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July 13, 2007

We’re in the money!

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:55 pm

As I was talking to someone in the back shop during intermission tonight, I saw this over their shoulder and suddenly exclaimed, “Dimes!” I guess they got a chance to dig into the 42nd Street truck during the day. Aside from $1.80 in dimes and some luggage, I haven’t seen what else might have been unloaded, but it was enough to get me excited. I rarely if ever look forward to going back into production, but I love 42nd Street, and I think it will be a very fun way to end the season.

We had our official opening night tonight and a little party in the lobby after the show. Things are still going well. We have our only two-show day tomorrow. So far I don’t have any grand plans between shows. I hope to get an opportunity to battle my Pokemon against Nick, who is the deck electrician on this show, and all to blame for the fact that I am playing Pokemon at all. We keep meaning to have a battle, but this putting-on-a-show thing keeps getting in the way.


July 12, 2007

King and I Opening

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:25 pm

We had our first performance today, a matinee. Well it was a matinee when it started, at least. This show is long. The running time hasn’t changed very much at all through tech, but the show has always felt so fast that I would stare at my notes checking and double-checking my math, thinking there’s no way it can be 2:42 without intermission. It’s now down to 2:40, but the house generally requires a 20-minute intermission, and God help us if we go up late. Today we started at 2:12, which was not the best way to begin a 3-hour show. We had some latecomers, a lot of whom were elderly and in various stages of disability, there was a line for the wheelchair lift, and by the time everyone was settled in, our estimated end time was approaching Les Miz proportions. And I’m not talking about Les Miz after the cuts.

Also at the performance were the students from Reagle’s summer theatre camp. There are about 80 students for the camp’s second year of operation. The camp is taught by members of the Reagle staff with master classes from visiting artists and technical personnel from the summer shows. Earlier this week the kids had a class with choreographer Gemze de Lappe, along with some of the show’s dancers, where they learned choreography from the show. We had a talkback with them after the show, which was attended by more cast members than I expected, enough that we couldn’t all sit on the edge of the stage. The kids were very enthusiastic, asking good questions. I can tell from these events that before they see the show they have spent time learning about it. Next week they will have their master class with me, which will be held at the theatre and include a backstage tour. I have a great time with that kind of stuff, and I can tell they’ll be a good group.

The show itself went very well, and we had a larger audience than I was expecting. I had heard numbers like 800 being thrown around a couple days ago, but I don’t think I believed them. In my very unscientific estimate out the booth window, I’d say it was closer to 900. Anyway, it’s already a bigger house than any on the last show. We’ve got a few production photos up on the website now, which were taken at our dress on Tuesday (minus a final coat of paint on some of the set), courtesy of production photographer Herb Philpott. This one captures best what I sometimes stop and gape at in certain cues:

Set: gorgeous. Costumes: gorgeous. Lighting: gorgeous. And all gorgeous in harmony with each other. This show is pretty. It’s not fast, it’s not difficult, but it just looks so good I feel like I’m still doing something helpful.


July 10, 2007

Oh My God, It’s a Truck!

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:12 pm


When I arrived at the theatre today, I was shocked upon arriving at our parking lot to find a trailer parked at the loading dock. I was highly confused about what show we were doing, as it’s not customary for a truck to show up on the day of the first dress rehearsal. I quickly realized that this must be the first of the 42nd Street trucks, arriving simply because it can. Reagle owns the set, which like all of the sets that they rent out, is stored in its trailers and parked at an off-site facility when it’s not needed, packed and ready to be driven wherever it needs to go when rented. It won’t be unloaded just yet, but as King and I‘s set is almost completely stored on the deck, there is lots of room in the shop for 42nd Street to start coming in and being put together during the run of King and I.

Tonight was our first dress rehearsal, first rehearsal with orchestra, and the first time we ran the show like a performance. Usually these things don’t all happen on the same night, but the show is in such good shape, the slightly unconventional schedule shouldn’t hurt us at all. I called the show from the booth tonight. This was only my second time calling a real run, and the first time to really get the uninterrupted flow of the show, but I find it so relaxing I didn’t mind. Our master electrician suggested it because she reminded me that when I call from the tech table with the orchestra, the sound is so loud that it gets into my headset and drowns out the calls. I normally move to the booth for the Tuesday run, but usually having had the first dress on Monday to call from the tech table. The show is very quiet at times and we’ve had to really struggle for the crew to be able to talk quietly enough so it isn’t distracting, but loud enough to hear each other. So as much as I wanted to stay in the house for one more day, it was more important that I be able to speak as much and as loudly as I have to, so I welcomed the move to the booth.

The run went very well. I had to adjust a little bit, as always, to figure out what I’m listening for in the orchestra in cases where it sounds much different than it did on the piano. I’m having a great time calling this show. It’s easy, but quite rewarding. All the design elements are beautiful and complement each other very well, I find the show itself funny and moving, the actors are great to watch, the dancers are amazing, the singers sound wonderful, the kids are cute. The show is looking to be a solid three hours with intermission, but I have not yet gotten bored while calling it. And calling the ballet is like its own little show-within-a-show, and while it’s still relatively easy, it stretches slightly different stage management muscles, so it provides a nice change of pace for about ten minutes toward the beginning of the second act. We have one more dress rehearsal and then the first performance at 2:00 on Thursday.


July 7, 2007

King and I Tech

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:14 pm

Done. We had a very successful tech today. Despite my bold predictions earlier in the week that we would be able to run the show or at least one act by tonight, we did not. We did, however, finish the show in less than our ten working hours. In fact — I can’t say I have ever had this experience — we finished the show, let the cast go, had our production meeting, and stood up to go home at 9:55. Rehearsal was scheduled from 10AM – 10PM. We were all shocked that we were leaving before the day should even have been over.

We didn’t really end that early, maybe 20 minutes at most. The tricky part was that we teched the show out of order. It’s always an issue in shows with a large cast of young children, especially those that aren’t getting paid, to figure out how to use the kids’ time without unnecessarily keeping them up past their bedtime, or simply wearing them out to the point where a four-year-old just doesn’t feel like going onstage or doing her blocking. So we called the kids first thing in the morning and teched all of their scenes first, which happen to also be the most complicated by virtue of having 50-something people on stage. After several hours the kids were dismissed, but we did not go back to the top of the show because the first scene change is an absolute nightmare, with only a silent and rather uncomplicated crossover to cover it. Anna, her son Louis and the Kralahome (King’s prime minister) arrive at the palace. Two sailors are following with a large trunk. They cross from stage left to stage right. That’s it. Meanwhile there’s five pipes flying, and about 20 people on the deck required to move all the scenery (for which we’ve used some of the non-union cast to supplement the crew).

Because of all the people involved and the need to assign and teach the change to the cast, we began with scene two and teched from there until the lunch break. The crew set up the first scene during the break. It’s on board a ship — there’s several flats including the ship’s cabin and smokestack, the sides of the ship, a big paddle wheel thing, a bunch of crates and trunks — a lot of it was supposed to be flown, but this goes back to the issue at the production meeting about ugly aircraft cables ruining the look. So before even attempting the scene we ran the scene change twice.

Because we weren’t attempting to run the scene, I had the unique experience of being on the deck during a crazy scene change. Normally I sit comfortably at the tech table, call the drop in, and then listen on headset to frantic banging and squeaking and calls of “Fly this out! Over there! OK, clipped! Downstage! Bring it in!” then some more banging and squeaking, the sound of counterweights whizzing up and down on the rail, then a few calls of “We’re ready. Are you ready over there? We look ready. OK, clear!” then I say, “Go,” the drop flies, and there’s a nice shiny new set on the stage. So when I realized this I went and got my camera. Unfortunately the video is not nearly as interesting as I hoped it would be. First of all I wasn’t able to get it on at the beginning because I was given the honor of calling the start of the scene change and also fumbling to start a stopwatch. And then for some reason I turned the camera off before it was completely over, probably to stop my stopwatch, or maybe because I realized how lame the video already was. But here it is, shot from stage left.

It’s not quite a well-oiled machine at this point (this was attempt #2, 1 minute 15 seconds), but after this we went back and ran from the beginning of the show through the scene change, and the crew and crewlike castmembers were done quite a bit before the onstage cast, who were expertly dragging out what could have been a 10-second cross into an entire play about people walking down a hallway. I’m sure it will only get faster. Actually, the show was written with a whole silent scene there in which we see the palace dancers preparing for the next scene in which they dance for the King — purposely put there to fill time while this unavoidable Huge Scene Change takes place. The alternative if you have a quick scene change is for Anna and company to simply walk across the stage with their boxes in tow. We went the optimistic route, mostly because all the large pieces were supposed to fly, but I think it’s going to be fine.

So after running that change successfully, we then skipped ahead to where we were when we broke for lunch, and continued from there in order, but skipping the second half of the last scene in Act I, which we covered earlier with the children. People love speculating about how long tech is going to take. I’m an optimistic person, but I’m also a realist, and I also know it’s better to make pessimistic guesses so people won’t be disappointed when it takes longer. By lunch we knew we were moving along well, and people would say so, but then in a low voice they would usually say, “We’re going to be spending all night on the ballet, aren’t we?” “Do you think we’ll end the night with the ballet?” “The ballet is going to take a long time, isn’t it?” I think we got to intermission somewhere around 7PM. This was when a lot of the real speculation started. My answer was, “Yes. Hours. I expect 1-2 hours, but I think we’ll still finish the show.” I wasn’t keeping score, but I think it probably took a half hour to 45 minutes.

First of all, you may remember I got to see the entire ballet on the third day of rehearsal. The dancers know it inside out, so there was no problem there. They did it in costume for the first time, and aside from Simon of Legree’s giant mask/headpiece being too loose on her head and having to be removed, they didn’t seem to miss a beat with the addition of costumes. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, but in many cases we added costume pieces when possible and where they would cause potential issues, like for dancers. We had a few small things to take care of, like spiking the location for the gong, and assigning who places it. Once we had done those kind of housekeeping things, we ran it once and were due for a ten minute break. Gemze seemed pretty happy with it, and declined to work anything or give formal notes before running it again when we were back from the break. The second run was especially helpful as we had some followspot assignments that needed to be worked out in a more efficient way, which we applied the second time through.

I said yesterday I was worried about the rapid pace of cues and losing my place among all the “Run, Eliza, run”‘s, but when the time came I didn’t have any trouble. My first attempt was not at all embarrassing, which was a nice change from the Singin’ in the Rain ballet, where up until the final performance I was never quite sure if I was about to make an ass of myself. The key with this one is that it requires 100% concentration, and with that it’s actually quite easy to call. I just can’t lose my place or fall behind, because there’s not much time between cues, and once you’re lost it’s not immediately evident where you are in the script.

After the ballet it was clear sailing. One by one ensemble members with little to do in Act II were dismissed. We were not running the finale or bows because we did them earlier with the kids. By the end of the day we were down to a book scene with just a couple actors, right before the finale. And thus, with a gentle sigh, ended our tech, about 15 minutes early.

Tomorrow we tech from 10:00AM – 6:30PM. We had hoped to do two runs, but we have already scheduled a 2:30 run. Because of the need to give the kids a definite call time regardless of where we ended up today, we scheduled an afternoon run in advance so they could just arrive at half hour. I picked 2:30 because I didn’t feel comfortable with less than four hours to run the show (I’m guessing it will ultimately clock in at about 2:45 with intermission), give notes, and allowing extra padding for any unforeseen disasters. So that means a 1:00 lunch, and we’re not going to be able to call the cast, get them in mics, and run the show in three hours. I mean it’s conceivable, but highly unlikely. So we’re going to do the same thing we did tonight and skip the kids’ scenes since they won’t be there. Then we run in the afternoon, and after dinner the orchestra has their first rehearsal, which also serves as a partial sitzprobe for the cast to sing with the orchestra for the first time, before they have to do it on Tuesday in dress rehearsal. For this sitzprobe we are calling the singers and dancers who are in the ballet, so they can hear tempos and such and avoid any problems, and once that’s done they’ll be released. Then the principals will stay to sing their songs and make any necessary changes or requests. Then we go home to enjoy our daylight day of rest.


July 6, 2007

King and I Approaches Tech

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:10 am

I’m sitting in the theatre, approximately 21 hours before tech begins. I got my cues at the paper tech this morning and have some time to kill before the 1:30 rehearsal. The paper tech moved along quickly, and with some discussion of other production-related issues, came in just under two hours, which is pretty much perfection. I’ve done some for more complicated shows that have taken four hours. Approximately 140 light cues, so not a very busy show, but enough to keep me entertained. Just on paper, I see a few cues I’m already looking forward to. I think the “Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet will be fun, but not too hard as to embarrass me, as long as I can keep following along quickly enough. Shouldn’t need to call anything off the score, which I like. My opinions on that change, but with recent shows I’ve tried to reduce it, because I find that following the score means keeping your head in the music too much and not looking at the stage. Even with Singin’ in the Rain, I called the 13-minute ballet off the score, but in reality I only really followed the music for a couple cues, and for the most part just flipped ahead to the next cue and knew what it was, so I could be looking and listening instead of being buried in the book and counting.

Took this picture just a few minutes ago:

They just put in our groundrow that will go behind the palace. The picture doesn’t quite do it justice, but it’s really nicely painted, and the set looks fantastic under the lights. I’m loving the gel colors on this show.

Another picture I shot a few days ago but never had a post for:

The drop you see downstage is brand new and was specially designed to match our set. This is the “Corridor drop” which is used for almost all the downstage scenes. The audience spends a lot of time looking at it, so it’s a good thing it’s pretty. This was taken right after it arrived and was hung.


June 30, 2007

A Run of Act I

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:54 pm

Not counting our read-through, we have just completed our fourth day of rehearsal of The King and I. The crew was given the weekend off, as many of the large pieces of the set were put up by Friday. This also benefits us greatly, as we have free access to the stage for the weekend rehearsals.

First thing in the morning, we ran Act I, just because we could. It was a nice feeling. Immediately following that, we ran the ballet on the stage for the first time. I had the opportunity to see the entire ballet for the first time on Friday afternoon in the dance studio, without the singers present. I considered that also a great advantage, to see the whole thing so early in the process, especially since I often have trouble getting sufficient time to attend the dance rehearsals. The dancers are already doing a fantastic job, and I’m sure in the next week Gemze will get even more out of them.

For the last few evenings we’ve had access to the stage after the crew finished for the day, and we had been working with the principals and singing ensemble on stage, as the dancers did their thing in the dance studio. We’ve now reached the point in the process where it’s beneficial to swap that: the dancers have learned their choreography, and a lot of what remains is for them to adjust to the exact dimensions and surface of the stage. The principals now begin blocking for Act II, which works just as well in the dance studio at this point in the process.

In the three hours after lunch today, we blocked a good portion of Act II. We also accomplished costume fittings for the children and many of the ensemble. All in all we are going to be in great shape when we start tech in six days. In fact, I think my little trick of pre-tech will mean a very smooth run (or two!) of the show with scenery, before we ever start tech. A lot of this is because the very straightforward technical operation of the show will make it easy to do with a reduced crew. I’m enjoying the show itself and I look forward to putting the technical elements on it very soon.


June 26, 2007

Schedules and Calendars

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:49 pm

Another thing I did today during music rehearsal was preparing the calendar to be distributed to the cast tonight. Bob Eagle is directing this show himself, and he’s had his breakdown of the rehearsal schedule pretty much done since last week. We made some adjustments and clarifications to the tech schedule at the production meeting in the morning, and with that I went about creating a calendar to outline the entire production in brief for our cast.

In preparing the calendar, it was the first real opportunity I had to examine Bob’s schedule in depth. I don’t really advise doing this five hours before distributing the schedule, but better late than never. What I’m looking for is two things:

1. Most importantly, is anything scheduled that’s a violation of Equity rules? The first thing I look at is span of day. Our contract allows for either an 8.5 hr day with a 1.5 hr meal break, or an 8 hr day with a 1 hr meal break. I make sure it’s not over that amount, and that the proper meal break is applied depending on the span of day. The next question is whether the meal break is spaced properly in the day. There is a decent amount of flexibility in this, but there can’t be more than 5 working hours on either end of the meal break. The final question is the 12-hour rest period between rehearsals. If rehearsal ends at 10:30PM, the next day’s rehearsal can’t start until 10:30AM. This is something to keep an eye on at Reagle because rehearsals are late in the day during the week and early on the weekends, to accommodate our cast members with “real jobs.” It’s an easy mistake to accidentally infringe on the 12 hours between Friday night and Saturday morning.

2. Once I know the schedule is legal, the next question is, does it make sense? One of the greater challenges of stage management is that you’re supposed to think of absolutely everything and fix everyone’s problems before they occur. Thinking through the schedule and looking for trouble spots or areas that could obviously be improved is part of that. In my perusal of the schedule today, I discovered that we had a 1.5 hr lunch break for an 8 hr rehearsal on the weekend of the first week. As much as I hated to give up that nice long lunch, the fact is we don’t need that long of a break if we’re taking the shorter day, and were losing a half hour of productive time each day as a result. So we fixed that. I also suggested a time change on the two days before tech to shift an extra hour to the evening so we would have more time for our scheduled runs of the show.

I hate math, and I hate math with time, but it’s very helpful to be able to work quickly in your head with common time-usage situations that one might encounter in rehearsal. Part of this is knowing your contract’s specific rehearsal rules inside out (or having a copy of the rulebook handy for those really obscure questions, like how many hours can you rehearse on a 1-show day after the week of the first public performance — I always have to look those up). Equity’s web site has all the rule books in PDF format in the Document Library. The beauty of this is that a) they take up no physical space or weight in digital format, and b) you can easily search them for whatever term you’re looking for. I was lucky in my early career to have spent most of my non-Equity years working on Equity Showcases (unless you don’t count working for like $0.25 /hr lucky), where I had to enforce all the Equity rules even though I wasn’t covered by them myself. By the time I got my card I was completely comfortable with all the basic rules. The numbers change (in general as the minimum salary goes up, so does the number of hours you work), but for the most part the concepts are the same. If you can afford to work for very little, I recommend it to aspiring Equity stage managers, as it will allow you to already know what you’re doing if you suddenly get your first Equity contract as a PSM and everyone expects you to know what you’re doing.

It took me a long time in my career (oh, about five-and-a-half years) to find a format for a calendar that I liked. Any calendar creation software was too restrictive, and in fact I think they’ve stopped making any kind of apps to do that, they assume everyone uses Outlook or iCal or something. Well I like to have complete control over the layout, and I don’t need to sync it to anything, so I couldn’t deal with that. When I was production coordinator of Bingo in Florida, the company manager had a rather nice calendar she made in Excel, I decided that was the way to go from now on. I came up with a layout I liked, and have used it as a template ever since. It’s very blank, which I like because you can really set it up however you want. You could make Wednesday the first day of the week if you really felt like it. You can also see in my example above how I have made a calendar for “June/July.” Since our whole process only takes four weeks there’s no reason to waste space and confuse people with a whole calendar for each month. I can start and end it wherever is most useful for the period of time I’m dealing with. Want to play with it? Have fun.

While I’m sharing files, here’s something else I had to print out today. The two-foot marks in the dance studio are starting to fall off, and we’re going to need to replace them before starting dance rehearsals tomorrow. As a result of the occasional need to rehearse down the street at the Studio of Creative Movement, where we need to bring our own numbers and remove them when we’re done, two years ago I created this PDF, which consists of three pages of fairly large numbers, from zero (center) to 18, which is as high as the numbers go on the Reagle stage. Since I pretty much always have my trusty Canon i70 printer in rehearsal, if somehow I wind up somewhere in life needing to put down numbers for dancers, I can print them out in a couple minutes. Having a tape measure can sometimes be the bigger problem, but in a pinch I have used the 11-inch side of a regular piece of paper, adding the extra inch by sight for every foot. Not the ideal way to do it, but it works. When I’m really prepared, I have in my kit a set of these already cut out and held together with a big binder clip, so they’re ready to be taped down right away, instead of taking all that time to set up the printer and cut out the numbers. It’s a real lifesaver at those horrifying moments when you realize 5 minutes before rehearsal that the room doesn’t have numbers, or somebody ripped yours up overnight. Of course if I was really slick, I’d have some pre-made, sturdy numbers like those you’d use to put the street number on the outside of your house. But that would assume I was prepared and planned to put down the numbers. The whole point of this PDF is that it’s there when you’re caught unprepared.

Enjoy!


King and I Day 1

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:03 pm

First rehearsal for show #2. The day began for me in the morning with our first production meeting. It was a fairly leisurely meeting, with a scene-by-scene discussion of each set and any issues brought up. The recurring debate: fly in hard flats for quickness of scene change, or take the time to set them by hand on the deck, to avoid ugly aircraft cables catching the light (especially given that the pieces will be silhouetted at times)? I love the elegance of flying stuff, but aircraft cables are indeed ugly, and not particularly at home in the royal gardens of 19th-century Siam. This matter is still undecided. Attempts will first be made to conceal the aircraft cables behind other objects, and if that doesn’t work, I think we’ll wind up with the stuff being set by crew, which will mean we’ll be pushing to make the scene changes in time.

The theatre is building its own set for this show, which has been pretty rare in the years I’ve been here. The set is being recreated by our very talented head painter, Matt, based on the design used for an earlier production. While I’ve seen pieces of it under construction in our warehouse, this is the first opportunity I’ve really had to see all the plans and have it fully explained. I’m excited about it. After the meeting Matt took me back to the warehouse to look at it again, now that it’s closer to completion, and I have a better context for it.

Here’s a view of some of it. You can’t see the best stuff in this photo, but the colors for the palace are very rich, and at the meeting Matt displayed a sample of the fabric for Anna’s bedroom drapes that I’m absolutely in love with.

Simultaneously, the most significant project of the year was going on onstage: the replacement of the entire deck surface. The deck has been due for replacement since at least last year, and Singin’ in the Rain sealed its fate with the inevitable water damage. As I mentioned last week, several sections had to be replaced during the run, including one emergency replacement at intermission. The crew did a lot of work today, almost all of the new surface has been laid. It still needs to be screwed down more permanently and then painted, but it looks great already.

I also got to see something I’ll probably never see again — the actual stage floor of the Robinson Theatre, just before the last of the large pieces was laid over it.

It’s your typical hardwood floor you’d find on a school auditorium stage, that someone obviously made an attempt to paint black at some point. Over that is laid a layer of Homasote to give the surface a little cushioning, before the top layer of tempered Masonite is placed. I have been informed that tempered Masonite is preferable to regular ol’ Masonite because it will be more durable. The darker black squares in the back and left are already finished, and the lighter black band in the upper right against the wall is the last of the old surface that has yet to be taken out. Eventually the surface, which is already black, will all be given a coat of black paint, but it’s being left au natural for now as it needs some time to dry out to avoid warping. It looks very clean and pretty, and best of all it will be a nice safe, even surface for our performers to work on.

Bye-bye old deck!

Our rehearsal schedule in the afternoon was very easy — just music rehearsals with a few principals. I sat around and worked on some leftover notes from the meeting, and getting the contact sheet ready. In the evening we had the whole company present. Seventy-seven. Yes, 77. Seven seven. Forty-nine adults, twenty-eight children. This is only slightly more than my previous Reagle-high of 72 for Carousel. I’ve heard people saying 61 all day, but by my count I get 77. To be perfectly honest, I think once you get beyond 50 it’s all the same.

Anyway, with this mass of people, we did a read/sing-through of the show, including watching the DVD of the movie for the ballet scene. Our choreographer, Gemze de Lappe, was the original dancer portraying Simon of Legree in the “Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet, and she also dances the role in the movie, which I didn’t know until recently. She’s wearing a giant mask so it’s impossible to tell it’s her, but it was fun to see her performance from over 50 years ago. I have no doubt she could do it today at 80-something! She doesn’t join us until tomorrow, but I’ve worked with her before on Carousel, and she’s quite an amazing lady.

Tomorrow is our first full day of rehearsal, and I’m looking forward to it.


June 23, 2007

Closing Night for Singin’ in the Rain

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:29 pm

We closed Singin’ in the Rain tonight. A closing performance in a situation like this always creates mixed emotions, and different emotions among different people.

The crew is eager to get this monster of a set back on the trucks and off to its renters in Oklahoma.

The actors who are not going to be in the next show are sad to be parting ways with new friends. Some are also happy to be returning home to their children or significant others.

People who are doing the next show have less reason to be sad because another exciting experience is starting in just a few days.

I have mixed feelings about it. I’m not going anywhere, so it’s not a huge transition. It’s a marker for me that I’ve completed a third of my job, and as far as I can tell, everything after this should be much easier. However, what I like about what I do is the part of actually putting on a show in front of an audience. The rehearsal process is just a means to an end. The hours are longer, and most of what I do is take notes and make phone calls, which is not particularly inspiring. Other people are making art (hopefully), and watching that can be exciting, but I just sit around pushing a pencil. So part of me would rather continue to do performances than go back into production and actually have to work instead of just have fun and put on a show.

I’m also looking forward to moving on to a new show. For all of Singin’s technical requirements, it actually was a pretty bland show to call. Not slow by any means, but not interesting. The show is written in such a way as to draw attention to the fact that we’re waiting for the set to be changed, and keeping the show driving forward was kind of a losing battle. I realized tonight how ready I am for something else.

I’ve never done King and I, in fact I’ve never seen it on stage, so I’m excited for it. Also, my friend Sarah Pfisterer is playing Anna, so it will be fun to work with her again.

As I write this (didn’t go to the closing night party because I’m still sick… grr…), the crew is busy striking the set, which they’ll probably be doing until about 4AM. They did a great job making this show go smoothly. It wasn’t easy, but it was always easier than I thought it was going to be.

This was the view out the loading dock door to the first waiting truck.

Joe and Christina making raincoats go away

One down, two to go. Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter in the Reagle summer season!


June 21, 2007

Second Week of the Run

I call this: summer stock — Posted by KP @ 10:56 am

So I’ve been sick for the last two days. Probably got it at the Majestic on Monday. There’s always some bug going around, and I don’t doubt that four hours in that building could send me home with something. At least that’s what I’m blaming it on. I’m not nearly as sick as a person could be, just an incredibly sore throat and a slight fever that I can’t really keep track of because I don’t have a thermometer up here. So I take some Tylenol whenever it seems to make sense, along with some echinacea, which it’s probably too late for, and my favorite cold remedy, Cold-Eeze. Calling a show sick never results in a particularly good show, it always feels a little bit like watching the show underwater — the music sounds muffled, and the timing of everything feels different. Not to mention if your illness is respiratory (which mine usually are) you can never be quite sure when you attempt to speak a short little word like “go” if your throat will choose that moment to get blocked up and not let it out.

But last night’s show was actually pretty good. I bought some ice cream in the lobby at intermission, and that was very soothing, so the second act was better. The key here is to not lose my voice. As I said, all the cues are verbal, so that would be incredibly bad. I can probably count on one hand the number of times in my life I’ve actually lost my voice to the point of no sound coming out, so I’m not too worried. I was careful not to push when calling last night, and although my voice sounds worse today, I think I’m probably on the way to getting better. The nice thing is that in the second week of the run there’s not much to do other than come in and do the show. We don’t even have any matinees this week, so I’ve been able to stay in bed as long as I need to and take it easy around the house.

When I came in before the show yesterday I noticed we had a new section of deck put down just downstage of the rain deck, in a spot that had taken a lot of water damage. At intermission I was informed that there was a section of deck all the way upstage that needed immediate replacement before the rain deck could be rolled back over it. About eight guys and gals with screwguns going simultaneously managed to put down a thankfully pre-cut piece of replacement deck with almost no impact on the length of intermission. I was impressed.

Since tech it’s been relatively common for there to be some kind of problem that threatens to extend the already-long intermission, and since I began my theatrical career in high school as a “techie,” in situations with non-union crews I sometimes enjoy pitching in and actually doing stuff instead of standing around and watching the clock. By now I’ve learned enough of the intermission changeover for this show that I actually know what comes next and can participate without needing to be told what to do or what spike mark I should be going to. Because of the very low grid height at Reagle, a lot of drops have to be clipped up to their pipes in order for tall pieces of scenery (like the rain deck) to move under them. Once the rain deck is pushed back upstage (which I often help with, although I doubt I’m actually taking much of the weight), a lot of intermission is spent unclipping drops used in the second act, which requires one person flying and about five people along the length of the stage to undo each clip, let the drop out, and reclose the clip, while holding the bottom pipe of the drop up off the still-somewhat-wet rain deck. Then the drop is flown until it’s stretched out, and we give it a tug to (hopefully) take out the wrinkles, and it’s flown all the way out. This process went faster last night than I’ve ever seen it, and I was glad I could actually be of some use.


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