OK, I haven’t gotten the backstory on this yet, but it has come to my attention on Facebook that a video has been placed on YouTube featuring… pretty much everyone at the Majestic Theatre dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.”
I’m sorry I can’t embed it, but please follow the link.
Yeah rehearsal is going well, I paid the rent and my credit card bill on time again this month… but I am not making an ass of myself on this video, and that makes me very sad. The closest I’ve come is orchestrating Ye Olde Tyme Romeo and Juliet Crewe, and that isn’t even remotely in the same league as this for elaborate backstage shenanigans. I don’t know what the hell is going on back at the ranch, but I’m glad to see that it continues to defy its old reputation as “the House of Hate.”
I’m having a great time on the tour, but I really hope that my life works out to give me some quality time with the Phantom phamily this year.
Ye Olde Tyme Assistant Stage Manageress
Ye Olde Tyme Master Carpenter
Ye Olde Tyme Proppe Mistress
Ye Olde Tyme Sounde Fellow
Ye Olde Tyme Wardrobe Mistress
Not shewn: Ye Olde Tyme Gaslight Directrix.
This morning we did our first full run-through of the show. It’s only been six-and-a-half days since we started staging the play. It went very well. Some fun stuff has been happening around that.
This event is quickly making the rounds on everyone’s Facebook pages.
Last week when we were staging, Alejandro (Romeo) was looking for a place to sulk to get into the proper frame of mind for his first entrance (where he’s been hiding in the woods pining for the fair Rosaline). He chose one of our prop boxes, which currently sits empty in the back of the room. It soon became his favorite spot to recline during rehearsal. Today Jamie (Paris) and Ben (Tybalt) demonstrated this rehearsal room oddity for the camera.
It’s pretty common for people to develop “their” place in the rehearsal room or offstage in the theatre — usually a favorite chair or corner. Clearly this is his. So Meaghan made it official by labeling the box.
And finally, a shot of our bed / tomb, which is named Fred. Sometimes really difficult pieces of scenery attract so much discussion that somebody finally decides they need a name. Well Fred had a name months before rehearsal started last year, long before he was ever built. And he has been known as Fred to everyone who has ever worked on the production — directors, designers, cast, crew, staff and local stagehands around the country.
The real Fred is with us in the rehearsal hall this year, which is a great luxury. He also has all his blankets, pillows and padding. During today’s run, his bedding got a little disheveled in the course of all the dying and such, revealing the lovely period padding underneath. You don’t think we’d have Juliet lying on that thing motionless for a half hour with anything less, do you?
And finally, he’s a slightly weird panorama of our rehearsal room, taken with the iPhone app 360 Panorama. The concept is cool: you slowly turn your phone and it stitches the image together in real time. It works about… this well:
I have better luck getting decent panoramas with Pano, though it’s not really designed to take full 360-degree images.
That’s the stage management desk on the right, and the director’s desk on the left. The director and myself sit at the inside places closest to center, with our respective assistants on the outside. It’s also a good idea to have the stage management desk on the side by the door, because it conveniently positions the ASM in the best spot to discretely enter and leave the room.
Gather ’round, children, and I will tell you the story of the J/K Tree.
(For anybody over the age of 20, or people who spend too much time in real life, and not enough time on the internet, “J/K” is text-speak for “just kidding.”)
This summer at Reagle the J/K Tree has become a metaphorical representation of anything that happens onstage when it’s not supposed to.
It began at the start of the summer, with our first show, Into the Woods. The set consisted of a bunch of two-dimensional trees covered in random text from fairy tales, as though they were cut out of the pages of books. Like so:
There were ten trees at various depths and locations, which would fly in in seemingly random patterns to define different areas in the story. In reality, which tree was in which scene was often very important to direct focus and allow access to certain parts of the stage while concealing others. But for the purposes of running the show, there was really no easy way to remember when a certain tree was supposed to fly. You just always had to have the right linesets moving.
Sometimes the wrong tree or set of trees would move. I had a tree-tracking table in a sheet protector on my desk which showed all the moves, the cue numbers, and most importantly, all the trees that were supposed to be in after a given cue had completed. Generally if it was found that a mistake was made, we would just have to deal with it for that scene and assign fly cues so that on the next transition we would end up with all the right trees in.
Until the J/K Tree. The J/K Tree was known to the director and the cast as Tree #2. It was known to the crew as lineset 7. I had to memorize both sets of numbers, which gave me a headache. Anyway, there was one particular transition, on one particular night, when Tree #2 flew in when it wasn’t supposed to. Because it was pretty far downstage, and close to center, it caught attention right away, and I and several other people immediately cried out that it was wrong. But it was coming in like it meant to, and being the center of attention, couldn’t just come halfway in, stop, and then go out. We figured, as we usually did, that we would just have to live with it until the next possible transition. As soon as it landed I mentally scanned ahead in the show to figure out when it could make a graceful exit.
Immediately I realized the problem: this was the transformation scene, where the Witch turns into a beautiful woman. There was a special in the floor that would shine right up at Rachel. I knew the special was just downstage of Tree #2, so her mark for the transformation would be exactly where the tree is. I said, “It can’t be here for the transformation, get it out!” and away it went, almost as soon as it had come in. As it casually returned to the sky, someone on headset commented cheerfully, “J/K!” And from then on it became known as the J/K Tree. Because of the words painted on the trees, we thought it would have been nice if it actually had the letters J and K on it, but I don’t think we ever inspected it that closely.
So through our techs of later shows it’s been the joke when something happens when it’s not supposed to, and is then quickly, and not so subtly, corrected — such as a dramatic light cue called early and then backed out of, or an actor who starts to sing before their cue and then stops — “Oops! Fly in the J/K Tree!”
It’s one of those you-had-to-be-there stories, but I noticed that I used “J/K” in my video in the previous post, and figured I should explain the particular history of it among our crew.
As you know, my Macbook Pro’s screen finally died this week. It died after I got home from the show on Wednesday. Thursday morning I brought it to the theatre and plugged it into the spare light board monitor in my office. There it served sort of like a desktop computer, while I had to write down the running times with a pencil, of all things. Then I took notes on my iPhone. Then at intermission and after the show I went to the office and actually entered everything into the database.
Between shows I went to the Apple Store and bought a new Macbook Pro. I got it home about an hour-and-a-half before our van call for the evening show, so I got as far as cloning my old drive (almost) before I had to leave. As the transfer was still going on, I decided I really could survive without a computer for one performance.
Nick had a good idea, which was for me to email him the database file so I could have his computer on the calling desk, and it would be exactly the same as usual — except his 13″ Macbook would fit on the desk better.
When we arrived I went out on a Starbucks run. I was feeling good about my purchase, and still have a ton of money on my Starbucks card (because we’ve rarely been near a Starbucks on the road), so when Nick tried to give me money to pick him up something to drink, I said I’d take care of it. We then agreed that the venti iced tea lemonade would be payment for the rental of his computer.
When I got back to the office with our drinks, Bobby was sitting at my desk, and casually gestured to a piece of paper and said, “Nick left you an invoice.” I really wasn’t gone more than 10 or 12 minutes, and Nick came up with a brilliant plan. I have encased it in a sheet protector and hung it in our road box.
Nick’s Macbook on the calling desk (which is very crowded and normally requires my script pages to lie on top of the wrist rest, so the 13″ size was a nice change!)
