HOME

September 23, 2007

A Run of Act I

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:41 pm

OK, I swear I’m going to post, and I have some pictures. As you might imagine, things have been busy since we started rehearsals on Frankenstein. We started on Tuesday, and finished our first week today. Towards the end of the day, we were able to run Act I. Well, OK, it was sort of a stumble-through, but definitely more running than stumbling. Considering we just started staging yesterday, it was pretty incredible to see so much of the show take shape.

The rehearsal period is very short, and there is a ton of music in the show. This made the first few rehearsals kind of scary because the cast had to learn the music before we could even do an effective read-through, so at first it was hard to see the bigger picture. Three days of running three simultaneous rehearsals (two rooms of music and one of table work) got us to the point where we could do a read-through (we had already done the meet & greet and design presentations in the preceeding days). Then we did more cleaning up of music before starting staging yesterday. From that point things took off rapidly. Yesterday we staged the first half of Act I and ran it, and today we staged the rest and ran chunks, and then the whole act. It’s amazing how quickly it went from something that happens in chairs around a piano, to a real show with props and some people at least partially off-book. Being on the deck, I see the whole thing backwards, so I don’t really have the same sense of how it plays out front, but I think it moves really well.

Being on the stage has been really helpful for me, as a deck stage manager I like to run things as early as possible like a performance, so I can start visualizing what my track will be like.

Here’s our finished floor:

The basic color scheme I went with is:
yellow = platforms
pink = walls
green = doors or traps
blue = stairs

The pink walls make it very clear how much offstage space there is going to be, which is very helpful for all of us to think about backstage traffic. One thing I’m being a stickler about is getting everyone to use their props, or any kind of substitute. Miming props is bad. It’s way too easy to forget the fact that you’re carrying something when it’s not convenient, or to imagine the item will be smaller or easier to carry. And most invisible props are assumed to have been taken offstage by the Prop Fairy when they are no longer needed — the reality of how something finds its way off gracefully is often something much different, and the sooner those questions can be answered, the better. I can make pretty much anything out of paper and gaff tape if I have to, just to have something that requires the actor to interact with it with specificity similar to the actual object. I also think it helps to get them used to picking up their props as early as possible, so it’s a regular part of their routine in the show, and not an afterthought that can easily be forgotten.

We have been lucky to be rehearsing on our actual stage, but not for long, as load-in begins tomorrow and we move to the smaller theatre upstairs, where I had to concoct a way-too-complicated method of scaling the important parts of our set into the space, varying the scale from 1/2 to 5/6 depending on the importance of the area, and considering vertical and horizontal scale separately. If someone asked “so what size is this relative to the real thing?” the answer would make their head spin, but the overall result looks surprisingly like our set. I’ll try to get a picture of it next week.

And in other news, our company is off to a great start fundraising for Broadway Cares. Today was the annual Broadway Flea Market, which is one of my favorite events, and unfortunately we were in rehearsal all day, so for the first time in about 10 years, I was not able to take my place at the Phantom table, except to help them set up from 8:30AM to 8:45. Things being so busy, there wasn’t much we as the Frankenstein company could do, having only been in rehearsal for a few days. But one thing we did have was a handful of posters that had been given to us by the producers, and some names in our cast whose autographs alone would have value, even though our show has not had a chance to establish a fan base. So yesterday afternoon I went out and bought some silver pens and got one of the posters signed by the cast and director Bill Fennelly.

While we would only have one item to sell, I saw that as an advantage — our angle was that this is the very first autographed Frankenstein poster, and currently the only one in existence. It was numbered “#1” with the date in the corner, and bore a sign advertising it as such. In the capable hands of the Phantom table, the poster sold within a couple hours for two hundred dollars!! I dropped by the table on our lunch break to see how things were going, and was told the good news. On top of that, the money was turned in to the BC/EFA powers that be on behalf of our company, not lumped in with Phantom‘s money. Word had obviously traveled quickly around the market, because by the time I got back to the theatre, Josh and Hunter had both heard from separate sources about the sale. The result was announced to the company on the first break after lunch, and of course everyone was very impressed with how much we’ve raised before even completing a week of rehearsal.

When I announced that we were doing a signed poster, I also mentioned that interested parties should start long-term thinking about a Gypsy of the Year skit. We have a long way to go before December 3-4, and thankfully about a month after we open for planning and rehearsals, but I just wanted to get people open-minded to it so that when a good idea arises it’s recognized for what it is. I was thrilled to discover that within our small cast of 13 we have many people showing great enthusiasm for participating. To my surprise, within a few hours we had a solid outline for the premise. That could all change as things develop and new jokes can be made, but right now we have a solid idea to work on.


September 13, 2007

Preproduction and Software

I call this: computers,mac,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:13 pm

Ooh, great, another one of those posts where I actually cover the full span of what this blog is about — theatre and technology, and how I use them together. We’ve been in meetings all week for Frankenstein, and I’m having a great time. As the ASM, my contract doesn’t start for another day or two, but I’ve been happily attending all the meetings with the PSM, as being in the loop is much more important to me than being paid, and quite frankly I didn’t have a lick of work last week and was bored out of my mind. So sitting in formatting meetings every day has been great fun, as we work through the show with the various design elements.

Monday and Tuesday were focused mostly on the set, with the director, choreographer and set designer, and us two stage managers. Wednesday was our sound day, with our two sound designers and the musical director. This is definitely a show where the sound design will contribute a lot, and I can’t wait to hear more about that. Today and tomorrow are all about projections, which will also be a key part of the show, and then we do lights and everybody together on the weekend.

It’s been very helpful for me to see the show take shape as everyone decides together how things will go. I have been taking notes on everything (using Pages), and have been using the very attractive comments feature to mark events that will likely be cues for me on the deck. See the drawing to the right for a sample page. I’m very happy that we haven’t even started rehearsal and already I’m thinking about what I need to be doing on the deck at any moment, and can look at the groundplan and plot my backstage traffic and ask the designer questions as they come up.

Some of the more artistic stuff is something I’ll probably never need to know as part of my job, but having grown up and gone to college wanting to be a director, I still find it really interesting to be in the room as the basic vision of the show takes shape and is altered through collaboration. The creative team is really great, and the mood in meetings is very positive and fun. It’s definitely one of those moments where I have realized how lucky we are that we get to put on shows for a living. Sure it’s serious business and all our jobs and rent depend on not screwing this up, but it’s got to be more fun than the vast majority of other professions.

A Clean Slate
Since I’ve been back from Reagle and lacking any kind of seriously demanding employment for the first month, I’ve taken this time to experiment with some technological toys that I wouldn’t risk playing around with if I was in the middle of production. Getting confirmation of the Frankenstein job with a couple weeks notice before beginning rehearsal, I have seen this as something of a clean slate to try a few things I’ve been wanting to.

Mail
I think I mentioned in my review of Pages that I see this latest edition of iWork as a possible precursor to me effectively removing Microsoft Office from my life. The big thing holding me back was Entourage, which I much preferred over the combination of Mail, Address Book and iCal. I shouldn’t say I much preferred, just that I stuck with the power of it, despite the vaguely Windows-esque feel of it.

Another part of this decision, less obvious at first, but lurking in the shadows, is the iPhone. I don’t want one now. I want a smartphone, and a phone that can’t open and edit a Word document or spreadsheet, or open an image file in its native resolution, or cut and paste, is not very smart. There is a litany of things Palm devices have been doing for five years that the iPhone can’t do. Third party hacked software has been helping this, but I’m not yet at a level of comfort where the iPhone is something I want. I’m definitely not jumping on the bandwagon until the second version, and I’m not too thrilled about AT&T on top of that. But I see that especially given how embarrassingly Palm has stagnated in recent years, there will be an iPhone in my future. And when that day comes, I’ll want it integrated as nicely as possible into my Mac. And that means using Mail and Address Book and iCal to get the full effect of the Mac experience. So being able to make this transition at a convenient time will save me trouble later, if and when I get an iPhone.

I also have been depending more and more on having access to my e-mail on my Treo. For years I have used SnapperMail, which is a very mature Palm mail client, but the version I own is only for POP mail. I am something of a pack rat, in real life and in my digital life. My goal is to keep every e-mail I ever send and receive in my life (excluding spam and advertisements and the like). Somewhere along the line I lost my earlier mail, but my current archives go back to the end of 2002. For this reason, IMAP mail has always turned me off. The idea of my mail residing on a server and maybe or maybe not being saved to my desktop client scared the hell out of me. But handling POP mail on my Treo while trying to keep complete records on my main computer was somewhat frustrating. I was willing to give IMAP another try, which meant using my .Mac account, which offered a perfect opportunity to give Apple’s Mail app another try.

I have been a member of .Mac for a few years now. I think it’s a bit overpriced and underdeveloped, and their servers are usually slow, but I use it mostly for iDisk storage and the ease of use and integration into OS X. I’m fully capable of doing things the hard way, but for what amounts to $8 a month, I don’t mind having Apple take care of most of it for me. With that of course comes an @mac.com e-mail address, which I have never bothered to use because I was never sure I wanted to keep the service.

E-mail
The next seemingly unrelated event in my life was that my parents moved over the summer, and on the day I returned from Reagle I went to their house and set up their wireless network. In the course of testing it, I noticed they were getting download speeds in the neighborhood of 12mbps. They have Optimum Online, on Long Island. Now I knew I was not getting anything near this from Time Warner/Earthlink. So when I got home I found I was lucky to get about 5mbps. It seems from my research this is the maximum speed of the network that people are reporting in NYC. This did not seem fair to me, and planted the seeds of discontent. However, ditching Earthlink would mean changing my e-mail address. I’m terrified of changing my phone number or e-mail, because I fear that someone I haven’t talked to in five or ten years will suddenly need to get in touch with me and will be unable to. Combine this problem with my interest in switching my e-mail to IMAP, and suddenly a plan was formed: if I used my .Mac account as my primary e-mail I could switch ISPs as often as I need to to get the best service, yet not have to worry about changing my e-mail address. Plus I’d get the cool and easy-to-type @mac.com address, which most importantly has much fewer letters than @earthlink.net.

So it all came together at once and I sent out an e-mail blast to all my friends and former coworkers advising them of the change, and created e-mail aliases for my other three addresses and updated the relevant sites and institutions about the change. And I have been using Mail ever since. The rules are definitely less flexible than Entourage’s, but overall I’m happy with it. Plus, Leopard is coming out in a month or so, and with that an update to Mail which might have some improvements.

On the Palm side, I have switched to Chatter, which is widely regarded as the best IMAP client for Palm OS. The developer has since been hired by Palm, hopefully to design something cool for their next mail client, so development on the current version has pretty much ceased. I’m not thrilled about paying for an app I know is no longer in development, but given the circumstances, I think it’s something I have to do to take advantage of IMAP. I find I’m using my Treo more for responding to e-mail because I’m not worried about it being in sync with my desktop. Just tonight on the train I wrote two e-mails that I normally would have waited until I got home to respond to.

Pages
I’m really getting to like Pages, the only dilemma I have is whether it’s appropriate in situations where I may need to share my work with others using Word. I think I’ve been pretty bold about using it for almost all my Frankenstein documents. I have been placed in charge of creating and maintaining the contact sheet, and today decided to go ahead and do it in Pages. I think first of all it will be much better for my sanity as I work with it, and I think the formatting will come out much cleaner and more legible. We have also decided to distribute it in PDF, which means I don’t have to worry about what Word decides to do with it. I will have a Word version, as some people will need to work on it occasionally, and I will keep an eye on the compatibility to make sure it’s not a disaster, but I hope that I will be able to do it in Pages without embarrassing myself. Anyway, so far Macs outnumber PCs in our production team 6-to-1 by my last count, so I doubt I’ll hear too much bashing.

Numbers
I like the feel of Numbers, but so far in my experience, and from what I’ve been reading, it’s not as sufficient a replacement for Excel as Pages is to Word. I guess this is to be expected, as this is the third version of Pages and only the first for Numbers. There are some things with formulas it can’t do, but for the most part working in show business, and being largely more concerned with the “show” than the “business,” I hardly ever use spreadsheets to crunch numbers. I received Frankenstein‘s prop list in Excel, and have since been editing it in Numbers, as it’s just a list and should export back into Excel easily enough if necessary.

iCal
I’m just going to come out and say I love iCal. I always have. I have always preferred iCal to Entourage’s calendar, it was just all the other baggage involved in switching away from Entourage that kept me from it. But now I get to use it every day.

My real work on Frankenstein began last Sunday when I got together with my PSM, Joshua, for a working lunch. One of the biggest things we had to tackle was to make some sense of the very short period of time we have for production and to propose a schedule, taking into account the needs of the production team and all the various Equity rules. I had been putting a rough sketch of the show schedule into iCal for my personal use, in a separate Frankenstein calendar.

Using the very clear and intuitive week view in iCal, we started dragging around rehearsals, dragging them between days, dragging them earlier or later in the day, of longer and shorter duration. It was very easy to see what we were working with and play around with it. While my version is not the official production calendar, it’s what we’ve been using whenever we’re brainstorming schedule changes. I couldn’t be happier with the way it’s working.

Address Book
The final piece of this puzzle is Address Book, and it’s probably my least favorite part. While the layout is very simple and easy to navigate and generally Mac-like, I’ve always found it a little too simple at first glance. Syncing contacts from any platform to Palm is always scary. If they don’t quite play nice together all of a sudden you’ll find people missing, duplicated, or all their e-mail addresses listed as phone numbers and all their phone numbers listed as e-mails. I’ve been backing up both ends a lot, just in case something bad happens. One basic thing I don’t like is that the Apple apps don’t deal with “categories” per se, in the way that Palm and the Microsoft apps do. iCal has calendars, and Address Book has groups, but they’re not exactly the same, especially in Address Book. See the problem is that on the Palm side, an item can only be in one category at a time. This is kind of Palm’s fault, since they haven’t innovated anything since about 2002, but in Address Book you can put a contact into multiple groups, and it’s quite difficult to tell you’ve done so, until you notice that on the Palm it’s not where you expected to see it. This is sort of a problem in Entourage as well, where you can assign something to multiple categories, but it’s harder to do accidentally.

Also, Entourage makes a distinction between categories, which are used to organize contacts, and groups, which are lists for e-mail distribution. I can have a Frankenstein category that contains everyone involved in any way in the production, and then separate groups for cast, production team, rehearsal report list, etc. so that when I send e-mails I have various pre-made lists to choose from based on who I want to contact. In Address Book the only form of organization is groups. If I want to send a mass e-mail to a bunch of people, I need to create a separate group with that bunch of people, which is a little confusing and clutters up my categories on the Palm end. I think having an iPhone or any device that behaves more similarly to Address Book would ease my concerns with this.

Overall I’m enjoying the new toys I’ve been playing with, and I have a few more to try out soon.


September 6, 2007

Why Phantom will Run Forever

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:29 am

OK, I figured it out. Go with me on this:
I was thinking this morning about my new job, and how I will consider myself lucky if it even opens. This is not because I think it’s going to be a bad show or anything, it’s just the way my career has always gone. Some people have problems where their shows never run long. My problem is that whenever I get an open-ended run, it doesn’t just flop, it goes catastrophically bad from the moment I get the job. There was my first open-ended Off-Broadway contract where the show cut down to a 3-shows-per-week schedule on the week my contract started, and was closed nine performances later. Then there was the Broadway-bound play that was canceled before it even started rehearsal. If Frankenstein makes it through the first week of rehearsal, it will be the most successful open run I’ve ever had.

That’s just the background. So how does this relate to Phantom‘s run? I was saying to myself today, “Why can’t anything I do have a decent run?” Then of course I had to admit, “Well, except Phantom.” That’s when it hit me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Man, every show that so-and-so does flops! Well, except Phantom.”

No one can explain why Phantom keeps running, in fact running so well that it’s keeping pace with every show except Wicked and Jersey Boys. They were talking privately about closing it just a few years ago, and here we are. Where does it get such good fortune? Obviously it’s leeching off all the good show karma of everyone who works on it, and when they go elsewhere there’s none left for their future endeavors.

I’m far from the only person whose career exhibits these symptoms, although my case does seem to be extreme. I do feel better knowing that my good show karma is somewhere, benefiting my friends and a show I love, which occasionally provides me some income, too. And if you’ve ever wondered how it’s possible for a show to run 25+ years, this is how it will be done. You heard it here first.


September 3, 2007

My Favorite Cartoon Ever

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:19 pm

I clipped this out of The New Yorker sometime in the early-to-mid ’90s and have held onto it ever since. I just recently rediscovered it and scanned it, cause I’m surprised it’s stayed in my life in non-digital format this long.


August 30, 2007

BBP Hamptons Bag Review

I call this: bag reviews,computers,mac — Posted by KP @ 11:00 pm

While browsing the online Apple Store for something new, I came across a new bag. It needs to be said that I am a major bag whore. I own lots of bags, each one appropriate for a slightly different situation, most of them with lots of fun pockets and compartments. Since the last year and a half has been devoted to the purchase of a Macbook Pro, which I finally now have, I haven’t been buying new bags because I was saving every penny for the new computer. I also hadn’t seen anything to catch my eye lately. Until I stumbled across this bag.

The company’s website is here. I ended up not purchasing it from the Apple Store. If I had been able to find one in an Apple Store, I would have, but online I found it much cheaper on Amazon (retail price is $95, but I got it for $50), and I have been putting ridiculous amounts on my Amazon credit card, so my gift certificates covered it. It comes in other colors, but I liked this titanium and orange one best. They come in three sizes: small, medium and large, which hold different sized laptops. I got the medium as they claim it perfectly fits the 15″ Macbook Pro, which it does. It also comes with some velcro-in padded inserts that you can use to customize the shape for your particular laptop. I actually used all of them in the bottom of the laptop compartment to provide a little extra cushioning.

The straps

The thing that makes this bag unique (and maybe a little frightening) is that you can wear it like a messenger bag over one shoulder, or like a backpack by converting the strap so that it attaches to the middle of the bag and over both shoulders. You may ask yourself, “Won’t I look like an idiot with a messenger bag dangling down on my lower back?” I asked myself the same thing. Maybe? Probably? But I decided it might be worth a try, and if it was really humiliating, at least I would still have a new messenger bag to wear in the regular style.

My first reaction to trying the straps is that it is indeed quite comfortable to wear the bag backpack-style. It also works well over one shoulder with the strap in backpack configuration, so it’s sort of a cross between backpack and messenger. It takes a little re-rigging to really switch modes, so I have been finding this the best way to be able to swap back and forth quickly.

Once I started using it on a day-to-day basis, I discovered a system that seemed to work well. I wear it backpack style as I walk to and from the train and my apartment, where it’s not crowded. While on the train, I switch it to messenger style, which works better in the tight confines of midtown streets where I can put it in front of me, to the side, or slung around to the back depending on the size of space I need to squeeze through. The bag definitely feels much heavier in messenger style, but it’s rather wide when worn on the back, and has been getting caught on things.

The other annoyance I have about wearing it backpack style begins with something BBP has on their site:

I was very comforted to hear this before purchasing, as I’m 5’0″ and often find that no matter how high on your back a bag is supposed to ride, it always winds up hanging down on my butt and distorting all the intended weight-distributing design. I thought maybe I was in the clear with this one. No such luck. I have read a review claiming that despite the low-hanging design, the bag does not bounce on your butt. Let me tell you, if you’re 5’0″ you can hike up all the straps to their shortest length, and the bag will still bounce on your butt. Hard. With every step. That’s thousands of bounces every time you go somewhere, and I don’t appreciate my laptop being bounced on anything thousands of times a day, even though the padding on the back of the bag is quite thick.

Brightly lined interior… or not

One of the things I found appealing about this bag that I now look for in all my bags is that the interior should be a bright color so you can find stuff in it. My bags, especially my computer bags, hold lots of tiny little cables and adapters, and generally I find them by sticking my hand way down into the pockets and finding stuff by touch. This is not really ideal. I was a bit disappointed when the bag arrived to discover that only two of the compartments have the fun yellow interior, and even that is a stretch. The big giant compartment is yellow, which is less helpful to me because I tend to put big giant things in the big giant compartment, and big giant things are usually easier to find anyway. The wide compartment in the front has yellow on the back side, adjoining the big giant compartment, but the pockets and the outer side are black. So you can sort of see things in the pockets, but anything sitting in the space in front of the pockets (which happens to be the natural place for all my cables and adapters) is lost in the blackness. Every other compartment in the bag is all black. Considering they tout this as one of the features of the bag, it feels a little half-assed when only one of the bag’s eight compartments is fully lined in a bright color.

The shower test

About once a year it seems I find myself walking 20 blocks or more in a torrential downpour. The kind of downpour where it feels like there’s more water than air in the air. For this reason when I buy a bag capable of holding my computer the first thing I do before ever letting it carry my computer is put it in the shower. I stick pieces of paper in the various pockets where sensitive items might be, and after letting my shower rain down on it for a while, I check to see if the papers got wet.

I’m sorry to say this bag did not entirely pass. The manufacturer clearly states on the website that it’s water resistant, not waterproof, but I was especially worried by the fact that the laptop compartment is conveniently located behind the main flap so that you can take your computer out without opening the flap. It has a water-resistant zipper, but it’s not protected from water like it would be if the flap covered it.

After ten minutes under the shower (suspended, not sitting in the water at the bottom), here are the results:
Inside flap: surprisingly dry. You can see that the lighter-colored silver area is where the interior pockets pretty much survived.

Inside the big compartment: wet! As you can see the paper was pretty soaked at the bottom, and there was also a large pool of water in the bottom of the bag. I attribute this to the fact that I sometimes spun the bag under the shower head which probably let a bunch of water in through the sides under the flap. Probably more severe than anything that would happen in an actual rainstorm. The large black seam at the top of the photo also showed a little wetness seeping through. The wide front compartment which I can best describe as “where I would put my power adapter” came out wetter than I would like at the bottom. I attribute this to the fact that the bottom of this compartment adjoins the bottom of the main compartment, which was filled with water. The pouch in the front came out almost completely dry.


The cute magnetically-sealed iPod compartment: soaked. I expected this, especially because this is the one pouch that doesn’t have a zipper, and it’s exposed on the outside of the flap. In the rain I would never have my iPod in the external pouch of any bag, but this illustrates why. I didn’t bother putting paper inside any of the other outer pouches.

And finally, how has my laptop been faring during this downpour? A bit wet. There is also a little water pooled at the bottom of the compartment. I’m not sure whether it came in from the adjoining compartment or from the seams at the top.

My overall verdict is that while my test was probably more severe than I would encounter in the real world, if I were ever caught in a real rainstorm with this bag and anything water-sensitive in it, my first priority would be to get the hell out of the rain.

The designers did add something helpful that I’ve never had in a bag before: an umbrella holder on the inside of the flap. I can’t demonstrate it because I kind of hate umbrellas and didn’t bring one with me this summer. They also give me this cool thing up here called a “car” which means I never have to walk 20 blocks in the rain. But when I get home this will be a nice incentive to carry an umbrella.

Overall

I think it will almost completely replace my usual messenger bag, the Timbuk2 Commute, which is also a great bag (and waterproof), and it should fix the main complaint I have about the Timbuk2, that it’s too small to hold much besides my laptop and script and a few accessories. This bag holds enough stuff to actually be usable for rehearsals when I have to bring everything, and the different carrying options will allow me to distribute the weight better than I would be able to with a normal messenger bag, on those days when it’s just too heavy for one shoulder.

Some little details I like:

Extra D-rings on the outside of the flap and on the straps for clipping… whatever onto them. I wasn’t sure what I was going to use these for, but figured I would find a use eventually. After the final performance of my summer stock season, I had crammed my belongings from the theatre into every possible pocket (see photo for an idea of how wide the bag gets), but I had nowhere safe to put my headset. So I tied the strings of its drawstring bag around one of the D-rings and let it hang on the outside. I wouldn’t call that a “safe” way to carry a headset, but for the trip from the booth to the trunk of my car it worked fine.

The open pocket on the back has a zipper at the bottom which opens it up to be put over the handle on a rolling suitcase. I love those things. Here’s a picture of it in action on my trip home from Reagle.

The magnetic clip on what is presumably the iPod pouch is classy. A special softer lining on the inside would have been a great touch, but no luck.

One other oddity is the center mesh pocket on the outside of the flap. I’m not a big fan of mesh in general, as I think it will result in the contents falling out, either accidentally, or because a potential pickpocket can see exactly what’s in it, limiting it to holding nothing more expensive than a roll of BreathSavers. This particular mesh pocket doesn’t even have a piece of elastic at the top. Now think about this: you put something in this pocket, then later you need to get something out of your bag and lift the flap. The outer pocket is now upside down! Something that is designed to be turned upside down as part of its normal operation should probably be closed at the top. Odd.

All in all, this bag has some really bold and smart design choices, but I don’t think it’s going to fully replace any of the bags I already own.


A New Job

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:49 pm

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been wondering when the hell I was going to post something new. Well I assure you I’ve got a number of posts in draft, mostly new computer-related product reviews which I’ll try to finish now that I have a few days off. But other than that, there just hasn’t been anything to post about.

In my last post I mentioned something cryptic about possible big jobs on the horizon, and the biggest of them has officially been offered to me, so now I can tell you about it. I’m going to be the ASM for the Off-Broadway production of Frankenstein, which starts previews October 10 at 37 Arts. The show’s website is here, it stars Hunter Foster, Christiane Noll and Steve Blanchard, and it looks like it will be a fun time. It doesn’t start rehearsals until Sept. 17, but exciting things should be happening soon.


August 19, 2007

Reagle Roundup

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:34 am

My summer season has come to an end. I’m currently on the Long Island Rail Road going directly from Waltham to a family barbecue that conveniently happened to be scheduled for today. I am so far enjoying the benefits of civilization like a cell phone that gets four bars and EV-DO coverage in a tunnel. There really isn’t any higher form of civic advancement than good cell coverage.

I’m glad to be returning home to my other group of friends and colleagues and to all my stuff, and most of all a big soft bed with nice soft sheets and pillows just the way I like them. I met a lot of great people this summer, and worked again with some more great people, and we put on three very good shows. I’m hoping to maybe get a bit of a break from the PSM thing for a while, but I’ll take whatever comes. My future is filled with a couple definite small gigs and some possible big gigs, and the usual subbing on Phantom and The Fantasticks. I don’t have any dates booked yet, but I’m hoping to get back into both rotations quickly, especially Phantom as I never like to let too much time go by between performances. I’ll need to spend some time with my calling script at home so that I’m ready at a minute’s notice if the call comes.

This concludes the summer stock mini-blog (at least this year). Thanks for reading. Hope you stick around!


August 17, 2007

iWork 08 Review – Pages

I call this: computers,mac — Posted by KP @ 10:25 am

While in the five years since I switched to Mac I have grown to love Apple’s style of hardware and software that “just works,” I still like to know that I have control over the way things work and can customize them to my liking. For the most part I haven’t felt that being a Mac user has taken away my ability to customize, but sometimes that means replacing Apple’s built-in apps with 3rd party replacements. Missing Sync instead of iSync, Firefox instead of Safari, and the biggest of all, Office.

I have tried. I have no love for Microsoft, and their Office apps are buggy and slow, especially because they just don’t seem to have gotten around to updating their software for Intel processors like, oh, I don’t know, pretty much every other Mac developer on earth. But still, I don’t seem to be able to tear myself away from Office. But with each release of iWork, I try again.

When Apple first released Pages, I was excited to see what it could do. I became frustrated very quickly. With Word, even when I don’t know exactly where to find a certain function, I usually instinctively look in the right general direction. Every time I try to use Pages I find myself searching the whole app, in menus, preferences, the Inspector, contextual menus, all the while wondering if I’m even going to recognize the name of the option when I find it. And when I do find it, it’s usually somewhere that makes no sense to me and took way too many clicks to get to. I just don’t like the layout of these kind of Apple apps with the Inspector, and the giant Font menu that pops up and gets all in the way just to make a simple change. Having this in an app as important as a word processor was driving me crazy. I never realized how much I’m tied to the Microsoft way of doing things, although it makes perfect sense since I’ve been using MS word processors exclusively pretty much every day since the age of nine. There are certain things I just expect in the UI and the menus, and can’t conceive of doing any other way. Knowing that Apple is often right about these things, I keep trying to get used to their way, but every previous attempt has sent me quickly back to Word.

I worked with a director last year who did everything in Pages 2, and his stuff looked great, and I made another effort to force myself to use it, but when I couldn’t get things to look exactly as I wanted, again I had to give up and do it in Word where I knew exactly what to do.

When 42nd Street started rehearsals last month, there were a lot of changes in the schedule every day, and I needed to produce new and easy-to-read schedules pretty much on the spot. Taking time to format them and make them look pretty was time we didn’t have. And they had to be easy to read as they were being made, so that we could see problems, like time overlaps or too many rehearsals scheduled in one room. Despite being in full anti-Pages mode at the time, I knew that this particular job was perfectly matched for Pages. It can look pretty, and it can look pretty immediately. I made a table, created the right number of columns, and began dragging things around to form our schedule, merging and dividing cells as needed. At right you can see an example. Stuff is just typed in without any thought to formatting, and it looks clean and legible. I would save a copy every day as a PDF to be e-mailed to the cast. Pages can also save in .doc format, but I prefer PDFs more and more as different versions of Office can screw up margins and formatting, and if the document won’t need to be edited by the recipient, I prefer the safety of knowing it will look exactly as I intended.

As the weeks went on, I came to appreciate the ease of Pages more and more, and sometimes would play around a little with settings, and got used to where to look for various options. So I was already in the right frame of mind when Steve Jobs announced the new version of iWork last week (yeah, I’m totally one of those people who sits at home following IRC chats and liveblog updates any time Jobs gives a keynote, and then watches the video of it once it’s available for download). A new version of Pages, plus a brand new (but not at all unexpected) spreadsheet app called Numbers, had me very excited. I use Keynote quite a bit in my career (as discussed here), but nothing in the new version has particularly caught my attention, it’s all been about Pages and Numbers.

The Pros

The big thing that got me all excited while watching the Stevenote was when he mentioned a contextual formatting bar. The best thing possible — all the easy-to-reach formatting goodness I miss from Word (you know, drop-down font menus, font size, alignment buttons), and contextual, to make space for only the options I need at a given moment. So exciting!

One other thing that seems to be improved is that Pages appears to be remembering my preferred settings for default documents. By default it has this maddening setting to add 12 points of blank space every time you press the enter key. It’s some sort of “paragraph break” or whatever, but I’m fully capable of hitting enter twice when I want such a thing, thank you very much. It’s nice to have a style option like that, but it drove me nuts that it was enabled by default and when I finally figured out where the hell to change it, I had to do it every time I opened a blank document. It doesn’t seem to be doing it to me anymore now, so either it’s teasing me, or it has learned that I don’t like it and will remember that from now on.

Pages has always been better than Word at page layout, and one of the new features is a separate page layout mode, which lets you start a document which is totally blank and waiting for you to add text boxes, images, etc. and you don’t have to worry about the regular typing area. It also has a feature I have long loved in Keynote: a line that shows up when you get close to aligning objects to sensible things like horizontal or vertical center of the document, or aligned with an adjacent object. It makes it really easy to arrange things perfectly. I’m not 100% sure this is new to Pages 3, but I think it is, and regardless, it’s something SO much better than Word. Have you ever tried to perfectly align an image or text box in Word? Enough said.

Office 2007 for Windows was released at the beginning of this year and it features new document formats which are supposedly smaller and better. I have been living in 2007 for eight-and-a-half months now, and have never crossed paths with one of these documents. I guess they’re slow to be adopted as many people and businesses haven’t upgraded to the new version of Office, or are using the old formats for the sake of their non-’07-using colleagues. For Mac users who need to open these documents, MS has recently made available a beta version of their conversion tool, which supposedly will be built into a future Office update… someday. In the meantime, while Office cannot presently open documents in the current Office format, there are some other apps that can. Such as Pages and Numbers. (In fairness, so can the open-source office suite OpenOffice, but it’s more fun to point out the irony that Apple’s apps are more Office-compatible than Office.)

The Cons

Two of my favorite things in word processing are tables and comments. I use tables a lot as you can see in my schedule example above. Now imagine I’m making that schedule. As I’m typing I say to myself, “do we need Julian to come to the ‘Go Into Your Dance’ rehearsal?” So now I want to put one of Pages’ oh-so-sexy comments pointing to the cell for that rehearsal and say something like “Julian?” Problem. A comment attached to a table attaches to the entire table, it can’t be used to indicate a particular cell. Bummer. It was a bummer last year when I was trying to get into Pages, and it’s a bummer in this version. In fact, in trying to test this, I find I can’t even get a comment onto a table at all in word processing mode, only in page layout. Not sure what’s up with that.

In Summary

I think the new version of Pages includes enough of the features I want to finally get me over my Word withdrawal so that I might actually be able to make the switch. When I’m old and gray and Office 2008 eventually comes out, I may have to still buy it just in case, but that’s still a long time away. If I can get Word and Excel out of my life, I will look again at getting rid of Entourage, but e-mail and PIM functions are the most important data I work with, and I find Mail + iCal + Address Book very weak in comparison to the power of Entourage. Thankfully, Entourage can be purchased separately if it comes to that. I look forward to seeing what happens to those three built-in apps in Leopard, maybe they will come closer to what I want, and I won’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on Office anymore.

A review of Numbers will be coming soon!


August 12, 2007

42nd Street Photos

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:36 am

We’re in the Money

Dames

Lullaby of Broadway

See, you can even see the tops of everyone’s head on the upper platform.

All photos by Herb Philpott.


August 10, 2007

42nd Street First Performance

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:52 pm

Last night was our first show. We were sold out, which was a little unexpected. I heard last week that the Saturday matinee is sold out, but I hadn’t heard anything else in a while, so that was a nice surprise. It was our first sold out show this season.

When I arrived the stage was still filled with sets getting their final touches, and the marquees for the ballet still being wired. Eventually I was able to bring in the curtain and open the house, but work continued behind the curtain until pretty close to show time. Nobody really saw the marquees hung and lit until 1,100 people saw them all at once, and I snapped a picture of the moment.

They looked great, although they need a little tweaking to make the heights more varied. Considering there was no way to really check that before the show, they came out pretty well. They actually look a lot better to the audience than they do from the booth because the viewing angle is different.

The first show was very smooth, and everyone was in great spirits afterward.

This is Mugsy. He belongs to one of our actors, and makes a cameo in the “Gettin’ Out of Town” scene, as the fictional cast packs up their belongings, “dogs, cats, canaries…” and heads for their out-of-town tryout. He’s doing a great job.Since we had only a matinee, the evening was taken up by a party at a local cast member’s house, which was very well attended and a great chance for cast and crew to unwind and mingle after a hectic couple weeks. The party was a fiesta, and of course it wouldn’t be complete without a pinata. Somebody got a sun pinata, because “There’s a Sunny Side to Every Situation.” Here’s me trying to hit the pinata. I got in a number of good hits, but alas I was not the one to break it.


« Newer Posts — Older Posts »