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April 19, 2011

Turnaround

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:43 pm

So the Acting Company tour is finally over after 7 months. It’s a very strange feeling after so much time, several layoffs, and a vacation week, to think that this time it’s really, seriously over. When I compose an email and it auto-fills my signature as “Production Stage Manager — The Acting Company 2010-2011 Tour,” I erase it out of habit when dealing with other projects or non-work emails. Yesterday I came to the surprising realization that I am not the Production Stage Manager for the Acting Company tour anymore. Next year is unknown, but at any rate, the 2010-2011 tour is over and done with and no longer has a PSM. I am not under contract to anyone. It’s a bit scary, and also very liberating.

I have, however had a couple jobs.

Me and Miss Monroe

Last Monday, you may recall, I got two jobs on the same day. One was a single day of subbing for the ASM on a workshop of a new musical, called Me and Miss Monroe, which is, in very brief, about Marilyn Monroe (played by one of my favorite performers and past collaborators, Rachel York). The day I was there they were reviewing one of Rachel’s songs, then a big production number at the top of Act 2, and staging from the middle of Act 2 through the end of the play. So things were very much still in development.

John Rando is directing, and although I think his finished products are pretty brilliant, it was great to get just a glimpse of how ideas are born in rehearsal. As you may know, I grew up wanting to be a director of Broadway musicals, so it’s really interesting to me just to sit in a room with a Tony-winning director and watch him have a really smart idea, right in front of me. Just in the course of a pretty ordinary rehearsal, I could see why he’s as successful as he is. I wish I could have been there for weeks to watch the whole process.

My favorite part of the day was when they got to the new stuff in Act 2. It was a scene with three characters, that leads into a song for Marilyn. There’s some dialogue, and then a song. Something was just not quite right about it. I don’t know if it was the actors or John who suggested it first, but everybody felt it was a little bit odd how they’re talking and then Rachel sings this big song and the other two people just kind of sit there. “I feel like we should be talking here” was said, and that sparked an idea of maybe moving some of the dialogue from earlier in the scene into the middle of the song. The writers (Charles Leipart and William Goldstein) weren’t there, off in a small room with a piano re-working some other song (which always just excites me for some reason), so the actors, John and music director Eric Stern played around on their own moving the dialogue around like puzzle pieces and adding underscoring where necessary. It was immediately more engaging. When the writers came back, they were filled in on the idea, and everyone gathered around the piano to work out how it should go, with the script PA, Rob, standing among the group with his computer, documenting the changes. I’d say the whole process took about an hour-and-a-half, and at the end they had a scene and song that was so much better than what it was at the start, that someone watching the show would never imagine it could have been any other way.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a new musical, and my 7-hour-without-a-meal-break day, followed by racing downtown to call Comedy of Errors was the best day I’ve had in years. It reinforced my belief that trying to stay in New York working with good people, even if it means lower-paying jobs, is the right thing to do right now. In the near future I may need to do other things to pay the rent, but right now that day I got to spend in the room working with a bunch of people at the top of their profession, in the part of the business I really want to work in, was worth more than financial security.

I was offered a spot on the run crew for the workshop, but sadly had to turn it down because I was already committed to another new musical, a reading of a show called Trails.

Trails

This week I begin rehearsal for a reading, which is probably the first reading I’ve done in about 3 years. My feelings about readings are kind of ambivalent. They’re quite easy, and usually take no more than a week from start to finish. They pay almost nothing (though this one pays a little more than most), but they get you involved with producers, directors, writers, musical directors and actors who might be big Broadway people or future big Broadway people, and you get in on the ground level of a new musical, which positions you nicely if the show moves on to a bigger production. That’s paid off for me once, on a show called Twilight in Manchego, which was one of the featured shows at NYMF a few years back. Not that NYMF is the pinnacle of the American musical theatre, but I got to work with some well-known people, and I had a great time doing the show. Having done the reading definitely put me ahead of the curve during the very short rehearsal and tech process. Actually, as much as I swore I’d never do NYMF again, the two shows I’ve done stand out as major highlights of my career in terms of enjoyment of the creative process, because the festival usually attracts a surprisingly high calibre of people.

Anyway, about the reading. It’s been a while (since September, in fact) since I’ve started a new show, and although a reading is very simple, that initial process of pre-production where you make up a schedule and send it out to everybody, and get their conflicts and make sure everybody received your emails, is pretty much the same. Thankfully it’s a small cast (six), and a small creative team, so the volume of information is a bit less. It’s kind of exciting to be back in that part of the process again. It often means waking up to 20 emails, and having lots of conversations shooting back and forth from the actors and the creatives and producers all day long, but in some way that’s kind of fun. At least I’m home for it, so I’m not juggling it with something else.

I also got sick this week. I think this is pretty common for stage managers, maybe for others in the business, too. Your body knows you can’t be sick while on tour, so the moment you have a vacation or layoff, you immediately get sick. I literally got sick the morning of my first day post-contract. Woke up sick on my first day of freedom. Poor Meaghan got sick on all the vacations, which used to happen to me. I think my immune system must have evolved to a higher level that it waited until the tour was actually over. I did get the bronchitis that was going around the cast in October, just in time for tech. That sucked. But other than that I survived the entire tour with nothing more than a sore throat. Whatever I have right now isn’t bad, just an annoying sore throat and a slight headache, and probably a slight fever, but my thermometer is mysteriously broken. I am mostly concerned with making sure that it doesn’t affect my efficiency on this reading. It’s easy to let things slip through the cracks or get put off and then forgotten about when you’re not feeling well. OmniFocus is especially my friend here, as I can write down all my tasks and when they need to be completed, so even if I forget the urgency of something, I will be reminded.

So that’s my week, making the transition from a long-term job to getting up-and-running on a new short one.


April 11, 2011

The New York Run

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:19 pm

The tour is almost over. Actually the tour is over, except for the people who don’t live in New York. We finish our contract with a few weeks at home, performing our one-hour Romeo and Juliet at Baruch College, and The Comedy of Errors in its New York premiere at Pace University.

Last night was our official New York opening (we had one preview), which culminated in a wonderful party at South Street Seaport. It was lots of fun to have a formal party, at home where we could dress up in our fancy-clothes that we would never bother bringing on the road.

So far we’ve been performing at Pace for two days, and it’s been anything but uneventful.

Load-in was on Friday for a Saturday night show. We had a 5-hour rehearsal scheduled to check tech elements and spacing, and any other brush-ups we needed. One of our actors (one of the leads, actually) had been sick a week earlier and suddenly had no voice. We began our rehearsal not knowing if it might have to be converted to a put-in. Thankfully he was well enough to perform and the show ran perfectly, with great energy. It was actually one of the most feel-good performances I’ve had in my career.

The next morning, before our two-show day, I got the phone call I had feared the night before: our sick actor couldn’t go on. Emergency put-in! Stage management phone tree! Everything went really well, everyone was totally supportive, and while we delayed the curtain time by 6 minutes (which was well under what we assumed it would have to be), we ended up holding 12 minutes for the house anyway!

By evening our sick actor was rested enough to go on (and it was, after all, opening night), so the show went on as usual, again with great energy. Every show we’ve done so far has been totally adrenaline-fueled. I think it will probably (hopefully!) settle down this week, but there is something very fun about everyone having to spring into action to make the show go on.

Today is my last day off, and then we have seven shows this week. I just booked two jobs today — a reading next week, and a day of subbing for the ASM on a show in rehearsal tomorrow. Nothing that will pay the rent, but it’s only Monday, and I still have one more week of full-time employment. This is probably a good sign that my crazy plan to find work in town isn’t so bad, and I haven’t even been looking for a job yet. Honestly I expect to be unemployed and blow through all my savings in a few months. If I can do that while working with big-name musical theatre people, I will consider it a success. Finding work weeks hasn’t been my problem in recent years, it’s that I’m too far away from the people I want to keep and make connections with. I’m also looking forward to doing the types of jobs that I haven’t done in a few years, i.e. every other type of show besides summer stock and tours of Shakespeare.

When not at the theatre, I’ve just been enjoying being home. I think at some point I might continue my project from May of 2006, to furnish my apartment. But that goes back to the thing about blowing through my savings in a couple months. I think that should wait until I have a job, or at least have some massive windfall of subbing. But just adjusting to not treating my apartment like a hotel room has been fun.


March 25, 2011

Drinks of Tour

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:25 pm

If I have a reputation for anything in this business it’s my love of fruity beverages. I drank so many appletinis on my first tour that at the end of the run the producer (who was not even on tour with us, mind you) got me a big bottle of Absolut and a big bottle of Apple Pucker as a closing gift.

This year I’ve had many photo-worthy drinks, and we the crew have collectively decided that I need an entire post dedicated to pretty drinks I’ve had around the country.

So…

We began the spring tour in Minneapolis, where we finally went to the Japanese place near the Guthrie, which is called Wasabi. There, my martini was on fire, which is probably a good way to stay warm in Minneapolis in January.

Then we left Minneapolis, on a rare daytime drive to Brainerd, MN. Along the way we found a steakhouse at a truck stop, that was actually very good. I don’t remember exactly what this was called, but it tasted like cough syrup, and yet was still tasty.

Our next stop was Poplar Bluff, MO, where we went to an establishment known throughout the Acting Company (even among the office staff) as “the Mexican place next to the hotel,” where we had GIANT margaritas. While I’m a martini drinker, this is known as “The Margarita Tour” for reasons that are rather complicated to explain, and still wouldn’t make any sense — but especially when eating Mexican, one is expected to have a margarita. Jackee and I had the large, everyone else got the medium. The large was, well, large.

A word about the margarita. Some people think that it’s the margarita tour because there’s a margarita in Comedy of Errors. This is not the case. There’s a margarita in Comedy because it was the company joke.

A few stops later, we were in Clinton Township, MI. It had been a long load-in day, so we searched out a place to have a nice dinner. Bart managed to get us a reservation at P.F. Chang’s, where I had this concoction, known as a “bomb pop martini.” I don’t remember what was in it, but how can you turn it down with a name like that? It was awesome.

The best sushi place we’ve hit so far this year was one I picked in Fairfield, CT, called Wild Rice. I don’t remember what this was called, it was a blueberry something-or-other, and it was delicious and messed me up. I could have stayed there forever eating sushi and blueberry martinis.

Time passed, the schedule got busy, we weren’t around a lot of nice restaurants, we drank a lot of beer on the bus, and finally we arrived in Fairfax, VA, where we stayed at the Fair Oaks Mall. On the day we arrived we had lunch at Champps, where I was reminded of their ridiculous Rockstar Martini, which I discovered last year. The main thing you need to know about it is that it has a rim of Pop Rocks. It’s a very interesting sensation! I didn’t even feel like having a drink that day, but I had one because it clearly needed to be included in this post!

After our next stop, Hampton, VA, we spent a few hours parked in the parking lot of the hotel the cast was staying at, right next door to a Hooters. I had a key lime pie martini, which, when done right, is actually my favorite martini. It was OK, but I’ve had much better.

Then we moved on to Maryville, TN, where we spent a couple days off. At a brewery near our hotel they had an orange dreamsicle martini, which sounded like something worth trying, if it could be done right. Unfortunately it wasn’t. I can see such a thing being really delicious, but however they made it was not the way I would have chosen. For one thing there was too much vodka, and it tasted more like alcohol than a creamsicle, which is all wrong. I later overheard the waitress advising the table next to us that it wasn’t very good. Thanks, lady!

We ended the tour with a few stops in Florida. In Ft. Pierce we ate at a tiki bar on St. Patrick’s Day, where I had this amazing concoction. I don’t remember what it was called or what was in it, but it was delicious, and I had two, which messed me up!

The night before the tour ended, I had an appletini at the hotel bar, but sadly didn’t think to take a picture of it.


March 18, 2011

Holiday Inn Express Runs Out of Internets

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:00 am

I bitch about hotels a lot. Almost always, the subject of my bitching is their terrible internet. Occasionally it’s just plain broken, usually it’s slow, sometimes it blocks important ports.

The other night, I returned home from a show to the Holiday Inn Express in Ft. Pierce, FL, and saw this:

I tried to refresh a couple times just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and then decided that I was exhausted and wasn’t going to deal with it. Some of my other cohorts also reported the shortage of internets.

I. have. never.


March 17, 2011

The Thing About Touring

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:23 pm


Yesterday I had a revelation. We had a show at the Sunrise Theatre in Ft. Pierce, FL, with a great crew and a really fast load-in, leaving us with several hours to kill along the Florida coast before our 5:30 show call.

I had lunch at a seaside restaurant (literally ON the water), and then went back to the theatre for a short time before the crew was released until show call. Then I took a leisurely walk by myself up and down the marina area, until being invited to dinner at the same seaside restaurant. Then on the way back we visited a cool store that sold lots of different microbrews (I’m not much of a beer drinker, but we have several beer snobs on the bus, so I’m learning by osmosis).

Over the course of this day, which despite being a 16-hour work day, still felt suspiciously like a vacation (and I’d like to point out, that is not normal), I realized what it is about touring.

Sometimes we get to spend our days in places where it would otherwise be expensive to live or hang out, and we get to do it as part of our job, with paid travel and subsidized housing and food costs. Yesterday I could have been sitting on a beach in Florida where it was 80 degrees, or I could have been working in New York where it was 40 and raining, fighting to get up and down the subway stairs. Now the flip side of that is that when it was 30 below in Brainerd, MN, I was wishing I was in New York where it was 20 degrees and sunny. But the other thing about touring, especially with as many one-nighters as we do, is that you’re never in the same place too long to get really sick of it. Don’t like something about the venue or the hotel today? Tomorrow you get a whole new set of living and working conditions.

I think that’s really what I find so fun about touring: it’s annoying at times, but it’s constantly changing, and every once in a while you end up someplace really cool. Maybe it’s because I never travel for fun, but I feel like I get to experience things that I couldn’t afford to do the way most people do — while on vacation — but I can have the same experiences while being paid to be there.


March 13, 2011

Maryville, TN

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:41 pm

At our last load-out, in Maryville, TN, some shenanigans were going on while I was on the truck. I only found out later because I was shown the photo evidence.

I had noticed during the out that Jackee had organized all our road boxes in the dock area, in the order in which they would be needed on the truck, and they were very neatly arranged back-to-back.

Somehow Meaghan wound up on top of the boxes. As I was shown the photos on the bus after we departed, I conducted a brief and largely uninteresting interview to get the story behind this.

“I just wanted to climb up there,” Meaghan said. As it’s a long way up, I wanted to know what she had used to get up there. “A chair, and Jackee’s hand,” she explained.

So. That’s the story. As it turns out, Maryville was our fastest load-out ever, at 90 minutes. Which explains a lot about how this picture came about.


March 10, 2011

Gonna Miss Touring

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:39 am

With the tour almost over, this morning I’m reminded of one of the things I’m going to miss most.

We just checked into a hotel this morning. We always arrive early in the morning after driving overnight, so early check-in makes our whole day. At this particular hotel we knew the manager, so when the rooms of the correct size weren’t ready for check-in, we got upgraded to suites because they were vacant. Regardless of the upgrade, this has been true of plenty of the hotels we’ve stayed at this year, many of which have been suites.

My bedroom is the size of my living room back home.
My bed is only slightly smaller than my bedROOM back home.
And my living room is the size of my entire first apartment.

It doesn’t help much when we rarely stay more than one night, and can’t really settle in. But still, it’s nice.

The one thing I will say is that at $89 a night, this particular hotel would be much more expensive to live in on a monthly basis than my apartment. So there’s that. I remember being on tour in 1999 and spending a week in a 1-bedroom suite with full kicthen that was huge and cost the same as my studio apartment. That was depressing.

The other thing about staying in such nicely furnished places is that I’m more inspired about ways I can make my apartment feel more like home. I’m out of town so much, and so often unemployed when I’m home, that I never really bothered to furnish it beyond the basics of bed, desk/chair and shelves. It really is more welcoming to come into a hotel room that’s nicely set up. So I’ve been observing things that make hotel rooms feel cozy and useful to me, in the hopes that I can inexpensively improve my own dwelling when I get back.


March 5, 2011

The Calling Couch

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:52 pm

I have several dreams in life. I’d like to be a Broadway PSM. I’d like to have an apartment with laundry machines in the unit. I’d like Hal Prince to see me call Phantom. Other than that, my dream was to call a show while sitting (or ideally, lying) on a couch. Preferably multiple times, but just once would be good.

Picture it: Phoenix, 2009

Our story begins in Phoenix, Arizona, in the spring of 2009. We were playing the Herberger, and I was assigned the orchestra-level booth to call from. At the time, it looked like this:

The couch was inspiring, but as you can see it’s way too low to see out the window. More than anything, I was frustrated and perplexed. All it needed was to be put on a 4×8 platform about 3ft high and it would be the most amazing thing ever. Why had it not been done? This haunted me for years.

This fall, we went back to the Herberger, where sadly, no further work had been done on the couch. In fact the sound console was on that table, blocking the view even more, and making the booth feel a little cramped.

Enter Fairfield, CT

A few weeks ago, we played a day in Fairfield, CT (just outside Bridgeport). Often when I scout my calling position I judge the booth based on how it looks from the stage at first. Does it look like there’s a crapload of stairs? Will I have to fight my way through the audience? Does it look nice and spacious inside? Is there a calling position backstage? Most importantly, is there a camera? If not, I generally won’t call from backstage unless there is literally no front-of-house position.

On this particular day it was a nice venue, and they probably had a backstage calling position, but I was predisposed to want to call from the house because our big bosses, Margot and Ian, were coming up from New York to see the show, so I wanted to be seeing the show as they were seeing it.

I spied a spot booth at center, which I always love for two reasons:
1. it’s generally unused, because our show doesn’t have followspots
2. the low window affords a nice view, and sometimes even a sill which can serve as a footrest.

So I declared that I preferred to call from the spot booth. It was many hours before I ever went up there. When I finally did, I was astounded to find…
A CALLING COUCH!!!

It was not so much a calling couch as a couch for the spot ops to recline on when not doing cues. The couch was against the back wall of the booth, where it didn’t afford a full view of the stage, but dragging it a few feet toward the window provided a perfect view. I took a nearby wooden step as a footrest, and set myself up with a music stand off to the side. With my computer sitting on the couch next to me, I had a perfect setup.

During the first act, my board op, Alex, who was sitting in the adjacent lighting booth, was very much amused by my love of the calling couch. At one point I commented that the only improvement I would make if I was sitting down for a long run would be an end table with a bowl of snacks on it. Of course when I came back from intermission there was an end table (he couldn’t find any snacks), and a pillow so that I could sit up more comfortably (the couch had a very far-leaning back which made it hard to relax and see the stage). It might have been the greatest three hours of my career.

Here’s a very rough picture of my view:


March 3, 2011

Cool Lighting Museum

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:16 pm

I sometimes refer to the Majestic Theatre as the Lighting Museum, because Phantom uses such old gear, but we found another one at our venue in Potsdam, NY.

Check out this awesome light board with analog faders — by analog I mean there’s a little window on each fader and when you move it a picture slides up and down showing what percentage the fader is at. I don’t think they actually use it for anything, but it’s in one of the booths, and it’s awesome. I wish it had been plugged in. It probably lights up in really fun ways, too.

Another cool thing they do have in use is their patch panel. Our lighting director, Annie, took this picture:

Computers and modern electronics may be great, but early versions of inventions always look more badass. Gear that looks like it could either be used to initiate a performance of Shakespeare or launch nuclear missles is my absolute favorite.


February 20, 2011

(How Not to) Pick Your Wireless Carrier for Tour

I call this: On the Road Again,phones,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:08 pm

Just found it worth mentioning that we’ve been on the road about 3 weeks, have hit 10 cities, and this is the 2nd time that our crew members on T-mobile (3 people including our production manager) have been completely without service.

Yeah, I know they have cheap rates and flexible plans. Just something to think about if you’re going on tour. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen to other carriers, but our sad T-mobile subscribers have been experiencing epic communications fail so far at a rate exceeding anything I’ve ever experienced in recent years.

Of course if you’re on some really nice tour that only plays places like LA, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. then you’re probably OK. But if your itinerary sometimes contains places like Portsmouth, OH and Potsdam, NY you may want to pick another carrier.


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