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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.


October 31, 2007

Backstage Goings-On

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:39 am

Our cast has said in a number of interviews that we may not be the funny Frankenstein, but we’re funnier backstage. On this show I have been introduced to a Halloween tradition that I had never experienced before: the Boo.

It started maybe two weeks ago. One day we came to the theatre before rehearsal and found that Becky Barta’s dressing table had been hit by an explosion of Halloween cheer: fake cobwebs, plastic spiders, pumpkin decorations, and even a bobble-head Frankenstein. Taped to the mirror was a note: “You’ve been Boo’d! Pass it on!” Apparently everyone in the cast drew dates for which they are supposed to boo another cast member. Nobody knows who has boo’d them, and people can choose at random who they boo, as long as that person has not yet been boo’d before the date they have drawn. Today we had a big surprise when the entire backstage hallway and both dressing rooms were boo’d, with signs proclaiming that we’ve all been boo’d by the original boo-er.

Some of them have been really inventive. One was in the form of a scavenger hunt, in which the boo-ee had to follow the clues to talk to various people backstage during the show, who would then present them with the next clue. I was incredibly honored to be one of the stops on the scavenger hunt. The clues were on white paper with a seal drawn on in pencil to evoke the clues used as props in the show (until they were cut a couple days ago), which were distinctive red letters with wax seals. The boo-er made some comment to me about trying to make them look like the clues, so I dug into my stack of used paper props and found the ones in best condition. The clues were rewritten on the actual show props before the boo was carried out. I was very happy to be able to participate in the boo, and later assisted in setting up another one.

Finally, today we came in to find that stage management has finally been boo’d. Josh’s spot in the booth got a little cobweb treatment, and a gummy bloody handprint stuck to the outside of the window. My desk stage left was completely covered in candy, a rubber severed hand, cobwebs all over the desk and the nearby video racks, as well as the entire handrail of the escape stairs behind me. The final touch was the rubber snake on my chair. Pic:

The camera flash is way more light than stage left has ever seen. This picture is the only time I’ve ever seen what it actually looks like. We use a real flower in the show, and quickly learned we can’t store them at the prop table because they die overnight. We have to keep them in the kitchen area downstairs where they get some florescent light.


October 25, 2007

Week 3 of Previews

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:32 am

First of all, a new video about Frankenstein that I just found today, from Broadway Beat.

The most major changes have gone into the show. Some pretty big rewrites, and completely new orchestrations (which will continue to be added to and tweaked). The plan is for the show to be frozen tomorrow (Friday). The things we’re working on now are some tweaks in the more tech-heavy sequences, putting music into the curtain call, that kind of thing. After today’s rehearsal we have only one more 4-hr slot tomorrow afternoon to finish whatever is going to be done before the show is frozen.

We had another day off a couple days ago, and for the third time in a row, I did absolutely nothing. My body has been hurting in various places since tech, and I have been trying to get enough rest so as not to make it worse with each additional day’s work.

Once we get to the point where we don’t have rehearsals every day I think I may be able to rest and also accomplish something. Freezing the show and opening isn’t exactly the end of all that, as we go full-force into understudy rehearsals right away because we have some planned absences coming up in the week after opening. But someday, eventually I think I may set foot someplace besides my apartment, 37 Arts, the Starbucks on 39th/8th, and the bar at the Zipper.


October 17, 2007

Week 2 of Previews

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:29 am

Yesterday was our day off. Like our last one, October 3, I did absolutely nothing. Well I did get to make some progress setting up my new phone, which is a whole other category of blogging I need to catch up on. From this point on, I will get a day off every Tuesday, so hopefully once I get used to the concept I can make it more productive.

I’m realizing now why it is that sometimes shows don’t seem to change very much during previews, or at least not as fast as an observer would think. While 18 hours of rehearsal in a week of 8 performances seems like a lot, it really isn’t very luxurious. You really have to think in small chunks. “Today we work on this.” There’s not time to change everything that needs work in a 4-hour span, especially considering that when you change staging you also need to allow time to re-tech the scene. And then hope that you don’t put it on stage that night and say, “Well that didn’t work!”

Rehearsal is short-to-nonexistent on two-show days (either 2 hrs on one day, or one hour for each), so today we have no rehearsal, and it will be the same show we did on Monday night. We still have two weeks, but only a little over a week before the show should be frozen, so there’s time, but not as much as it seems at first glance.

I’m not worried, I just find it interesting how even with a fairly long preview period, you have to be very careful about budgeting time to make sure the most needed work gets done.


October 10, 2007

First Preview and Some Links

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:54 pm

We had our first preview tonight. The whirlwind that has been this production is coming together and several hundred people happened to be watching it tonight. The performance was our second complete run of the show in real time, which is better than some shows get, and considering we only started rehearsal 22 days ago, it could
have been much worse.

Bill (our director) gave a funny little curtain speech before the show basically saying “welcome to our first preview, please bear with us if there are any train wrecks.” He actually used the word train wrecks. Maybe more than once. Thankfully we had none.

I don’t think we were really at a point where there was a big chance of a trainwreck, unless the huge sliding doors that are involved in a large percentage of the show had stopped working completely. They go through moods hourly where they are happy or unhappy, and we knew they were unhappy when we opened the house. I wasn’t counting but I’d say they got stuck maybe five times in Act I, two of which required me to apply an inelegant amount of direct force to get them to close all the way. We’ve been dealing with the bothersome stage right slider since the beginning, so it’s become routine for us, and aside from not closing or opening as smoothly as they’re supposed to, it was nothing that really affected the show. In many cases it probably couldn’t be noticed because we almost always had someone posted on the stage right side physically holding the slider as it moved, ready to apply extra force at the first sign of trouble. Unbeknownst to me, some adjustments were made at intermission, which explains why they were behaving during Act II, and more work with be done tomorrow morning.

Overall it was a very good show considering how little time we’ve had to get comfortable with it, and things will continue to be added and improved as we rehearse during previews. Afterwards, just about everybody involved with the production headed over to an informal gathering at the bar adjoining the Zipper Theatre to relax and celebrate.

Meanwhile, some press is showing up as the result of our open rehearsal from last week. We had a ton of press there, for an Off-Broadway show at least, and here are some of the links we’ve found:


Interviews:
NEW:
Broadway.com – First Person with Hunter

NEW: TheatreMania video.
Christiane just tipped me off to this one, which we just watched during rehearsal. My computer at my desk stage left has become the nerve center for the cast and crew to check up on what the buzz is on the internet (and for the inexplicable number of Red Sox fans to check the playoff scores as they pass by during the show).

Photos:
Playbill
Broadway.com
Broadway World
…more Broadway World! (more set photos and stuff)

Video:

Stage Notes blog
Broadway.com

I have to share my personal favorite, though:

Being in charge of props, I was kind of mortified to see this picture featuring Struan Erlenborn, Mandy Bruno, Steve Blanchard, and Hunter Foster playing background while the photographer decides to take a nice juicy close-up of the bar code painted onto the ball. And yes, it’s painted on — there’s no way to get it off. Of course that’s not the actual ball used in the show. You should have seen the infamous Scooby Doo ball we used before we found a red one. Anyway, would ten seconds of Photoshop work have killed them?

Well I have to get to bed. We’re all thrilled that we don’t have rehearsal until 3:00. It’s almost like a day off. Next Tuesday will be our first day off in 13 days, and it will be very welcome!


October 6, 2007

Glimpses of a Tech

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:38 pm

A few thoughts as we continue tech (scroll down for the latest updates):

“Watch your eyes, folks!”Most common phrase of tech. There is a lot of light. Insane amounts of light. There’s one place in the show where my track takes me down a set of escape stairs just as a bunch of giant strobes on the boom at the foot of the stairs go off in my face. That one always catches me by surprise. I also like our signage in the lobby which warns of “Theatrical Haze and Intense Strobe Effects.” Not just your garden variety strobe effects. Epileptics in Jersey should be covering their eyes. I’m told it looks even brighter in the house.

10/08/2007 2:38PM
The word of the day.
We’ve developed a little thing among those of us on the deck channel on headset. Every day there’s a word of the day, which we discover as events progress. Yesterday’s word cannot be printed in a family-friendly blog. Today’s word is “cut.” Over the last couple days we’ve been weeding out props and scenic elements, and today it continues. Letters from school officials? Cut. Noose? Cut. While some of us have gotten very attached to certain props, notably the “implements of death,” I much prefer a show that cuts props at the last minute rather than adding them.

10/09/2007 11:00AM
Just arrived at the theatre and plugged in my computer. I just realized how stupid it is that I’ve been bringing my power cord home with me every night. This week I have spent about 15 of my waking hours at the theatre, 2 hours on the train, and about 2-3 at home. My computer has a battery life of over 4 hours. Well I will be smarter tonight, and that will be the only chance I get to use it, as we start previews tomorrow. I don’t like the sound of “tomorrow.” We have 15 actor-hours to work before we have a paying audience. In some ways it’s a lot of time, and in some ways it’s really scary!


September 30, 2007

Frankenstein Photos and Press

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:11 pm

Probably half the e-mails I’ve received in the last two weeks have been from our publicist, notifying us of the various press commitments that our actors have. This is the first one that I’ve actually seen the results of: Playbill’s The Leading Men column. The show should be getting a lot of coverage in the next three to four weeks. There was a great full-page ad in New York magazine this week.

The website also has put up some pictures from the photo call we did a few days ago. Here’s one:

These are just the photos for early publicity, no sets, no wigs, and not necessarily finished costumes, but I think they won’t look too out of place when compared with the finished product. The rest of them can be seen on this page.


September 25, 2007

Trusses! The Musical

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


If you had walked into Theatre A at 37 Arts today, that’s what you would have seen. We have trusses. Lots and lots of trusses. Some of which are not hung yet, and some of which are out of the frame of this horrible phone-camera photo (I’m putting my real camera in my bag right now). No sign yet of the 90 Par Cans in a 12-foot square. Later in the day tomorrow the set starts loading in, which should also be very exciting. Our crew is working 8AM-midnight every day this week to get everything in in time for tech on Monday. Suffice it to say there’s a lot going on.

Meanwhile, in Theatre B, we didn’t quite stage Act II today, but we should be done sometime tomorrow morning.


September 23, 2007

A Run of Act I

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

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

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

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

Here’s our finished floor:

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

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

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

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

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

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


September 13, 2007

Preproduction and Software

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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