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June 10, 2012

Triassic Tech

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:51 pm

Well tech is basically done! We still have one 10-out-of-12 tomorrow, but it’s a rather unconventional one, as it will consist of both a photo call and our invited dress, which I think is an interesting way of doing it. It should be a fun day.

Here’s my tech table:

Yesterday we finished teching early in the day, then did a stop-and-start run out of costume (which only had like two stops, so it was basically a run), and then in the evening did our first full dress run. We’ve still been making significant changes, which is a struggle to keep up with now that all of us have our own responsibilities, but the changes are great, and well worth it!

The tech process has been going very well. I’ve got like 300 cues in a 90-minute show, so I’m pretty busy. I think there are about 3 pages that don’t have cues. Tomorrow I make the transition from calling the show to the assistant lighting designer, to running the Ion myself. I’m a little scared, because now I have to re-learn all the timing again, but I’m hoping I’ll just instinctively be able to figure it out. I get two (maybe three?) cracks at it before we have a paying audience. If you want to see if this is effective, feel free to go to triassicparq.com and buy tickets to Tuesday’s show!

As usual, I’m having a great time. We had a few people in the house last night who hadn’t seen any significant portion of a run before, which was nice (they appeared very entertained!), but I’m really looking forward to tomorrow night when we’ll have people who, although they’re our friends, haven’t seen or read (or written) any of the show.


May 27, 2012

Triassic Parq – End of Week 2

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:42 pm

Another week of rehearsal comes to an end. Most notably during this week, I discovered the technique of measuring scenic drawings on a computer screen.

Yes it worked, and I didn’t even have to set my zoom level to something like 87.3% to get it to the right scale. There are old-fashioned ways of making theatre, like using a scale ruler to measure large rolled-up drawings that you keep in a corner behind your desk, and there are newfangled technological ways, like Vectorworks. And then there’s holding a ruler up to a PDF. Which also, apparently, works, at least for simple questions like “is the actual bench taller or shorter than the block we’re using in rehearsal?”

Our goal before we started was to have the show staged by the end of Week 2. I’m pleased to say that we made our goal half a day early. And it wasn’t one of those race-to-the-finish-line kind of processes where we just staged the show as fast as possible before going back and making it good. We took a lot of time along the way, and reviewed periodically, so not only does it exist on paper, but people actually know what they’re doing and have retained it.

Now we’re going back and doing what I would normally describe as “table work,” although in this case it’s more “sit in a circle work,” which is one of my favorite parts in the process. It’s sadly one that often gets skipped on a musical, because there’s just so much else to do in a limited amount of time. But it’s great that now that we have a solid sense of the big picture, we can go back and really explore what’s going on in individual moments, and apply that to the existing staging. We only had time to do that with two scenes yesterday, but it made an immediate difference.

I’m really excited to see what else comes out of these discussions. Between this and some improv exercises, a really detailed history has been created for the dinosaur community, to fill in the questions not explained directly in the script. Since most audience members probably aren’t familiar with the tribal structure that arises in the average genetically-engineered dinosaur park, I think this will help give a more complete picture of the world they’re stepping into (and speaking of stepping into, if you really want to step into this world, I recommend the onstage seating).

I’m still having a great time. My stage management team, which still doesn’t have a catchy dinosaur name, is still being amazing. They track the props, they look out for costume issues, they print and distribute the script updates, they ask the studio staff to crank the AC, they fill the water bottles, they get the coffee, and they keep the entire room fed with chocolate-covered small food items (espresso beans being the recent favorite). And a million other things expected and unexpected throughout the process.

From what we’re being told about ticket sales, we’re building an impressive advance, but for an Off-Broadway show to have any kind of advance is impressive. It’s really hard to get the word out before the show is open and people are seeing it. For that reason, I can’t wait till we start previews, because I think it will exceed expectations and I hope that people start to get excited about it.

If you’re in New York this summer, and you want to be like, “I read this cool website about stage management, and I knew this show was going to be amazing before anyone else,” you can buy your tickets now. And because you read this cool website, you now also know that to get 30% off tickets, you should use the discount code TPDINOS.

We ended our week with nearly everyone from the rehearsal room going out for dinner and drinks afterwards. It was a great way to celebrate the end of our second week, and the accomplishment of our staging milestone. On Wednesday we have a small press event during rehearsal. Due to what can only be described as awesome luck, we move into the theatre on Thursday. Tech starts next Tuesday. So excited!


May 16, 2012

First Week of Rehearsal

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:20 pm

We’re midway through our first week of rehearsal of Triassic Parq now. And mercifully, I am finally only working on one production, and able to devote all my time to it. Which means occasionally having time for blogging what I hope will be a very interesting process.

To recap, I spent last week in the office. I have an army of assistants on this show: my ASM Ashley, (who you may recall from the time I spent at the Guthrie in 2010, and my recent reading with The Old Globe this spring), and interns Carly and Sarah. At least one of them was always in the office, so I had lots of help printing and organizing paperwork, making Staples runs, attending meetings, trying kneepads on visiting actors, and a bunch of other random things that came up. We also found a few occasions to have lunch or dinner together as a stage management team, to get to know each other and figure out how we’re going to divide up the work.

This past Monday we began rehearsal. Our meet & greet, Equity meeting, and read-through went very smoothly, and with the pressures of putting on a punctual and organized first rehearsal for our assembled guests out of the way, we got down to the business of learning music for the rest of that day, and the following day.

Today was our first day of staging, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve probably said it a million times, but I hate taking blocking. However, I actually had a pretty good time with it today. By the end of the day I was feeling a little fried, as I’m sure the actors also were by having to retain so much new choreography, as well as lyrics and notes, but I really enjoyed seeing the show take shape, and tried to put all of my concentration into learning the show (even the choreography, which I usually leave to the dance captain, and don’t try to memorize or document down to every count). You may know that I don’t have a great track record of successful open runs or transfers. I have a strong feeling that this is the show that has a serious shot at being a hit, and I’m putting my all into treating it as such from a stage management perspective.

As always, I was dreading taking blocking, up until the point where I had to put pencil to paper to scrawl down the starting positions of the cast for their first entrance. It’s amazing how much more important and engaging it can feel when there’s at least a possibility that the blocking you take might need to be passed on to a successor, or used in staging a future production. There’s a lot that would need to happen before that becomes a reality, but then it would be a little late to decide to take good blocking, so I’m just going to assume that I’ll want all my notes to be as detailed as possible.

After rehearsal we had our third production meeting. We have been meeting regularly on Wednesdays since two weeks before rehearsal began, which I think is rather dedicated of us. We also have a meeting next Wednesday, and that will probably be our last one, as we move into the theatre a little more than a week after that, at which point we’ll be meeting daily. Our previous meetings have been well over an hour. This one was much shorter, more of a check-in, and as usual filled with people in good spirits, displaying a lot of enthusiasm for putting this show together.

I’m very excited to share more about the process as it progresses!

I leave you with a photo of our rehearsal room, which is actually within a couple inches of the width of the stage at Soho Playhouse (lazy stage managers, rejoice!). Also, that may be the most obnoxiously-placed rehearsal room column I’ve ever seen. It has, however, justified the presence of four stage managers in the room, as we all have a slightly different angle to report to each other what’s going on on the other side of the column.


February 24, 2012

Day -44: Production Meeting

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:47 pm

Today I attended my first production meeting for a developmental presentation of a show that starts rehearsal in April. 44 days from now. No, that’s not normal. Also, I’m the ASM. Generally, unless you’re working on Broadway, the ASM’s contract starts 2 or 3 days before the first rehearsal, but I’m a big believer in getting involved ASAP if I’ve got no other work. I figure it’s more helpful in the long run not to have missed anything. Also, one of the biggest things I think I bring to the table as an ASM is my ability to function in place of the PSM when needed, and it’s hard to do that if you don’t have the same information the PSM has. So in pretty much any case where I’m told, “well, you don’t technically have to be there, but if you want…” I’ll go.

Anyway, it’s good I was there, because my friend Brian is the PSM, and he’s doing a show in New Brunswick which had one of those awful 10AM / 8PM two-show days today, and he didn’t make it in time. I took notes in Evernote, and cleaned them up and emailed them to him when I got home.

At the meeting we received a calendar, and an updated contact sheet (which we got in an email the other day). I hadn’t received the script yet, but it was waiting for me in my email by the time I got home from the meeting.

That led to an interesting situation towards the end of the meeting when I was asked, “does stage management have any questions?” I admitted honestly that all I knew about the show was the title, which got a good chuckle from the room. But it’s an interesting illustration that there are lots of things to think about at a meeting like this, that remain the same no matter what the show is. A lot of my initial questions usually revolve around the rehearsal situation: where is it (this was already answered, we have a nice studio at Pearl, which I’m thrilled about), whether we can tape the floor in the rehearsal room (and more importantly, leave the tape down overnight), whether we have storage at the studio. Usually I also want to get some kind of sense of what crew we will have when it comes to the actual run. In this case we’re presenting the show in a large rehearsal studio, and there isn’t planned to be any “backstage” space, so it looks like I won’t even be able to help with the running of the show, much less need a crew. Basically there will be sets, props, staging and choreography, and some level of sound to be determined by the acoustic needs of the space, but no lighting. So it sounds like Brian will be sitting around a lot, too.

With the hour-long meeting completed, I headed home with lots of new things to do.

The first thing I did was send Brian my notes.

Calendar

Then I finished putting the information on the calendar into iCal (which I had been doing a little of during the meeting). I always like this part of the process, when I first get something of a schedule. It makes me feel much more organized, and there’s always a moment of “what have I gotten myself into, anyway?” when I first see it laid out. This one is pretty nice. Straight 5-hour rehearsal days until we get to tech. I say that with the biggest “we shall see” possible!

Pro tip: if your rehearsal schedule looks too easy, that’s usually because it is, and while you may be the only person to think that in pre-production, and the producer may say, “nope, this is really it — we’ve booked the studio time,” the director will realize it eventually in the middle of rehearsal and that booking will be changed. Let me tell ye: we shall see.

I promise to let you know. I’ve got a reminder in OmniFocus for April 23rd, so you know I won’t forget it. I would love to have to admit I was proven wrong.

Contacts

After dealing with the calendar, I put all the contacts into Address Book. About 5 of the people on the production are people I’ve worked with before. When that happens, I generally don’t update their title and company from the first show I met them on, but I add a note listing any subsequent shows I do with them. I currently have 1,498 contacts, because I basically don’t ever remove people I work with. I will usually, but not always, remove someone who drops out of a show before it starts production (if I’ve had literally no contact with them). I also tend to remove non-professional child actors because the odds of working with them again are a bit lower. Of course I’ve still got contact sheets elsewhere, so nothing is ever really lost, but I like to have most of my old contacts at hand (and not have to type them again!)

This allowed for a rather funny exchange before the meeting as those of us getting settled around the table began introducing ourselves. I worked with the set designer about 4 years ago, we hugged and said hello. Then I turned around to meet the choreographer, and we both looked at each other and knew that we had worked together, but had no idea where. I threw out a couple show titles with no luck. I asked what her last name was (I was pretty sure I had matched the name with the face, but wasn’t certain), and began typing it into my phone. She was like, “Wait! Don’t tell me, I want to figure it out!” I pulled up her contact and said, “Wow! I never would have guessed that one!” and we began the meeting. Impressively, a few minutes later she figured it out. Anyway, that’s the most useful reason I never get rid of my contacts: I use the quick search feature on the iPhone constantly when I think, “I know that name — have I worked with that person?” or when I know I’ve worked with the person, but am not sure what show it was or what their role was on it.

If I was the PSM, I would then import all the contacts into my database and begin making my own contact sheet. But since that’s not my job, my involvement with the contacts is limited to making sure I have everybody in Address Book so they’re in my phone if I need to call anyone suddenly.

Props

Ah, props. One of the only jobs of the ASM. One thing was made clear at this meeting, there will be a lot of props. But — halleluja! — we have a prop designer, and he seems really on the ball. I actually kind of like managing props, as my title implies. When someone else makes them appear, and I don’t have to go shopping for them, it’s a source of great pride, as it is, after all, the only thing the ASM really does independently.

I don’t know anything about what the props are yet, except a vague notion that they will be largely kitchen- and restaurant-related, but in preparation for this onslaught, I have prepared my blank prop spreadsheet. You can find the template for it on the templates page.

Script

My last post made it clear that I don’t particularly like reading scripts during pre-production. As a result, this is the only part of all the information I received today that I haven’t fully processed. I still have 44 days. Maybe 42, since I might be able to get a good start on the prop list if the script is descriptive enough.

As is apparently my new M.O., I made the script into a PDF and then emailed it to my Kindle, so the next time I go somewhere I can start reading it on the train. I’m visiting my parents on Monday, that should cover it. Something I just thought of: I can even take notes on the Kindle as I read, to mark mentions of props and other things of import. That would remove the main advantage of reading on paper. I’ll give it a try.

The Cloud

So to recap where all my information on the show is:

  • The calendar is in iCal, which through the magic of Google Apps is synced instantly to my phone, and available on the web with Google Calendar.
  • The contacts are in Address Book, which through the magic of iCloud is synced instantly to my phone, and is available on the web through the iCloud web app, which I have used approximately never, but if my computer and phone fell down a well, it would be an option.
  • The notes from the meeting (along with another note from when I got hired where I jotted down some simple info like my salary, and the dates of employment) are in Evernote, which syncs less-than-magically between all my computers and my phone, and is available on the web in case every piece of electronics I own has fallen in the well.
  • My task list pertaining to the show, which thanks to my work today is now empty except for reading and processing the script, is in OmniFocus, which also syncs less-than-magically between my laptop and my phone, and is not available on the web.
  • The script is on my Kindle, ready for reading. I think it actually saves a copy on Amazon’s servers, but really, who cares?
  • All the files pertaining to the show, which right now are the contact sheet, script, and prop list, are on my Dropbox in a folder I’ve created for the show, which syncs instantly between my computers, and less-than-magically to my phone.

So that’s where everything is now. I should be caught up for some time, and ready to process any smaller bits of information as they trickle in. There was some casual talk about having another meeting in about two weeks. For now, I’m going to do my taxes tonight!


September 17, 2011

How I’m Using Evernote Today

I call this: mac,pc,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:51 pm

Just a quick use case for Evernote in rehearsal.

Right now we’re still focusing on music, so one of the few things to track in rehearsal is what songs we’ve covered. That’s the biggest challenge on this show — there are 31 of them.

When I’m PSM, I have a ridiculous database that tracks things like this, but this is a pretty simply-structured show, being basically a revue, with minimal blocking, sets and props, and most of what the database does is either not needed, or not needed when I’m the ASM.

Back when I was doing pre-production I made myself an Evernote note with the names of all the songs, because I wasn’t familiar with the show and knew I’d need to be referring to it often. If I were really on top of things I’d have the names of the characters who sing them on there. Maybe that’s my next project.

I didn’t really plan this, but I had nothing to do in rehearsal, and when I have free time when assisting, I do one of two things: create more paperwork than I probably need, and monitor things that the PSM is already doing, just in case it becomes helpful to have that redundancy — for instance if the PSM needs to be out of the room for an extended period he will miss some of what we were working on, and my paperwork can be used to double-check his list for the report.

So I started using my note to not just list the songs, but to check them off as we learn them. I love checkboxes in Evernote. On the Mac you can make them quickly with shift-command-T. I have a suspicion it’s shift-ctl-T on Windows. The system I came up with is that when we start a song, it gets a checkbox. When the song is completely taught it gets a checkmark.

Nothing fancy, but sometimes Evernote is so open-ended that I don’t quite know what to do with it. So here’s an example.

I only wish the iOS client didn’t crash so much. I would keep my run sheet on it. But I can’t have a run sheet that crashes just before a scene change, or loses its most recent changes, and I feel like that would happen at least five times a day, which is five times more per run than I can accept. Currently I’m writing the run sheet in Word. I’m not sure yet what method I’ll use during tech. It will very likely be paper.


July 9, 2011

The Calling Case

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:35 pm


This is a little something I like to call The Calling Case. It’s a handy little box that sits with me when I’m calling a show. The need for a convenient, easily-transported box comes mostly from touring, where I might spend four hours or less at a given calling desk before packing it all in again. Especially on the road, I found it very handy because I could take off for the desk with nothing but this, my script, and my computer and know I have everything I will need during the show.

Find Your Own

As you can see from the ArtBin label on it, this is presumably supposed to be a case for artists to carry their tools. I think it’s probable that I found it at a Hobby Lobby, but I’m not 100% sure. It could also have been a Walmart. The exact case doesn’t really matter, although this size is sufficient, just barely, for what I need to carry. If it could fit a LittleLite, it would be even better. But the key is, it’s sturdy, closes securely, has a slim profile, and a nice big handle.

The Contents

  • My headset – that’s a Telex PH-88 with some modifications I’ve made. The most important function the calling case serves is to protect my headset. Everything else that happens to fit in the case is just a bonus.
  • Pen/pencil case – that’s a Mont Blanc case, but they’re not Mont Blanc writing implements. My primary pen and pencil are made by Sensa. I generally call every performance with a pencil in my hand, or very close by. The pen just kind of tags along because it’s in the case with the pencil.
  • Snackage – I try to have a Nutri-grain bar or similar healthy and filling snack on hand in case I get hungry during the show, or end up missing a meal if things get crazy approaching curtain time.
  • Binoculars – this is my little luxury inclusion because my calling case travels in a road box that weighs hundreds of pounds, so the weight of the binoculars is negligible. If I had to cart it everywhere myself I might think the weight was unnecesary. I’d estimate maybe once a week something will happen onstage where a pair of binoculars comes in handy — maybe to check what a foreign object is on the floor, or to see if an actor is bleeding. My actors don’t bleed once a week, I swear. I used it on Comedy of Errors a lot to see if things were on spike, because we performed in a lot of different-shaped venues where proportions sometimes looked weird, and often I had the best perspective to see if it was just a trick of the venue, or if the actors/crew missed their marks.
  • Flags – I throw a miscellaneous packet of post-it flags in, which can be used to very quickly mark a page of the script for later examination. This is mostly useful in tech or early in a run, when changes are happening and errors are still being discovered.
  • Occasional inclusion: LED USB keyboard light (not shown) – sometimes I include a USB keyboard light, which I can use as a script light powered by my computer. On the Acting Company tour I always have a LittleLite, but on shows where I have to be more self-sufficient sometimes it ends up being my keyboard light, and when that’s the case, it goes in the box.

April 19, 2011

Turnaround

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:43 pm

So the Acting Company tour is finally over after 7 months. It’s a very strange feeling after so much time, several layoffs, and a vacation week, to think that this time it’s really, seriously over. When I compose an email and it auto-fills my signature as “Production Stage Manager — The Acting Company 2010-2011 Tour,” I erase it out of habit when dealing with other projects or non-work emails. Yesterday I came to the surprising realization that I am not the Production Stage Manager for the Acting Company tour anymore. Next year is unknown, but at any rate, the 2010-2011 tour is over and done with and no longer has a PSM. I am not under contract to anyone. It’s a bit scary, and also very liberating.

I have, however had a couple jobs.

Me and Miss Monroe

Last Monday, you may recall, I got two jobs on the same day. One was a single day of subbing for the ASM on a workshop of a new musical, called Me and Miss Monroe, which is, in very brief, about Marilyn Monroe (played by one of my favorite performers and past collaborators, Rachel York). The day I was there they were reviewing one of Rachel’s songs, then a big production number at the top of Act 2, and staging from the middle of Act 2 through the end of the play. So things were very much still in development.

John Rando is directing, and although I think his finished products are pretty brilliant, it was great to get just a glimpse of how ideas are born in rehearsal. As you may know, I grew up wanting to be a director of Broadway musicals, so it’s really interesting to me just to sit in a room with a Tony-winning director and watch him have a really smart idea, right in front of me. Just in the course of a pretty ordinary rehearsal, I could see why he’s as successful as he is. I wish I could have been there for weeks to watch the whole process.

My favorite part of the day was when they got to the new stuff in Act 2. It was a scene with three characters, that leads into a song for Marilyn. There’s some dialogue, and then a song. Something was just not quite right about it. I don’t know if it was the actors or John who suggested it first, but everybody felt it was a little bit odd how they’re talking and then Rachel sings this big song and the other two people just kind of sit there. “I feel like we should be talking here” was said, and that sparked an idea of maybe moving some of the dialogue from earlier in the scene into the middle of the song. The writers (Charles Leipart and William Goldstein) weren’t there, off in a small room with a piano re-working some other song (which always just excites me for some reason), so the actors, John and music director Eric Stern played around on their own moving the dialogue around like puzzle pieces and adding underscoring where necessary. It was immediately more engaging. When the writers came back, they were filled in on the idea, and everyone gathered around the piano to work out how it should go, with the script PA, Rob, standing among the group with his computer, documenting the changes. I’d say the whole process took about an hour-and-a-half, and at the end they had a scene and song that was so much better than what it was at the start, that someone watching the show would never imagine it could have been any other way.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a new musical, and my 7-hour-without-a-meal-break day, followed by racing downtown to call Comedy of Errors was the best day I’ve had in years. It reinforced my belief that trying to stay in New York working with good people, even if it means lower-paying jobs, is the right thing to do right now. In the near future I may need to do other things to pay the rent, but right now that day I got to spend in the room working with a bunch of people at the top of their profession, in the part of the business I really want to work in, was worth more than financial security.

I was offered a spot on the run crew for the workshop, but sadly had to turn it down because I was already committed to another new musical, a reading of a show called Trails.

Trails

This week I begin rehearsal for a reading, which is probably the first reading I’ve done in about 3 years. My feelings about readings are kind of ambivalent. They’re quite easy, and usually take no more than a week from start to finish. They pay almost nothing (though this one pays a little more than most), but they get you involved with producers, directors, writers, musical directors and actors who might be big Broadway people or future big Broadway people, and you get in on the ground level of a new musical, which positions you nicely if the show moves on to a bigger production. That’s paid off for me once, on a show called Twilight in Manchego, which was one of the featured shows at NYMF a few years back. Not that NYMF is the pinnacle of the American musical theatre, but I got to work with some well-known people, and I had a great time doing the show. Having done the reading definitely put me ahead of the curve during the very short rehearsal and tech process. Actually, as much as I swore I’d never do NYMF again, the two shows I’ve done stand out as major highlights of my career in terms of enjoyment of the creative process, because the festival usually attracts a surprisingly high calibre of people.

Anyway, about the reading. It’s been a while (since September, in fact) since I’ve started a new show, and although a reading is very simple, that initial process of pre-production where you make up a schedule and send it out to everybody, and get their conflicts and make sure everybody received your emails, is pretty much the same. Thankfully it’s a small cast (six), and a small creative team, so the volume of information is a bit less. It’s kind of exciting to be back in that part of the process again. It often means waking up to 20 emails, and having lots of conversations shooting back and forth from the actors and the creatives and producers all day long, but in some way that’s kind of fun. At least I’m home for it, so I’m not juggling it with something else.

I also got sick this week. I think this is pretty common for stage managers, maybe for others in the business, too. Your body knows you can’t be sick while on tour, so the moment you have a vacation or layoff, you immediately get sick. I literally got sick the morning of my first day post-contract. Woke up sick on my first day of freedom. Poor Meaghan got sick on all the vacations, which used to happen to me. I think my immune system must have evolved to a higher level that it waited until the tour was actually over. I did get the bronchitis that was going around the cast in October, just in time for tech. That sucked. But other than that I survived the entire tour with nothing more than a sore throat. Whatever I have right now isn’t bad, just an annoying sore throat and a slight headache, and probably a slight fever, but my thermometer is mysteriously broken. I am mostly concerned with making sure that it doesn’t affect my efficiency on this reading. It’s easy to let things slip through the cracks or get put off and then forgotten about when you’re not feeling well. OmniFocus is especially my friend here, as I can write down all my tasks and when they need to be completed, so even if I forget the urgency of something, I will be reminded.

So that’s my week, making the transition from a long-term job to getting up-and-running on a new short one.


March 17, 2011

The Thing About Touring

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:23 pm


Yesterday I had a revelation. We had a show at the Sunrise Theatre in Ft. Pierce, FL, with a great crew and a really fast load-in, leaving us with several hours to kill along the Florida coast before our 5:30 show call.

I had lunch at a seaside restaurant (literally ON the water), and then went back to the theatre for a short time before the crew was released until show call. Then I took a leisurely walk by myself up and down the marina area, until being invited to dinner at the same seaside restaurant. Then on the way back we visited a cool store that sold lots of different microbrews (I’m not much of a beer drinker, but we have several beer snobs on the bus, so I’m learning by osmosis).

Over the course of this day, which despite being a 16-hour work day, still felt suspiciously like a vacation (and I’d like to point out, that is not normal), I realized what it is about touring.

Sometimes we get to spend our days in places where it would otherwise be expensive to live or hang out, and we get to do it as part of our job, with paid travel and subsidized housing and food costs. Yesterday I could have been sitting on a beach in Florida where it was 80 degrees, or I could have been working in New York where it was 40 and raining, fighting to get up and down the subway stairs. Now the flip side of that is that when it was 30 below in Brainerd, MN, I was wishing I was in New York where it was 20 degrees and sunny. But the other thing about touring, especially with as many one-nighters as we do, is that you’re never in the same place too long to get really sick of it. Don’t like something about the venue or the hotel today? Tomorrow you get a whole new set of living and working conditions.

I think that’s really what I find so fun about touring: it’s annoying at times, but it’s constantly changing, and every once in a while you end up someplace really cool. Maybe it’s because I never travel for fun, but I feel like I get to experience things that I couldn’t afford to do the way most people do — while on vacation — but I can have the same experiences while being paid to be there.


January 18, 2011

Student Audience Psychology

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:44 pm

Today I learned something new.

We had our first student matinee of Comedy of Errors. Now I’ve certainly done enough student matinees in my career, and have learned a bit about how student audiences react to shows. But we have an interesting start to our show that makes it different.

I think this show has the most badass opening of any show I’ve done in my career for one reason: it has no preshow announcement. Not only that, but the opening sequence has no music or anything else to provide a segue before the text starts.

House to half
House out
Curtain rises
Actor begins speaking

It’s without a doubt my favorite 15 seconds of my day.

I recall the days when Broadway shows didn’t have preshow announcements, though I never really got to stage manage in that era. I’ve probably done a couple shows without announcements, but they would have been small off-off-Broadway shows, which feel much different in a 99-seat theatre. I’m not particularly opposed to announcements, I actually enjoy doing them a little, but I think it’s fabulously old-school to dim the house lights and jump right into a show.

So anyway, this is what I have to work with when we start the show. The timing of the whole thing is at my discretion — when the audience has settled enough to go to black, and when they have fully settled before taking the curtain out. Here’s where 11 performances for adult audiences have led me astray: I have become accustomed to waiting until the moment the house is completely silent before bringing the curtain up.

There is a well-known characteristic of student audiences: they really like blackouts. More often than not, when the lights fade to black they will scream. They will scream for the duration of the blackout. I’ve had many discussions trying to figure out exactly why this is, without much success, but it is so.

So I made the fatal mistake, when there was still a little bit of settling and rustling as the lights hit black, of holding and waiting for it to stop, as I would do for an evening performance. Well of course it didn’t stop. It transitioned from rustling of programs to laughing and screaming, and well, I put a stop to that by taking the curtain out while it was just a few kids before it could spread to all 461 of them.

So, stage managers, life lesson: if your instructions are to hold in a blackout until the house is quiet, do NOT do this at a student performance. Get the hell out of the blackout as soon as you can, it will only get worse the longer you sit in it. I should have known this before, but was just going through my usual show and forgot about the dreaded blackout scream. Let my folly be a lesson to you.


January 8, 2011

An Invited Dress

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:14 am

Tonight was our invited dress of The Comedy of Errors at the Guthrie. Over 300 students attending the Minnesota Thespian Society’s conference were in attendance. They also came to R&J‘s invited dress last year, and were probably our best audience of the entire tour, so those of us who experienced last year have been greatly looking forward to having such a warm group to be the first outsiders to see our Comedy and let us know if they thought it was funny.

We had five hours of rehearsal in the afternoon, a relatively tech-light day, as we fixed little staging things here and there. Last night we did an almost-run of the show (which could have been considered a relatively smooth run, but we ran out of time about five minutes before the end of the play) — but for all intents and purposes, we had already done a complete run before tonight.

I was nervous, but not really about calling the show. More about going from our 5:00 end of rehearsal to eating, re-typing sections of my calling script with things we changed that day (that were too convoluted to read without being re-typed), getting the stage prepared, our cast to their warmup, bringing my stuff up to the booth for the first time and making sure nothing is wrong up there while there’s still time to fix it, getting fight call done in the allotted 15 minutes (which never happens on the first couple tries), getting blackout check done, and opening the house in some manner of timeliness that doesn’t leave the Guthrie house staff thinking I’m incompetent. Then pacing around for a half hour (I only made it 15 minutes before I radioed Meaghan that I was going up to the booth), hoping none of our actors run into a costume or wig delay that requires holding the curtain, then going through the places procedures, coordinating Ian’s preshow curtain speech, remembering to leave time for Ian to get back to his seat before beginning the show, and finally starting the show. Everything after that point, I wasn’t really nervous about.

As I arrived in the balcony, I was anxious to just sit in the booth for 15 minutes putting the re-typed pages in my script and checking cue-by-cue that there were no errors, but before unlocking the door, I was compelled to pause for a moment to take a picture.

So the time came, I got the house right on time. Ian was with Meaghan backstage, waiting to hear word from me that we could begin. He came out and gave a brief speech welcoming the Thespians, telling them that he too had been a Thespian, and gave the usual director-at-invited-dress speech that basically goes, “this is a rehearsal, if something goes wrong you may hear my voice or someone else’s [i.e. mine] saying ‘hold’ and we’ll have to fix something.” I vaguely remember the kids either laughing or outright clapping at this.

Let me tell ye: all this week I’ve been hearing it from people. I have literally been stopped in the halls by Guthrie staff telling me how excited the Thespians are to come see the show. And I, in turn have said how excited we are to have them, since a comedy especially needs an audience to get its bearings. And I would be told, how the Thespians are so excited to be able to be the first to see it, and they don’t mind that it’s a rehearsal, and the thing they want more than anything in the world is to see the show stop!

Now, I was a young technical theatre person at that age (and a Thespian), and I felt the same way too — whenever I met someone who worked on Broadway, all I wanted to hear about were stories of things going wrong. So I didn’t take any offense to the fact that 300 kids desperately wanted to see me experience the ultimate disgrace a stage manager can suffer. So I would just laugh and say that I understood how they felt, but I hoped they would not get their wish!

So…

Ian gives his speech, and as foretold, the kids titter at even the possibility of seeing the show stop.

I remember to hold for Ian to come back. When I see the side house door swing open, I call:
“Electrics 2, Go” (which also takes the house to half)

I wait a little while longer for Ian to get up to the production row.

I’m about to call Electrics 3 (which is a fade to black) when I realize I hadn’t given a formal warning to our prop man Craig, who is also our flyman for the house curtain.

“I’m sorry, Craig, are you standing by?”

Nothing.

“Craig? Craig? Meaghan? Hello?”

This is not the first, not the second, not the third, and probably not the fourth time in my career I’ve lost contact between the booth and everyone on wireless comm just before or just after a performance has started. So it was more of a “here we go again” than anything else.

By this point people on the electrics and sound channels are chiming in that they can hear me, and our sound engineer, Brandon, is starting to talk me through troubleshooting my console (which is not the same one from the tech table, so I haven’t used it since last year, and haven’t had a chance to familiarize myself with any of the buttons beyond the three channels — and the conveniently labeled “God Mic” button, which I only knew about because when Ian mentioned it in his speech, Brandon was like, “hey have you found your God mic button yet?”).

So Brandon and I are making sure that I’ve got all my listen buttons and talk buttons lit, but I had successfully been communicating with Meaghan up until just before Ian’s speech, so it seemed unlikely that something was set wrong. Then Susan, our wardrobe supervisor, calls in from her office that she can hear me. This is also interesting, as she’s on the same channel as the deck crew, but not wireless. So it looks like we’ve lost the wireless. The whole time this trouble-shooting process is going on, I’m glancing from time to time at the red-labled “God Mic” button, deciding when to use it. I know the kids want nothing more in the world, so I’m not dreading it, just deciding based on the information coming in when to formally admit defeat.

Some time after the delay had gotten obvious, Michael (lighting designer) had said, “maybe we should go back to Cue 1,” which sounded like a good idea. Ian, sitting near the tech tables, had by this time been informed of what the problem was, and it was he who invoked the God mic (which was probably nice because the kids had a pre-existing relationship with him by now). He said something like, “I told you we might have to stop!” and the kids went wild. I also felt I was now off the hook about providing them with their desired train wreck, and thankfully in a way that didn’t disrupt the show at all.

Ian explained that we were having a communication problem (which surprised me momentarily at how he would know that, until I realized he was sitting with four people who were on headset), and that we would begin soon.

I was getting frustrated, and had just picked up my radio to see if Meaghan had maybe turned hers on by now, when suddenly the voices of Meaghan and Craig popped on headset! A split-second later my phone received a text message from Meaghan, which I no longer needed to bother reading. We rejoiced for a moment, and they told me they could hear me the whole time. We conferred that none of us had touched anything at the time the comm suddenly started working again, so we were at a loss to explain why it had broken or what could be done to prevent it again. It was a mystery, without any hint of an immediate explanation, so all of us, across all channels, agreed that the only course of action was to press forward and cross our fingers. There aren’t very many cues that pass between me and the deck crew (“unless there’s a problem!” we said uneasily), but Meaghan and I agreed to keep our radios on for an emergency.

Ian had something else he had wanted to say to the students, so he requested to be the one to speak when we were ready. Once we all agreed to employ the solution of “hope that doesn’t happen again,” I passed word to Ian, and he made his announcement, and off we went!

From that point things went very smoothly. This show, especially being a comedy, moves fast, and has lots of intricate parts that go from hysterical to “meh” pretty quickly if they’re not timed perfectly, so while we knew we could go through the motions safely and more-or-less correctly, we had only run once, and this was going to be a big test for us to not just do our jobs correctly, but to do them like a well-oiled machine. I think we all exceeded our own expectations. Things came together really well, and the audience was with us the whole way.

The big excitement for me was the curtain call. We didn’t have one. We hadn’t even run the last moments of the play in two days. So word was passed around to the cast to get in a line behind the curtain and take a simple bow.

I had a bunch of cues scrawled on the last page of my script that I had never called. We had only ever teched up until the curtain fell. Thankfully the cues existed, but I have a thing where curtain calls make me nervous. I don’t know why, they don’t even really “count” in the same way as the rest of the show, normally. I just always get all up in my head about doing the sequence of events properly.

I’ve been calling Phantom for six years, and the curtain call still gives me butterflies every time. To be fair, it’s actually pretty crazy, involves catching the Phantom’s mask from one person, handing it off to someone else while listening for clears, checking for open traps and cueing a bunch of automation. Like, “really? I have to do all this other stuff, and in the middle of it I have to have this mask in my hand?” Actually the way I do it is more like
1) remember to stick hand out
2) close hand when mask is felt
3) open hand when someone tugs on mask
and then the rest of my energy is focused on what’s happening onstage (which you can barely see because scenery is being struck right next to you).

So anyway, curtain calls freak me out. And here’s one I’ve never actually tried. Who knows that any of these cues actually do what they allegedly do? So I spent a good chunk of the last scene reading and re-reading the sequence so I could smoothly move from one cue to the next, knowing what was coming. It went flawlessly, thankfully! I won’t say I called a perfect show, but it wasn’t bad, and my crew backed me up when I gave them short preps on a couple occasions.

Everybody was in a celebratory mood afterward. Our production meeting was short and sweet, like our show is, and was done by 9:40, which was amazing after a couple of post-midnight nights this week. Pretty much the entire Comedy team went to Sea Change, the in-Guthrie restaurant/bar and most convenient source of post-show beverages. The mood was incredibly festive. We remarked several times how everyone was toasting and congratulating as if it was opening night. In a way, I think it was. We proved to ourselves that we could do it, and I think that’s far more important than whether the audience paid for their tickets or whether we’re having a formal party afterwards. I’m looking forward to building our confidence even more in our remaining rehearsals, so we have a really solid show to play in Minneapolis, to be ready for whatever the road throws at us.


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