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May 23, 2009

End of Tour

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 12:33 pm

Well the end of the tour has come. I’m sorry I didn’t have any posting to do during the 6 days of our final leg. Our internet problems continued and worsened, to the point that there really wasn’t any convenient time to sit and relax with internet access that might have lent itself to blogging. On top of that, there wasn’t really anything spectacular to blog about. It was kind of same-old-same-old. We came, we saw, we did shows. We finally got to perform The Spy a bit, between the end of the New York run and the final leg, we actually did more Spy than Henry. It finally started to evolve into something as natural as it had been when we rehearsed it in New York way back in November/December. It was kind of sad to see it finally coming together too late, and to get a hint of the potential it might have had if not for all the misfortunes that befell it (and the fact that most of America’s presenters apparently had no interest in booking it).

Overall the tour turned out pretty well after its rough start. There’s a lot I think we can do better next year if we build on what we learned this year, and I hope to be a part of that. Romeo and Juliet and a workshop of a new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland are on the agenda for next season.

I think this concludes the Tour Mini-Blog, I hope you had fun reading of my adventures this season. I’d like to give one final plug to my Flickr photostream, over yonder on the right sidebar. It contains almost daily photos from life on the road, along with some pretty detailed descriptions, and it covers some aspects of the tour I didn’t blog about (and certainly was too lazy to post photos of in the blog).


May 10, 2009

My Week “Off”

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:11 pm

I feel like I hit a milestone in my career this weekend. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to call a show in performance without any rehearsal, based on having called a different production of the same show.  

Last summer you may recall I was PSM for a production of No, No Nanette starring Donna McKechnie. If not you can read about it in the August 2008 archives. Anyway this week we are laid off from The Acting Company, and my friend Brian is PSM for a production of Nanette for Amas, who in addition to producing Off-Broadway, also run a program for high school kids where they get to learn about theatre and at the end of the school year put on a full-length musical with a creative team and tech staff of working professionals. I have worked with Amas a lot, and worked as ASM on one of these shows a few years back.  So due to having the week off, I decided to support my friends and see what the kids were doing with Nanette.

Brian’s assistant couldn’t make a few hours of tech on Thursday, so I agreed to stop by to be a warm stage managerial body, and then stayed to watch the final dress. Which is a good thing. After the run, Brian found out the next night his other show, which his sub would be calling for the first time, would be welcoming the Times critic.  How could Brian call the show for the Times when he was supposed to be calling opening night of Nanette at the same time?  Unless of course there was someone who already had a working knowledge of calling Nanette and preferably had at least seen this production. The next morning at 9AM I got the confirmation that they wanted me to call. I finished reading through the script about ten minutes prior to the show, then listened to a couple bits of the original cast recording to remind myself of a couple bumps I didn’t remember and the end of the overture.

The show went fine and I didn’t have any major regrets upon actually seeing what the cues do. I came upon a couple funny situations due to the fact that the show was slightly cut down.  I had a restore cue and wasn’t sure if the tag at the end of the number was kept or if they would go straight on.  So I took the cue to be safe, and sure enough they did the tag.  A few bars before the end of “Hubby Gone Blues” I couldn’t quite tell from the markings if the entire boys’ section was cut or if the last bit was in, which greatly affected where the final cue went. So I had to ask on headset, “um, strange question, but do the boys come in in this number?” “No.” “Ok, so this is the end right here then.” “Yes.”  It was a fun time.


May 2, 2009

Turning 30

I call this: gaming,random — Posted by KP @ 10:49 am

You know when you’re playing an RPG, where you have to complete some side tasks before moving past a certain point in the game, or not make any mistakes, or else you’ll never be able to achieve the good ending? And once you’ve failed to do that, you might not even be halfway through the game, but from then on you know the best you’re going to get is the generic ending. And maybe you bother playing the rest of the game out, but you’re not really enjoying it, because you screwed it up and no matter what you do you can’t get to the result you want. That’s how I feel about turning 30.


April 29, 2009

Red Flag

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:00 pm

I got an email today forwarded through several people, about a company looking for a stage manager for an upcoming production.  When I got to where it said, “This is a paid position,” like there was any question that it might not be, I stopped.  Of course I wasn’t available for all the dates, and I doubt this gig was Equity-approved anyway.  However…

Being that it’s a paid position, I’m sure it would be a great job for somebody just starting out.  But honestly, nobody deserves to stage manage for free EVER, unless it’s in school, or for charity.  Whenever I see that in a job description it makes me crazy.  The implication that under other circumstances a “professional” company or individual producer might have been looking for a stage manager for no pay is just sad.  Come on, if you’ve got the money to put up a show, however small, you can find $100 to give to the person doing the hardest and most thankless part of it.  I know some people really do need the resume and experience, but I think anybody has the right to refuse to work for free.  In fact it would be nice if enough people did it that producers wouldn’t think to ask.

Sorry, I had to vent about that peeve.  Am I being overly sensitive?


Baruch Revisited

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:27 pm

Late last night we departed Frostburg, MD, and this morning we woke up home-sweet-home on 24th St. and Lex. We said our final goodbyes to Bart, and unloaded all our luggage and other belongings from the bus into a hallway by the loading doors at Baruch College (see photo).

Last night in Frostburg was a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out.  This is something we do every now and then, where the whole crew will wear our Save the Ta-Tas shirts that Daphne got us for opening night in New York.  Like so, in Tucson:

We decided pretty much at the start of this leg that Frostburg would be a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out since it was the last venue before returning to New York.  The interesting advantage of this was that the next morning when we got up in New York, it was easy to tell who had decided to sleep in their clothes, as they were the ones still wearing their Ta-Tas for load in.  I didn’t exactly count, but I’d say it was four or five of us, including me. Speaking of which, we have submitted our photo to savethetatas.com, but it hasn’t been published yet.  I did have a nice email conversation with their customer service lady about our company — she wants to see us when we come to California — and she assured me it would go up “soon.”  That was like a month ago.

Baruch is kind of the most hellacious load-in situation ever. Unloading the truck on the street, followed by a lot of ramps and hallways, to a rather small freight elevator, and then down some more winding and public hallways to the theatre. Apparently it took 5 hours to unload the truck. Sadly for my friends, Nick and I did the stage manager thing and helped unload the road boxes, then broke off with our box and did our jobs and went home. We both felt bad for our friends, but my personal philosophy is that when you’re playing Poplar Bluff, MO and the show must go on, and you need a few more hands, that’s one thing. When opening a show in New York, there’s no reason stage managers should be needed to work as stage hands, without compensation and when their home is just a subway ride away. At any rate, I feel slightly less bad since I also had to come back at night for a late-night cueing session for The Spy. Due to the tightly packed schedule (if performances and film shoots manifested themselves as fish, this week’s would be sardines), there was no other time to do it but late tonight on load-in day, and as this is the New York premiere, we want to try to show it a little more love than it’s been given on our very Henry-heavy touring schedule. At least I had a chance to shower, change, and show up nicely dressed and clean like a normal person. I even have some simple jewelry on.

My first task upon coming back to Baruch at night was to set up our wireless network. As I have reported before in this post from December, Baruch’s theatre is in the third basement of their main building, surrounded by more concrete than any radio wave can get through, so cell service is a complete impossibility, and setting up a router in one room and expecting it to work three rooms down the hall is sketchy. When we teched The Spy here, it took me the better part of three days to get a reliable wireless signal to reach the theatre from the single ethernet cable in the production office. The solution I came up with was to bring in two of my own personal routers — an old UFO-shaped Airport Extreme, and an original Airport Express — and to place the Extreme on top of a filing cabinet in the production office, where the ethernet was, and to plug the Express in in the shop, which is just behind the stage. The signal from the Extreme went just far enough to reach the Express, which then passed it on just far enough to reach the tech tables in the house, but not quite enough for a steady signal in the booth. I may see what I can do about that this time, as I will be spending pretty much all my time in the booth.

This whole day has been deja vu. So many things have changed since we began our journey here, and yet there are other things that are exactly the same. When I came back at night, I found a couple of the tiny Spy columns, which we call “nubblies,” nestled against a diagonal wall, where six months ago another pile of short unused Spy columns sat when it was decided they weren’t needed (or something). This time they will be needed, but because we’re repping Henry and Spy, they are simply waiting there while Henry takes the stage. As soon as I glimpsed the greenroom through an open door I was instantly taken back to our final post-invited-dress notes session, on the eve of beginning the tour, and thought of all the people who were there who are no longer with the company. It’s been kind of a bittersweet return. But with all the drama along the way, the very fact that we are back here and performing both shows is an accomplishment in itself, so we can be proud of that.


Dear Apple

I call this: mac — Posted by KP @ 1:05 pm

Thank you for your recent emails suggesting that I get my mother an iPod Touch for Mother’s Day.  Were it not for your almost daily reminders, I would not actually have been aware that Mother’s Day was approaching, or that I needed to be planning gifts for both my parents (as I’ll be out of town by Father’s Day).  I’ve been quite busy on the road and thinking of days in terms of load ins and load outs, and completely oblivious to weekends, birthdays or national holidays.  Actually I’m turning 30 in a few days, and the most I can tell you about that date is that we have performances of The Spy at 2 and 8, with a seminar prior to the matinee.  So you can see how I greatly appreciate your reminders that I need to get a gift for my mom.

However, while my mother is a Mac user and might have an iPhone except that AT&T sucks at her house, I don’t believe that the iPod Touch is the ideal gift for her.  She’s not much of a music lover — I think she still has yet to spend all of an iTunes gift certificate I got for her several years ago — and I don’t imagine she’d enjoy watching videos or TV shows on such a small screen.  Personally, I don’t see the point of an iPod Touch for anyone who doesn’t intend to use it first as an iPod.  I would like someday to be able to get her an inexpensive Macbook, as she would truly use that, but this would be exceedingly more difficult if I now spent $300 on a gift she won’t really use.  And P.S. Mr. or Ms. Apple Marketing Person, I have a feeling you have a larger and more regular income than I do and can afford to drop $300 on a Mother’s Day gift — and then presumably match that gift a month later when Father’s Day rolls around.  Well good for you.  

In brief, I appreciate that you’re looking out for my mother, and for my own preparedness, but the next time you feel the need to send me 5 or more emails suggesting I buy a specific gift for someone, please pick something more appropriate.  Thanks!
Love, KP


April 24, 2009

My Newfound Love of OmniFocus

I call this: computers,mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 9:40 pm

Among my favorite types of computing applications has always been the organizer/checklist/outline kind of app. Back in my PDA days, the Palm apps Bonsai and ShadowPlan competed for my heart with each new update. When I got a Mac it came with a version of OmniOutliner which I loved a lot, but alas because it was one of those “came-with-the-Mac” things, as soon as I tried to install a new update it broke my fragile registered version, and I was pissed about it and refused to pay for it, so it was gone (I’m currently having that relationship with ComicLife).

The other problem I have with tasks in general is that the default Apple apps have a really stupid way of handling them, or at least stupid to me, growing up with Palm’s big four apps: Datebook, Contacts, To-Dos and Memo. Apple seems to hate to-dos and memos, so much so that after what seems like centuries in technological time, we may soon finally be seeing them sync between iCal, Mail and the iPhone. What, I ask, was the damn point of using them at all until now? First I stopped using tasks, because I could never get them to sync properly between iCal and my Treo. So I just wrote everything as a note. Now as an iPhone user my notes don’t sync with anything (???!!!!WTF??!!), and yet I still write everything as a note. Occasionally I will email that note to myself if I really need it in another format.

So of course I looked to the App Store to see what the third party developers had come up with that might serve as a basic tasks app. I honestly wanted a basic tasks app — a list and a bunch of giant checkboxes. I tried, I really did. But at the time the basic apps were either ugly, overpriced, or reported buggy and lacking basic features. Who knows, since there are no free trials. But the one that sounded the best to me was the most complicated of all — OmniFocus. At $20, it’s one of the more expensive apps in the App Store, but that was back in the day when an average game was $10, so it didn’t seem as expensive to me then as it might now when everything else is 99 cents.

Using OmniFocus brought some kind of order to my life. I use it sometimes for shopping lists, generally more of the long-term stuff, not like “what I need to get from Duane Reade in 3 hours,” which is usually a straight list. I write down things I want to work on with my computer, like reinstalling Parallels, which I forgot to do the last time I was home; and things I need to pack for the next leg of the tour, or what I hope to accomplish during my down time on the next load-in day. I also have a special project for fight call, which is really not what OmniFocus is designed to do, but I tried it anyway. With both Henry V and The Spy, we have a rather extensive fight call, running through distinct sections of fight choreography with different actors. There is a standard order which we have developed for that, and especially because we perform The Spy so infrequently, Nick and I needed a way to keep track of that order and make sure we’ve hit all the proper scenes. So I have a project for Fight Call and a sub-project for each show, and inside each are the actions representing each individual fight and the actors needed. I’m not sure exactly what app Nick uses for his list, but he has it on his Blackberry. This allows both of us to open our phones at the top of fight call and Nick runs the current fight while I can let the actors know who is up next and which scene it is, and make sure they have their weapons ready when it’s their turn. This is sort of a recurring checklist rather than a regular list of tasks, and the blending of the two types of lists is kind of weird to me, but I think OmniFocus can be made useful for things like this, or prop checklists, with a little work.

Anyway, I was very happy with my purchase. Of course it’s designed to sync with the desktop version of the app. That is, if you’re willing to pay $80(!!??!!WTF??!!) for it. It’s kind of all or nothing. There’s not a way to say “Gee I’d like to be able to see and edit my OmniFocus file on a desktop machine” without fully committing to using the software to run your life. I’m not sure exactly what happened to me, I think it was a conversation over drinks with a few of my colleagues about organization and task lists that led me to question if the fact that my technology has failed me, and is driving me closer and closer to having to etch my tasks on tablets, might someday result in me screwing something up. I’ve done OK with this seat-of-the-pants way I’ve been running my life and career with the occasional iCal appointment (with or without an alarm) to remind me to do things, or with a plain-text list in my iPhone’s notepad. But really, how far I have fallen since the days when there was a checklist for home and shopping, and work stuff was laid out in fancy outlines with multi-part projects and due dates and things!

So I decided — by way of writing an action in OmniFocus on my iPhone — that when I got a chance I would download the 14-day trial of OmniFocus desktop. I have been using it for about two days, and so far I am hooked. It’s got an even steeper learning curve than the iPhone version, but the larger screen in some ways makes the relationship between the different views and types of data clearer. I’ve also been watching some of the introductory videos on the website. After that, I discovered a great set of video podcasts called ScreenCastsOnline, which do in-depth screencasts of popular Mac apps. I’ve only watched a couple, but they have tons available that I want to see. They also offer podcast subscriptions in HD or iPhone-compatible sizes. I sense this will be a new favorite podcast of mine. You can get the links to either of these feeds on their website.

In all, I’ve been having fun trying to think of every little thing I need to accomplish and entering it into OmniFocus and categorizing it. I think I’ll be much more efficient using the desktop app since the majority of what I need to accomplish either requires me to be at my computer, or in an environment where my computer is out. This way, the iPhone app, which is a little more cumbersome to use due to the fact that it can’t run in the background, is only really needed when I’m out and about. More thoughts to come as this experiment goes on…

UPDATE: there is now an entire page of the site dedicated to OmniFocus tips!


April 23, 2009

My Week in Computing

I call this: computers,mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 10:17 pm

The biggest event of my week was yesterday when we visited the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. As befitting a giant mall, of course there is an Apple Store. I decided to take my chances on a walk-in visit to the Genius Bar to see if anything could be done about my Macbook Pro battery.

A little background, because I don’t bitch about my battery nearly enough for you to have known it was going on: my computer is not quite two years old, and its second battery has withered and died. The first battery lasted pretty much a year exactly, before the battery life got to a point where it was really negating the purpose of having a laptop (somewhere around a half hour). I probably had a case for premature failure, but I just bought a new one, and was happy.

Cut to ten months later. While the battery life on the second one had not become quite so brief (maybe an hour to an hour and a half), the battery was all confused. Diagnostic programs reported the battery health at 40% after 90-something charge cycles, which based on my perusal of the Apple Support forums, is way worse than a lot of people who were able to get their batteries replaced. Worst of all, instead of simply dying quickly, it was misreporting its charge, so that the computer would show it maybe 30% full, and instead of showing a low battery warning or forcing the computer to sleep, it would completely shut off without warning, which is, um, terrible, in so many ways. It had just started doing this before the logic board failure, so when the computer died I thought maybe the battery was not to blame after all, but the problem continued after the repair.

While my computer is sadly without Apple Care, the battery is less than a year old, and thus has its own warranty. It’s clearly indicated on the receipt, which I made sure to have on my iPhone in PDF format before going to the store.

So I walked into the store and was able to get an appointment right away, and within 5 minutes was talking to the genius. He booted my computer from an old iPod nano which had some diagnostic software on it (as I tried to stifle my excitement at this idea of using my old nano as an 8GB flash drive), and after a few seconds, the screen popped up with this big red box with the word “BAD” in it in huge letters (artist’s rendering above). It was really comical. Well that settled that! I showed him the PDF including the warranty date, signed some papers and walked away with a brand new battery. Between the logic board and the battery I feel like I have a brand new Mac.

Right now I’m using my days off to be a good little girl and train the battery properly. It’s probably going to want to be shut down soon — oops, there goes the warning — so bye!


Foooooood

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:16 pm

With my last remaining bits of energy I will attempt to write a post. Tonight we took part in the traditional final crew meal for the Acting Company tour. The tour still has almost a month left to go, but we are losing Bart for the last leg because he’s starting another tour, so we are celebrating now. It has been tradition that at the end of the tour the crew goes out to a ridiculously expensive dinner.

We went to Barclay Prime, a fancy steakhouse in Philly. We’re not playing Philly, we’re just here for 3 days so we could have steak tonight. No, I’m not kidding. We also did a lot of shopping today. Half of us, including me, got new shoes at the Puma store.

All told, we spent over $1,300 on dinner, which lasted for three hours. The food was amazing, and the restaurant and service was very nice. I had the salmon, but also got to try kobe steak for the first time, as well as a madeira, which we ordered because there is a bottle of madeira which is a plot point in The Spy.

As soon as we got back to the bus, I fell into my bunk and have not moved since.


April 18, 2009

The Tour: Leg 3

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:42 pm

This is the leg of the tour that is going to kick all our asses.  It consists almost exclusively of one-nighters, few of them having days between performances.  We were lucky in a sense to lose our scheduled performance in New Brunswick, NJ, as that’s where we’d be right now, rather than enjoying our first day off.

Since I last blogged, we left Nashville at night and awoke on the campus of Mississippi State, where we performed The Spy.  After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke on the campus of Auburn University in Alabama, where we performed Henry.  After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke in the loading dock of the Opera House in Newberry, SC.  As sad as it is, we were fortunate at that point that our set did not fit at Newberry, so very little had to be loaded in or out.  Having not showered in close to four days, it was very nice to have a dedicated load-in day, and a day that ended early at that.  The following day, we had a one-hour Henry performance in the morning, which gave us a chance to try out some of our ideas for staging the Big Henry that night.  Without the set, a lot of our staging actually borrows a bit from the one-hour, such as having many of the entrances that happen on the upper gallery occur in the aisles.  The Opera House is a beautiful little theatre of about 400 seats, built in 1882, and beautifully restored to keep its historic feel.  We all decided it felt almost like a town meeting hall where the Declaration of Independence would have been read — and regretted that we weren’t performing The Spy there.  After the Baby Henry, we had a two-hour rehearsal (yuck — but everyone was in good spirits and ready to bang out a restaged 3-hour show), and we blew through the entire show, mostly a cue-to-cue of the beginnings and ends of scenes, and in less than two hours we were done.   Then we did the Big Henry, an 8:00 show, which everybody usually dreads because it means we don’t get done until 11.  But with the short load-out, we were actually closing the doors of the truck before midnight, and were able to join the cast at a local bar, drink, chat and play some pool together.  It’s a very, very rare thing that our schedules allow us to all socialize in the same place, so it was a fun end to the Newberry experience.

That was last night.  Then we went to bed on the bus in the parking lot of the hotel we had stayed at the night before (which incidentally was only the second night in a real bed we’ve been able to sleep in on this leg), and woke up to the familiar alarm clock of Bart yelling “GET THE F*** UP!!!” at 10AM.  We were in a parking lot at Ashville Airport in North Carolina, where we have decided to spend our day off (had we not lost the gig in New Bruswick, we’d have been rushing to get there instead).  We rented a minivan, which Bart drove like a race car, up the winding roads of the mountains to visit some waterfalls and other sights where the bus would not have easily been able to fit.  After that we checked into a crew room at a Holiday Inn Express, and at night went to eat at a Middle-Eastern restaurant where Joel’s brother used to be the chef.  It was really good.  Tonight the bus departs at 2:30AM, and we’ll wake up in University Park, PA, where we’ll have an honest-to-goodness day off, and then a full load in day at Penn State, followed by a two-show day of Henry.  And as is usually our custom, that two-show day means a 10AM student performance, followed by a 7:30 evening performance.  At least it’s not 8:00.

This week has been pretty rough on us, but we’re all aware that the tour is winding down, and soon we’ll be back performing in New York, and then after that we’re laid off for a week, and then have just one more week of touring the Northeast before we’re done.   I’m sad for the tour to be ending, but I will be very happy to be able to stay put in one place for a while, even if I’ll still be away from home.


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