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August 15, 2010

Crazy Sunday Afternoon

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:38 pm

All we had to do today was a Sunday matinee. After that we have no show until next Thursday. Things have been running smoothly, audiences have been leaping to their feet. When the sun rose this morning, all that stood between us and three-and-a-half days off was two-and-a-half hours of awesome musical theatre.

9:30AM

I’ve already been awake for a while, because somehow I’ve become an early bird like that. My phone rings, and it’s our star. She’s not calling me at 9:30 on a matinee day just to say hi. As I suspected, she wasn’t feeling well. She was calling me to get our producer’s home number to see if she could be rushed in to see a doctor so she could get a prescription before the show. Much to my relief, that was the extent of my involvement, and she was indeed able to see the doctor, and was feeling OK for the show.

12:15PM

I’m about to leave the house. Like packing my stuff. And I get a call from one of the Dynamites. It’s obvious right away it’s train trouble. A large portion of our actors commute on the red line from Boston, and need rides from Alewife, which is the last and nearest station to the theatre. There are two regular pickups: an hour-and-a-half before the show is the Ednamobile, which is driven by our “Edna,” Dan. 15 minutes later is the scheduled departure of the Musicmobile, driven by our music director and keyboard player, also Dan (which is why the two cars have names, instead of “Dan is driving me.”) Anyway, I find out that it’s not just the usual Sunday delays on the red line. Apparently the entire T has been shut down for about 40 minutes due to a power outage. Part of my dismay is that, not being from the area, I really don’t know how to help people when they have train trouble. But I do know that somebody even being slightly delayed on the train can really mess up my day, so all the trains in Boston being shut down less than two hours before a show doesn’t sound good.

I decided that getting to the theatre was not important at the moment, and stayed on my computer trying to reach people who could potentially offer rides, while checking Twitter to see what other Bostonians were reporting about the outage (the MBTA website showed all trains happily running with a green checkmark. Thanks!) Shortly after that, the trains started running again, and our actors (and one of our other keyboard players) made it on, and slowly towards Waltham. The Musicmobile would stay behind for them.

Act I

So finally everybody arrived and the show started without incident. Marissa wasn’t having problems, and I soon stopped worrying about her completely. We had almost gotten through act I when everyone kind of noticed at once that there was something in the air in front of the house right light tree. With all the fake hairspray hanging in the air, seeing particles in the beams of light isn’t anything unusual, but as our board op, Jess, pointed out, there hasn’t been any hairspray sprayed in that area in a really long time. So then the only explanation is that something is burning.

Thankfully this happened at the single point in the show where we have lots of time, during the last scene of the act. There was definitely steady smoke, but even with people looking from all possible angles, nobody was able to tell which instrument it was coming from. The light trees are just in front of the front row on either side and probably contain about 12 instruments each, from about 15-30 feet in the air. We spent the last 10 minutes of the act trying to narrow down the offending equipment, and praying it wouldn’t set off the fire alarm before we could examine it more closely at intermission.

We made it, and soon a good portion of the crew had gathered with flashlights to look at it, and saw nothing. After some debate, we decided it was time to take the inelegant step of bringing a ladder out into the audience. Taking a chance, we got the 16ft. ladder, which was much less disruptive than the A-frame, but wouldn’t be able to reach the top rows of lights, if that’s where the problem was. Basically we just wanted to figure out which light it was so we could unplug it or turn it off at the board.

Most of intermission went by and still no luck. We had our deck electrician on the top of the ladder checking all the connections. We brought all the lights up at 20 percent and he saw no sign of smoke. Finally I said that if we couldn’t find anything we’d have to give up, and suggested we put everything on that tree at full in the hopes that the offending light would show itself. Soon after, the smoke began again. After more looking with multiple sets of eyes on the ground and on the ladder, they found it was coming from a damaged connector. Jess quickly took all the lights out, and the connector was unplugged, and traced to the lights it controlled. That channel was parked out on the board, and soon the ladder was being spirited away backstage.

After the Show

We were pretty exhausted by the time the second act started, but everything went very smoothly for the rest of the show. Then as soon as the show ended, or perhaps as it was ending, the stage right toilet started flooding. Not like kind of backing up, or leaking a little bit. It was gushing water like Niagara Falls. By the time I got there there was at least an inch of water on the bathroom floor, so I wasn’t going in to see exactly what was happening. Two of our stagehands were inside trying to do something, and succeeding mostly in getting soaking wet. Wardrobe, who are based in the room next to the bathroom, and props, who have their tables set up just outside in the hall, produced several tubs filled with towels and we began laying barriers to contain and direct the water away from the props and costumes. The janitor arrived from the lobby, and splashed bravely into the bathroom. Soon we heard cries of, “Leatherman! Leatherman!” coming from inside. I dug into my bag and passed my Leatherman forward. Several seconds later, the sound of rushing water stopped, and the three intrepid plumbers emerged from the bathroom, mission accomplished.

Remarking that in one day the theatre had been attacked by both fire and water, I was getting out of there before the plague of locusts showed up.

I did, however, make a movie about the end of our harrowing day.


August 13, 2010

Hairspray Reading Material and the Joy of Live Theatre

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:09 pm

Just wanted to share a link about my current production of Hairspray at Reagle Music Theatre of Greater Boston.

The Globe ran an interview with Marissa Perry, who is our amazing Tracy Turnblad. Her story of how she got to Broadway is really inspiring, and actually involved many more twists and turns than described in the article. I described her yesterday during the show as a “quadruple-threat” — acting, singing and dancing, of course, but the threat that’s important to stage managers — she’s really smart and aware on stage, and can recognize and solve problems (like picking up a prop that’s been dropped on the floor, or figuring out how to casually set a brake on a set piece that’s sliding around).

The thing about live theatre that’s tricky is that you can’t always control what will happen on stage, and once it’s in view of the audience, there’s often nothing the crew can directly do to fix it, especially in a show like Hairspray that only has one or two blackouts. Things that get out of place or left on the floor create hazards for dancers, or can cause scenery to get stuck on them. An actor who can be counted on to notice these things and quickly remedy them before they become a problem is incredibly valuable for the smooth operation of the performance. To have a star with that ability, especially one who is almost never offstage, is a great blessing for me.

And I would add to my “quadruple-threat” comment from last night, that she is also a “quintuple-threat,” because on top of everything else, she’s everything you want a performer to be on stage, and she’s nice! It really doesn’t get any better than that.

On the subject of technically-aware actors:
I’ve also been kind of surprised to work with a few directors lately who have specifically taken a moment in rehearsal to talk about the importance of this, by saying things like, “If a prop falls on the floor, don’t ignore it, stay in character and find a way to pick it up. There are other things that need to happen besides your performance, and it’s important that that prop be where it’s supposed to be. You bending down to pick up the prop will not look as bad to the audience as any later problems it might cause.” So I’m grateful for that.

And I will share a story of the best case of an actor saving the day I’ve ever seen:
When I was in college I was the merchandising manager for Jane Eyre on Broadway. There was this scene where Rochester takes Jane out to the garden to propose to her, where there’s a bench on the turntable, and the bench turns off left while Rochester and Jane are kind of walking alongside it, and a scrim flies out revealing the garden. Well on this particular day in previews, I guess maybe the bench had gotten knocked out of place a little on the turntable, and as it spun and the scrim flew, the bottom pipe of the scrim went under the arm of the bench and began lifting it up off the floor by one end. James Barbour, walking slowly past the bench, arm-in-arm with Marla Schaffel, reaches out with his free hand, and casually lifts the arm of the bench off the pipe and deposits it back down on the floor, without missing a step. The combination of reaction time, calmness, and willingness to interact with something (flying benches in his backyard) that was completely out of the realm of the reality of the scene was really amazing.

And finally, if something goes wrong and you can’t fix it, at least come up with a good ad lib, like our Edna, Dan Dowling, did last night:
Somehow he lost a shoe during “Big Dollhouse,” and somehow the shoe ended up in the pit. At the end of the scene, when everybody is released from jail, Dan says his line to the Matron, “You touch one hair on my little girl’s head and I’ll be back to teach you a whole new meaning for split ends,” and then adds, “…and you can mail me my other shoe!” I’m not sure how much the audience laughed because I couldn’t hear anything over the laughter on headset, but suffice it to say, there was laughter all around. He also referenced it again in the next scene where he has an ad-lib spot in the phone call with Mr. Pinky. I think he said something like, “I’ll be right over. But I’ll be minus one shoe” (in that scene he’s wearing slippers). Of course not every show affords such opportunities, but we are lucky to have a show that was intended to have certain spots for ad-libs, and more importantly — a brilliant cast that spends time thinking up good ones, and can also come up with new ones on their feet. It definitely keeps things interesting instead of watching exactly the same show over and over.


March 22, 2010

West Palm Beach: Vortex of Per Diem

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:04 am

We are now in the part of the tour that was, for a lot of us, I think, the big selling point of this whole adventure: a week-long sit-down in Florida. Let’s take a look at the budget:

Per diem: $90/day
Hotel room: $99/day

damn.

Food: NY prices
Martinis: NY prices

damn.

Despite the fact that we’re spending a lot more money here than we would pretty much anywhere else, I think the sunshine and warm weather (remember this is a company that spent the first two months in Minneapolis in winter), combined with the free time and calm routine of a sit-down, has been well worth it.

We’re playing at the Kravis Center, which is a large complex of two indoor theatres and an outdoor amphitheater. Our neighbor across the hall is one of the tours of Jersey Boys, which is in the middle of a three-week run.

Our theatre is a large black box that apparently also gets converted into a dining room for other kind of events. The stage is made of temporary platforms 40 inches high. The tricky part is that all the access to the space is at floor level, meaning that the wingspace is at floor level and the actors have to go up stairs to get to the set and the playing space. Which wouldn’t be such a problem if there was some extra room on the stage platform. But as it is, the set barely fits on the platform, so the moment they get off the physical set they have to deal with stairs. Getting from one entrance to another usually involves exiting, going down stairs, walking along the narrow floor-level space that is crammed with prop tables, and then back up another set of stairs to access a different part of the set. It is cr-a-zy. But it has been the subject of frequent conversations on the crew bus, at venues, hotels, restaurants and bars across the country for months now, and we worked out with the venue staff the best way to prepare the space for our arrival. It’s weird, but the fact that it functions at all is a miracle.

The backstage area is a veritable obstacle course (one actor actually had to vault onto a platform and under a railing because he forgot he had to set himself in a different place for his entrance until the last minute). However, onstage the set actually fits really well into the space. It’s very intimate, but the Rinker has a very high ceiling and an openness that matches the scale of the set well. Sometimes our set is a tiny speck in a house with a 60-foot proscenium, and then there was Baruch where the audience literally had their feet on the stage. The subtitle for the show among the crew and staff during the Baruch load-in was “Shakespeare… IN YOUR FACE!!!” This is a little bit like that because the edge of the marley is only a couple feet from the front row, but it all feels a little more in proportion.

We actually are doing a lot of the Baruch staging for the fights, because the actors are close enough to the edge of the stage, and the audience is lower than where the swords swing out downstage, but still very near, and Corey felt the impending danger would distract the audience from concentrating on the story. Since we did all the legwork at Baruch, we have a bag of tricks that we can pull from selectively when a venue requires a change in staging, and can mix-and-match to only alter the show as much as we have to.

We also had to change some entrances (which we do to a small extent in a lot of venues), many due to the fact that our only stage left entrance is about 18″ wide and down a flight of stairs in view of the audience. Directing traffic through that entrance late in the second act was a bit of a puzzle.

I must say the cast has done a great job of justifying the presence of the onstage escape stairs. It’s not easy to take a show that was staged on a flat surface and suddenly make everyone enter and exit on stairs for no apparent reason. Before the first performance they had a quick discussion of how to handle it, and the basic idea was just to start acting before you get to the stairs. They’re doing a great job making it make some kind of sense in every situation.

We’re doing six performances while we’re here, including two school shows that were originally scheduled to be the 1-hour R&J, but just a week or two ago were changed to be full shows. It required a large flurry of emails among the departments to make sure that could happen (including delaying the load-out for a day), but I’m very happy they made that decision. The 1-hour is a great intro to Shakespeare for groups who for some reason can’t see the full show, but it’s no comparison to a real production with sets, costumes, lighting and sound, and since we’ve got the show loaded in anyway, we might as well go whole hog. It’s more work for us, but the payoff for the audience is exponentially higher in my opinion.

There have also been a number of social events, from birthday parties to free dinner and drinks for the cast and crew at a local restaurant, to a fancy benefit for the cast to mingle with board members and other donors. It’s definitely a change of pace from our usual breakneck pace at which we roll into town, do a show, and roll out.

After this we head to Chattanooga for another sit-down, which includes only two performances of R&J and two days of work on our Alice in Wonderland development process. After that it’s vacation time! So the West Palm stop has been kind of the gateway to our vacation. It won’t be easy when we come back, so we’re enjoying the cushy part of the tour while we can.


March 13, 2010

R&J Turns 50

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:57 am

Yesterday we celebrated our 50th performance of R&J. This was our official 50th performance, not counting three previews and an invited dress.

As our run is something like 80-ish performances (we keep canceling and adding and it’s driving me crazy as the database is currently built to have performance numbers manually associated with dates — that is changing!) But as we are only doing 80-something performances, 50 is really the only milestone we hit.

The last time I had to deal with something like this was a few months ago, right before I left to start rehearsals, when I was asked if a curtain speech should say “9,000 performances” or “performance number 9,000.” (I said “performance number 9,000,” which I later read in the press is what was said.)

Anyway, milestones and anniversaries have been a common occurrence in my career, so I tend to see them and plan to celebrate them out of habit.

Last year we were doing a sit-down in Phoenix when we hit #50, and I had a little sign on the callboard saying “Happy 50th” and that was about it.

This year as I saw the numbers creeping up from 40, I counted ahead and at the start of the week said, “Our 50th is going to be in Hartford [Wisconsin], we should get a little something for the cast.”

I didn’t do the best job at remembering to pick stuff up on the one occasion I was in a store, but I did get some little candies, and it so happens the venue’s hospitality had a nice candy jar, so I combined them to make a cornucopia of candy, under my sign that I had prepared during some downtime earlier in the week.

I also took a page from Phantom‘s publicists, who are fond of including fun facts (usually spelled phun phacts) along with anniversary press releases (like “Phantom has used 43,520 pounds of dry ice” and stuff like that.) So since my sign was looking a little empty, I decided to compile a few facts that would still be interesting even with only 50 performances to work with. Since I was planning this a few days in advance, I threw together a layout in the database that would keep some of these stats updated so I didn’t have to do any math on the day of the event.

  • Total time in performance to date: 129 hours, 37 minutes and 30 seconds
  • Seen by 26,762 people!
  • “Banished” spoken 1,431 times!
  • Someone called “Ho” 530 times!
  • Animal life encountered [backstage or onstage]: bat, bird, mouse, beetles

Everybody seemed very happy with the candy, and intrigued by our fun facts (which are calculated up to the performance before the 50th, and include previews and the invited dress).


March 8, 2010

Nick’s Signage Purse

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:15 pm


Nick’s signage purse deserves its own post.

During the few days that Nick was off the tour, I had the opportunity to do his job myself. One of the things I have always been dissatisfied with is how we have organized our signage. All our signs live permanently in sheet protectors and there are many different types, and they’re slippery, and carrying a bunch around, along with tape and a dry erase marker, is a huge juggling act. And carrying just a few is a pain because you can’t just make a path around the theatre, you have to keep coming back for more.

So I grabbed an expandable folder thing, which was used by our predecessors and filled with old signage, took out all the old signs, and categorized it for our signs. When we got to New York, I showed my rough creation to Nick, and we both agreed that it needed a shoulder strap, because holding the folder was only slightly less annoying than holding the loose signs. So we cut a bunch of tieline and sized it for Nick. At first he was not happy that the folder was pink, but soon embraced it.


March 5, 2010

Nap Day

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:24 pm

Just a quick day-in-the-life post.

Today we had a two-show day, in the manner that only an education-based company can: a 9:45AM matinee, and an 8PM evening show. It’s a good thing our bus is so awesome.

We were all exhausted this morning. I mean totally exhausted — cast and crew — without much explanation. I have never been so tired while calling this show. I had a Monster energy drink when I woke up at 6AM. Most of the rest of the crew had Starbucks from the hotel. And none of it helped.

During the first act, Nick and I were bemoaning how tired we were (I’m calling from backstage here). I mentioned that I hadn’t had breakfast, and maybe that was part of it. Nick earned huge bonus points by going to the bus (which was right outside the stage door) and warming up some Pop Tarts for me, and surprising me with a Mountain Dew as an extra treat. After eating I felt a little more functional, but despite now adding a Mountain Dew to my energy drink, I was still really sleepy. We all spent the whole show fantasizing about how comfortable our bunks would be as soon as the show was over.

In the final scene, after all the dead bodies have been discovered, and the Friar is explaining his tale of woe, I was really tired of standing up.

A word about my chair: I have a chair, but it’s a regular-size, kinda odd-looking folding chair that’s not tall enough to see over the calling desk, so while I sit down during the long speeches and stuff, a lot of the time I have to stand, or lean on the chair.

So during the Friar’s speech, the show is maybe 2 or 3 minutes from ending, and I’m tired, as I think I mentioned. I just wanted to rest my weary feet by kneeling/leaning on the chair, as I had done throughout the show. Well this chair is kind of unusual as folding chairs go, and clearly I kneeled on a part of it that’s not balanced to have weight put specifically on that area. The chair began to tip, dumping me over, and although I didn’t fall all the way to the floor, I couldn’t stop the chair from crashing back to the floor when I fell off it. As clattering folding chairs go, it was a fairly small noise, and as calling desks go, I was relatively far from the stage, but it was unfortunately very quiet onstage. I did not recover quickly enough to look up and see if the actors actually looked offstage to see what the noise was. God I hope not.

Storytime:
While ASM on Frankenstein I had an incident in which I was moving quickly for a cue and tripped with both feet over a prop bag which had been left in the walkway, and went crashing between tables, masking flats, and finally smacking full force into the floor during a quiet duet. I of course couldn’t see it, but I was shown many reenactments of what Hunter Foster and Christiane Noll did in response to the noise. Both of them separately left the stage after the scene and asked me more-or-less if somebody had died. Aside from ruining my pants and getting floor-burn on my knees that left a scar months after the show closed, I did make my cue.

Nick was standing right next to me when the whole thing happened, and the two of us spent the rest of the show gasping for breath from trying to stifle our laughter. He says I need to wear a spike tape “F” for “FAIL” for the evening show. I think that sounds fair.

UPDATE: Nick has dedicated a post to this event, with pictures of my “F.” It’s entitled PSM Fail.

Once the show was over, we grabbed a bite at the student cafeteria, and then all of us took a nice long nap in our bunks (between 4-5 hours for most of us, which is about as much sleep as we sometimes get overnight). In the last hour or so, we’ve all woken up and gathered in the lounge. We’re watching CSI right now. We have to go back in in about 20 minutes, and we’re all rather sad to have to leave the comfort of the bus, but we should be well-rested for load out tonight. We expect this one to be good — we have a loading dock very close to the stage, and an efficient local crew.


February 13, 2010

Adventures in Calling

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:48 pm

So far on this tour, since we left the Guthrie, every single performance has offered some new challenge to me in calling the show. I haven’t minded it, it’s kept a very simple show interesting. After running at the Guthrie, the one thing I’m most comfortable about is my ability to call the show, so I’m more than happy to make that harder for myself if it makes somebody else’s job easier.

In reverse chronological order (newest first), I will keep this post updated as I have more adventures.

Morgantown, WV

Again, due to Nick being gone, I’m more inclined to call from backstage even under somewhat less than ideal circumstances. There’s not a calling desk here, or a camera, and the view through the masking is a little chopped up, but in completely unrelated developments, we’re all using the house wireless comm, and so I decided that being on wireless, I can stand up and move around if I can’t see something from where I sit.

Fairfax, VA

I called from backstage again, but this time with a worse view of the stage, but with cameras. So it worked out just fine, but it was the first time I’ve had to really rely on a camera to see what I needed to see (aside from tech and the early part of the run at the Guthrie, when I was using the infrared). The real challenge, however, was that Nick had to go home for a few days, and needed to leave during the second act. He trained Bobby on his track before the show, and then watched as much as he could before he left, but really Bobby had to do the show for the first time on his own. The track is really easy, but it does require a certain extra bit of attentiveness on my part as well, because I have to be really paying attention to make sure I’m giving all the warnings at the right time, and thinking ahead to each sequence to see if there’s anything that should be explained ahead of time that might be disorienting to someone who had never heard it before.

Pittsfield, MA

This was a really big challenge. We didn’t do the show with our own light plot. We used the venue’s rep plot and focus, with our color in it, and a few specials, as well as our set-mounted lights, which are pretty numerous. Basically the entire lighting design had to be recreated from scratch using whatever we had at our disposal. Corey, the staff director, asked Devon and I to create six different looks which could be used to roughly cover the whole show. I took out my backup calling script and on the drive to Pittsfield, scratched out the internal cues we wouldn’t need.

Due to the ease of load-in for the set, we had time to be more ambitious. We created the six basic looks first, and then started at the beginning of the show, modifying each one to better adjust to the needs of the scene and the feel of the original cue. After four hours, we had almost 50 cues (the show only goes up to 135 to begin with).

I marked up my backup script for calling this particular performance, which is a lot easier than modifying the main calling script and then removing the changes. This way if something like this should have to happen later in the tour, we will still have a script to base it on. I took the time to hole punch it, but then decided I didn’t need to bother to put it in a binder.

In a way it was an easy show because I had less cues to call, but I had to be very alert to which cues were in, and in a few cases made decisions on the fly to move cues where we replaced a multi-cue transition with a single cue. The show looked really good — when we saw it, we were actually amazed at how close it looked to the real thing.

New London, CT

This wasn’t so much a problem, as an opportunity. There wasn’t really a decent front-of-house position for me to call from, and there was a really nice calling desk stage right. Every venue has slightly differently-spaced masking based on where the available linesets are, and this one seemed to have a pretty clear view to the deck from where the calling desk was. I decided early in the day, based just on the lines drawn on the marley and where the legs were in the air, that I could call from backstage, despite the fact that there was no camera.

Indeed that’s what I ended up doing and it was awesome. I generally love calling from backstage most of the time, and it was great to be able to see the actors close up and watch the show from another angle. I also like to be back with everybody and feel like part of the backstage world. I took over the stage right cues that Nick does with hand signals, and I would have gotten to use the remote to turn off one of the remote-controlled candles, but the local guy who was supposed to do it had already been told about it, and I didn’t feel it was right to take away the one somewhat interesting thing he gets to do in the whole show. Someday. Someday.

Now that I know how easy it was to see all my cues, I can be a little more liberal with deciding if I can call from backstage in a given venue. Unlike Henry V, in which the whole set was a wraparound semi-circle, this one can definitely be called without a camera if the masking is in the right place, so that increases my options.

This is the calling desk during load in. That big binder isn’t mine, that’s the lighting book. None of that crap is mine. During the show, I had my script and my computer on the desk.

St. Cloud, MN

Everything was actually fine here, but the calling position was literally right behind the back row — at a table, not behind a booth wall or anything. So calling clearly enough to be understood by a crew unfamiliar with the show, but quietly enough not to disturb the people three feet in front of me was a challenge.

Appleton, WI

The house wired comm was having trouble talking to our wireless system, so I called the show wearing two headsets — thankfully they were both lightweight, and to be honest, it wasn’t as uncomfortable as you might imagine. Making sure both booms were near my mouth was the most difficult part.

I prefer to call the whole show on all channels so everyone hears what’s going on, but in this case I told them I would be calling only to the channel involved in most cases. I was just afraid of fumbling with both talk buttons and screwing something up if I was always trying to activate both.

Grand Rapids, MN

Monitors so quiet that I couldn’t hear the show beyond mumbles. Once you know a show well enough, it’s pretty easy to know what the actors are saying just by their inflection, but the downside is you have to follow where they are in the text very carefully so you don’t get lost.

Moorhead, MN

We had a bad headset cable, which caused me to lose comm twice within the first few minutes of the show. I was across the booth from the light board and the sound console was right outside the open booth window, so I was able to keep things going until we got it fixed.


February 11, 2010

How Many Technicians Does it Take…?

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:52 pm


Apparently the answer is four: one to hold the sconce to the wall, one to hold the head of each bolt in place, and Bobby is unseen behind the wall tightening the nuts.

Installing practicals during load-in in New London, CT.


February 8, 2010

Alternate Stage Directions

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:25 pm

We here on the Romeo and Juliet crew decided a few days ago that we were tired of the traditional “stage right” and “stage left” and so forth, and we came up with some better alternatives to the boring “upstage,” “downstage,” etc. Sometimes we actually use them.

Below is our glossary for our new invention. Click to enlarge, and feel free to print, hang in your greenroom, or spread around the web.


February 7, 2010

St Cloud, MN

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:59 pm

St. Cloud was the last stop on our grueling first week of touring. Based on the tech specs, we knew the venue was small and the path to load our boxes in would be tricky. After leaving the new, spacious, union house in Appleton, WI, we were expecting disappointment in St. Cloud. What we got was just the opposite.

We were greeted by Max, who was one of our most trusted local crew guys in our first stop of Moorhead, MN, who arranged to work on the crew in St. Cloud as well (about a 3-hour drive for him). It was nice to be able to look forward to seeing a familiar face, and one who was familiar with how our show goes up and down. The rest of the crew was equally eager, and somehow, with a really convoluted path from the street to the stage for our heavy boxes, and a 2-ft lift up to the loading door for the human-carryable pieces, this crew still managed to put the set up much faster than any other venue so far. I’m sure part of that is us learning to be more efficient, but without the right crew, everything would fall apart.

We actually had free time to get everything ready before the show. Nick and I had rehearsal for an hour and a half in the afternoon — our first understudy rehearsal. The cast had a relatively relaxing travel schedule, and with the rehearsal in the afternoon, they had plenty of time to see the venue and grab dinner before their warmup time an hour before the show. Also, they didn’t have to deal with the crew running around finishing the set and lighting while they were trying to do warmup and do fight call, which must have contributed to their sense of relaxation, even though the backstage area was more claustrophobic than usual.

There was a very nice greenroom, in which there were several copies of the local arts & entertainment paper, where we were the front-page article.

My calling position was in the house, just behind the back row. I chose to be positioned between the light board and sound positions, with my desk made from the lid of our light board’s road case, stradding the lighting and sound desks. It was actually one of the more comfortable calling desks I’ve had so far.

I generally dread calling from the house, or with an open booth window anywhere near the audience. Not for myself, but because I feel really bad for the audience who has to listen to me talk the whole show. Also, I believe that having to talk quietly, especially when calling to a crew unfamiliar with the show, leads to unnecessary mistakes because I can’t be heard as clearly as if I was speaking freely. When I heard a rumor that the show wasn’t well sold, I hoped there would be many rows between me and the nearest audience member. When I walked out into the house just before places, and saw the entire orchestra and much of the balcony filled, I was at once very happy for us, and also really sad for the people whose heads were literally three feet from my mouth.

However, being able to be in the house for the show — not in an open booth, but literally sitting in the back row of this beautifully restored old theatre — was well worth the challenges of calling quietly and clearly. It’s been a long time (since rehearsals during previews) since I’ve been able to watch the actors “in the room,” and then I was still too busy worrying about my own stuff to sit back and enjoy their work. And they have discovered a lot of great things since we opened. I was actually really moved by the show, and was very glad I had the opportunity to experience it from the house.

The best thing that happened, however, was the bat. We discovered during the day that a bat had found its way into the theatre. It hadn’t been seen for a while, and then during Scene 2, the bat comes flying out of the window in our set, and out over the audience, where it continued to soar around the house and the stage for at least 30 seconds. The audience freaked out. The cast was momentarily stunned, then broke into smiles, and then carried on bravely, accounting for the audience’s lapsed attention in the way that one holds for laughs but then presses onward. They did a great job keeping their own laughter together and bringing the audience back into the play.

The bat returned a few times through the play, most notably during the “lark” scene in which R&J are on the balcony, debating whether the bird they hear is a nightingale or a lark, thus signaling the approach of day. As Juliet is saying “it was the nightingale and not the lark,” the bat flies right past the balcony. I’m not sure if the full irony of that moment was understood by the audience, but we in the back had to really stiffle our laughter.

The load out went equally smoothly, not the fastest ever, but very good in relation to the difficulty of getting things to the truck. We then began our 3-day trek to New London, CT. Today we spent in Chicago, or rather in a parking lot near Midway Airport, surrounded by hotels, one of which we have a crew room in, where we take turns enjoying such luxuries as a shower and a real toilet. We also watched the Super Bowl on the bus, and did some troubleshooting to improve the TV picture and surround sound.

Tomorrow we’re going to Niagra Falls. I’ve never been, so that seems pretty cool. One of the reasons we chose to go a little bit north out of our way is so that Nick can be dropped off at his old college, where he’s talking to some tech theatre students. Then he’ll rejoin us at the bus.

I’m looking forward to our arrival in New London on Tuesday night because we’ll have real hotel rooms — for two days — in the same hotel! It’s practically like being landed gentry!


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