HOME

October 14, 2011

iOS 5 for Stage Managers

I call this: phones,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:54 pm

Now that Apple has released iOS 5, here are a few new features I’m finding particularly useful for stage management.

Reminders

If you’re a seriously anal stage manager with some disposable income, you may have already invested in some of the more robust and expensive task management apps like OmniFocus or Things, but if you like to keep your tasks more simple or cost-free, the Reminders app is a great addition. It also syncs with iCloud so you can see your tasks on all your iOS or Mac devices. One of the features of this app, and the new OS in general, that I’m most excited about is geofencing — the ability to have it remind you when you enter or leave a certain place (like your home or theatre) based on your GPS location.

I’m a heavy OmniFocus user, but I think I’ll probably be using Reminders to keep track of simpler short-term tasks like shopping lists. I also want to compare the geofencing abilities of Reminders versus OmniFocus.

Clock

Please note, the timer now has a “pause” function. I’m struggling a little with when you would use this — perhaps if the earth stops rotating for a few minutes while you’re on a ten? But I add it because it’s the kind of feature Phil Schiller is never going to bother to tell you about in a product launch, and you may have more inventive uses for the timer in your workflow than I do.

iCal

Week view in iCal!!!!!!

I don’t know about you, but I always have my calendar in week view on the Mac. With the Retina Display, I couldn’t fathom why I couldn’t have a teeny-tiny week view on my phone, too. Well now if you tip the phone sideways, you can. Only one minor nitpick from a stage management perspective: when you swipe to the side to advance through the days, it has a little division between Saturday and Sunday, denoting the new week. Of course the Equity week starts on Monday, and there’s no way to change this. So if you’re counting hours on your tiny screen, you may be a little distracted by having to break up the week differently than is indicated, but this is a very minor inconvenience compared to the awesomeness of having a week view at all.

Note: there is one roundabout way to do this: under Settings/General/Date-Time/International you can select United Kingdom, and that will fix your week start problem and leave you with a host of other problems in the formatting of your date, time, phone numbers, etc. Unless you’re British, at which point you’re totally set already and are probably wondering why we silly Yanks start the week on Sunday anyway.

Flags in Mail!!!


Finally! Seriously!! How hard was this? This is one of those things that even the simplest mail client on any device should be able to do. I could do a Let Me Tell Ye on this alone, but now it’s fixed and all is forgiven, so I won’t. You may now go about marking emails you need to follow up on, and when you look at them on your phone they won’t blend in with whatever other crap is in your inbox.

I should also mention that I’m having some issues with flag status updating between devices. So it’s more of a theoretical “finally” than an actual solution. It seems to work better on my iCloud account than on Gmail.

Notification Center

Finally iPhone users who don’t jailbreak can have a feature that other smartphone users had over 5 years ago — something we used to call a “today screen” back in the PDA days, which was even longer ago.

One of my favorite things about this little applet is that I was on a train last night and every time I looked at my notifications, the weather had updated with whatever city the train was passing through. I didn’t even notice it, it was just there. This would be great for the road — no more having to remember to update your weather app with where you are.

You can pretty heavily customize (for Apple, at least) the apps that appear on this screen, and how much they show you, and in what order. One problem is that you don’t have control over what calendars you can see. So say I have a work calendar (don’t be silly, I have six work calendars) and a personal calendar, but I don’t want to clutter up my notifications with my personal appointments — you can’t turn that off, even if you hide that calendar in iCal. What’s worse is that you can’t get rid of the birthdays calendar. So one day when I had three contacts with birthdays, that took up most of my 5 appointment slots, and pushed off things like, you know, the performance I had that night. You can have it show you 10 appointments, but then you’d have to scroll to see any other type of notifications. It would be great to be able to hide certain calendars from the notifications screen, and give them an order of importance, the way you can with what apps appear.

It would also be nice to get rid of that nasty linen background, but I assume we will have to jailbreak or wait for several years to pass before that happens. The linen, it grows on me not.

Find Friends

This would be awesome on the road. You’re on lunch break during load-in, and somebody finds a cool restaurant. See where all the members of your cast/crew are during the day and meet up somewhere. Nick and I once walked all the way around the campus of Minnesota State University Moorehead in like a foot of snow, on top of a sheet of ice, looking for our bus, and never found it. Now we could just walk directly to the location of our colleagues on the bus.

Otherwise it’s a little stalkerish, but this app would be amazing for keeping track of a group in an unfamiliar place, which is pretty much the definition of stage management on the road.

iCloud

I don’t think of this as a big deal because I’ve had MobileMe and Google Apps for years, but if you haven’t been syncing your contacts, calendar, emails and bookmarks instantly over the cloud, you now have no excuse not to enjoy the convenience and security of knowing that your data is updated everywhere without you having to do anything.


October 2, 2011

Let Me Tell Ye: Backstage Bathrooms

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:44 pm

Let Me Tell Ye: if you’re building toilets into your theatre — and let me tell ye, ye should, because it’s more comfortable for everyone and is required to meet Equity’s safe and sanitary policy — then please for the love of all that is holy, put locks on all the bathrooms.

Don’t try to psychoanalyze how I intend to use the dressing rooms and figure out which ones you can cleverly fit with plain doorknobs compared to locking doorknobs. Just let people sit on the can in peace and security. Just go to that by default. How much extra does it cost in a multi-million-dollar building for all the bathroom doors to lock instead of just some of them?

I don’t care if you think it’s a star dressing room and there won’t be anyone in it but the person trying to go, who can lock the whole dressing room when nature calls. Ye are wrong. Ye know how I know? Because I’ve seen it time after time, all over the country. Dressing rooms are used for many things, by many different people. In fact, I know of one venue in Connecticut where we had to use the bathroom in pairs to make sure somebody was guarding the door cause none of the crew-usable bathrooms (which were also dressing rooms) locked.

Which brings me to a slight tangent that even more venues are guilty of: if your only backstage bathrooms are in the dressing rooms, your theatre fails. Where is the crew supposed to go? I can tell ye, they do not want to invade the actors’ space during the time that they’re in the building, nor do the actors want crew members passing through their dressing room.

And if it wasn’t clear, this other bathroom should also lock.


October 1, 2011

Designer Run

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:33 am

A thought from yesterday:

Designer Run: so called because the designers are there, and everybody else is running around trying to finish blocking the show so the designers don’t think we’re idiots.


September 17, 2011

My Project

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:48 pm


One of my side projects this week has been making the above happen.

André has wanted a nice-looking notecard on which to send personal invitations to the show. I’ve been working on the layout with him, and today we had them printed (at Staples, who lost the cap to my thumb drive, much to my dismay). They’re not actually postcards — we printed four of the same image on a 8.5″ x 11″ piece of glossy paper, and had them cut into quarters. They came out looking much better than I expected.


How I’m Using Evernote Today

I call this: mac,pc,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:51 pm

Just a quick use case for Evernote in rehearsal.

Right now we’re still focusing on music, so one of the few things to track in rehearsal is what songs we’ve covered. That’s the biggest challenge on this show — there are 31 of them.

When I’m PSM, I have a ridiculous database that tracks things like this, but this is a pretty simply-structured show, being basically a revue, with minimal blocking, sets and props, and most of what the database does is either not needed, or not needed when I’m the ASM.

Back when I was doing pre-production I made myself an Evernote note with the names of all the songs, because I wasn’t familiar with the show and knew I’d need to be referring to it often. If I were really on top of things I’d have the names of the characters who sing them on there. Maybe that’s my next project.

I didn’t really plan this, but I had nothing to do in rehearsal, and when I have free time when assisting, I do one of two things: create more paperwork than I probably need, and monitor things that the PSM is already doing, just in case it becomes helpful to have that redundancy — for instance if the PSM needs to be out of the room for an extended period he will miss some of what we were working on, and my paperwork can be used to double-check his list for the report.

So I started using my note to not just list the songs, but to check them off as we learn them. I love checkboxes in Evernote. On the Mac you can make them quickly with shift-command-T. I have a suspicion it’s shift-ctl-T on Windows. The system I came up with is that when we start a song, it gets a checkbox. When the song is completely taught it gets a checkmark.

Nothing fancy, but sometimes Evernote is so open-ended that I don’t quite know what to do with it. So here’s an example.

I only wish the iOS client didn’t crash so much. I would keep my run sheet on it. But I can’t have a run sheet that crashes just before a scene change, or loses its most recent changes, and I feel like that would happen at least five times a day, which is five times more per run than I can accept. Currently I’m writing the run sheet in Word. I’m not sure yet what method I’ll use during tech. It will very likely be paper.


September 13, 2011

The Evolution of Recording Music Rehearsals

I call this: mac,phones,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:19 pm


Today we started rehearsal for Ain’t Misbehavin’. After a very complex and inspiring opening speech from André De Shields, we spent the rest of the day on music.

While watching the actors rehearse, I noticed something I had not seen before: one of our actors was using her iPad to record her music. There’s really nothing surprising about this, but I made a mental note that it’s another small step in the evolution of technology in the rehearsal process. In addition to its capability for recording, she also uses one of the many piano simulators available for iOS to find her notes when reviewing music.

A History Lesson as Taught By A Largely Inattentive Observer

Most singers in musical theatre bring some kind of recording device with them to music rehearsals. They use it to capture their individual vocal parts as they’re being taught, the song as it is sung with everyone, and often they will use time on breaks or after rehearsal to have the musical director play through a whole song with the piano part only, creating essentially a karaoke track that they can then sing along with at will. The recordings allow them to continue to review the music at home, on the train, or anywhere else that they don’t have access to an accompanist. Naturally the recording device that allows this is an important tool.

When I started out, tape recorders — either full-size or mini cassettes — were what everybody used. Sometimes an actor would run out of tapes and would be lucky to be able to borrow a spare from a colleague. Batteries would die, and a stage manager who could immediately produce two AAs was a hero.

Around 2005 it seemed that many younger or more tech-savvy actors had switched over to purchasing a mic attachment for their iPods, allowing them to record huge amounts of music and sort through their recordings in an organized manner.

Naturally the plain ol’ iPod gave way to the iPhone and iPod Touch, which have built-in microphones and offer an even easier user interface for making and organizing recordings. The iPad is basically the same thing with a giant screen, so it’s no less useful. Maybe what struck me most about it was not so much what the iPad was doing for music rehearsals, but what its presence signifies in terms of how common the device has become since the iPad 2 came out. It definitely seems more mainstream, and no longer just an expensive experiment for early adopters and Apple enthusiasts. I actually feel like a little bit of a luddite for not having one, or thinking I need one.

I consider myself lucky that my stage management career has spanned a very interesting 10 years. I was around to see the end of a different way of doing things, but thankfully not for too long before the internet age took hold of most aspects of production. I imagine it’s something like what took place when computers began to operate lights, sound and automation in terms of the way the business has changed.

Today in rehearsal the actors were waiting to have their measurements taken, and engaging in a lively discussion about the ups and downs of the business. One of the women somehow got on the subject of the answering service, which made me laugh because it’s been so long since I’ve heard anybody bring up the idea of a service. The rest of the actors in the cast had never used one, having never worked professionally in the time before ubiquitous cell phones, email and texting. I added the stage managers’ perspective — how if, for instance, a call time changed, you had to call every actor at their home, their service, and their cell or pager number — because you never knew which phone they would be near, and cell phones were expensive and had short battery life, so were often turned off when not needed. And you certainly couldn’t rely on actors or production people to a) have an email address, or b) check it more than once a week. Nowadays you can send a single email or text to a mailing list and be confident everybody will get it in a timely manner, and with accurate information — imagine having to leave the same phone message 75 times in a row, and hoping you didn’t accidentally say the wrong time or day on one of them! And that is by far the best thing that’s happened to stage management in the last 10 years.

One last tip on the subject of recording vocal rehearsals: if by some chance your actor forgets to bring their recording device, whatever it may be, a handy way for the generous stage manager to help them out is to use your computer (or iPhone) to record their song and then email it to them immediately — a relatively painless way to keep their process moving, and have the song(s) waiting for them when they get home. The duration of said rehearsal would determine how time-intensive this favor is, but on the occasions that I’ve done it, the very grateful actor and musical director were economical and specific about when they were ready to record, which makes it pretty easy.


August 11, 2011

First Production Meeting

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:34 pm

So yesterday, as I said, we had our first production meeting for Ain’t Misbehavin’. Brian, my good friend and PSM, is out of town so I attended the meeting on his behalf and took enough notes to pretty much summarize anything a PSM could possibly want to know about what was said in a room for two hours.

The time I spent last night watching the YouTube videos of the ’80s television special paid off. Despite being at a table with five people who clearly have spent a lot more time thinking about the show than I have, I never felt like I didn’t know what everybody was talking about.

We met in a private room at a restaurant (my favorite restaurant from my Frankenstein days, actually), which gave the meeting a nice casual environment. It was just me, our producer, set/lighting designer, costume designer, sound designer, and director (original cast member André De Shields). André brought a vintage windowcard from the original production, which we propped up at the end of the table for inspiration. Actually it became very effective for discussions throughout the meeting because it has a large color photo of the cast and set, so we referenced it throughout the meeting when talking about costumes, hair, design motifs and scenic construction. Of course having spent 13 years as a Broadway merchandiser, what I noticed most about it was the incredibly thick cardstock they used for windowcards back then. Today’s windowcards would not stand upright on a table. I tried to find a picture of the windowcard online to use for this post, and I can’t find one. That’s a rare poster, there.

The designers also brought in their research photos — books of ’20s/’30s-era paintings and architecture, and costume photos from several rental houses that are being considered. I don’t always get to attend these early design meetings, but I always enjoy it when I do. I spent way too many years being taught how to do this in directing school to go through my career without seeing it done in the real world. It always comforts me somehow to know that what I recall as a rather tedious part of my education is really exactly how it’s done at every level. It seems much more important when you know it’s actually going to be used to put on a real show for real people, and not just for a theoretical classroom project.

As far as the structure of the meeting, we basically went around by department, in great detail, and then called it a day. Well, no, then we spent about another hour afterwards having sushi and talking more casually about the show and getting to know one another on a personal level. It was a lot of fun. I had been a little worried about stepping into this meeting with a bunch of people I didn’t know (I worked with André as an actor a couple months ago, but just for a day), and having to fill the role of PSM when I wasn’t entirely sure the whole production team even knew I existed. But everybody made me feel totally welcome and like a legitimate member of the team.

When I got home, I typed up my notes. People who know me may be surprised to learn that I took them using a technology known as “pen” and “paper”, but I often will go to a meeting like this prepared for both laptop- and notepad-based note-taking, and determine the method based on what everybody else is doing, and how much room is on the table. It was pretty much an even mix of iPads, MacBooks, and paper, but I decided that there is still something about taking notes on paper that gives more of an impression of attentiveness (which kinda sucks, considering how much better notes you can take electronically), so I went with paper.

At home, I went through my notes and typed them into Evernote, arranged them into a logical order, and expanded them into coherent thoughts for Brian. It’s a little different taking notes for somebody who wasn’t there, versus taking notes for yourself, or to be distributed to the production team by email. Basically I tried to attend the meeting as a PSM and document every thought I had, so that Brian has the full context for what was decided and why, as well as where the various people involved stand on these decisions. After I got everything into Evernote for myself, I made a Word document and tidied it up a bit so it’s easier to read in outline form, and sent it off to Brian.

We start rehearsal a month from tomorrow. I don’t know when my next obligation to the show is, so for now I’m going back to finishing Season 4 of CSI.


August 9, 2011

Slowly Starting the Stage Management Engine

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:35 pm

I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I went through this phase of “write a blog post about something every day,” and then I went through this phase of “Netflix fixation and getting addicted to episodes of long-running television programs,” and now I’m at a point where I need to start paying attention to things outside my apartment because I’m about to start a for-reals job.

The job actually doesn’t start until the second week of September, but I have my first meeting tomorrow, so it’s kind of important. I’m going to be the ASM on Crossroads Theatre Company’s production of Ain’t Misbehavin’. One of my closest friends is the PSM, so it should be a fairly low-stress return to having a regular job. I was really hoping my first job after the tour would be as an assistant, so I’m glad it worked out that way. I may also end up subbing as PSM at some point, so I still have to sort of approach it with that mindset throughout the process.

…Starting with tomorrow, where I will be attending the first production meeting, representing the stage management team. So I’m trying to go in as prepared as possible, by watching old clips from the TV special of the original Broadway production on YouTube.

You know how watching a recording of a show never captures the magic of seeing it live? 30-year-old grainy video compressed for YouTube doesn’t help either! But it’s definitely more helpful than being totally unfamiliar with a show. Seems pretty easy from an ASM’s perspective, although I don’t know exactly how faithful we’ll be to the original staging. While in many cases that may be a “famous last words” thing to say, I find that when it comes to assessing a deck track, first impressions are usually correct. I have much experience at seeing a show and later finding the kindest way possible to ask my friends, “is your track as boring as it looks?” and pretty much always being right. I’m not complaining! It doesn’t look deadly boring, probably more like simple tasks to accomplish every 3-5 minutes throughout the show, which is a nice way to enjoy a simple deck track.


July 13, 2011

KP vs. Angry Birds

I call this: gaming,phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:20 pm

Confession: I suck at Angry Birds. I hurl my birds haphazardly at structures with little understanding of what causes them to destroy or bounce off harmlessly. When I win, I don’t know why. When I lose, I know it’s because… I suck at Angry Birds.

But I drew a comic about my most perplexing Angry Birds moment ever:


July 9, 2011

The Calling Case

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:35 pm


This is a little something I like to call The Calling Case. It’s a handy little box that sits with me when I’m calling a show. The need for a convenient, easily-transported box comes mostly from touring, where I might spend four hours or less at a given calling desk before packing it all in again. Especially on the road, I found it very handy because I could take off for the desk with nothing but this, my script, and my computer and know I have everything I will need during the show.

Find Your Own

As you can see from the ArtBin label on it, this is presumably supposed to be a case for artists to carry their tools. I think it’s probable that I found it at a Hobby Lobby, but I’m not 100% sure. It could also have been a Walmart. The exact case doesn’t really matter, although this size is sufficient, just barely, for what I need to carry. If it could fit a LittleLite, it would be even better. But the key is, it’s sturdy, closes securely, has a slim profile, and a nice big handle.

The Contents

  • My headset – that’s a Telex PH-88 with some modifications I’ve made. The most important function the calling case serves is to protect my headset. Everything else that happens to fit in the case is just a bonus.
  • Pen/pencil case – that’s a Mont Blanc case, but they’re not Mont Blanc writing implements. My primary pen and pencil are made by Sensa. I generally call every performance with a pencil in my hand, or very close by. The pen just kind of tags along because it’s in the case with the pencil.
  • Snackage – I try to have a Nutri-grain bar or similar healthy and filling snack on hand in case I get hungry during the show, or end up missing a meal if things get crazy approaching curtain time.
  • Binoculars – this is my little luxury inclusion because my calling case travels in a road box that weighs hundreds of pounds, so the weight of the binoculars is negligible. If I had to cart it everywhere myself I might think the weight was unnecesary. I’d estimate maybe once a week something will happen onstage where a pair of binoculars comes in handy — maybe to check what a foreign object is on the floor, or to see if an actor is bleeding. My actors don’t bleed once a week, I swear. I used it on Comedy of Errors a lot to see if things were on spike, because we performed in a lot of different-shaped venues where proportions sometimes looked weird, and often I had the best perspective to see if it was just a trick of the venue, or if the actors/crew missed their marks.
  • Flags – I throw a miscellaneous packet of post-it flags in, which can be used to very quickly mark a page of the script for later examination. This is mostly useful in tech or early in a run, when changes are happening and errors are still being discovered.
  • Occasional inclusion: LED USB keyboard light (not shown) – sometimes I include a USB keyboard light, which I can use as a script light powered by my computer. On the Acting Company tour I always have a LittleLite, but on shows where I have to be more self-sufficient sometimes it ends up being my keyboard light, and when that’s the case, it goes in the box.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »