HOME

May 31, 2010

Because It’s MY Database

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:03 pm

Still doing paperwork. Now I’m working on the weekly schedule. One of the hardest things in the first week is learning people’s names. This is like 10 times harder in preproduction because you don’t even have faces and performances to associate with who is playing what role.

So I’m going through the schedule trying to fill in who is called for what scenes, and I’ve decided in this case it’s easiest to go with actors’ last names rather than characters. Only problem is, I get to the first one and I know it’s Little Red and the Wolf, but I’m drawing a total blank on both their names. So I took 15 minutes and decided to solve this problem once and for all by adding a feature to the database.

I could have given it a very professional name, such as “Name / Role Cheat Sheet” or something like that. But this is my database, and until such time as it becomes someone else’s database, this particular feature is going to be called “ZOMG HALP!!!” because that’s what I’m thinking when I need it. Yeah, I do think like a lolcat sometimes. What of it?

I have placed a big red ZOMG HALP!!! button on the main page, which pops up this screen in a little window, that can then be tucked off in a corner where it’s always visible. It can display all the contacts associated with the show, but I’ve added a button which narrows it down to just the cast, since that’s the most common use. Here it’s showing the cast in the order I added them to the DB, which is an approximate of order-of-importance list, which I decided to leave as-is because it might be handy. It can also be sorted alphabetically by any of the fields which would be more useful at other times.


It All Seems So Simple

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:07 pm

Today is my last day of preproduction before beginning rehearsal for Into the Woods at The Reagle Players. I’ve settled into my apartment, and have parked with my laptop in my favorite spot on the couch next to the living room window, where I go when I want to pretend that I work in a job that lets me see windows, as I listen to the cast recording playing in the background.

I just finished entering everything into my event list, which is kind of a master table where the database tracks every rehearsal and performance. It’s from this that it knows that something is performance #6, for instance. It also allows it to fill in certain details automatically when I create a report, based on the current date. On tour it’s more interesting, because based on the date it knows the performance time(s), type of performance, what city we’re in, the name of the theatre and capacity.

Anyway, one side effect of this table is that it very concisely summarizes everything from first rehearsal to closing. And this is what it looks like for Into the Woods:

It looks so small and simple, but it feels so hard at the time. The only other show I’ve had this part of the DB for was R&J, and that had 111 records. This only has 23, so I’ve always thought of this table as something that has to be scrolled for many pages, and it’s strange to see it so short. I’m not sure if I’m depressed or encouraged by how quickly the next month of my life can be summarized, but I suspect I may be encouraged. I think it fits the attitude I always try to have towards it: you just have to give 200% for two straight weeks, and then it’s easy. There’s even a day off somewhere in there.


May 26, 2010

Caffeine

I call this: tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:36 pm


This is not my graphic, but I found it on the web, and it taught me a lot of things I didn’t know.

Whether you are a stage manager, computer geek, gamer, or all three, you will find ample uses for this knowledge. Enjoy.


May 11, 2010

R.I.P. Doris Eaton Travis

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:31 pm

I must take a moment to address a sad event, but also to celebrate an amazing lady.

I just found out not five minutes ago that Doris Eaton Travis passed away today at the ripe old age of 106. She is without a doubt one of my favorite people that I don’t actually know. And I must add that I don’t know this because I saw the very extensive obituary on Playbill, but because I got a text message from a friend as soon as he found out. Her name may not be widely known, and her actual career was relatively short, but she was much beloved in the business.

I came to know of her, like most people in the Broadway community, at the 1998 Easter Bonnet Competition, when she appeared with several other former Ziegfeld girls to usher in the first Easter Bonnet held at the New Amsterdam Theatre, after its restoration by Disney for The Lion King the previous year. It was a nice nod to the building’s former glory, and it was fun to see those ladies return to the stage after more years than many people’s entire lifetimes.

The following years the other ladies didn’t return, but Doris participated in the Easter Bonnet by herself, usually recounting a story about her years in the business, and demonstrating some dance moves from her shows, while flanked by a few boys who could be her great-grandsons.

The Easter Bonnet is probably the best show anywhere in New York all year, and is almost exclusively attended by people who work in the Broadway and Off-Broadway community, as well as devoted supporters of Broadway, so the audience is particularly receptive and appreciative of someone with such a rich history in the business. It’s almost inconceivable to sit in a theatre surrounded by friends and colleagues and right there in the same room have someone tell you about the time they were in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. Nineteen. Eighteen. She made her Broadway debut in 1917. To have a connection with someone whose work experience extends back basically to the birth of musical theatre, and have that person still alive and well and dancing onstage with today’s Broadway gypsies was just amazing. And she did it year after year.

Obviously we all knew the year would someday come when she would not be around to perform at the Easter Bonnet, but she even made it this year, just a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I’ve missed the last two years of Broadway Cares events due to touring, but I was especially thrilled that she was around for the 2006 Easter Bonnet, when I performed with the Phantom cast, crew and orchestra, singing the Broadway Cares anthem, “Help is on the Way.” Her part of the show was right before us, so we couldn’t actually watch because we were getting in place upstage of the curtain, but I did get to meet her very briefly in the wings, and that was exciting after eight years of being in awe of her from the audience.

The Easter Bonnet won’t be the same without her, but I’m so happy that she had such a long and active life that she could share her experience and love of performing with so many later generations.


May 5, 2010

The Space Pen: A Stage Manager’s Best Friend

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:42 am

If you’re a stage manager, maybe something like this has happened to you:
You’re out at dinner with your cast or crew, and at the end of the meal everybody is paying with credit cards and the waiter drops off the receipts and doesn’t have, or forgets to leave, a pen. Then everybody looks at you — and this is one of those evenings, you’ve dropped all your stuff at the hotel or whatever and are enjoying the rare opportunity to just go somewhere without lugging all your crap — and you don’t have a pen. And then everyone else at the table is like, “What? A stage manager without a pen?”

You may mutter something about not being at work, but then secretly you spend the rest of the outing suspecting that you may be a failure as a human being because you are at once a stage manager, and not within reach of a pen 24 hours a day.

This exact event has happened to me a lot in life, but as a kid who used to wear a pocket protector in my Catholic school uniform shirt (simultaneously with a fanny pack, while lugging an overstuffed backpack as big as me), I have fought hard to convince myself that it’s OK not to carry the kitchen sink on my person at all times.

Recently the above situation happened several times in one week, and aside from the embarrassment, the actual inconvenience of not having a pen started to get to me, and I decided that it’s time for me to suck it up and carry a pen everywhere I go. I already knew which pen it would be, one that I already purchased for this purpose years ago, but didn’t adopt steady use of.

Ever since I forced myself to start carrying it all the time, I have been surprised how many times it’s come in handy. Sometimes I forget I’m carrying it, and it’s been very exciting to discover, “wait, I do have a pen!”

I don’t want to recommend a specific pen too strongly, any compact pen would be better than none, but this one is a very good choice. It’s very small and smooth so it fits comfortably in the corner of my front pants pocket, it has a clip so it won’t fall out, and it’s a matte black so you can always be wearing it, even in show blacks. It’s very small when the cap is on, but very well constructed so that it is full sized and well balanced when you are writing with it.

Being a space pen, it can write for long periods against walls and at other odd angles you sometimes end up needing to write on backstage, as well as on wet paper (such as drawing on a cocktail napkin when having a debate with your crew), in extreme temperatures, and, if your show should be going on a really expensive, really long-distance tour, in space.


April 26, 2010

Stage Management Survey

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:35 pm

A while back I took a stage management survey that I saw advertised in an issue of Equity News (which is a monthly newspaper for Equity members). It was organized by a stage management class at the University of Iowa.

There was recently another note in the Equity News that the results are now available at smsurvey.info. Based on their numbers, they got approximately 15% of all Equity stage managers to respond, which is really cool. It’s only a few hundred people, but in such a small profession, that’s a good turnout. The survey was open to students and non-Equity professionals as well, but it’s much harder to know how many of them are out there.

It was a very extensive survey, and the analysis of the results is quite detailed. If you’re interested, I encourage you to take a look, I’m not going to quote all of it here.

I will paraphrase some parts of interest:

  • Stage managers have no personal lives
  • Female stage managers especially have no personal lives
  • More people (12%) have called a show from a computer than I would have imagined, and not just young people. I very much want to do this, but I have not settled on the software that would work best (during a very boring load-in recently I wrote the first two pages of my R&J calling script in HTML/CSS. It was fun, but time-consuming and way more complicated to get proper margins than just doing it in Word.) They mentioned InDesign for making calling scripts (not necessarily to call on screen), which has kind of blown my mind, and must be thought upon.
  • Young people like calling from booths, old people like calling from backstage. I don’t even remember what I responded. If the options are both equally viable, that question generally will shut down all my brain function for several minutes. I probably said backstage, though. I like both for different reasons, and on tour, being in a different theatre almost every day, sometimes I mix it up just for the sake of mixing it up.

The statistic of particular interest to me is that 11% of responding stage managers call light cues as “electrics.” This has been a frequent topic of debate on the tour because I say “electrics,” and it’s unusual, and especially unusual for someone of my age. Indeed the survey found that the percentage was more than twice as high among older stage managers.

Devon (our lighting director) had a little informal survey of his own that he would do in every venue: He would always be in the booth at the start of our first show, and would watch the reaction of the board op to the first cue, and would note if they were a) completely clueless that “Electrics 2” was them, b) a little bit thrown off for a second, or c) reacted like it was totally normal. We didn’t keep records of the results or anything, and we also played a variety from IATSE houses to high schools, so the experience of the board op varied quite a bit. But on the whole I would say that the majority of the reaction to it leaned toward the belief that it was at least a little bit weird.

And now, a little bit about why I say “electrics:”

It has been a consistency in my entire Equity career that at any given time I need to be ready to call two shows: the show I am currently employed on, and Phantom. Phantom (being from the dawn of time) uses “electrics,” thus by calling my other show the same way, I am less likely to screw up by saying the wrong word. Especially earlier in my career when I was doing short runs of showcases and stuff, it was very common for me to be calling a couple performances of Phantom and a couple performances of something else in the same week.

I also think that “electrics” is a better idea because there are so many syllables that the chances of the board op not hearing it, or mistaking it for another word, is almost impossible. It’s a little more work for me to speak it all, but I think that’s worth it to increase the chances of the cue coming out right. I have done a few shows where certain sequences were so fast that I had to switch to “lights” (just for those parts) because there really wasn’t time for three syllables.

The program intends to conduct another survey in 2011, so be on the lookout for it!


April 23, 2010

The Computer Rental

I call this: computers,mac,On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:33 pm

As you know, my Macbook Pro’s screen finally died this week. It died after I got home from the show on Wednesday. Thursday morning I brought it to the theatre and plugged it into the spare light board monitor in my office. There it served sort of like a desktop computer, while I had to write down the running times with a pencil, of all things. Then I took notes on my iPhone. Then at intermission and after the show I went to the office and actually entered everything into the database.

Between shows I went to the Apple Store and bought a new Macbook Pro. I got it home about an hour-and-a-half before our van call for the evening show, so I got as far as cloning my old drive (almost) before I had to leave. As the transfer was still going on, I decided I really could survive without a computer for one performance.

Nick had a good idea, which was for me to email him the database file so I could have his computer on the calling desk, and it would be exactly the same as usual — except his 13″ Macbook would fit on the desk better.

When we arrived I went out on a Starbucks run. I was feeling good about my purchase, and still have a ton of money on my Starbucks card (because we’ve rarely been near a Starbucks on the road), so when Nick tried to give me money to pick him up something to drink, I said I’d take care of it. We then agreed that the venti iced tea lemonade would be payment for the rental of his computer.

When I got back to the office with our drinks, Bobby was sitting at my desk, and casually gestured to a piece of paper and said, “Nick left you an invoice.” I really wasn’t gone more than 10 or 12 minutes, and Nick came up with a brilliant plan. I have encased it in a sheet protector and hung it in our road box.

Nick’s Macbook on the calling desk (which is very crowded and normally requires my script pages to lie on top of the wrist rest, so the 13″ size was a nice change!)


April 21, 2010

Musings on Musicals

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:53 am

In relation to my last post about the IRNE Awards, as well as various Facebook posts among friends about it, I put on a couple cast albums of last year’s shows, and a few minutes into the opening number of Mame was reminded of something very special.

It was the feeling of calling a first preview of a show with about 600 cues (maybe a third of which can hurt somebody), having maybe run it once before, if you’re lucky. While the relative relaxation of premiering a show you’re sort of comfortable with is nice, there is a thrill in doing the former which is probably the stage management equivalent of skydiving. I don’t understand why anybody would want to risk jumping out of a plane just because it’s fun, and I know there are people who would never want to stage manage a musical, but I find that after I’ve been terrified out of my mind and survived, it’s really fun. Maybe the being terrified is what makes it fun later.

I should also mention that I am always nervous before a first preview, no matter how easy or well-teched the show. On R&J our stage management intern, Ashley, was in the booth with me for first preview, partially to observe the call, and partially to take a final round of scene timings on my computer. I was probably as comfortable in my knowledge of the show as I’ve ever been in my career. Just before we started, I turned to her and said, “Just so you know, I’m really nervous right now,” and she said, “That’s good to know that it’s not bad that I feel that way when I do a show.” I said, “That’s why I’m telling you!”

As we come to the end of this year’s R&J tour, I presumably have to get my head in gear to call some more big musicals (not to mention the biggest musical of all time, which I need to be call-able on five days from now). I’ve been very addicted to Pandora Radio and other popular music for a while now. think I need to listen to more showtunes.


IRNE Awards Shoutout

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:42 am

The IRNE Awards were last night — that’s the Independent Reviewers of New England, basically the theatre awards for the Boston area and other New England environs. I’ve never been to the IRNEs or anything, but it’s something I like to follow because I usually have a few horses in the race.

This year it was productions of Hello, Dolly, Mame and La Cage that I was PSM for at the Reagle Players this past year.

I’m pleased to say that we won six awards including Best Musical.

The winners were:

  • Best Choreography: David Scala for La Cage
  • Best Supporting Actor: R.Glen Michell in Mame (Beau) and La Cage (Dindon)
  • Best Actress: Rachel York in Hello, Dolly! (um, Dolly. Obviously.)
  • Best Actor: David Engel in La Cage (Albin)
  • Best Musical Direction: Daniel Rodriguez and Jeffrey P. Leonard for Dolly and La Cage
  • Best Musical: La Cage

We had many other worthy nominees, many of whom lost to the people above. They were: Susan Chebookjian for choreography on Dolly, Maureen Brennan (Mame) and Sarah Pfisterer (Dolly) for Supporting Actress, Jamie Ross (Georges in La Cage, who was just as important to the charm of the show as David, but naturally had the less flashy role — literally!), Worth Howe (Dolly) and David Scala (La Cage) for Best Director, who were both a real pleasure to work with, Troy Costa for Most Promising Performance by a Child Actor for Mame, and finally Dolly was also up for Best Musical — which is a tough choice, as it may or may not have been the best show I’ve ever done. At least until we did La Cage a few months later.

I also have to give a shoutout to Anita Yavich, who is an awesome costume designer I worked with on Henry V, who won for her design on The Miracle at Naples.

Anyway, if the IRNEs are anything like the Tonys, they would be motivated only by political and financial concerns, by a bunch of people who haven’t seen half the shows nominated. So I hope they’re not. I prefer instead to think that we are being recognized for our good work this past summer. It’s nice to think that my work might have contributed in some way to the impact the show had to earn it Best Musical, especially since I haven’t been able to have that degree of impact doing Shakespeare for the last six months. It is truly time to go home.


April 17, 2010

On the Subject of Star Dressing Rooms

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:35 pm

On this leg of the tour I have taken the majority of my showers in star dressing rooms around the country, and it’s gotten me thinking: I’m no star, but if I was, I would be distressed by the fact that most venues have not provided any hooks or towel racks in my bathroom. Maybe I’m going to dress in the dressing room proper, but maybe I would like a place to hang my towel, or a toiletries bag, if not my clothing.

One recent venue not only had no hooks or racks in the bathroom, but no mirrors as well!

Of course as a stage manager, the dressing room itself is usually my office, so I can’t use it as a getting-naked-place, which makes the lack of anywhere to hang or place anything off the floor in the bathroom (including the toilet, which almost never has a seat that can be closed) even more frustrating. Sometimes this is only made workable by the presence of a railing for the handicapped, over which clothes can be draped, or toiletries bags hung, but this is far from a civilized solution, and is often too low to the ground, so that it risks things dragging on the wet floor.

Nobody cares what I think about this, but I think the stars should be like “WTF, I’m bringing thousands of people to your theatre, and you couldn’t spend $3 at a hardware store and screw one lousy hook into the wall?”


« Newer Posts — Older Posts »