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January 29, 2010

Final Guthrie Week

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:57 am

This week I transitioned to calling the show off my new script, with the cues color-coded and typed into the script. I had the script done since previews, but mostly due to running out of paper, and our hole punch getting temporarily lost, I hadn’t had a chance to finish it until this week. It’s always scary to call from a different script, but it’s actually very easy to read. Right away it actually felt more comfortable than the script I’ve been calling from for weeks, which is pretty amazing.

At the same time, I called my first performance with the video monitor turned off. Since tech I’ve used the infrared view for five cues that occur in blackouts or near-blackouts. Knowing that I won’t have that luxury on the road, I have spent the whole run here studying what happens in the dark, looking for ways to call the cues that are reliable and can be done without seeing in the dark. As the cast is now comfortable with their blocking, they are reaching their positions in plenty of time, and it has been very consistent for weeks.

All last week, I had the monitor on, and would close my eyes until right before I called the cue, at which point I would glance at the monitor to check that it was OK. Now I have completely weaned myself off of it. At the end of the first act I will have our prop supervisor giving me a “clear” stage right to make sure that Tybalt has made it offstage before the lights come up. Today for the first time, our local crew member Craig gave me the clear so we could get used to it, though it has been very easy for me to do without it here. However, at other venues where the distance to get offstage may be longer, or the actor may not be as sure of where he’s going, it will be a good idea to get a clear.

Today was our last student matinee — here, at least. We have many more on the road, some of which are our one-hour version of the show.

Today before the show Nick and I were hanging out by the production link, which is the giant hall/bridge area that connects the scene shop across the street with the two mainstage theatres here. The Scottish Play is in the middle of their tech, and we were getting an update on their progress from Trevor. As usual the subject turned to how awesome their set is, and I was saying that I had seen it on their model, and on the video monitors in the green room. Trevor asked if I had time for a tour, and he showed me all of the cool stuff they have, while the crew did their morning notes. Amazingly, in four months working here, I had never actually had the opportunity to set foot in the thrust theatre, though I’ve seen many pictures of it. It was really cool to finally get to see it. From the stage it feels incredibly intimate, although it’s actually much bigger than our theatre. I wish I could see a production in it, but I can see already why its design is so much talked about.

Tonight was our last day of rehearsal for our Alice in Wonderland reading tomorrow morning, and we ran through the show and finished early. Our Artistic Director and Associate Artistic Director, Margot and Ian, just arrived in town for the reading, and treated the cast to drinks to celebrate the end of our long rehearsal weeks.

Between all of these events, I think we all feel the pull of the road growing stronger than the inertia of our long stay here. Every day there are more signs that our time is coming soon. Our crew is here and trailing their local counterparts, tomorrow we get our company manager, we’re almost done with rehearsals (for now), our touring light board and sound package have been delivered. Everyone is packing, sending boxes home, and cleaning their apartments. Very soon our truck and buses will be here.


January 26, 2010

Happy 22nd Anniversary, Phantom!

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:13 pm

Tonight is the 22nd anniversary of the Broadway opening of Phantom. And for the second year in a row, I’m stuck in Minneapolis while it’s being celebrated. Until last year I had been to every anniversary party since the 8th year.

There are lots of exciting things going on in my life and career right now, but Phantom has been the greatest constant in my life — I have worked there longer than I’ve known any of my friends, longer than I have lived in any home. So while I’m having a great time here, this one particular day of the year is the day when I feel like I should be at the Majestic to connect with something that has been so much a part of my life, and to share in celebrating its success with the people past and present who I have experienced it with.

I have a couple friends texting me from the party at the “Travelator Bar and Grill,” which is the traditional name for a party on stage, with the travelator bridge brought down to waist height, with the railings folded down, which makes for a handy automated buffet table. I had made a habit of taking blurry camera-phone pictures of the cake every year for the last few years, and I was just sent a picture of tonight’s (albeit half-eaten) cake:

Also, in my reflections on this historic event while I was in the shower this morning (where all great reflections come from), I did some math and realized that this coming June will mark my 15th year with the show, and surely that deserves some kind of huge retrospective on this site. As many of the photos of my early years are in non-digital format, this will require digging around for pictures and memorabilia during the relatively narrow windows when I’m at home. Preparations must begin soon. The real celebration I’ve been aware of for probably more than a decade will be the following year, when I will have worked on the show for half my life. I remember doing the math on that many years ago, and wondering if it was possible that the show could run that long. I’m not in the slightest bit concerned now. Who would have ever thought?

Anyway, a very happy anniversary to all my friends, and all members of the Phantom Phamily, past and present, and those who are no longer with us, who have been such a source of support and inspiration to me throughout my life.


R&J Cast Interviews

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:34 am

The Guthrie recently posted this video blog of our cast being interviewed by Matt Amendt, who was our Henry last year, about their expectations of life on the road. It was filmed about three weeks ago, when we were in tech, and Matt was in town and came to hang out with us at the tech dinner.


January 25, 2010

Treasure!

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:39 am

Last night was road box spring cleaning day for Nick and I. We load out in exactly a week. We had put off doing an inventory of our first aid kits for almost two months, and finally on the last day it was practical to do so, we brought all the first aid boxes to the green room between shows and made a shopping list.

After that we threw out all the paperwork from last year that’s no longer useful (well I saved the calling script for the original, never-performed version of The Spy for my personal collection).

At some point before our time, there were two inflatable mattresses and pumps in the box. Last year one of them was no good, and didn’t have a working pump anyway, so we decided it was time to let it go. It had been kept rolled up in our valuables cabinet, which is a little cube-shaped cubby that can be separately padlocked to secure the actors’ valuables.

When the time came, we inspected the mattress to make sure it was the bad one, Nick encouraged me to get it the hell out of our lives, and I bent down and began trying to yank it out, while Nick went back to his ASM station to work on something else. The mattress was caught on something, and after much pulling and tugging, it began to unroll. What happened next was amazing.

The mattress unrolled and wrapped up in it, perfectly preserved like a long-forgotten buried treasure, was a giant unopened bottle of Ketel One vodka! I called out, “Nick! Nick! It’s treasure! Treasure!!”

I held up the bottle and he picked it up and cradled it in his arms and we both ran out to the upstage hallway to share our discovery with our deck crew, and to tell the rich history of this bottle of vodka.

The Leektini

Any understanding of this bottle’s origins begins with the leektini. When we were touring Henry V last year, we had a fresh leek in every performance, that had to be beaten over an actor’s head and then eaten. The leeks were purchased by our prop supervisor at any supermarket we could find in our travels, and lived in the fridge in the crew bus. Some people were particularly offended by the smell of the leek in our fridge. Having leeks in our lives every day for six months made them so pervasive in our consciousness that we began thinking strange things about leeks.

One of my favorite drinks is the appletini, and I’m not ashamed of it. The frequent sight of an appletini in my hand led the crew to speculate if one could make a leektini. We decided it would probably be absolutely disgusting, but it should be tried. There was also simultaneously a plan we had been discussing for a while to play a practical joke on the cast towards the end of the tour. We called it the “leeky bunk” — to leave one of the discarded leeks in somebody’s bunk so it would stink.

Eventually the two ideas combined, and instead of stinking up someone’s bunk, we decided that at one of the last venues, during the show some of the crew would sneak onto the cast bus, and make leektinis, which would be waiting for the actors when the show was over.

In order to accomplish this we needed copious amounts of vodka, among other things. When we were in Philly on a day off, we visited a liquor store, almost exclusively for the purpose of gathering supplies for the leektinis. One of the things we bought was the giant bottle of Ketel One. We then put it in the stage management road box until the appropriate time could be found to pull off our plan.

In the last week of the tour, one of the venues we visited was a high school. Realizing we had a giant bottle of vodka in our road box, in a high school, we wrapped it up in the inflatable mattress and put it in the valuables box where it would be cushioned and hidden until we found an appropriate place to use it. Things got complicated in the last couple cities, and the situation wasn’t conducive to pulling off the caper, and somehow we forgot about the bottle.

Until today, of course. Here Nick shows off our prize. I don’t know what we’re going to do with it, exactly, but I’m sure it will be mixed with something more appetizing than a leek!


Minneapolis Winds Down

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:39 am

Tomorrow is our last day off in Minneapolis. It’s the last “normal” day off we’re going to have for a long time, as in a day off in a city you know something about, where you have an apartment and something resembling a normal existence.

Nick and I are going in the grocery run, but we don’t need groceries. We need some personal items, and a long list of supplies for the road box. Tonight between shows we did inventory of our first aid kits. We have five of them (stage left, stage right, miscellaneous, “lady products”, and a basic kit that stays on the crew bus). So a lot of our shopping is for restocking the medical supplies.

I have some other loose ends to tie up myself. I’m shipping some stuff home that I don’t need anymore, as well as more Caribou Coffee that my parents and my aunt really liked when I sent them some for Christmas.

I also plan to do as much laundry as possible to take advantage of the free and accessible laundry here. A few nights ago I cleaned up the apartment a little to make it easier to pack, and moved my suitcase from the bottom of the bedroom closet to the couch in the living room, ready to receive items. I now have some clean clothes I know I won’t wear again that are piled next to it.

Looking Back

It’s hard to believe our time here is coming to an end. I remember very well when Nick and I arrived, before there was any snow on the ground, and our show was just a script, a model and some renderings. Now it’s on stage eight shows a week, and has already been seen by 10,669 people as of today. We’ve achieved the main task we had here — to go from nothing to a finished show, and now it’s time for us to move on and take it to other audiences.

It’s impossible to say what the next year will bring, but at this point it seems probable to me that I’ll be back in about 10 months, so while I’ll miss everybody here, I’m not leaving with the feeling that I’ll never be back again. There are people here who are some of my favorite collaborators in my career, and who I consider friends. But it’s also the nature of the business anywhere that we work usually with strangers, and form very strong bonds over a short period of time, and then we move on, and may or may not have the opportunity to cross paths again. It was great to return here this year to a number of people I already knew, and I hope this won’t be the last time.

Looking forward

Nick and I have been talking on Facebook with Bart. He’s on his way here, and will arrive on the 31st, which is the day we leave. I can’t wait to move into our rolling home. This tour has a lot of 1-nighters, so the bus will be even more of a home than it was last year.

Most of our crew (who we haven’t met) arrive on Tuesday and will be at work on Wednesday, learning the show for the first time. By Friday everyone will be in town, and we’ll have dinner as a group (probably Saturday) to get to know each other and discuss how we’re going to run things on the road.

I’ve been talking over email with our TD, Bobby (who I haven’t met yet), and our lighting supervisor, Devon (who was here for tech), forming a plan of attack for an upcoming venue with tricky dimensions. Discussing what pipe the first electric will be on in some theatre four cities from now has brought the reality that the tour is starting to my attention. It’s a really exciting time. Every time I walk past the theatre where I can see the parking lot by the loading dock, I look for our truck and buses, even though I know they won’t be showing up for close to a week. It doesn’t matter, every time I turn the corner I wish they were sitting there. It’s the beginning of the feeling I find so fascinating about touring — at once being sad to leave a place that’s been great, but burning with a desire to keep moving and seeing what’s next.


January 23, 2010

Best Prop Note Ever – With Video

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:04 pm

Tonight Nick was checking the prop preset and found something amazing: a wonderfully humorous way to remind actors not to take props back to their dressing rooms instead of returning them to the prop table.

Nick and I report from the scene:

Spoilers:

The object in question was a kazoo, which an actor had taken to his dressing room in his costume pocket. Around the kazoo was attached a note: “Return to prop table! Or face the wrath of the fearsome Kazoo Beast!”

Artist’s rendering of Kazoo Beast:

Backstory

In the background at the end of the video you can hear some offscreen noise. This could have been edited out, but was left in, because Nick and I find it as funny as the Kazoo Monster. So here’s the story:

Last year we did this play called The Spy, which contained a scene in which the American revolutionary Captain Lawson confronts the British officer Colonel Welmere. He says, “Why is it, Colonel, that I don’t trust you at this moment?” right before getting stabbed by the Skinner who was supposed to be helping him, as seen here in this production photo:

Of course this scene was run at fight call every night before the show, starting from the line before the violence. Since Wellmere was not actually involved in the violence, he didn’t need to be there, and Andy, who played Captain Lawson, would have no one to talk to. So somehow it came about that I would stand in for Wellmere so Andy didn’t have to talk to the air. Thus at fight call, the line became, “Why is it, Karen, that I don’t trust you at this moment?” before Chris Thorn, who played the Skinner, would stab him.

At one of our last performances of The Spy, our wardrobe supervisor hatched a plot to dress me up in Colonel Wellmere’s costume as a surprise for Andy at fight call. Here’s a photo of that incident:

So anyway, back to the present. In our show there’s a moment where Tybalt leaps off the stairs from the balcony, does some fancy cane-twirling and says “Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death.” After fight call is over, just before we open the house, Isaac practices the jump and the cane-spinning. Since I’m milling about the stage trying to open the house, I’m usually in his way, so I’ve taken to placing myself where Benvolio stands, so I’m doing something useful rather than just being in his way. Chris Thorn is in the company again this year, and after witnessing this one night, said “Why is it, Karen–” and we all had a good laugh remembering the fun we had with that last year.

So tonight while we were filming this little video, Chris wandered out onto the empty stage and exclaimed to no one in particular, “Karen–? Why is it, Karen…?” and it happened to get captured on the video, which Nick and I thought was hysterical. So we left it in.


Our Scottish Neighbors

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:38 pm

Today is an exciting day for us here in the McGuire Proscenium. Over on the Thrust stage, our new neighbors have finally moved in. They’re doing two days of spacing onstage prior to tech for The Scottish Play (I will not blog the title during intermission of a performance!).

Our stage management counterparts are running around (all of us equally clueless as to where tissues come from, without our trusty intern around!) I was starving at intermission, so I went to the greenroom for some M&Ms, where I found the kids from the show being entertained by their child supervisors (which is a fancy name for “wrangler”), including Ashley, who was engaging some youngsters in a game of Monopoly, while all watched the progress of the rehearsal on one of the monitors. The set looks really cool, and apparently there’s a great battle scene at the top of the show. I wanted to stay and watch, but there were 400-something people across the hall who might have been disappointed if I had not returned.

I have never seen a production of The Scottish Play, and I’m rather disappointed to be here in such a respected theatre, with one occurring just a few dozen feet away, and to be unable to see it.

Anyway, it’s nice to have more people among us here. One of the things I was looking forward to when returning this year was to be part of the hustle and bustle I saw from afar, when we were up in the studio theatre and there were two shows running on the main stages. As it turned out, there are fewer shows in production right now, so we’ve been alone most of the time, both in the rehearsal area, and backstage. It’s been kind of fun that we’ve had the run of the place most of the time, but it will also be fun to have company.


Small Wonderful iPhone Moment

I call this: phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 9:03 am

This afternoon during rehearsal I got an email from Hunter, who runs the accessibility program that provides a variety of ways for audiences with disabilities to experience Guthrie shows. He wanted to get a transcript of our preshow and intermission announcements so they could be added to the captions for our performance tomorrow night.

I had an older version of the preshow announcement, but they both had been somewhat improvised when they were recorded, so I didn’t have anything with the exact wording of the current announcement.

During the preshow sound check I asked our engineer, Jake, to play both announcements for me while I used the voice recorder on my iPhone to record it, so I could later write it out for Hunter. It so happens, as I was doing so, Hunter came into the house to prepare for the sign language interpreters we had tonight. He saw what I was doing, and said that if I just sent him the audio file he could handle it. So right there, with a couple clicks, I emailed the file to him, and was done.

It’s not the most exciting thing ever, but it was just one of those really simple cases where something can be handled so much more elegantly than ever before with modern technology.


5-Show Weekend

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:53 am

Now we enter the heart of a 5-show weekend. That term can make any theatre person cower. But for us, I think a lot of us are looking forward to it, because it means we don’t have rehearsal for a few days, and can focus on one show for a while. It’s still a long day, maybe longer, but it feels more straightforward.

After the whole week of early matinees and late rehearsals, we switched it around today and rehearsed for 5 hours during the day and then had a show at night. We also got our swine flu shots, courtesy of the Guthrie, prior to rehearsal. We had our regular flu shots in New York, way back in October, before our contracts began, but the H1N1 shots were not available until now. I’m glad we were able to get them before heading out on the road.

The weather has been unseasonably warm here for the last couple weeks. Tonight after the show it was actually raining a bit! But the downside of that was that the entire city is covered in a slick sheet of ice.

Tonight Nick and I had drinks after the show with Ashley and our intern from last year, Meaghan, who just arrived to visit for a few days. It was great to see her again and catch up. As we left the bar, Nick showed me the back way back to our apartments, which winds through alleys in the industrial neighborhood we’re in. I’d say we live about 5 blocks from the bar. It took us 15 minutes of skating, shuffling, and carefully choosing our path over the ice to make it home — and we didn’t fall once!


January 21, 2010

Morning Matinees

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:47 pm

This morning was the last of our 3 consecutive 10:30AM student matinees this week. Some people might look at that and think that after getting over our morning sluggishness, we must be enjoying our evenings off at least. Well no. We have been back in the rehearsal room, working on the 2nd and 3rd of the shows we are doing this year: Alice in Wonderland, and the 1-Hour Romeo and Juliet, which will be performed for student audience that are too young, or for whatever reason are not going to see the full-size show.

After our early shows we have a lunch break, and then 5 hours of rehearsal, until 8PM. So we’re certainly not resting on our laurels despite the fact that the theatre is dark in the evenings.

As for the morning shows, it’s been very hard to get up in the morning. A morning matinee is very hard to prepare for if you haven’t done one in a while. I was thinking this morning that I have no idea how I’m going to deal with 7:30AM bus calls and 8:00 load-ins when I can’t handle a 10:30 matinee.

It’s definitely an acquired skill. The one good thing is that when we have the bus, it’s easier to get out of bed when our beds come with us. If we have some free time during the day, it’s usually just a few steps outside the stage door, where we can take a nap in our own beds, so that makes it easier to get up.

We’ve been working on Alice for two days, then spent today on the 1-hour for the first time. Tomorrow at noon we have more Alice, and 30 new pages of revisions based on exploration we did earlier this week, which just landed in my inbox as I got home. In the evening we have a regular performance of R&J, which everyone is very curious to see the effect of, now that we’ve gotten accustomed to this strange routine of performing in the morning and rehearsing in the evening.


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