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January 3, 2011

Twas the Night Before Tech

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:16 pm

Today is my day off. We just had a day off two days ago, which is a strange, but very enjoyable phenomenon that comes about every year as a result of our attempts to wrestle ourselves back onto the traditional Monday day off, after two weeks of taking holidays off (Christmas and New Year’s Day). So to get us back on track, we end up with two days off close together, but in different calendar weeks.

Yesterday was a very long but very productive day on stage, in what in Guthrie parlance is termed the “first onstage rehearsal,” although in our case we were miraculously given the stage on Thursday and had it for our last three rehearsals. But since Sunday was our “first onstage” we introduced the new element of our deck crew, Craig and Natasha, which sort of creates a bridge between rehearsal and tech. We even tried out our fly cues (on this show we will use the house curtain, when a venue has one, at the top and end of the show). I love fly cues, so I’m incredibly excited at the prospect of sometimes having them. I’d never seen the house curtain at the McGuire Proscenium. Can you guess what color it is?
A funny story about this photo. I googled “McGuire Proscenium” and picked the first picture I saw that got the point across. Then I saw that it linked to Flickr, and I thought, “I probably took this picture, or Nick!” Well it’s Nick’s. So this image is copyright of Nick Tochelli, who always was better than me at getting venue photos.

Anyway, on the day off I finally managed to go on the grocery run, since it’s the first one we’ve had in weeks that wasn’t dangerously close to or overlapping with rehearsal time. Then I went downtown to Target to buy some needed supplies. Then I watched several episodes of West Wing while gaming and doing laundry, before deciding it was time to get down to business and work on my script.

It was 8:50 and I was marveling at how cool it was that it was still a reasonable hour, and suddenly a little voice wondered what I have to do tomorrow. Tomorrow is TECH. Yes, TECH. When I decide to go to bed and the alarm clock goes off, it will be THE FIRST DAY OF TECH. In an instant I was completely terrified, and immediately relieved and excited. Tech really isn’t a scary thing. It’s a necessary and final step to being ready to perform the show, and it’s when I actually get to start doing the part of my job that’s fun. Scheduling costume fittings is terrifying. Tech is fun, even if it’s not going particularly well. When tech goes badly enough to cost money, that’s the only time it stops being fun, and I have almost never had that problem.

So my project for the night is to take our lighting designer’s script and transfer his tentative cues into my calling script, and then pencil in the ones I think I’ll have from other departments (sound and those two fly cues, basically). This will be the fifth show Michael and I have teched together in three years, so it’s no problem to flip through his book and jot down the cues. There are no cue numbers, but it helps me to have a guide to what’s coming up, and to start to see his thought process of where he wants cues and what they’re doing. When we actually tech the scenes I’ll get the numbers, and in many cases a lot of the cues that have been marked may not end up existing.

I haven’t actually done anything with my calling script since printing it, so it’s exciting to see it coming to life, even if it’s the faintest outline. At this point it’s just the rehearsal script with a 3.5″ right margin and the font reduced from 12 point to 10. When we finish tech the cues will be typed in, in the style of the Romeo and Juliet script you can see here. I’ll post it when it’s done, if for no other reason than because I intend it to be awesome and resplendent with decoration that will beat my “swan = crow” graphic in the R&J script.


December 23, 2010

Dropbox is the Shiznit

I call this: computers,mac,pc,phones,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:57 pm

Over the past six months or so, I’ve written a couple posts which mentioned my interests in incorporating cloud computing into my stage management life a little more. I talked about the wonders and terrors of cloud computing in general, and mentioned in passing about the software Meaghan and I are using on this tour.

Over the summer — I don’t think I talked much about it — over the course of three productions, I quietly and tentatively began using Dropbox to store my folder of show files on the cloud. I used to use MobileMe’s iDisk for this purpose, but being slow as all hell, and just as likely to corrupt and delete your data as to save your bacon when you need remote access to a file, I would periodically back up to MobileMe, but never actually trust it with the primary copy of the show files.

At the urging of several of my colleagues (and readers), I tried out Dropbox. As I said in one of my other posts, “It’s just like MobileMe, except it works.” So while it’s redundant, it’s also completely life-changing. Over the summer I went from cautiously putting my show files on it while keeping backups elsewhere on my hard drive, to using it as the primary storage point. I also back up to a Time Machine drive, of course, so in theory there is an isolated copy that’s at most several days old, even if Dropbox totally fails and deletes an important file both from the server and from my local copy.

The Acting Company tour this year is the first production I’ve done where every file related to the show (except the backup of our SFX files, which is over 2GB) is kept on the Dropbox, and is shared with my ASM. The files are also stored locally, so we also have offline access to the most updated files on our hard drives, for those times when we’re in a basement theatre or the bus has driven into a patch of wilderness, without ever having to think about making manual backups or syncing.

For all intents and purposes, as far as the show is concerned, it’s like both our computers share a single hard drive. And our iPhones can access that drive if they need to, as well. It’s like the most exciting thing to happen to stage management since the headset. Only once have I seen a situation where we both tried to edit the same file at once, and it seemed to have been handled safely, if a little clumsily, with a copy being saved in each of our names. For the most part, Meaghan has things she keeps paperwork on, and I have others, so the odds of us needing to edit the same file at the same time are surprisingly low. We tend to reference each other’s paperwork a lot, but not necessarily collaborate heavily on the same thing. In a different situation the limitations of this system might get more annoying.

Also, here in Minneapolis, Meaghan has been using the Guthrie-provided laptop. She can’t install Dropbox on it, sadly, but can still access and upload files through a web browser, which is not nearly as convenient, but still a great option to have when you’re using somebody else’s computer that’s locked down.

My favorite story comes from the New York rehearsal process of R&J: we made a change to the script, and some hours or days later, I went to add the new text to our Word file of the script. When I got to the appropriate page there was a happy purple bubble pointing to the already changed text telling me that Meaghan had made such-and-such an edit on such-and-such a date. After last year’s extensive re-writes, which Nick and I took turns updating by emailing the file back and forth to each other (and having to be very meticulous about who had the absolute most current file), I was actually stumped for a moment at how this had happened. But it’s so simple. There is really only one copy of every file, so there’s virtually never an issue of “my copy”/”her copy.” We’ve been working this way for three months now, and I can’t imagine how stages were ever managed before this!

So I just want to say to any stage management team: Dropbox. Do it. It will change your life. In the good way!


December 16, 2010

Comedy of Errors: Staging Rehearsals

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:15 pm

At the end of each rehearsal we have a little pow-wow lasting about a half hour to 45 minutes (if we’re lucky!) with the rather many people who are in the room, behind the tables each day.

There’s me and Meaghan, Ian our director, our two Jesse’s, both assistant-directorial types, who, in the style of our show, we have taken to referring to as Jesse of New York and Jesse of Los Angeles (and our two Elizabeths as Elizabeth of New York and Elizabeth of Minneapolis). Jesse of New York is our Staff Director, who maintains the show on the road, and Jesse of Los Angeles a former company member and budding director. Andrew Wade, our voice and text consultant, is also there, as well as Allie, the Guthrie’s Literary Intern, who assists our dramaturg and is in the room with us almost all the time.

At this meeting we talk about how the day went, and what we hope to accomplish the following day. We make the next day’s rehearsal schedule, including any costume and wig fittings that have been requested, and go down our respective lists of notes for the report and anything else we need to bring up with each other. Then I send the report, Meaghan and I publish and print our respective schedules (she handles the Guthrie format for the stage door), and we go home.

Tonight after this meeting, as Meaghan and I were walking out the door, Ian mentioned that there was one more thing he had been meaning to discuss with me, namely, “What has happened to your blog?”

Indeed, I haven’t been blogging nearly enough in proportion to the exciting things I should be talking about. Apparently when Ian recently spoke to a class of the Guthrie’s BFA students, it was mentioned by a student as a good source of information about the tour, lending further embarrassment to my lack of posting. The truth is I’ve been gathering material for an epic post about our rehearsal process, and then, well, we had a day off and I got lazy.

So without further ado, here’s what’s been going on, up to Day 9 of rehearsal (you can already read about Day 1.)

The big news is that by tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, we should have staged the play, maybe even run it. This play is a very different experience for me in my time with the company, because it’s short and has relatively few scenes (only 11). It’s estimated to be about 90 minutes with no intermission, so the rehearsal process has felt much more productive because we can focus in on things more at length without worrying about staging three hours’ worth of text. We only do about two scenes a day, which on paper looks slow, but without the pressure of having to cover 30 scenes, we’re able to spend much more time refining what we work on, taking chances, and changing our minds.

The Set

The biggest boost to our productivity is that we have most of our set in the rehearsal room. And now I have pictures.

The basic element of the set is three sets of full-stage silk curtains which are suspended across the stage at varying heights between two towers. Black aircraft cable is strung between the towers and the curtains ride on them basically in the manner of a shower curtain. The engineering of this has been a huge ordeal for months — we can’t assume a theatre has a fly system, so the curtains must be supported from the ground, but then how do you counterweight a 30-foot-long expanse of cable with huge curtains hanging from it, without the towers being pulled over?

The answer: water. We thought we’d be carrying literally tons of counterweights on the truck, much to everyone’s dismay. What we ended up with is six large Pelican cases, which are watertight. When filled with water they weigh about 200 pounds each, and have wheels and handles for easy movement. The truss attached to the offstage side of the towers gets progressively longer the taller the tower is, allowing that 200lb box at the end to balance the load. I’m really glad it’s not my job to figure that kind of stuff out (I wanted to be a director, I thought my career would involve no math), but it works.

This view is offstage looking upstage-right. Because our rehearsal room is not as wide as the stage, the third tower is constructed a little differently. That piece joining the 2nd and 3rd towers is actually the extension of the 3rd tower’s leg that will run straight offstage when there’s more room. As you can see, there’s not a lot of offstage space here, but our cast has very quickly gotten adept at stepping between the bars and under the cables without jostling anything, which bodes very well for backstage life in tech and on the road.

Trying to stage this show without the curtains would have been nearly impossible, so I’m very grateful (as I’m sure the actors and the creative team are also) both to the money people and the technical people who have made it possible for us to have our actual set to play with for our entire rehearsal process. During the final week in the studio, once the scenic load-in begins, obviously the set has to go upstairs, but by then we’ll have had plenty of time to learn how it will be used and can mark it.

The other element we have in the room is the metal contraption shown upstage in the first photo, which in great understatement, is called simply “the ladder.” The platform is eight-and-a-half feet high (incidentally the exact same height as the balcony in R&J, which gives us a handy point of reference for how tall it will feel on stage), made of steel and wood, on locking castors. Much like our platform in R&J, named Fred, the unit has so much inertia and the castors are so solid, that it never needs to be braked, which is a great advantage, though it’s nice to have the option. The platform at the top is large enough for some furniture, and the inner triangle underneath provides an interesting space to duck in and out of. The height of the railings means it can only travel under the yellow curtain, but we haven’t felt the need to cut it down. It’s actually really cool how it can hide behind the yellow or white curtains for different effects. It was very imposing on the first day it arrived, but we have found it to be effective in many scenes, and the actors took to it right away and began experimenting with ways to use it. From a technical perspective, my experience has been that it’s a solid and well-built piece of work, constructed right here by the Guthrie’s prop shop.

So so far, all of our potentially problematic scenery is working great, and here we are on Day 9 using all of it. The only other scenic elements are an upstage wall with double doors at the center, and a painted deck with an apron extension, made to look like a tile floor. As far as props we also have three luggage trunks of varying sizes (built from scratch to be stood on, opened, and rolled by picking up from either end, so they’re very versatile), and a number of chairs, tables and hand props that appear in the room as we find the need to request them. We’ve been very well-supported on this show, and it’s been enormously helpful, since so much of the discovery of the staging and the comedy is born out of interacting with the set and the props. We even have a dimmable lighting instrument in the room to work on a particular scene that heavily relies on shadows made behind the curtains. Consider me a happy stage manager.

Otherwise

As far as everything else going on, we’re done with costume fittings until tech. We have a few wig fittings here and there, and are adding a beard for Ageon, which he just had a consultation for the other day. Nothing gives me stress more than trying to work fittings into a rehearsal schedule, so despite the fact that I wanted to kill myself in New York when trying to schedule fittings for two shows around a rehearsal schedule, I’m glad it’s been very low-key here.

The shoes went to be rubbered today. We don’t have a wardrobe person in Minneapolis, so this has become a stage management problem, which earned a name. Scenic people like to name particularly problematic pieces of scenery (R&J has Fred the platform, and Betsy (a wall), and then there’s Wall 3B, which we call by its proper name, but affixed a photo of fossilized dinosaur dung to, to make our feelings about it known). Anyway, much like this, when a project starts to become disproportionately difficult, I give it an official name. This one has been known as Project Rubber. I received word this morning: “Project: Rubber: Part One: The Reckoning (aka There but for the Grace of God) is complete.” So that’s off my plate.

We’ve rescheduled our weekly grocery runs around our somewhat brutal Christmas schedule. This is always an issue, because we rearrange the days off to give us both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, followed by New Year’s Day. That’s great, but it means we work ten days straight. Also our only days off for two weeks are national holidays, and no one wants to go grocery shopping (or drive us to the grocery store!) on those days, so we have to work the grocery runs into our rehearsal days. This year it’s infinitely easier because we’re doing 6-hour days, starting at 9:30 (to the chagrin of some), so we’re done for the day at 3:30 with time for groceries remaining. But it’s something I always have to work out with the Associate Company Manager, and I’m glad it’s out of the way and less of a pain for all involved than it usually is.

Straight 6’s

I just wanna talk about straight 6’s. For those not down with the lingo, a “straight 6” is a kind of rehearsal day allowed by a vote of a 3/4 majority of an Equity cast wherein you’re called for six hours, and instead of a real lunch break you make one of your breaks 20 minutes. And then you’re done. Unless you’re really far from food and/or have no fridge or microwave available, it’s a pretty awesome way to work. Usually the resistance comes more from directors, who do lose an hour or more of each rehearsal day by doing it that way, depending on the contract. But especially in a case like this where we’re rehearsing a comedy that requires the actors to be inventive and spontaneous, sometimes you get more work out of people in 6 good hours than in keeping them around the building for a 9 or 10-hour day.

A lot of it is just psychological. Here in the dead of winter where it’s dark before 5:00, it feels really good to be done for the day at 3:30. Not to mention that every day kind of feels like a day off in a way, because there’s still so many hours left to do shopping, watch TV or be productive in other ways. I have only very rarely gotten to do shows where the straight 6 was the status quo, and I’m totally in love. I was telling Meaghan the other day, I’ve done about 60 shows, and I think this is the 2nd or 3rd that has done so. It’s not appropriate in many cases (musicals especially), but when it is, it’s wonderful.

In fact, last year after the first preview of R&J at the Guthrie, I was having a drink with Ian when he first started trying to sell me on the 2010-2011 tour. All I remember about what he said was, “and when we’re doing Comedy at the Guthrie I want to do straight sixes.” I don’t think I heard anything after that, because I was penciling in “2010-2011 Acting Company Tour” from September 2010 to April 2011 in my mental calendar. Honestly, that was a huge mark in favor of doing the tour this year, and it has been everything I dreamed it would be. What should be the most stressful month of this job has been really nice — partially because things are truly running more smoothly than they ever have — but in large part because I don’t feel like I spend every useful hour of my day locked up in rehearsal.

I think it’s really important as a stage manager to stay attuned to your own sanity. I have learned that there are certain things that seem minor but greatly contribute to my sanity. The length of my commute is one. Length of the rehearsal day is another — they’re kind of related, they both ultimately determine how much free time I have. And I have learned in touring that the added expense of having my own hotel room is more than made up for in the reduction of stress it provides. These are just things to consider when weighing the pros and cons of a job, and not to be underestimated.

In summary

That’s what’s been going on this week. I think I’ve covered enough that I can show my face in rehearsal tomorrow morning. Next week we start fight rehearsals — this show isn’t as traditionally fight-heavy as R&J but our good friend Felix Ivanoff will be back to lend his insight to the various beatings and physical comedy throughout the play, which I’m sure will be lots of fun.

And as always happens, Christmas will distract us and then all of a sudden OMG we’re loading in, we’re doing designer run-throughs, and the next thing we know we’re on stage. But things seem to be on track and I’m excited to get to the next stage of the process. I can see a clear path ahead to bring this thing upstairs and show it to many thousands of people, and then for our truck and our rockstar buses to show up in the parking lot and take us to Brainerd and onward.


December 8, 2010

First Rehearsal, Minneapolis

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:10 am

Today we began rehearsal for The Comedy of Errors, the second of the shows we’ll be touring with this year. After our successful remount and fall tour of last year’s Romeo and Juliet, we’re starting from scratch with a new and very different production.

As is the custom in recent years, it’s co-produced with the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis, who invite us to use their amazing facility and staff to rehearse and premiere one of our shows.

I got into town on Sunday, and yesterday Meaghan and I spent the day at the theatre, meeting with people and setting up our rehearsal room.

In the lobby I got my first look at our new posters. The Guthrie did their own logo for R&J last year, and now we have a Comedy logo to match!

This morning we had the great pleasure of having our truck show up bright and early to unload part of the Comedy set, which consists of a series of curtains suspended by towers at varying depths across the stage. Because of the very specific design of the curtains and the intricate uses they’re expected to have, we have taken the rather ambitious step of having the actual scenery in our rehearsal room for almost the entire process (from day 1 until the day they’re needed to go upstairs to the stage). The arrival of the truck also allows us to have some of our road boxes in the building, namely the much-appreciated stage management workbox, and some other boxes which contain useful items, and things of a fragile nature that would not benefit from spending a month in a frozen trailer parked in a field in St. Paul (such as wigs).

The Guthrie crew set up the towers and curtains this morning, under the direction of our TD and set designer, who are also in for a few days to oversee the beginning of the process.

At noon-ish, Meaghan and I went up to one of the classrooms in the building, where we conducted the Equity meeting, to allow the crew time to finish in our rehearsal room. It was a casual and fun-filled meeting (it’s quite easy when the whole company has already been working together for months), the highlight of which was one of our actors who had clipped an article from the Equity newsletter by union president Nick Wyman, and read aloud this very funny and accurate piece about what usually happens when it comes time to elect a deputy, and encouraging members not to dread this duty.

With the meeting done, we returned downstairs to our rehearsal room for the meet & greet, which at the Guthrie is a big production involving the whole community of staff, not just those involved in a specific production. Artistic director Joe Dowling introduced Acting Company artistic director Margot Harley, and both spoke about the continuing collaboration between the two companies. Our director, Ian Belknap was introduced, and he spoke a bit about the play and his ideas for it, before introducing brief design presentations from scenery and costumes. It was really cool that in addition to the set model, the gathered audience was actually sitting within most of the actual set in 1:1 scale. The cast and the rest of the creative team were introduced, and then there was some time for mingling, before we were left to begin rehearsal.

It was a good day of table work. I find it really interesting to start a process with a bunch of people who pretty much all know each other intimately already. The whole cast, stage management team, and our staff repertory director have been through a 4-week rehearsal process together, followed by weeks of touring, so it’s already very much a family. Ian hasn’t been our director, but as associate artistic director of the company, he’s been very much a part of our lives throughout the process, so there’s not that usual weirdness of everybody feeling out the director’s personality. The majority of us have worked at the Guthrie before, so there’s a familiarity with many of our “new” collaborators already. I definitely feel the difference that it makes in the early hours of rehearsal when everyone already feels safe and has nothing to prove in the rehearsal room.

Most of our costume fittings were done in New York during the R&J rehearsal process, and tomorrow and Thursday we’ll finish them up. It was a huge pain trying to get everyone into the shop outside of R&J rehearsal time, but the payoff is that we don’t have to deal with it now. We have some wig fittings later this week, and then hopefully that should pretty much be it.

All-in-all it was a very smooth first day. It was a lot of fun to see everybody at the Guthrie. It definitely feels like coming home. We don’t have a stage management intern to guide us through the Guthrie system this year, but between Meaghan’s experience spending a full year as intern and ASM (including the initial Acting Company/Guthrie collaboration on Henry V), and my two previous shows as PSM, we have pretty much learned all the procedures and people that need to be known to stage manage here.

As much as I generally find it frustrating to go back into rehearsal when we’ve already rehearsed, teched, opened and toured a show, I’m actually looking forward to this process. So many of my collaborators are old friends by this point that I’m just excited to work on it. Also, this is the first comedy I’ve done with the company, and it’s short, so that’s a nice change from the 3-hour tragedies and histories we’ve done before!

I think Comedy and R&J are such polar opposites that this tour will be incredibly fun to perform in rep. One show will be easy to load in, funny, short, but probably more hectic and stressful to run. The other will be hard to load in, emotionally intense, long, but more easy and slow-paced to run. There will be things to look forward to every time we switch shows, and I think that will keep us always looking forward to whichever one we’re doing.

And I’m once again staying in what I have come to call my “winter apartment,” which I will have lived in for six months of my life by the time we leave for the road. Sometimes I think a change of scenery might be interesting, but I had loads of fun getting dropped off at the garage door with my suitcase and my groceries, and just busting in and unpacking everything in about 10 minutes. Everything already has its place, its shelf, its drawer, which outlet it gets plugged into, as comfortably as if I’ve lived here all my life. Almost every time I come home to my NY apartment (which I moved into in 2006) I fumble around for the lightswitch on the wrong wall. So I feel at least as comfortable here. It’s nice to have some consistency in my rather inconsistent domestic life.

I think I’ve said before that I believe that when you tour a certain part of your brain gets set aside solely for remembering your hotel room number and which way to turn when you get out of the elevator. Usually, for me at least, this works surprisingly well, even when you have to memorize a new 3- or 4-digit number every day or two. I think it’s somewhat related to keeping a mental picture of what the hallway looks like and that somehow helps you to remember the room number. Very seldom do I experience something that happened to me in Tucson a few weeks ago, where I went to the front desk for something, and they said, “what’s your room number?” and I went, “…uhhhhh….” (what city are we in? Tucson. 8th floor, turn left, turn left, turn right, turn left…802!). So being in an apartment that’s familiar for two straight months might as well be like owning a house.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention something about the weather. I was afraid that coming from California and Arizona, this would just be torture. The temperature has been in the teens since we got here, but so far it doesn’t bother me. I think it’s some kind of sense memory, that when I see these streets and buildings, my body just expects to be frozen solid, and 15 degrees feels warm, because it is, relatively speaking. I love this city, and I swear some day I will see it not covered in a sheet of snow and ice, and it will be awesome.

The underside of the Endless Bridge, as seen from the rear of the lobby. I love the Endless Bridge. It’s just ridiculous. It’s one of the longest cantilevered structures in the world (this photo actually makes it look much shorter than it is), and it doesn’t really have a purpose other than to be cool. Working here for the first time was a big culture shock in terms of theatre architecture. Broadway houses are so much about efficient use of space and maximizing seating capacity, that they don’t even allow room for things like an elevator, or adequate restrooms. And then there’s the Guthrie, that has a 178-foot-long, 30-foot-wide, two-storey-high bridge to nowhere, just because. It definitely makes you feel like you’re working someplace special, and by extension, your work must be important because this impossibly flamboyant building exists just to house it. Working here is kind of intoxicating. Everything is a heightened experience because the building itself is so weird and intriguing. You just go to a meeting and you’re like, “Why does this room have diagonal yellow windows?!?” It makes working anyplace else seem incredibly dreary.


November 13, 2010

100

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:55 pm

Tonight is our 100th performance of Romeo and Juliet. We did 3 previews and 77 regular performances of the tour last year, and this will be our 20th performance of this tour.

In addition to me, the others celebrating their 100th performance are:
Ray Chapman (Friar Laurence)
Jason McDowell-Green (Montague)
Jamie Smithson (Paris)
Elizabeth Stahlmann (Nurse)

I was planning to do a little something to make some acknowledgement of it, but Ray was in my office a few days ago asking me to look up some other stat from last year, when he said, “We’re coming up on 100 performances, aren’t we?” I said, “yes, we’re very close,” but up till that point I hadn’t actually bothered to figure out which performance it would be. Fittingly, it’s a Saturday night. Upon hearing this, word spread through the company and everyone is quite excited. I have heard there are plans to go out and celebrate after the show. Not that we need an excuse to go out after a show.

The joke among the crew is that after 100 performances of the balcony scene I will hit Shakespeare overflow and just start spitting out cues one after the other:
“Electrics 50, go. Electrics 51, go. Electrics 53, go. Sound 107, go. Electrics 54 and Sound 110, go, Electrics 56, go…”
And Meaghan will be running around backstage trying to figure out how to turn me off.

It’s actually been kind of nice to be with a show for so long. I’ve also done three other shows in between the two tours, which is good because I think I’d probably have gone insane by now if I didn’t have a few musicals with 600 cues thrown in to make things interesting.

I remember being in tech for Into the Woods and saying to the crew, “If in October I’m bitching about how easy my show is to call, I want you to slap me and remind me how stressed I am right now!” So it’s nice to take it easy again, and with a show that I already knew how to call.

There’s still plenty that I’m working on, though, mostly related to learning to anticipate the moves of the new actors. Meaghan is also learning the show, so that keeps me honest and makes me have to articulate my choices. There was one sound cue where I said, “Honestly, I’m calling it where Sonny used to pick up the basket,” which of course is totally not helpful to anyone but me, and while that was the easiest way for me to feel it out, that’s not why I continued to call it there. I continued to call it that way because it was still working, so I left it at that. Over the few days after that conversation with Meaghan, I continued calling it where Sonny used to pick up the basket, but watched and listened for what was really happening that made that cue work, and decided that it works because it happens at the same time the Friar speaks. I still use “where Sonny used to pick up the basket” as my way of anticipating when the Friar speaks, but now I’m more aware of what else is happening. Meaghan will have to develop her own method, which might be something like “when Alejandro reaches for his jacket,” but at least she has a more concrete goal to achieve.

For most of us, this will be the most performances of a single show we’ve done. I’ve done more performances of Phantom, but when last I checked I think I’ve only called it about 80 times. So I’m pretty happy. I’m also glad it comes so close to the end of the fall leg of the tour. The achievement kind of caps off this part of the tour and gets us ready to tackle something new in a few weeks, when we begin rehearsing The Comedy of Errors.


November 6, 2010

Surprise Blackout

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:31 pm

This afternoon we were having a leisurely Saturday matinee, maybe two-thirds of the way through our first act, when suddenly we had an OMG Surprise Blackout!

Artist’s rendering of the event:

Surprise blackouts are never fun, although they definitely help to pass the time!

The basic story is that the house’s light board crashed. We have kind of an interesting lighting situation here. Our board sends its cues to a submaster on the house board, which then sends the signal on to the lights. The house has a backup board, but because the cues are coming from our board, their backup board is kind of out of the loop. The house ME, Greta, is totally awesome, and as I have learned, decided to make the backup board somewhat useful by taking two of our well-lit cues (a daytime and nighttime look) and saving them on submasters on the backup board so we would have appropriate looks we could use in the event of a crash. We were in the blackout for about two seconds before the daytime cue came up.

Greta and I talked for a few seconds, during which time I learned of this rather impressive backup plan we were witnessing. The cue that was chosen was a very good stand-in for most of our daylight cues, that would not seem out of place in any of the remaining scenes in the act. Greta wasn’t sure exactly what would happen if she tried to unplug our board and put it into their backup board, and once she said the magic words, “I’ve never had to do this before…” I decided that this lovely daytime cue was perfectly fine for the rest of the act, rather than risking another blackout while the boards were swapped.

So I got to call the last 20 minutes or so of the act without having to call light cues, except for a manual fade to black at the end of the act. At intermission our board was plugged into the backup board and all was well in a few seconds. The main board couldn’t be reset because it would have taken out the house lights, so we didn’t have a backup for Act II. Which is OK cause usually you don’t have a backup at all, although the very fact that the venue has a backup board in such a state of readiness is perhaps not the most encouraging sign of the reliability of the main board. It’s a Strand, I’m not sure exactly what kind (ours is an ETC Express 250).

Thankfully all was well for the rest of the show! Hopefully that will be the last surprise blackout we encounter!


October 16, 2010

On the Cusp of Tech

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:54 pm

We finished our three weeks in the rehearsal studio today. I don’t think I got a break all day from 9AM to 8PM, except about 15 minutes to scarf down a slice of pizza at around 4:30 while Meaghan minded rehearsal. We rehearsed lots of scenes, ran Act II, loaded out all our props, furniture and road boxes from the studio, rehearsed some more scenes, and then restored the rehearsal room to its natural condition.

As soon as we had the studio looking clean and orderly, with all the chairs and tables stacked exactly as they were when we found them three weeks ago, Meaghan and I lugged the last remains of our rehearsal supplies down to the theatre (the Schimmel Center at Pace University) to check out the set.

We’re not planning to be back until the morning of tech on Tuesday, so we wanted to stop in and make sure everything looks good. The theatre is really nice. It’s much wider and less deep than I pictured, but it seems very intimate. It reminds me of some of the venues we played in the early days of the tour last year. The deck is of a nice size, with sufficient wingspace on both sides, a large-ish shop upstage and enough room for an onstage crossover. The backstage area reminds me a lot of our venue in Philly where we closed the show last year.

I had been warned that the dressing rooms were up a long flight of stairs, but what we found up there was not at all the dark and dirty dressing rooms I pictured from my experience of narrow backstage metal staircases. The staircase, though very long and somewhat narrow, is sturdy and safe, and leads to the cheeriest backstage area I think I’ve ever seen. The color scheme and lighting create a warm and cozy (cozy as in comfortable, not cozy as a euphemism for too small) atmosphere. The green room is off the hook. Everything is red and gold — there’s an entire wall covered in gold silk. It looks like it should be Queen Victoria’s sitting room or something. I’ll have to get a picture sometime this week.

Feeling very good about the accommodations, we returned to the stage to scope out the set. If we encountered this house on the road, it would be a very good day, so it’s nice that we get to spend a week here. The set looks pretty much as it always has — it was initially a little disorienting when we first saw it from the back of the house because it’s been cut down a little, I think by 2 feet. I did my usual inspection, walking up the staircase shaking everything looking for loose bolts. It feels like we’ve never left. I feel very confident because we’ve had most of last year’s crew involved in some part of this process, so there’s a clear handing off of experience with the show to our new crewmembers.

Tuesday we’ll start tech. The cast has been running the show for about a week and a half, so they are very accustomed to the sequence of the show. We’ve had all the show props and the actual prop tables in the rehearsal studio, so I think they will adjust quickly to the stage. Navigating the stairs, and adding the element of costume and wigs will be the biggest adjustments for them. Tech-wise, the show already exists, it will just be a matter of seeing if everything looks and sounds the way it did before, and if we still like the way that was. Including rehearsals, I’ve probably called this show about 90 times in the past year. I’ve never teched a show that I already knew so well. I’m prepared that problems may crop up, or there may be things we’re asked to change, but it’s nice to have a very solid framework to follow, and to only need to make changes to that, rather than starting from scratch, as one normally does in tech. I’ve also gone through three weeks of rehearsal knowing what my cues are, and have watched this cast with that in mind.

We’re very close to our departure. Just three days of tech, culminating on the third day with an invited dress rehearsal, then three performances, and the next morning (Monday) we get on the plane to California. This weekend is our last time off before our first day off on tour, on Halloween in Phoenix, AZ. Crazy! I need to pack!

I’ve got a lot of work to do this weekend, mostly with the script. We’ve been making changes to the text up till today (and might make more), so I didn’t want to commit to a script until today’s rehearsal was done. I’m going to send the revisions to the production team so they can show up on Tuesday with all the changes, and then re-do my calling script with the current text. I’m going to start with last year’s calling script and just edit the text, as that seems easier than adding hundreds of cues into the new script (as each cue involves messing with margins, borders, underlining, colors, etc.) Check out the scripts page to see what it looks like. You can even download last year’s script from that page.

It’s still tech, but I am determined to have fun.

And as we depart New 42nd Street Studios, I want to share my favorite bit of signage:
DO NOT DISMANTLE THE PIANO.
You know for every rule like this, there’s a good story.


October 5, 2010

Big Pieces of Show

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:33 pm

Today was an unexpectedly exciting day.

First of all we began at the crack of 10AM, staging the tomb scene. Which is like, a total downer — not to mention a 13-person traffic nightmare. It’s not really something you want to jump right into, but we were working around fittings so we had to. But as they have all along, our cast picked up their blocking and executed it expertly right away, and in less than two hours we had it all done and run a couple times.

We finished up another rather complicated group scene that we ran out of time on yesterday, and staged a quick easy one, and then spent the second half of our day reviewing everything we had.

We have all but three scenes of our first act staged (and the ones remaining are short and pretty simple). We ran the act, skipping over what was missing. Aside from the jumps, we didn’t stop much, so it felt more like a run than a work-through. We didn’t stage the show in any semblance of order, so this was the first time for everyone to feel the flow of the show. I think it was encouraging for everyone to see just how much we’ve accomplished, and how solid our foundation is with the show already. We’ve been in rehearsal for 8 days, but we didn’t start staging until the end of day 4, so it’s really amazing how much we’ve done.

Our second act is where most of the work remains. We have the first scene, one scene in the middle (Act 3 Sc. 5, which is a pretty serious one), and the final scene in the tomb. However, those three scenes are the most complicated, so even running those felt like a great accomplishment.

This morning before our crack of 10AM rehearsal, Meaghan and I began fully setting up the prop tables at the crack of 9AM. One awesome thing about our rehearsal situation is that we have all the prop road boxes in our room, which includes the folding tables that travel with the show and already have the tape marks laid out to divide up and label the prop tables. Meaghan is new to the show, and I have only a passing acquaintance with how things went backstage, so it was a good opportunity for us to bumble around figuring out exactly where everything goes. We set up the tables on the appropriate sides of the stage and populated them. It’s great that we have this opportunity to get the actors accustomed to which tables to go to for each prop before they ever enter the theatre — and basically all the work was done for us.

The room feels much more alive to me with the prop tables out. I think it’s because it very much resembles a stage. The set is just tape on the floor, but the prop tables are all in the right spot, and I can pretty easily imagine a set and a theatre surrounding us, and it feels like an old friend.

It’s very comforting to return to a production I remember fondly. One of the best things from a professional perspective, is that I’m finding I don’t have my head buried in the book all the time. When I want to make sure the actors are speaking and moving correctly, for most scenes I can do it by looking up at the stage, instead of down at the book, and that allows me to be more aware of everything that’s happening. I also don’t have to look up the answers to a lot of questions, or look at the script when someone calls “line” (which has caused me to step on Meaghan a couple times, because my mouth says the line before my brain says, “you’re not on book”!)

Tomorrow we stage a good deal of the remaining scenes, and it looks to me like we’ll finish staging as hoped on Thursday. That will give us two days to review so we have something nice to show Penny (our director) when she arrives on Monday.


September 30, 2010

Early Rehearsals

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:35 pm

Today was our fourth day of rehearsal remounting the Acting Company tour of Romeo and Juliet. Our process has begun somewhat unconventionally because our director, Penny Metropulos, is finishing up a show in Oregon and won’t be joining us until about halfway through rehearsals. But because this is a remount, Corey (our staff director from last year) and I can get our new cast up to speed on the basic structure of the show before she arrives. We also have four returning cast members who can help us, two former cast members who will help teach choreography and fights, and our original fight director, the amazing Felix Ivanoff (for a little more on Felix, see Nick’s post from last year — and we’re not crazy, he’s changed the spelling of his name since then).

We have one new major addition leading our cast through the first couple weeks: Liz Smith is our voice and text coach, and she is really great. She’s one of the most respected people in her field, but also has been working with the Acting Company since its inception nearly 40 years ago, because she was running the voice program at Juilliard when the company was founded. Her job is to help the actors in their interpretation of the script, both in technical matters like making sure they pronounce things correctly and place emphasis on the right syllables, but also in their understanding of the meaning of the text, and how an analysis of the words Shakespeare chooses can help to explain the meaning. Even our returning cast members are learning a lot of new things.

We also have the wonderful Andrew Wade returning as our voice and text coach at the Guthrie, who I miss very much, but it’s a great opportunity for the cast to draw on the talents of both of them over the course of this year.

Picture Day

One of the first things we did this week was a photo shoot. It seemed a bit premature, but venues need images to go with their publicity, and our first tour performances are less than a month away. We took a number of shots of our new Romeo and Juliet, and a group photo of the whole cast.
Don’t they look like a nice group?

They are:
back row: Whitney Hudson, Ray Chapman, Sid Solomon, Jason McDowell-Green, Kaliswa Brewster, Benjamin Rosenbaum
middle row: John Skelley, Jonathan C. Kaplan, Alejandro Rodriguez, Jamie Smithson
bottom row: Elizabeth Stahlmann, Elizabeth Grullon, Stephen Pilkington

Below is a shot of how the magic is made. Our new touring wardrobe supervisor, Mariela, adjusts Kaliswa’s hair before another round of photos. It was really cool to have them in costume on the second day of rehearsal. I think stuff like that early in the rehearsal process always makes the experience more real. We hadn’t even read the play at that point, but already we’re made aware that someday there will be a finished product and these pictures are very close to being seen by people, who will be inspired to spend their money on tickets and will have their butts in seats ready to be entertained when we come to their town very soon. It reinforces the importance of all the messing around in jeans and sneakers, walking between lines of colored tape. It will be real before we know it.

We spent a day-and-a-half on table work. The script has been cut a bit since last year. The hope is that we have eliminated 10 or 15 minutes, to make it easier for schools to attend the show and talkbacks afterwards. The running time of the first read-through was much improved. Obviously that doesn’t always translate to the finished product, but it’s a good sign.

Hooray for Skype

Yesterday we had a video conference with Penny. The internet at her house had been having trouble, but she soon found a spot where the video signal was good enough to make it work. There was a slight delay, which seemed to get better as we went on, so it wasn’t as fluid a conversation as it would have been in person, but the video wasn’t choppy, and she was able to speak to the cast for a while, and ask what we had been working on, and then everybody in the room stepped close to the camera and introduced themselves and what they’re doing on the production. I think it must be very helpful for her and the new people on the production to put a living, breathing, talking face to the other people they’ll be collaborating with.

As Skype conferences go, I considered it a great success (which is not really saying much). We knew she might have connection problems and had planned that we might have to do audio only if the bandwidth wasn’t good enough, so I’m just happy we got intelligible video, even if it was a bit like watching a TV journalist reporting in by satellite.

I also was able to borrow some cheap computer speakers from the office which were more than loud enough to let everybody in the room hear. That’s usually the main problem with full-company conference calls for me. The MacBook Pro speakers don’t do well if you’re not sitting right near the computer.

Staging

Today we finished our table work earlier than expected, and after lunch began staging! Meaghan and I were caught a little bit off-guard, but we jumped in, and everything went pretty well. All I can say is that I’m glad I got in a little early and put most of the furniture spike marks down before rehearsal.

Recreating an exact production is something new for me, so I’m excited to try it. We began with the prologue, which doesn’t really leave a lot of room for personal exploration, blocking-wise. It’s very much an “enter at this time, hit this mark, talk, and exit this way” type of thing. You are umbrella number 12. You will be assimilated. The cast did very well. They seem to be picking up on the ground plan quickly. It may help a lot that some of them saw the production, and there are many photos available of what the set looks like.

When they got that down, we continued staging onward. We quickly hit the first brawl, and sketched out the basic shape of it, without actually addressing detailed fight choreography. So everybody pretty much understands what’s happening, what weapons they have, where they go, and who they fight with. Then we let most of the cast go, and finished the day with the following scenes between Montague and Benvolio and Benvolio and Romeo, which are both more free-form, and in fact changed blocking numerous times (much to my dismay) during the rehearsal process. Corey pretty much let the actors feel it out, but it was actually really fascinating to see some very surprising similarities pop up on their own.

I hope that we can continue to strike a good balance between recreating the previous production while letting our new actors feel like they’ve been given ownership of their roles.

Tomorrow is our dance and fight choreography day, and we also have some scene work happening. I’m actually really intrigued to see how well we can all collectively put the huge puzzle of the party scene back together.


September 24, 2010

PrePro Week Over!

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:37 pm

It’s Friday night, when all those normal people who work in offices don’t have to do anything for the rest of the week. Thankfully, I have been enslaved by such people all week, and am now free, and starting next week can resume being a touchy-feely artisty-type person for the next seven months.

As much as I hate the idea of working in an office, I actually find preproduction to be a great and very important part of the process. And while I lose two hours of my day commuting and sometimes think, “couldn’t I just do this from home?” there is a lot to be said for the ease of collaboration that happens from being in the office.

Having everybody no more than 50ft away from each other certainly speeds up the process, and allows quick consultations that probably wouldn’t always happen if you had to pick up the phone or write an email every time you had a question.

My process also involves some stuff that is decidedly office-y, such as copying the scripts for first rehearsal, putting them in binders, assembling some basic office supplies like pens, pencils and paper, and making copies of the various paperwork that’s going to be distributed on the first day. It’s times like that that make actually being in a fully-functional office a great advantage.

Here are the actors’ scripts, ready to go. Nick and I always had a thing we did where we gaffed a postcard of the show onto the front of the binder and wrote the actor’s name on it. I’m pretty sure it was his idea, so I have to give him credit for that. It’s been very popular with actors, and it’s also useful for us because when somebody leaves a script behind somewhere, it’s easy to know who to return it to.

In the middle of the day today, I took a walk over to Barbizon to buy some gaff, glow and spike tape. That’s $72 of tape right there. I also picked up lunch on the way back.

Spike tape and sushi. I really can’t think of many more things I would rather have.

The very last thing I did before leaving the office was to send out my first real email to the whole production team. I’ve been in touch with the cast more consistently to get them prepared for the start of the process, but this was my first contact with a lot of our creative and production team. Most are Acting Company and Guthrie regulars who I’ve worked with before, but there are a few I don’t know, and at least a couple I don’t expect to meet for several months. I sent out the contact sheet, a calendar showing the R&J rehearsal process up until we head out on the road, and a detailed schedule for the first day of rehearsal. In the body of the email I also added a few notes about the rehearsal studio and other business.

I still have a few things to do from home, such as print the wallet cards (which I designed while at the office, but I keep my business card paper at home), and a pseudo-wallet card with the addresses of the two costume shops we’re using, so that actors who have to go to fittings will always know where they’re going. I also have a few things to add to the database before first rehearsal, and I need to gather up all my stuff to bring with me on Monday.

When I got home I got a call from our Production Manager / Tech Director, who’s arriving in New York on the day of the first rehearsal. We’ve worked together before, but he’s just coming on board for this show, and it was our first real chance to talk about work stuff, and for me to mention a few issues that I think require careful attention to make sure everything goes smoothly.

I’m looking forward to finally getting started. Everything I’ve heard is that this company of actors is wonderful, and I’ve had an opportunity to meet many of the new actors when they came into the office to sign their contracts during the past week, and everyone seems very eager and excited for rehearsal to start. The whole season seems to be a very nice mix of a comfortable return to a familiar production, and frequent collaborators, with the injection of new people, a new production, and a new season of tour cities, which will make the process fresh at the same time. Honestly I think that’s really why I’m here. I’m at a point where I feel continued touring is harmful to my New York career, but from the earliest conversations I had with our producers, at the bar celebrating the start of previews for R&J at the Guthrie last year, the things I’d heard about this season were too good to pass up. It continued that way all through last year’s tour. It was just too much fun, and there are many people at The Acting Company and the Guthrie that I just love working with, and I had to stick around for this year.

Everything’s pretty much set for first rehearsal. Bring it, I say!


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