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June 27, 2009

Dolly – End of Run

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:44 am

IMG_0760We close Dolly tomorrow, and I’m definitely going to miss it. The show has been a pleasure from start to finish. Our houses have been packed, and the response from the audience wildly enthusiastic. There are so many numbers that stop the show — “Sunday Clothes,” “Hello, Dolly” and “Before the Parade Passes By” tend to be the ones where the actors often get stuck standing there waiting for people to stop clapping for 30 seconds or more. It’s really fun to work on a good show, especially one that has such iconic moments as those three songs. The set is still unwieldy at times (it’s the most inconveniently overbuilt, bent-out-of-shape pile of steel and wood you could ever work with), but it looks great, and a lot of the light cues are really cool and fun to play with. For calling a show, it’s pretty high up there on satisfying experiences. Not so hard as to be frustrating, but it’s challenging to keep up to the level of all the other excellence on the stage.

Today I spent pretty much all my waking hours working on paperwork for Mame, and while I was at it, decided to do the paperwork for La Cage at the same time since they start off the same templates. All the Mame stuff got done, and except for the contact sheet which is half-done, La Cage is as good as it can get until we get closer. It took me six hours, right up until the time I had to leave for the theatre, but I eliminated a few hours of work for myself over the weekend — and over the weekend four weeks from now, when I’d need to do all that La Cage stuff. I’d have kept going too, if I didn’t have to go to the show!

Tomorrow I’ll probably spend some time taking notes on the Mame script, but I’m pretty well caught up until we have a schedule. We have a production meeting on the dinner break of the first rehearsal (I hate doing that, but we had to to accommodate people’s schedules). We’re building the set for this one, which is a big undertaking but also good because we don’t wind up with set pieces that are too tall for the theatre, which happens, oh, every time we use a rental set. A lot of it was built during this past week and is shoved in random corners of the building, like in the dance studio, until Dolly starts loading out tomorrow. The truck will arrive in the afternoon, and all pieces not used in the show will be loaded then. The rest of course will have to wait until they’re done on stage!


June 24, 2009

Equity Stage Managers and AFTRA

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:00 pm

Just sharing something I learned, in the hopes that it will help others who find themselves in this situation:

If you are an Equity stage manager and your show is filmed in such a way that you and the actors are paid through AFTRA, you may learn the hard way that once you have done this twice, you must join AFTRA.

EXCEPT, this is not quite true. Because stage managers are not performers, AFTRA waives the need to join the union and still pays you. Normally stage managers get the short end of the stick on Equity issues, but for once we get the far better deal! So if, as happened in my case, AFTRA makes a mistake and sends you a membership letter saying you need to pay them $1,000 before they release the $400 you’ve earned, just call them up and explain that you’re a stage manager and you should be all set! And try not to gloat in front of your cast, most of whom just got totally hosed.

Thanks to Nick for getting all “This is BS!” and doing all the research on this.


May 29, 2009

Crazy Pre-Pro Day!!

I call this: mac,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:33 pm

Well it would seem to be “that day” in the preproduction week for Hello, Dolly! at the Reagle Players. We start rehearsal in four days, and this seems to be the day it’s all coming together. It’s a really good thing I like to multitask. It’s like a puzzle. Some pieces can’t be put together until other ones are complete, and then all of a sudden a bunch of pieces start getting fit together and all of a sudden the things that can be completed start growing exponentially, and I’m racing to keep up before new ones come in.

I’ve been getting several emails per minute for the last few hours, mostly due to the fact that I just sent out an email blast to our 49-person cast with a bunch of questions. As each one comes in, I have to take the information out of it, put it where it goes, and get the email out of my inbox and into my Reagle storage folder before another one comes in.

While this has been going on, I’ve been making up the schedule for Week 1 based on a meeting the director and choreographer had earlier this afternoon (which in turn is based on my recommended schedule for the rehearsal process in general). That’s done, has been proofed by the director, but not the choreographer. Once she gets back to me, it will go out to the cast, who are dying to see it.

I also have a contact sheet that needs some details filled in, but is probably about 90% done, and waiting on people to get back to me. My next project is to finish the production calendar (which is in a very rough draft at the moment, only because I drew it up to show the director what the usual structure of the process is). I’d really like to be able to send that to the cast tonight with the week’s schedule.

Then I have to do all the things for me — like laundry and packing and cleaning my apartment.

What I’m Using

I have something of a love-hate relationship with the “Spaces” feature of Mac OS X Leopard. What it is, in brief, is a way to have several different setups of windows arranged on your desktop that you can flip between, instead of having 10 random windows from a bunch of apps all piling up on top of each other. I don’t generally bother with it, as I tend to find it more trouble than it’s worth. But as I’ve been having one of those days, that’s exactly what my desktop was starting to look like, and I needed some organization.

The overall project I had going on (and is still going on) was that I sent out an email to the 49 people in the cast asking them to proof their information on the contact sheet and tell me if they have any conflicts. When they respond, I need the contact sheet open, and the document where I’m tracking their conflicts (and highlighting their names in green if they have confirmed their contact info is correct). Because some of them responded right away and others might not get back to me for hours, I need this stuff open and arranged in a way where I can use it easily, but also not getting in the way of me using other apps, or other documents in the same apps. So I shoved those two documents over to my #2 space. When an email comes in pertaining to that, I see it in Mail, which is in my main #1 space, then I can hit ctl-rightarrow to swing over to the #2 space, where I have the two documents ready to receive changes. The 2nd space looks like this:
spaces1
The other major app I’m using to keep track of things is OmniFocus, which is a task manager, though that’s a bit of an understatement. For more on that, check out my section on it in the Stage Mgr Tools area of the site (it’s under iPhone and Mac apps). I’ve been checking off a lot of tasks, but also adding a lot of new ones. I have one in progress called “confirm production meeting” which has sub-tasks with the names of all the people I invited. As each one RSVPs I check their name off. When all of them are gone I’ll be able to confirm the meeting is on. I have one major one I’m waiting on — the lighting designer — which is kind of a dealbreaker if he can’t make it. So that is always a big ball of stress over my head when trying to schedule a meeting.

I have a lot of pending tasks I have to do (like 33 of them) cause all of the individual things I have to pack just hit the “due soon” stage, so I’m going to try to cut down on some of those now.

This is also the time to run frequent Time Machine backups, now that I actually have a ton of paperwork that wasn’t done yesterday when I last backed up. These next couple days will probably see a lot more backups than my normal schedule of every 2 days (which are also managed with recurring tasks in OmniFocus).


February 15, 2009

Glenn Ellyn, IL

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:50 am

Another post? Must be a load-in day!

Last night we loaded out from St. Louis, which took about four hours. It was a rather rough stop for us — we had to do both shows, and the path from the truck to the stage was rather long and convoluted, so load-in took approximately forever (13 hours just to get the set up, with the entire traveling crew working as carpenters), and load out was about an hour and a half longer than it has been at venues with a more direct path to the truck.  Also, the campus folks wouldn’t let us park the crew bus, so we spent the entire 3 days there without our kitchen/office/bedroom available to us, which led to an endless list of problems and inconveniences.

One thing I will say about the fact that we were shorthanded, in a hurry, and without the bus is that I learned a whole lot about these shows we’re dragging around the country.  I participated in parts of the truck pack and unpacking that I had never seen before, and pretty much built the Henry set bolt-by-bolt, so instead of having just a theoretical understanding of how it’s assembled, I literally know every action that has to be taken to make it go up, and I feel much more informed about the rather complicated structure we play on.  We’re still experimenting with the truck pack, and I was in the thick of it the entire night, so I now feel more qualified to help direct the process.  We accidentally did some things differently this time, but our truck driver, Mike, said this morning that the trailer felt really smooth on the drive up, so we must have done something right.

Last night into this morning was the first true one-night move we’ve had.  We had a changeover yesterday morning starting at 8AM, did The Spy, and left the theatre in St. Louis shortly before 3AM, and arrived at the theatre in Glenn Ellyn, IL (a suburb of Chicago) at 7:30AM. Until this point we’ve never had to load out a show and load it in the next morning to play a show that night. The delays in St. Louis were a big concern for us, especially so because it’s a 7PM curtain here tonight, but we were thrilled to discover when we stepped out of the bus this morning that our truck was backed up to an honest-to-goodness loading dock, which lead in a pretty much straight line to the stage, maybe 30 feet away.  And there to unload the truck were a large bunch of stagehand-looking adult men and women, who made quick work of our truck, and had the deck and part of the gallery up before Nick and I even finished putting up signage.  We only had to unload Henry, which is also a blessing. I am told the lights were all properly hung, colored and patched when we arrived as well, so we are all a little bit in awe of Glenn Ellyn right now.

The bus is parked just a few dozen feet up the slope from the loading dock (as it’s sort of in a trench between buildings, they didn’t want the fumes from the generator getting sucked indoors all day), and Nick and I are properly able to conduct our load-in day routine of updating signage and then sleeping and playing on the internet. Nick’s next project is probably going to be laying down carpet on the gallery (which gets skipped if we’re pressed for time, but I don’t think he’ll be so lucky with this speedy crew), and my next appointment is with Daniel, our lighting supervisor, who tells me around 4:00 he’ll be ready to do cueing, which is theoretically when we sit out front and step through all the cues and make sure they look right, but in the last couple venues has been more about reprogramming the show to somehow make it look like what it’s supposed to, while cringing at lights wrongly focused, substitute gel colors that look nothing like the original, and occasionally saying, “What the hell is that??”when something completely inexplicable pops up, like last night when we had a single solitary house light come up in one cue! Of course this is also the most important thing I personally do during load-in, as catching these things avoids much embarrassment and danger to the cast, and results in a show that mimics as much as possible the designer’s intention. I think we will find the process much easier here.

Sometime before this happens I take a few minutes with our sound supervisor, Tim, to talk about comm, which is one of my favorite topics. First of all, since without comm everything I do during a performance would just be me sitting alone in a room talking to myself, it’s a matter of some interest to me. Especially on this tour I like to know whether we’re using elements of the house system or entirely our own, because we have a crappy old base station which doesn’t like my personal headset, and the company-supplied headsets are ridiculously uncomfortable. So sometimes it’s all our stuff, and sometimes all the venue’s, and sometimes we add our wireless headsets into their wired system. Often Tim presents me with a couple options to choose from — naturally I prefer the one that gives us the greatest reliability and allows me to use my headset. So sometime in the middle of the day I grab the script(s) of the show(s) I’ll be calling in the venue, and Tim and I go visit the booth or other locales where I have the option to call the show, to figure out where I’ll be calling from and make sure that I have comm and monitors where I need them. I also check out the lighting in the area to see if I have enough light to read my script, and in many cases to decide if the venue’s usual stage manager lighting is too bright. I prefer a very dark place to call shows from, especially these shows, as the lighting design is very dark. I tend not to want any light source higher above my script than is necessary to light it. The stage management workbox is supplied with its own LittleLite, which I try to avoid using because I’m always afraid I’ll leave it behind somewhere, but with the exception of the Guthrie, I think I’ve ended up using it in every venue, once because there was no light for me, once because the light supplied was too bright, and once because the booth was lit by dim-able overhead lights, which I hate because they have to illuminate an entire room when all I need lit is one page. I haven’t checked out the situation here yet.  That’s what I’m up to so far today!


February 6, 2009

Life on the Road

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:42 am

I’m still new at this, but now that we’ve been really in touring mode for about 5 days, here’s what’s going on.

Our day often consists of waking up at 6:30AM to be ready for a 7:30 bus call.  If I think my personal involvement in the insanity occurring at the theatre at 8AM will be minimal, I will bring my personal pillow from the hotel to the bus, in the hope of getting to sleep more hours on the bus than I do overnight.

Our schedule here in West Lafayette is kind of insane.  We started out re-teching The Spy, then tearing it all down to do a single performance of Henry V, then tearing that down to put the Spy set back up for our last two days.  This has been a kind of boot camp for our crew, getting to practice almost every method of changeover before we leave our first stop.  They’re getting very good at it.  Nick, being an ASM, deals a lot with props, and actor-proofing the set, so that’s basically what he helps with during load-in and changeover.  I really have nothing to do once the signage is up and I’ve put the proper calling script in the booth, so I kind of float around helping with simple tasks.  Today I packed a drum in a cardboard box and carried a few things to and from our prop road box, then I went on a cleaning spree of the stage management work box, which it desperately needed.  Then when I ran out of things to do, I went back to the bus and took a nap for about 45 minutes, before returning to help Nick set up for our 1-hour Henry performance for a student audience.

Thankfully, that performance was in the same building as our main shows are, in a small proscenium theatre, so we didn’t have to go too far with our trunk of props.  I hung out for that one and helped to set up and get the cast settled in before the show.  The 1-hour show is Nick’s baby, as there will be times when he has to stay behind to put it up in a city after the crew has left.  As far as that show goes, he functions as the PSM, and whenever I’m available I will make myself useful as his ASM.  This was the first time it’s been performed, and although it’s been rather underrehearsed due to all the work needed to remount The Spy, the cast did well and the kids seemed to enjoy it.

Now that the show is over, we are back on the bus.  Bart, our very awesome driver, needs to take the bus for an hour or so, so the call went out for anyone who intends to hang out and/or sleep on the bus to get on for the ride.  I’m not sure where we’re going.  I’m not sure where we are.  It doesn’t really matter.  I think we’re going back to the hotel for a while (where I suspect we are now), and then to a place where he can service the bus.

Tomorrow we have five final hours of rehearsal, and then we play our first performance of The Spy to a paying audience (finally!  We started rehearsals Nov. 3!), then the cast stays here for a true day off before traveling to Poplar Bluff, MO.  For the crew, we will load out the show Saturday night and immediately begin driving to Poplar Bluff, where it will be loaded in.  

I still don’t know where we are right now, but I’m pretty damn sure that’s our cast bus parked inches away ahead of us.  Either that, or there’s more than one black rockstar bus with gray swirly designs in Lafayette, IN.   I haven’t explored their bus that much.  I’ve only taken one brief ride on it.  They have 12 bunks instead of our 8, which means they stack 3-high, giving everyone less headroom.  On the plus side, the bunks are there for convenience, they don’t ever actually have to sleep overnight in them.  I heard a rumor they have a shower on their bus.  That sounds nice in theory, I guess, but I’m sure the reality is more cramped and awkward than it sounds.   Their front lounge is also smaller, which I don’t like.  On short jaunts around town, including our favorite pastime here in Lafayette, having a late-night dinner at XXX, Indiana’s oldest drive-in diner (founded in 1929), we generally all sit in the front lounge, which can comfortably hold all seven of us.  It’s a nice chance to unwind, check in about how the show went, and discuss anything we need to.  I have taken to claiming the seat at the table on the post-show trips, so I can write the report and send it before we get to XXX.

As far as the show goes, things seem to be going well.  Last night was our first performance of Henry outside of the Guthrie, where we teched it.   The adjustment to a very different space, and to a new local crew who were unfamiliar with the show, went pretty smoothly.  It felt good to try that once, to prove that we can do it.  I’m really looking forward to this week being over, and finally being done with tech and major rehearsals.  We have a couple 1- and 2-nighters next week, which will be a different experience as well.  I enjoy the travel, so I welcome the change of scenery.  If there’s one thing we’ve gotten experience with on this tour, it’s changing scenery!


January 7, 2009

Tech Day 2

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 4:58 pm


Our first 10-out-of-12 hour day. We are making very good progress, and everyone is pleased with how smoothly it’s going. The picture above is one I have entitled “Henry Cast and Crew in Repose.” There are several more like it on my Flickr page, linked in the sidebar. This was taken while a light cue was being written.

The set is rather complicated as it’s got lots of little doors that open and things that can be climbed on, which were bound to require time to get used to that just can’t be prepared for in the rehearsal room. We’ve had to restage some things, but we have also discovered new ways to play with the set that we didn’t imagine before, and none of it is taking too long. We’re at our dinner break, only 9 working hours since we began tech from the top, and are through the majority of Act I. We’re shooting for a run (perhaps an invited dress with some students who will be at the Guthrie) in two days, then our first preview the following night.

Most of our touring crew are here this week (some are going back to New York for a while before rejoining us for the tour), so that has been a nice reunion. Our two local backstage crew are great, and the large and valiant wardrobe crew have done a great job tracking a ridiculous number of costume changes, with the assistance of Nick’s paperwork. When we’re on the road, we’ll have Nick, our TD, wardrobe and props supervisors, as well as a local crew of two stagehands and two wardrobe people backstage. This tech will be the final test to make sure the shows can be run by the number of people we are budgeted for.

Today we were treated to the Guthrie’s traditional tech dinner, which is a homecooked buffet provided by volunteers. By some fluke of scheduling, the Guthrie is teching two shows at exactly the same time — A Delicate Balance also started tech yesterday, so the two companies shared the enormous meal in one of the rehearsal studios. I don’t think any of us have ever seen so much food. With the rest of my two hour break, I am letting my food coma wear off by sitting with my laptop in a nook of the 9th floor lobby of our theatre. It’s this crazy room surrounded in yellow glass, that is cantilevered out from the side of the building — it even has a glass floor in one spot. I have a thing for colored glass in architecture, so this has been my favorite place in the building even before I got here, when I saw it on the photo tour on the Guthrie website. You can see it from the outside in this picture, which is also my current desktop wallpaper.

At night the yellow glass casts a tint on all the lights of the cars and buildings below. It’s quite cool. This picture doesn’t do it justice at all. At some later time I must try to do better.


November 24, 2008

Weeks 2 and 3 and the Beginning of 4

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:39 pm

I’m a terrible blogger. See I’m PSMing this tour, which is preventing me from blogging about PSMing this tour. And we’re working a lot of straight 6-hour days, which doesn’t give me a meal break to spend those ten minutes writing a blog post like a real lunch break would.

But enough excuses, here’s what’s going on.

The show is coming together really well! At the end of Week 3, on Saturday, we scheduled a stumble-through. For those not in the business, a stumble-through is generally when you have staged the whole show, and determine that there’s a slight possibility that there might not be a complete train wreck if you tried to run a few scenes at a time. The goal is to get through the end of the show in however many hours you have to work with, with the understanding that an entire day might not be enough. Well our stumble-through on Saturday began, and first stopped when we reached intermission. People called for “line” occasionally, and once or twice there was a slight delay in a scene change when an actor forgot they were responsible for taking a stool or table off with them (which they had only learned at the end of the previous day), but we did the show in almost real time. I have seen many bona-fide run-throughs that were more stumbly than our stumble-through.

I was really proud of our cast. They had clearly done their homework, and came in with lines word-perfect that had never been up until that point, and mastered their scene change assignments overnight. They are a really great company, and very generous with each other — always working off in a corner on some physical business, or drilling each other on lines in the hallway. I think spending WAY too much time with them in the middle of nowhere is going to be a lot of fun!

This week is a little stressful because it’s our last week in the rehearsal room, and things are starting to get serious. Our company manager comes in with “greenies” which is a list comparing two hotels in a given city that we have to choose from. The ones we’re currently getting relate to our stop in Indiana in February. I am hammering out the tech schedule with the production manager, as well as juggling the requirements of photo and video shoots and invited dress rehearsals. We don’t actually perform The Spy here until late April. We will do our invited dress and then fly out to Minneapolis to begin rehearsing Henry V. So it’s also kind of a bittersweet time because we’re having a good time with the show and starting to realize that there’s a whole other show we still have to rehearse, and The Spy is actually the minority of the performances we’ll be doing on the tour. It feels like such an accomplishment to get the show up, but it’s just a relatively small part of our job.

The main thing you missed in Week 2 and 3 of rehearsal was costume fittings. At one point during that period I said on my Facebook status that, with apologies to my friends who do wardrobe, I believe costume fittings exist to make me miserable. They really are the stage manager’s worst nightmare. It’s hard enough to schedule rehearsals, now all of a sudden the costume designer wants to take someone (always the person hardest to spare at that moment) not only out of rehearsal, but usually to send them to some costume shop that is rarely in the same neighborhood as the rehearsal space. Figuring out how to get everyone to the necessary fittings in a timely manner, and without disrupting what the director wants to rehearse, and taking into account that the rehearsal or the fitting could take less or more time than expected, is probably one of the hardest activities a stage manager ever has to do. For the most part it’s over, although we do have some final wig fittings to work in on Saturday. I have a hunch how I could make that work, but John (the director) may have a reason not to want to do it that way. We’ve had a very good collaboration with scheduling, which I always appreciate.

Today our playwright, Jeff Hatcher, returned from Minneapolis to visit us again. I can’t remember exactly when he left but it’s probably been at least two weeks since he’s been in rehearsal, so a whole show has sprung up while he was gone! He seemed very pleased to see how things are coming along. It must be quite the change for him to go from seeing his work read off the page by actors struggling to remember their new blocking, to coming back and seeing a show almost ready to be put in front of an audience.

We’ve had increasing visits from designers, our fight director and vocal coach. It’s always nice to have other collaborators in the room.

Stay tuned for more excitement as we approach tech!


November 5, 2008

Start of Rehearsals

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:41 am


Forgive me for being a day and a half behind.  The start of rehearsals has kept me very busy and exhausted, but we’re starting to get into a routine.

We began rehearsals on Monday, with our meet-and-greet.  We had about 60 people in attendance, including the cast, office staff, production staff, creative team, and board members and other friends of the company.  The opening speeches were made by founder and Artistic Director, Margot Harley; director of The Spy, John Miller-Stephany; and Harriet Harris, who was a member of the company early in its life and still stays involved.  They spoke about the history of the company, its mission to bring high-quality classical theatre to parts of the country that may not normally have access to the arts, and the importance of this tour in continuing that work.

Everyone in the room was introduced and spoke a little about themselves and their involvement with the show and how they came to the company.  The designers spoke a bit about their vision for the show.  Our set designer was not able to be there, but we had the model and some photos to show, as well as costume sketches which were also shown on a projection screen.

We also had a camera crew in attendance, taking initial footage which hopefully will be used to create a documentary about the tour.

After all the guests left, we finished the day with a read-through of the play.  Once that was done, we used the few remaining minutes for the Equity meeting, where we elected the deputy, and voted on a few issues pertaining to rehearsal hours (straight 6 hour rehearsal day, 1 hour lunch, and rehearsal on a two-show day — all passed).

———————————–

Day 2

We began table work.  In attendance, besides Nick and myself, were the entire cast, John, the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, and staff repertory director Ian, who will maintain the show artistically on the road (which I must admit I’m kind of glad to have taken out of my hands).   They spent the entire day reading slowly through the script, discussing questions about plot points and character relationships, while Jeff made many small script changes after hearing each scene read aloud.  Act 1 was finished by the end of the day.

After the main rehearsal was done, we had two special meetings of an hour each.  The first was with our publicists and communications staff, preparing the actors for the interviews and other publicity events they may have to do on the road.  After that was the first session with our education staff, which provided a brief overview of the educational workshops the cast will be leading with students in the cities we play.


November 17, 2007

Post-Opening Update

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:36 am

This is just one of those been-awhile posts. The show is open and still running, which in my history with “open” runs is nothing short of miraculous. The local reviews were rather unkind, but we got a couple raves from the AP and Gannett, which have run in papers across the country. Our audiences, even when small, have been enthusiastic, so everyone has been keeping in good spirits. We are also taking part in fundraising for Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS now. With the strike going on, our relatively small contribution is going to mean a lot more this year, with 27 Broadway shows shut down and unable to collect money. We may be a small show, but our audiences have been very generous.

Understudy Mania
This week was the first in which we didn’t really have understudy rehearsal (well we’re rehearsing on Sunday, but we have the majority of the week free of rehearsal). Last week we had our first scheduled understudy going on — Christiane was out for three shows over the weekend, with Casey Clark covering the role of Elizabeth, and Leslie Henstock covering Casey, as well as her own ensemble stuff (we have no swings — a bad thing waiting to happen if ever there was one).

We had a very interesting put-in the day before. All our understudies are basically ready to go on, so instead of a put-in with the regular cast opposite Casey and Leslie, we decided to lighten the load on the principals (who would have had to do the equivalent of a 5-show weekend) and let the understudies handle the bulk of the show, except in scenes were they played directly opposite Casey or Leslie. It was very interesting when the handoffs would happen. For instance, Jim Stanek played Victor for most of the show, but before scenes between Victor and Elizabeth, Jim would exit and at the next entrance Hunter would come in. It was really fun, if a bit confusing!

Anyway, all of that went surprisingly well (especially given that some people were understudying two roles at once!), but at the end of it, we found out that Casey might be going on that night as Mother. Despite the fact that her scheduled performances as Elizabeth had been the focus of understudy rehearsals from day one, she had also gotten enough time on stage as Mother, so it wasn’t really scary, just a little surprising. With seven minutes left before the end of rehearsal, we ran the big chunk of Mother’s part of the show and called it a day, and wardrobe sat around on the dinner break waiting for word to begin frantic altering of costumes. Casey did end up going on that night, and Leslie got to go on a day early for Casey, and both did a great job. By the time Casey was Elizabeth the next day, everyone was completely calm, like it was the most well-prepared-for thing in the world. I was really proud of us as a company for pulling off a great put-in, allowing all of our understudies the luxury of some time in real performance conditions (it was full tech, costumes only for Casey and Leslie), and then throwing in another put-in at the last minute for that night’s show.

As much as rehearsal can make every day feel like a matinee day, I have never felt like it’s wasting my time. I learn things about the show constantly. If there’s truly nothing going on on the deck for a while, I can come out front and actually see stuff. There are tons of little moments that I never knew were there. Learning what the show looks like from the front is going to be very important as time goes on, for calling the show and times when I may need to run rehearsals by myself. The dance captain and understudies had requested an additional video monitor stage left next to the conductor monitor, that would show the same feed the stage manager gets of the front view of the stage. Then one day we had rehearsal. When we came back that night, suddenly there it was, thanks to our always-accommodating sound department. That night was quite comical — it was like I imagine it to have been when the first television sets started to appear in homes. Everyone just gathered around under it, whether they were waiting for an entrance or not, watching the little figures move around inside the tiny glowing box, putting on a show that none of us had been able to see before. Once the novelty wore off, it’s now mostly used by the understudies to look at specific moments they want to see (often involving them pointing at the screen trying to count the steps on the grand staircase to double-check which step their person is standing on).

Although I don’t have a calling script yet, I have been doing everything I can to prepare to call the show. The new monitor, as well as the conductor monitors scattered about, have been very helpful that way. Even before we started previews, Josh has been saying, “Can you get near a conductor monitor for this cue?” and explaining what he’s calling so that I start to learn what the cues look like.

My Rehearsal Process
In rehearsal, even though I’m basically just doing what I always do, it has added challenges. My stuff is the same, but the idea that none of the actors are doing their normal thing makes me have to pay attention to things I take for granted. As we go through the show, especially the first time giving them blocking, I had my own private backstage blocking rehearsal going on. It’s often said on many shows that there’s more choreography backstage than onstage. That is certainly true of our show at times, and I made it my task when people came offstage to talk them through anything interesting that they might encounter: “I’ll be standing here, you hand me your props, you step over here where your dresser will do your change, then you have to watch out because a table will be coming off this way, and this person needs to get by. Before you go on again, don’t forget to pick up your prop here…” Thinking about all those little things that just kind of happen automatically was good mental exercise for me, and it reduces the number of traffic accidents we’ll have when an unfamiliar person steps into an otherwise well-oiled machine.

At the put-in we ran the show with full tech, but in regular rehearsals I’m alone on the deck, which is really cool because it forces me to think about all the deck cues, not just my own. It’s already my job to make sure the other cues happen, but watching them happen is different from actually operating them myself, and knowing off the top of my head where every deck cue is called (we rehearse without cue lights, and often without headsets in more informal rehearsals). Throughout the tech and preview periods, a lot of cues were added and cut so I used to do some of the cues that are no longer mine. But rehearsing is a good way for me to keep up with actually doing them correctly in case I ever have to do them during performance in an emergency — things like operating the trap and catching the lantern that Victor throws are not things I’d want to do without being confident.

The Routine
Overall I’m just happy to have a job. I really enjoy the routine of going to the same place every day, seeing the same people, doing basically the same thing, which is what I love to do. And every Thursday at midnight, more than enough money to live on magically appears in my bank account. I have no expectations of how long this will continue — I’ve said the whole time it could be a huge hit or close in a week — I don’t really mind, I will appreciate it as long as it lasts.

I am anything but a morning person, but for some strange reason I look forward to matinee days. Maybe it’s because I make such terrible use of my free time anyway (not that there’s anything wrong with sleep), but I just feel so much more productive when I get up and go to work all day. Or maybe it’s because I know how quickly I could find myself unemployed, and I’d rather do two shows a day than have no show to do.

It’s starting to feel like a real show. We’re up and running, and that’s a big change for stage management, when the creative team is gone and the operation and maintenance of the show is up to us. We have some fans who are becoming organized — I just heard tonight they’re starting to refer to themselves as the Prometheans — a reference to Mary Shelley’s characterization of Victor Frankenstein as “the modern Prometheus.” Your show really isn’t anywhere until your fans have a clever name for themselves. There are a couple fan sites cropping up on MySpace and Facebook — I actually finally joined Facebook tonight to check it out. It seems like that’s where the majority of our company members have accounts, or at least which they like better. This is my first experience being on this kind of show since the era of social networking sites began, and it’s really cool to have these pages where the fans and the cast and crew can post messages back and forth easily. I heard a girl the other day introducing herself to one of our actors after the show as “the one from MySpace,” so it’s fun to make the connection between the people on the internet and the real live people who watch our show each night, some of them coming back multiple times. This show, like many of the other dark/serious musicals, will need that kind of active fan support to thrive, so it’s been very helpful to our morale to see people getting attached to the show and taking it upon themselves to spread the word.


May 31, 2007

The Rehearsal Report

I call this: mac,summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:40 pm

Time to give the rehearsal report it’s own featured post. To your right, you will find a picture of my template for the report (click to see it full size). I keep this e-mail-in-progress saved in my Drafts folder in Entourage. At the start of each day, the first thing I do is select it and duplicate it (Command-D), so now I have two — one to work on, and one to stay as the template. It’s already filled in with all the information that doesn’t change: first the addressees (a group defined in the address part of Entourage, in this case “SITR (that’s Singin’ in the Rain) Report”. So who gets the pleasure of reading my reports? It can vary slightly by show, but in this case:

  • The director
  • The producer
  • The assistant to the producer / costume supervisor
  • The choreographer
  • My assistant
  • The musical director
  • The conductor
  • The orchestra contractor
  • The tech director
  • The lighting designer
  • The sound engineer
  • The assistant sound engineer
  • The prop master
  • The assistant prop master

On the subject line, I fill in the day of the week, i.e. “[Thurs]day”, and stick the date in between the two “//”‘s. Same thing with the date in the main body of the e-mail.

I’m a fan of plain-text reports myself, because I like the idea that they can be read on a Blackberry, Treo, etc. and retain a semblance of proper formatting and legibility. Yes, fancy reports with tables and stuff look great on a full-size computer, but I prefer to know that everyone can read it the same way. I actually switched to using simple HTML this year, which displays fine on my Treo, so I think it should be acceptable to mobile users.

I break up the report into simple categories. Summary is basically what we did today, i.e. “Blocking for “All I Do,” scene I-4 and I-5, choreography for the ballet…” that kind of thing, or if there was a production meeting, Equity meeting, anything else of note (although a production meeting will then get its own separate e-mail outlining everything that was discussed).

Tomorrow’s agenda is the span of day, time of the meal break, and on a show like this which publishes a weekly schedule of what’s being worked and breaks down call times, I only go into further detail if it differs from the published schedule.

General is just what it says. It might be an actor who dropped out of the show, upcoming conflicts for actors, a problem with the air conditioning in the studio, anything that doesn’t fit in the categories below. One of today’s general notes concerned these lightweight plastic chairs in the downstairs rehearsal studio, which for the second time in as many days have spontaneously had a leg snap off while an actor was sitting in them during a scene. Thankfully neither actor was hurt, but from now on we’ll only be using the folding chairs from the upstairs studio. I put it in the report the first time it happened only because we rent the studio and I wanted to document that the chair was broken during normal use, and not because anyone was standing on it, throwing it, etc. just in case the studio later complained about it. Putting things in the report is like having a receipt for something. If it was in the report on the day it happened, there’s proof that it happened and when, in case a question ever comes up.

This leads into another category which comes after General, but hopefully doesn’t have to be used: the Accident Report. Any time somebody gets hurt during the work day, even if it doesn’t require any medical attention, it gets put in the report, just in case. It doesn’t require any more paperwork unless they decide to see a doctor, at which point they need a C-2, but having it in the report on the day it happened allows them to later prove that it was a work-related injury if it becomes a more serious problem at a later date. For instance, my one and only appearance in the accident report at Phantom was when I was on the deck and through a series of unlikely events, was more or less punched in the side of the face through a masking curtain by the actor I was about to page the curtain for. Some combination of my headset and glasses created a small cut on the outside of my right nostril. When I had a moment between cues, I went to the office to check it and get a tissue, and that was the end of it. But imagine, if you will, that the cut became infected, resulting some days or weeks later in the amputation of my nose. No worker’s comp if it wasn’t in the report. Thankfully my nose is just fine, although on the third day the cut started to heal on the edges and the center turned pink, at which point it looked like a zit. I should have been entitled to payment for emotional damages after that.

The other categories below (Music, Set, etc.) I should think don’t require explanation. The video category is only included on shows that have a video component of course, of which this happens to be one. I keep the “nothing today” label in there, and type over it when I have something to say. Today I actually had something to say in each category, which is pretty rare.

I try to keep a lighthearted tone in the reports without wasting anybody’s time with stuff that’s silly or serves no purpose. A few things I’ve learned in life about reports are to think about whether what you’ve written is going to cause unnecessary panic, or if it will make people try to get involved in things they don’t need to get involved in. If there is time, there are some things that are best left to a private e-mail or phone call to the proper department, and when they have had a chance to come up with a response, then tell everyone else what the situation is and what’s being done.

I have learned from talking to producers and general managers that most of them like a lot of detail in reports, even if they have a lot of shows to follow. Especially in cases of running shows where the producer or GM is no longer actively involved at the theatre, the report is their link to what’s going on. The stage manager’s artistic opinions (whether the cast gave a good show, pacing problems, performances of understudies, etc.) are also welcome, because there’s no one else there to make those judgments, and otherwise the artistic staff won’t know when there’s a problem. When I was production coordinator of Bingo, being 1,200 miles away and having only the report to make me feel like I was there, I got firsthand experience in what someone in the office wants to hear from the stage manager. I have also been thanked by the creators of shows for the detailed reports, because it serves as a kind of diary for the creative process — some have told me that they’ve printed all the reports and saved them as a keepsake.

I write detailed reports, but I find they don’t actually take up too much of my time. I achieve this two ways:
1. Begin the report at the start of the day, even if it’s only to start filling in what scenes/songs you’re working on. Instead of taking notes throughout the day, type them directly into the report. By the end of the day the report is usually done, but I tend to wait until I get home to send it, just in case something comes up at the last minute.

2. Always finish the report before you start drinking. If you’re going out with the cast and/or crew after a show or rehearsal, take a moment and finish the report before you go. You don’t have to send it, just make sure it’s in sendable condition. It can be really hard to remember what happened that day if you wait until later, not to mention proofread. Then you can go out and relax and not have to put your brain back in work mode when you get home.


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