can put a limit on the extent of frozen horrors we expected, so I guess it should be no surprise that the reality is not as bad as the city’s reputation would suggest. Below is a view from the back of our 3-vehicle caravan bringing the company from the airport to the apartments.
Temperatures have been regularly in the single-digits in the mornings and evenings, and yet the four-block walk from our apartments to the theatre doesn’t feel any different than an average winter walk in New York. Today on my morning walk I was considering how this is possible. First of all, I have found the main point is that we are taking the cold very seriously. Before I get in my elevator, I have on warm clothing, a fleece vest, leather-and-wool show jacket, scarf, hat, and leather gloves, and I think this warms me up before I step outside. I decided this morning that it takes me longer to put on all my outer layers than to actually get dressed in my basic clothes. I also think the walk is too short to get really bothered by the cold. There are only two streets to cross, so there’s not much time standing still, letting the cold sink in. Also, there aren’t many large buildings along the way, which I think cuts down on the wind, and allows more direct sunlight to warm the path, than one would encounter on the same walk in New York.
The apartments are pretty amazing. The building is an old glass factory which has been converted into stylish industrial-inspired lofts with stainless kitchen appliances and lamps and things. I think the well-designed furnishings set these apartments above any other company housing I’ve seen. It looks like something out of an interior design magazine, instead of a pile of hand-me-down furniture donated by friends of the theatre. Or maybe they are, but it’s very clear, in all regards, the Guthrie has friends with very deep pockets!
On to the theatre itself. The building is only a couple years old, and by one account I heard cost about $120 million. It surely must be the most expensive building dedicated solely to the production of theatre ever in the history of ever. If there’s a bigger one, I’d like to see it!
The best way I can describe the building and the way it functions is that it’s like if the Starship Enterprise were designed primarily for the production of classical theatre. It really gives the impression that at any moment it could blast off from its mooring on the bank of the Mississippi, and take off into space as a fully self-sustaining habitat and theatre company. Everything is designed to be sleek, beautiful and interesting, while still being completely functional. Many times when working in a theatre, one may ask, “Why the hell would anyone design a theatre like this?” I have not yet had any of those moments here. Everything from lamps in the restaurants in the building, to the hardwood floors in the costume shop, to the bathrooms in the rehearsal room hallway are absolutely perfect.
The facility is run with a level of organization that I imagine works wonderfully if one is doing a show at the Guthrie and nothing else. It’s been a little hard for me because we are a separate company in residence here, so we have separate needs and methods of communication for the majority of our people who are not at the Guthrie and linked into its computer network. In fact they don’t allow outside computers on the network, so I have chosen to have our fabulous intern, Meaghan (they give us an intern!!!) be master of the Guthrie computer and keep me on track to make sure I do all the little things that are expected of me to assimilate into the Guthrie collective. It’s been a lot of fun working here and enjoying this amazing building.
HENRY Rehearsal Week 1 Minneapolis
We have begun rehearsals for Henry V at the Guthrie. This is incredibly strange for all of us, because we just finished four weeks of rehearsal and a week of tech for The Spy, concluding with a very successful invited dress, just a few days ago. Now we’re back at square one, doing tablework for a different show, with a new director, vocal advisors, and other collaborators. We definitely benefit from the month that many of us have been working together, though. The core of the touring company — the cast, stage management, and Ian our staff rep director, have all been together now for a while and work well as a group. We also have had our documentary crew with us for the flight and the first few days, and the director, Sara, has become a familiar member of our team. She surely has hours of footage of us dying of hunger, sitting in traffic between the airport and our apartment building on the night we arrived. She’s leaving today and will rejoin us closer to opening, and for one of the tour stops and a trip on the bus with the cast.
Yesterday was the day from hell for me. It was a combination of relatively small things that just made the entire day miserable and never a dull moment of things just going well. It started when I woke up to a message that one of our actors had overnight gotten a terrible stomach bug and wouldn’t be able to be at rehearsal. This is not really my problem beyond a certain point, but the few communications it added to my morning made me almost late for my production meeting with the Guthrie tech staff, where I was asked tons of questions that really were better addressed to our production manager in New York (like how many crew we need for the load-in and the run). Then we had to spend the entire morning during rehearsal taping out these handholds that will be on the walls, so we can play with them and send the desired changes to the shop, which MUST MUST MUST build them immediately. It’s a long story, but it’s been a huge ordeal about these things. Add to that the fact that New York is an hour ahead of us, so our work day ends an hour and a half after the people in the office go home. Simultaneously, I’d been trying to schedule a production meeting among a bunch of people in Minneapolis, and a bunch of people in New York, on either Thursday or Friday, with many of the people involved flying between the two cities on Thursday or Friday, so which date we picked would affect who was in what city at the time. It’s happening today, and I will be glad to have it in the past. All that really needs to be said about this day is that after rehearsal, Nick and our awesome intern, Meaghan, were crawling on their hands and knees taping the floor while I finished the report, and both expressed relief that they were not me. I actually went to bed at 9:30, not because of tiredness, but because I knew nothing good would come from remaining awake. So I plugged my computer in at my bedside table with the volume cranked up so an email would wake me, and set my alarm for every hour until midnight so I could double-check for email, and then once again at 3AM. I didn’t think I’d get any restful sleep, but I actually slept quite well.
Other than that, rehearsal has been going well. The meet & greet was attended by probably a hundred people, as the Guthrie opens these events to their whole staff, from the artistic director to the maintenance people. It was nice to see such a community come together to give a new show a good sendoff (OK, there was free food, too, but still). The read-through was great, and the tablework and other exercises the cast has been doing are really fun to watch and listen to. Our vocal consultant, Andrew Wade, has lots of great ideas that are bringing a lot of good stuff out of the actors.
For stage management’s part, things are really going well. Having an intern is sooo nice. Meaghan is awesome, and there is something natural about the setup of PSM, ASM and PA/intern. It’s the natural order of things. Delegating just makes sense more than it ever does with just two people. Meaghan also has the advantage of having interned and ASMed at the Guthrie for a while, so she knows the way things work and does all the Guthrie paperwork for me, based on my report to The Acting Company. The Guthrie is kind of a Borg-like entity with all these interlocking systems that I’m sure work wonderfully, but the nature of our production makes it not very efficient to bend our paperwork to fit the needs of the collective. So Meaghan does that translation for me, with my input.
The floor is taped out, the props will be arriving from New York tomorrow, and we’re almost ready to begin blocking.
December 7, 2008
Washington
One of the nicest things that can happen to a company, especially one that has to coexist in tight quarters for six months, is to begin to develop some sort of company identity, and this usually starts with references and jokes that arise out of the rehearsal process.
If you haven’t read my previous posts, The Spy is a new play adapted from the 1821 novel of the same name, by James Fenimore Cooper (better known as the author of The Last of the Mohicans). Â If you’d like to read it, check out this link. Â I’ve never actually used Google Books before, but it looks pretty cool. Â Should I ever find time to read it myself, that’s probably where I’ll go (although I have recently downloaded Stanza for the iPhone, which also has it). Â The story takes place during the American revolution, and suffice it to say George Washington plays a prominent part in it.
About a week or so into rehearsals, this YouTube video was sent to everyone on the cast email list, and it immediately became the defining theme of The Spy rehearsal process.
I have taken a number of still images from the video and saved them for use on our signage. Â So far I’ve only used them for our dressing room signs, an example of which you can see below.
December 1, 2008
Tech Day 1
We’re on the dinner break of our first day of tech. Â We have a two hour break, which is very luxurious for us, as most of our rehearsals have been six hour blocks. Â I’m currently sitting in the green room, where a number of crazy and humorous things are going on.
Our staff rep director, Ian, who is also our only understudy, is running lines with our company manager, Emma. Â The other cast members sitting around playing cards, drinking coffee and generally hanging out are having fun shouting out lines to him.
Our production manager, Joel walks in with the business end of a noose, and asks Ron, who is one of the two actors who gets hung, if he has a moment to be sized.
Over the monitor in the greenroom we can hear our sound designer testing cues on stage.
Tech is going a little slowly, but no crises have come up. Â There’s some preliminary talk of eliminating some parts of the set because it currently appears to be too complex to set up in the time we will generally have for load-ins, and with the traveling crew we will have. Â That’s a discussion that’s still in progress though.
I have a lot of room at the tech table. Â I have almost a whole table to myself, easily 4ft of space that is completely mine. Â I think we have about 18 straight feet of tech table for stage management, lighting and sound, which is the longest unbroken expanse of tech table I’ve ever had. Â Our director and staff rep director have another table a short distance away.
We have 3 wireless headsets, and a two-channel system. Â It’s a nice little setup. Â The only problem that has come up is that there’s something weird with the volume on the headsets, at least at my base station — instead of going from off to loud, the knob allows me to adjust from loud to really loud. Â When I try to use my personal headset, which has an omnidirectional mic, it feeds back. Â The gain setting on the back of the main box is already on “low.” Â Tim, our sound supervisor, could not immediately figure out a solution, but I hope that we will discover one eventually. Â Until then I have to wear this gigantic ear-enclosing football-helmet type thing, which can only be worn on the left ear. Â It sucks royally.
That’s about all that’s happening so far!
November 24, 2008
Weeks 2 and 3 and the Beginning of 4
I’m a terrible blogger. See I’m PSMing this tour, which is preventing me from blogging about PSMing this tour. And we’re working a lot of straight 6-hour days, which doesn’t give me a meal break to spend those ten minutes writing a blog post like a real lunch break would.
But enough excuses, here’s what’s going on.
The show is coming together really well! At the end of Week 3, on Saturday, we scheduled a stumble-through. For those not in the business, a stumble-through is generally when you have staged the whole show, and determine that there’s a slight possibility that there might not be a complete train wreck if you tried to run a few scenes at a time. The goal is to get through the end of the show in however many hours you have to work with, with the understanding that an entire day might not be enough. Well our stumble-through on Saturday began, and first stopped when we reached intermission. People called for “line” occasionally, and once or twice there was a slight delay in a scene change when an actor forgot they were responsible for taking a stool or table off with them (which they had only learned at the end of the previous day), but we did the show in almost real time. I have seen many bona-fide run-throughs that were more stumbly than our stumble-through.
I was really proud of our cast. They had clearly done their homework, and came in with lines word-perfect that had never been up until that point, and mastered their scene change assignments overnight. They are a really great company, and very generous with each other — always working off in a corner on some physical business, or drilling each other on lines in the hallway. I think spending WAY too much time with them in the middle of nowhere is going to be a lot of fun!
This week is a little stressful because it’s our last week in the rehearsal room, and things are starting to get serious. Our company manager comes in with “greenies” which is a list comparing two hotels in a given city that we have to choose from. The ones we’re currently getting relate to our stop in Indiana in February. I am hammering out the tech schedule with the production manager, as well as juggling the requirements of photo and video shoots and invited dress rehearsals. We don’t actually perform The Spy here until late April. We will do our invited dress and then fly out to Minneapolis to begin rehearsing Henry V. So it’s also kind of a bittersweet time because we’re having a good time with the show and starting to realize that there’s a whole other show we still have to rehearse, and The Spy is actually the minority of the performances we’ll be doing on the tour. It feels like such an accomplishment to get the show up, but it’s just a relatively small part of our job.
The main thing you missed in Week 2 and 3 of rehearsal was costume fittings. At one point during that period I said on my Facebook status that, with apologies to my friends who do wardrobe, I believe costume fittings exist to make me miserable. They really are the stage manager’s worst nightmare. It’s hard enough to schedule rehearsals, now all of a sudden the costume designer wants to take someone (always the person hardest to spare at that moment) not only out of rehearsal, but usually to send them to some costume shop that is rarely in the same neighborhood as the rehearsal space. Figuring out how to get everyone to the necessary fittings in a timely manner, and without disrupting what the director wants to rehearse, and taking into account that the rehearsal or the fitting could take less or more time than expected, is probably one of the hardest activities a stage manager ever has to do. For the most part it’s over, although we do have some final wig fittings to work in on Saturday. I have a hunch how I could make that work, but John (the director) may have a reason not to want to do it that way. We’ve had a very good collaboration with scheduling, which I always appreciate.
Today our playwright, Jeff Hatcher, returned from Minneapolis to visit us again. I can’t remember exactly when he left but it’s probably been at least two weeks since he’s been in rehearsal, so a whole show has sprung up while he was gone! He seemed very pleased to see how things are coming along. It must be quite the change for him to go from seeing his work read off the page by actors struggling to remember their new blocking, to coming back and seeing a show almost ready to be put in front of an audience.
We’ve had increasing visits from designers, our fight director and vocal coach. It’s always nice to have other collaborators in the room.
Stay tuned for more excitement as we approach tech!
November 8, 2008
End of Week 1
Today is the last day of our rehearsal week. We did a straight 5 hours of staging, with a little bit of rewrites from the playwright. We have now blocked 9 of the 21 scenes in the play, of which many of the more complicated ones remain, but still it’s a nice sense of accomplishment.
Right now we are on a long lunch/dinner break, followed by a movement education workshop, where selected members of our cast will be instructed on how to teach movement classes to students while we are on the road. Part of our usual “performance” schedule is to conduct workshops with schools in between performances, so the cast will be receiving training throughout the rehearsal process on how to run the workshops.
I have sent Nick home (he’ll be attending next week’s class, on stage combat), and I’m just here to mind the breaks, so it will give me a chance to catch up on whatever organization I can get done in the room. My paperwork is pretty caught up, but there’s a lot of work I want to do on our filing cabinets, which have almost no organizational concept or labels at this point. The stage management road box arrived from the company’s storage earlier in the week, and it contains lots of goodies that we’re still discovering. One of the goodies Nick discovered this morning was an inventory of what’s in the box! Because we only have access to the studio for an hour before and an hour after rehearsal, I haven’t yet found the time to tear everything out and see what’s there and put it all back how I want it. Maybe tonight I can do that without being too disruptive. I did, however, add my first sticker to the collection of decorations already on it — one of those white Apple stickers you get when you buy a new computer or other Apple product.
I’m looking forward to having a day off tomorrow. Whenever I take on a really big project, I tend to forget that they actually do come with a day off. So now I have no idea what to do with it. I better figure it out, though, because I don’t get one next week — I agreed to do two shows at The Fantasticks next Sunday, just because I miss the show and it will be fun to do it again. And they needed a sub. The show has closed and reopened under new management since I last worked its closing performance in February, but I’m told it’s pretty much the same — enough that I can walk in and be told the changes to the deck track when I get there. Apparently I have two new cues.
November 7, 2008
Week 1 of Rehearsal
We’ve really started blocking now. We did the prologue for a little while on Thursday, but today we spent the whole day staging. We got about a fifth of the play staged. It feels good to see a lot of it on its feet. The actors have come pretty prepared and are either off book or comfortable enough not to be buried in their scripts. We’ve been dealing with a few actor conflicts for people who are still performing in their previous jobs, but after tomorrow all of that is over so we should be able to schedule more freely without having to jump through hoops to find scenes we can do with the people we have.
A lot of what I’m starting to work on now relates to the schedule for next week — scheduling production meetings, fittings, voice and stage combat sessions.
