We here on the Romeo and Juliet crew decided a few days ago that we were tired of the traditional “stage right” and “stage left” and so forth, and we came up with some better alternatives to the boring “upstage,” “downstage,” etc. Sometimes we actually use them.
Below is our glossary for our new invention. Click to enlarge, and feel free to print, hang in your greenroom, or spread around the web.
St. Cloud was the last stop on our grueling first week of touring. Based on the tech specs, we knew the venue was small and the path to load our boxes in would be tricky. After leaving the new, spacious, union house in Appleton, WI, we were expecting disappointment in St. Cloud. What we got was just the opposite.
We were greeted by Max, who was one of our most trusted local crew guys in our first stop of Moorhead, MN, who arranged to work on the crew in St. Cloud as well (about a 3-hour drive for him). It was nice to be able to look forward to seeing a familiar face, and one who was familiar with how our show goes up and down. The rest of the crew was equally eager, and somehow, with a really convoluted path from the street to the stage for our heavy boxes, and a 2-ft lift up to the loading door for the human-carryable pieces, this crew still managed to put the set up much faster than any other venue so far. I’m sure part of that is us learning to be more efficient, but without the right crew, everything would fall apart.
We actually had free time to get everything ready before the show. Nick and I had rehearsal for an hour and a half in the afternoon — our first understudy rehearsal. The cast had a relatively relaxing travel schedule, and with the rehearsal in the afternoon, they had plenty of time to see the venue and grab dinner before their warmup time an hour before the show. Also, they didn’t have to deal with the crew running around finishing the set and lighting while they were trying to do warmup and do fight call, which must have contributed to their sense of relaxation, even though the backstage area was more claustrophobic than usual.
There was a very nice greenroom, in which there were several copies of the local arts & entertainment paper, where we were the front-page article.
My calling position was in the house, just behind the back row. I chose to be positioned between the light board and sound positions, with my desk made from the lid of our light board’s road case, stradding the lighting and sound desks. It was actually one of the more comfortable calling desks I’ve had so far.
I generally dread calling from the house, or with an open booth window anywhere near the audience. Not for myself, but because I feel really bad for the audience who has to listen to me talk the whole show. Also, I believe that having to talk quietly, especially when calling to a crew unfamiliar with the show, leads to unnecessary mistakes because I can’t be heard as clearly as if I was speaking freely. When I heard a rumor that the show wasn’t well sold, I hoped there would be many rows between me and the nearest audience member. When I walked out into the house just before places, and saw the entire orchestra and much of the balcony filled, I was at once very happy for us, and also really sad for the people whose heads were literally three feet from my mouth.
However, being able to be in the house for the show — not in an open booth, but literally sitting in the back row of this beautifully restored old theatre — was well worth the challenges of calling quietly and clearly. It’s been a long time (since rehearsals during previews) since I’ve been able to watch the actors “in the room,” and then I was still too busy worrying about my own stuff to sit back and enjoy their work. And they have discovered a lot of great things since we opened. I was actually really moved by the show, and was very glad I had the opportunity to experience it from the house.
The best thing that happened, however, was the bat. We discovered during the day that a bat had found its way into the theatre. It hadn’t been seen for a while, and then during Scene 2, the bat comes flying out of the window in our set, and out over the audience, where it continued to soar around the house and the stage for at least 30 seconds. The audience freaked out. The cast was momentarily stunned, then broke into smiles, and then carried on bravely, accounting for the audience’s lapsed attention in the way that one holds for laughs but then presses onward. They did a great job keeping their own laughter together and bringing the audience back into the play.
The bat returned a few times through the play, most notably during the “lark” scene in which R&J are on the balcony, debating whether the bird they hear is a nightingale or a lark, thus signaling the approach of day. As Juliet is saying “it was the nightingale and not the lark,” the bat flies right past the balcony. I’m not sure if the full irony of that moment was understood by the audience, but we in the back had to really stiffle our laughter.
The load out went equally smoothly, not the fastest ever, but very good in relation to the difficulty of getting things to the truck. We then began our 3-day trek to New London, CT. Today we spent in Chicago, or rather in a parking lot near Midway Airport, surrounded by hotels, one of which we have a crew room in, where we take turns enjoying such luxuries as a shower and a real toilet. We also watched the Super Bowl on the bus, and did some troubleshooting to improve the TV picture and surround sound.
Tomorrow we’re going to Niagra Falls. I’ve never been, so that seems pretty cool. One of the reasons we chose to go a little bit north out of our way is so that Nick can be dropped off at his old college, where he’s talking to some tech theatre students. Then he’ll rejoin us at the bus.
I’m looking forward to our arrival in New London on Tuesday night because we’ll have real hotel rooms — for two days — in the same hotel! It’s practically like being landed gentry!
We are now halfway through Week 1 of our actual touring schedule. Apparently, unless my dashboard widget is lying to me, it’s Thursday. Before I looked at it, I thought it was Saturday, but felt that was probably just my imagination and it’s really Friday. But no, I guess it’s Thursday.
Our last venue was in Grand Rapids, MN. The venue was in a high school, but gets a lot of touring shows. It was a very nice, intimate theatre with a semi-thrust stage. Unfortunately our show is designed for a proscenium, so due to the lighting needs, the first electric has to be over the edge of our marley deck, so we couldn’t use the apron as a playing space.
We’re in Appleton, Wisconsin. Last night during load-out in Grand Rapids, MN, a bunch of us were sitting in the green room finishing up paperwork, and I pulled up my venue database, which has many features, including that it automatically pulls up the Wikipedia page of the city in question. We learned many things about Appleton. Apparently in the late 1800s it was kind of a big deal — it had a large paper industry, which spurred development of electricity far ahead of most cities. We also found this interesting because our show takes place in 1912, and has a little throughline about how excited the Capulets are to have electric lights at their party. As I said to the assembled crew in the greenroom, “Appleton’s gaslit streets were replaced with electric lights in the year…” and everyone said, “1912!”
In addition to having been a pretty big deal back in the day, Appleton also has a very new, very fancy theatre, the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center. The theatre seats almost 2,000 and has three balconies, in a horseshoe configuration.
We’ve had some young and eager student crews (I have no idea what has happened to the poor high school kids we kept up till 3AM last night, but their parents must be pissed at us!), but today we have an honest-to-goodness IATSE crew. Sometimes that can be a mixed blessing, because a non-union crew can be used more flexibly, and we can pitch in to do more of the work ourselves if necessary. But at one point today a few of us were standing around watching a group of about six or seven stagehand-looking stagehands (men and women) putting up the walls and platforms of the set, and we remarked to each other how exciting it was to have an IATSE crew. It’s really a completely different energy.
Here’s a picture of our set facing out towards the house.
Last night at some point late in the day, our lighting director, Devon, mentioned that to speed things along, he would like me to call focus. Now, I am well aware that in the “real world” of touring, one of the stage managers generally does so. I have hung out with friends doing focus on the Phantom tour, but I am a bit embarrassed to confess I’d never had to do it myself. So when I was asked, I was rather excited because it’s something I need to get experience doing, so that I don’t make an ass of myself when Broadway calls, now that I supposedly have “touring experience.” Then I realized where we were going today, and I was kind of mortified. I told Devon, “You couldn’t have asked me to call focus with the high school kids? I would have been perfectly confident to do it with a high school or college crew. But I have to do it for the first time with an IATSE crew?”
It actually went really well. We only had one or two guys focusing at once, which was a relatively easy way to get into it. I also had no familiarity with the lighting channels used in our show and what they do, and now that I’ve seen it once, the order in which one would want to focus makes logical sense. We aren’t completely done at this point — we had to skip the lights that need to be focused on the balcony, because it’s not assembled yet.
For once, we don’t have a show tonight — but we do have a 9:30AM show in the morning, so all our work has to be done. It’s good that we have some flexibility because we got here late. The driving time between our load-out last night and this morning’s supposed 8AM load-in was far longer than the time we had. Once load-in is done we will get to check into our hotel and have a shower for the first time in a few days. Then we’ll do the early show and have the rest of the day to spend in Appleton.
For additional reading, I suggest the following of Nick’s blog posts. He has already said pretty much exactly what I would say if I went into detail about our first two venues:
Moorhead, MN
Grand Rapids, MN
I’m about to go to bed for the night. It’s just before midnight and I’ve spent most of the day since load out ended socializing with the crew. This was our first free time together as a group.
We all went out to a local pub here in Fargo for dinner, and then spent hours in the front lounge of the bus getting to know each other. People came and went here and there, but for a long time it really was all seven of us.
Finally one by one people have turned in for the night. A lot of people took naps in the afternoon. I laid down in my bunk with my computer, under the covers and with the lights out, but I was blogging and just web browsing the whole time. Now I’m tired and ready to go to sleep to the soothing sounds and steady pulsing of the generator.
Bart has declared a 2AM departure time, but I think all of us will be asleep by the time he wakes up and comes on board. We have an 8AM load in in Grand Rapids, MN, and a show at 7:30PM, so it will be a long and busy day. What I do know, or what I’ve heard, is that the theatre is in a high school, and it will be our first venue without a loading dock. It will be a little scary to figure out how hard it is to get our set and boxes down the ramp.
We have completed our first tour stop since leaving the Guthrie. We performed Romeo and Juliet at Minnesota State University Moorhead — home of the Dragons, which Nick and I thought was so awesome that we each spent $20 on a cool “Dragons” baseball cap, as well as our customary sticker for the road box.
The crew here was really great, and worked their butts off to get the show ready on time, on a very tight schedule. We had originally been scheduled to play tonight instead of last night, but the venue had to move it up a day, losing us of a day of prep time to work out the kinks of our first load-in (remember, most of our crew was not present for load-in at the Guthrie, during tech, or most of the run, so we were doing it for the first time).
The balcony stairs were assembled just a few minutes before the cast arrived, the cast was constrained to the house and the apron for their warm-up, and we did fight call with a Genie lift and about four electricians hanging set mounts inside the door of the “house” on our set. They were placing floor-mounted pars in the wings while the house was open, and Nick was following them around with white gaff tape, marking all the lights and cable for the cast. Because the balcony was finished so late, we didn’t have time to install the decorative lightbulbs that go on the stairs, and figure into the setting of the story at the time of the dawn of electricity. There are three specific moments in the show that reference the lightbulbs, and I called Corey (our staff director) when it became apparent that we definitely wouldn’t have time. Their absence was covered very well, and nobody would have known something was missing.
There wasn’t any time to double-check things the way we normally would, so there were some surprises. A few programming differences popped up in the transition between the Guthrie’s light and sound consoles/computers to our own, and my comm went haywire twice early in the show, before we tracked down the bad cable. We were minutes without comm, but the proximity of the booth and front of house positions, and where in the show it happened, were in our favor, and we didn’t miss any cues.
We loaded out this morning instead of last night, which is rather unusual. That also took an abnormally long time, partly because we had a student crew who had to work around their classes, and partially because we’re working on our truck pack, and were moving slowly to make sure we were making the best choices. We still have room for improvement, but we did a good job, I think. The truck is definitely full, although we have quite a few excess road boxes that are going away when we return to New York.
My job for load out officially was to stand around with a notepad and document the truck pack. In addition to this, I did some labor myself. The highlight of the doing-things-that-aren’t-my-job day was getting to run the hydraulic lift that brings things from ground level up to truck level. The vast majority of the time, I was on the truck, but I did get to run the lift once up and down, just because I wanted to. My proudest moment of the day came when I was successfully the Person Who Can Cram Into a Small Space. We were storing our stair pieces overhead and needed to strap them around the load bars, but had already packed the balcony and stair landing underneath them before we decided to do that. Nick was looking hopelessly at the spot on the wall of the truck where we needed to attach the strap, but I felt I might able to climb up and reach it. I don’t always feel very small or very light, but in this case I was small and light enough.
We have checked out of our hotel in Fargo, and are hanging out on the bus until 2AM when Bart will wake up and drive us to Grand Rapids, MN for our next show tomorrow night. Some people are napping, some playing/working on the computer, and some chatting in the front lounge. I think there are plans for dinner, which would be our first dinner as a crew. Right now I’m going to get out of my bunk and snack on some Goldfish and/or jerky until dinner time.
This morning was our first load-in. We finished load-out from the Guthrie around 2:30am, and after saying goodbye to our local crew, were on the road and in bed by around 3:30.
At around 7:45am I was greeted by a voice outside the curtain of my bunk saying, “Good morning! Happy first load-in! It’s one degree outside!”
In some sort of tour-booking cruelty, after two months in Minneapolis we’re going north, to Moorhead, MN. It’s right next to Fargo, if that helps you place it on the scale of places-you-know-are-generally-cold-in-February.
It is indeed cold, but not as windy as Minneapolis tends to be. The entire surface of the ground is covered in about a half-inch sheet of ice, and it’s been snowing all day. To add to this, our bus could not park near the theatre, so it’s either a long walk or a short drive away. Nick and I searched for it for an hour, missing it by just a few yards at one point, but we did get to see the four corners of the campus of the University of Minnesota at Moorhead while looking. That was hours ago, and my feet are still frozen.
We’ve been working on our signage today, and once we leave the bus, we’ll be hanging it up, and then getting ready for the arrival of the cast. The crew here seems great — very eager and friendly, so I think it will be a fun show.
I already miss our Guthrie friends a lot, but I’m also excited to see who we’ll meet in all our other cities.
Nick and I have another video blog for you — this time a tour of our bus. This is where we live, with our TD, lighting, props, sound and wardrobe supervisors, and of course our one-and-only bus driver, Bart.
We shot this video the day the bus arrived, after having only spent a few minutes checking it out, so you can see us figuring it out for the first time too. Most of Pioneer Coach’s buses have a similar layout, but each bus is a little bit different, so finding how light switches, coolers, appliances, thermostat controls, etc. work takes a little exploration.
The day has come — after spending our entire process here, since Dec. 1, it’s time for us to leave the Guthrie and go out into the wide world.
It’s been even more fun for me to be here for the second time. I didn’t have to spend as much time figuring out what I need to do, and who I need to talk to in all the many departments that keep this place running. Also, being on one of the mainstages was a change, and brought a lot of new experiences we didn’t have last year.
I’ve seen many cool pictures of the Guthrie, as there are many cool things to take pictures of, but this is my absolute favorite, that I found on Flickr (click to visit the photographer’s page).
There’s so much I could say about this place, I wouldn’t really know where to start or end. If you’ve been reading through my “On the Road Again” posts from this year or last year, I’ve said a lot of it along the way. What stick with me most of all are three things:
1. The kind, talented, and fun people who work here and care deeply about the work that is put on here
2. The blessing of having a facility like this to work in, that’s thoughtfully designed to assist in production, but also inspires the creative process with its beautiful architecture and sunlit spaces.
3. The intelligence, sophistication and generosity of Minneapolis audiences. The pride that the people here take in their many theatres is really amazing, and it has always been a pleasure to give performances and talkbacks here.
I’m very grateful to have been able to work here twice, and I hope to be back again soon!
And now, placing tongue in cheek a bit, I have devised a graphic that captures what the experience of working here has been like for Nick and I, who spend most of our time in the ragtag world of New York Off-Off- and lesser Off-Broadway theatre, where if you have internet and enough room to tape out your set in the rehearsal room, you’re living like a king.
Working in a regional theatre that operates year-round with the same staff has been a bit of a culture shock, because everything is so specifically organized and every little thing happens exactly the same way on every show, so everyone knows what to expect. We’ve come in like a very small bull in a very large China shop, and especially this year with our previous experience, we’ve been working hard to knock over as little as possible while fitting our process into the way things are done here.
Whenever I talk about the Guthrie, being a geek, it tends to come out in Star Trek metaphors. Last year I was fond of saying that I wouldn’t be surprised if one day the Guthrie lifted off from the bank of the Mississippi into space, as a fully self-sufficient traveling intergalactic theatre platform.
The more specific Star Trek metaphor that I often find myself using is the Borg — in the most loving possible way something can resemble the Borg — mostly because of the system of paperwork that has to be done with certain forms, and only on Guthrie-supplied computers. If you are to do a show here, you will be assimilated. Nick and I didn’t have to get any implants, thankfully we had a Guthrie Intern Interface which handled most of the translation for us. But I think especially this year we’ve learned to become one mind with the Guthrie Collective, and I hope our hosts have not found us to be too disruptive to the normal routine here.
And so, I have created this image in honor of our assimilation:
For anyone who has worked here it will be self-explanatory, but the flashing thing is the ubiquitous door lock that prevents access from pretty much everywhere to anywhere else, unless you have your magical Guthrie badge on you.
Attention stage managers:
I have decided this weekend it’s not advisable to eat Animal Crackers while calling a show. They seem to have some kind of throat-coating qualities that make me have to clear my throat a lot. So beware.
My favorite thing to snack on while calling a show is Smarties candies — because if you want to savor them, you can suck on them, but if you suddenly have a cue coming up you can easily chew them and have them gone quickly. It’s also interesting to eat them if your light is very dim or gelled blue, because it can be hard to see what color you’re putting in your mouth, so it’s always a surprise.
This is my post where I talk about the one-hour condensed version of Romeo and Juliet that we’ve been rehearsing in between performances of the full R&J, which is designed for younger student audiences (roughly 5th and 6th grade), schools that for some reason can’t come to see the Big Show, or to be performed in places where the Big Show can’t go.
The beauty of the show is that it can scale down to the tiniest venue imaginable. The only requirements are some floorspace (even a regular classroom would work) and 16 chairs (3 of which have no arms and can be stood on), which are provided by the venue.
The actors wear street clothes, and the only props are carried around in a small trunk under the actors’ bus.
The reason the trunk is on the actors’ bus, as opposed to say, on the truck, is that one of the tricks the 1-hour does is to be able to perform in a city the day after the Big Show performs. When the Big Show comes down, the set is immediately struck, and within a few hours of the end of the show, everything is packed up and the truck and the crew drive through the night to the next venue, where the load-in starts at 8AM, for another show that night.
Meanwhile, the cast wakes up the next morning in the same place they went to bed, and boards their bus to head to a school, or sometimes the same venue from the night before, only now on a bare stage. The 1-hour can be performed without any support from the Big Show — all the props are different or duplicates of the show props, and in our case this year, the only sound support will come from a boom box with a CD in it.
There’s only one tricky fact, which leads to the part of the 1-hour that most affects me: if the crew already has the set halfway up, hundreds of miles away, by the time the 1-hour starts, how to stage manage it?
The solution The Acting Company uses in these cases is that the ASM stays behind in a hotel and travels with the cast to the 1-hour performance, and then rides on the cast bus to the next venue, while the PSM loads out with the crew as normal, and advances the Big Show. This is necessary because sometimes immediate decisions need to be made based on the situation found at the venue, which might impact everything from where the set is placed to what spaces should be set up as dressing rooms. The PSM is the person who has to be available when the call comes over the radio, “I need you to come look at something…”
When I took over as PSM last season, I was given very little instruction on how the 1-hour worked. The above situation was explained to me, in the sense that the ASM needs to be able to do the 1-hour self-sufficiently. Now my personal philosophy of management is that if you’re going to make someone responsible for something, you have to also give them authority over that thing (i.e. if the ASM is dealing with props, they are in charge of props, and I won’t do a thing that involves props without clearing it with them.)
So in the spirit of The Acting Company, and its mission to bring professional theatre to new audiences, while also giving young theatre professionals a chance to work on their skills, I took the approach that the ASM should essentially be the PSM of the 1-hour show. I don’t know if this is exactly how it was done before, but in my mind it makes a lot of sense.
Contractually I’m the PSM of all 3 shows we’re touring with, and I’m responsible for the operation of the tour in general, so I can’t entirely check out when it comes to the 1-hour. I could step in if something truly ill-advised was happening, but I’ve never had to do so, and I doubt I ever will.
When we started 1-hour Henry last year, I told Nick he was in charge and could organize things as he saw fit, and in cases where I was around, he could use me as his assistant. It’s nice for me, because I get to switch gears once in a while, and it’s good for Nick because he gets to do the tasks and making the decisions that a PSM gets to make. Some may be big or small, but I think the concept is pretty brilliant. What ASM doesn’t hate something about their PSM’s show report or other paperwork? — or maybe while assisting, thinks of something new and has to wait for their next job as a PSM to get to try it out. So the 1-hour is like a sandbox for the ASM to do things their way.
It’s also good for me, because I don’t assist that much, and when I do it can take time for me to start seeing things the right way. Until I get my head around which job I’m doing, my brain doesn’t naturally react to situations in the way most helpful for an ASM or PA. When a director asks for a prop to be used in a scene, for instance, my instinct is to take a note first, rather than to hop up and get the prop. To have to switch between the two from day-to-day or hour-to-hour within the same job is an interesting exercise.
It’s also been funny these past couple weeks because we’ve been rehearsing every day around our performances, but alternating from day-to-day between Alice and 1-hr R&J. We’re in the same room, we don’t even bother to switch seats because Nick, Ashley and I have had “our” spots at the desk for months now, and there really aren’t many clues as to who’s supposed to be in charge each day.
The other day in 1-hour rehearsal, we were sitting at our desk on a break, and Nick said, “We’re back,” and while finishing up what I was doing, I said, “Thank you.” Then I got up out of my chair, and while crossing to close the door, said, “I mean, yes sir!”
Nick gave me “the look,” and I explained that whether he heard the difference or not, my “thank you” was the PSM thanking the ASM for pointing out the time, not the ASM responding to the PSM’s declaration that the break was over, and I was trying to get myself out of that frame of mind.
I think I was successful because the following day at Alice rehearsal, I was repeatedly disappointed to realize that I was in charge!
For the opposite perspective on the 1-hour, you must read
No, seriously, you must. Click on it now. If your browser isn’t total crap, ctl-click on that link (on a PC) or cmd-click (on a Mac) to open it in a new tab, and as soon as you’re done with this, read it. It’s a really good post.
So good, in fact, it got a special entry in the Guthrie’s Big Blue Blog. I might have felt a little left out, were it not for the fact that Nick and I had already had a conversation in which I said it was such a great post that I was just going to add a little bit and then put a giant link saying, “Read this!” Well as it turns out, I had a little more to say about it than I thought. But still, read Nick’s post. He covers some other stuff, as well as the whole PSM/ASM dynamic from the other perspective.
Okay, go now.
