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February 10, 2010

Winter Wonderland: I Wonder if We’ll Have a Show

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:39 pm

The big snowstorm has hit the northeast — the forecast to which we said, “Ha! Sucks to be them!” until we realized we were returning to the northeast. Damn!

We’re in New London, CT, which was lovely yesterday for our full day off, but today is quickly filling up with the white stuff. It may not look like much in the photo, but it’s really coming down, and Nick, who has been our bus-based meteorologist, says the forecast predicts 8-12 inches by 6PM.

We had an 8AM load in, which began at 7:30 with Bart driving carefully down streets already covered in a thin layer of snow. By the time we were unloading the truck, it was coming down pretty heavily. The presenter was already in meetings about whether we’d have a show tonight, or a school show tomorrow morning (which has more to do with the schools being closed than the theatre).

Because the theatre has very little storage space, we left the set on the truck until the last minute (and also because if the shows were cancelled early, we wouldn’t have to unload it). Also, there’s no loading dock, so taking things up and down the ramp and down the sidewalk in the snow is not something you really want to do if you don’t have to.

Here’s Juliet’s balcony, just delivered to the theatre, having accumulated a thin layer of snow on its trip around the corner from the truck.

We’re moving along at a very good pace, and at this, our lunch break, have most of the walls up. I’m calling focus again, and we’re most of the way through all the instruments we can focus before the set is finished. We’ve had three or four electricians going at once, so I’m getting a little more of a mental workout.

In other news, it’s very nice to be back in the northeast. Yesterday on our day off, Nick and I walked down to the waterfront, where the Amtrak station is, and the pier looks out on the river. I wanted to see a submarine float by, but no such luck (or maybe it did, and I wouldn’t know!) Being around the waters of Long Island and Connecticut reminds me of my childhood, so it was a nice way to come home to this region after being away since late November.

UPDATE!

The evening show is canceled. Tomorrow’s morning student show may still happen, so we have to continue working.


February 4, 2010

Tour Week 1

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:47 pm

We are now halfway through Week 1 of our actual touring schedule. Apparently, unless my dashboard widget is lying to me, it’s Thursday. Before I looked at it, I thought it was Saturday, but felt that was probably just my imagination and it’s really Friday. But no, I guess it’s Thursday.

Our last venue was in Grand Rapids, MN. The venue was in a high school, but gets a lot of touring shows. It was a very nice, intimate theatre with a semi-thrust stage. Unfortunately our show is designed for a proscenium, so due to the lighting needs, the first electric has to be over the edge of our marley deck, so we couldn’t use the apron as a playing space.

We’re in Appleton, Wisconsin. Last night during load-out in Grand Rapids, MN, a bunch of us were sitting in the green room finishing up paperwork, and I pulled up my venue database, which has many features, including that it automatically pulls up the Wikipedia page of the city in question. We learned many things about Appleton. Apparently in the late 1800s it was kind of a big deal — it had a large paper industry, which spurred development of electricity far ahead of most cities. We also found this interesting because our show takes place in 1912, and has a little throughline about how excited the Capulets are to have electric lights at their party. As I said to the assembled crew in the greenroom, “Appleton’s gaslit streets were replaced with electric lights in the year…” and everyone said, “1912!”

In addition to having been a pretty big deal back in the day, Appleton also has a very new, very fancy theatre, the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center. The theatre seats almost 2,000 and has three balconies, in a horseshoe configuration.

We’ve had some young and eager student crews (I have no idea what has happened to the poor high school kids we kept up till 3AM last night, but their parents must be pissed at us!), but today we have an honest-to-goodness IATSE crew. Sometimes that can be a mixed blessing, because a non-union crew can be used more flexibly, and we can pitch in to do more of the work ourselves if necessary. But at one point today a few of us were standing around watching a group of about six or seven stagehand-looking stagehands (men and women) putting up the walls and platforms of the set, and we remarked to each other how exciting it was to have an IATSE crew. It’s really a completely different energy.

Here’s a picture of our set facing out towards the house.

Last night at some point late in the day, our lighting director, Devon, mentioned that to speed things along, he would like me to call focus. Now, I am well aware that in the “real world” of touring, one of the stage managers generally does so. I have hung out with friends doing focus on the Phantom tour, but I am a bit embarrassed to confess I’d never had to do it myself. So when I was asked, I was rather excited because it’s something I need to get experience doing, so that I don’t make an ass of myself when Broadway calls, now that I supposedly have “touring experience.” Then I realized where we were going today, and I was kind of mortified. I told Devon, “You couldn’t have asked me to call focus with the high school kids? I would have been perfectly confident to do it with a high school or college crew. But I have to do it for the first time with an IATSE crew?”

It actually went really well. We only had one or two guys focusing at once, which was a relatively easy way to get into it. I also had no familiarity with the lighting channels used in our show and what they do, and now that I’ve seen it once, the order in which one would want to focus makes logical sense. We aren’t completely done at this point — we had to skip the lights that need to be focused on the balcony, because it’s not assembled yet.

For once, we don’t have a show tonight — but we do have a 9:30AM show in the morning, so all our work has to be done. It’s good that we have some flexibility because we got here late. The driving time between our load-out last night and this morning’s supposed 8AM load-in was far longer than the time we had. Once load-in is done we will get to check into our hotel and have a shower for the first time in a few days. Then we’ll do the early show and have the rest of the day to spend in Appleton.

For additional reading, I suggest the following of Nick’s blog posts. He has already said pretty much exactly what I would say if I went into detail about our first two venues:
Moorhead, MN
Grand Rapids, MN


February 2, 2010

Tour Stop: Moorhead, MN / Fargo, ND

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:04 pm

We have completed our first tour stop since leaving the Guthrie. We performed Romeo and Juliet at Minnesota State University Moorhead — home of the Dragons, which Nick and I thought was so awesome that we each spent $20 on a cool “Dragons” baseball cap, as well as our customary sticker for the road box.

The crew here was really great, and worked their butts off to get the show ready on time, on a very tight schedule. We had originally been scheduled to play tonight instead of last night, but the venue had to move it up a day, losing us of a day of prep time to work out the kinks of our first load-in (remember, most of our crew was not present for load-in at the Guthrie, during tech, or most of the run, so we were doing it for the first time).

The balcony stairs were assembled just a few minutes before the cast arrived, the cast was constrained to the house and the apron for their warm-up, and we did fight call with a Genie lift and about four electricians hanging set mounts inside the door of the “house” on our set. They were placing floor-mounted pars in the wings while the house was open, and Nick was following them around with white gaff tape, marking all the lights and cable for the cast. Because the balcony was finished so late, we didn’t have time to install the decorative lightbulbs that go on the stairs, and figure into the setting of the story at the time of the dawn of electricity. There are three specific moments in the show that reference the lightbulbs, and I called Corey (our staff director) when it became apparent that we definitely wouldn’t have time. Their absence was covered very well, and nobody would have known something was missing.

There wasn’t any time to double-check things the way we normally would, so there were some surprises. A few programming differences popped up in the transition between the Guthrie’s light and sound consoles/computers to our own, and my comm went haywire twice early in the show, before we tracked down the bad cable. We were minutes without comm, but the proximity of the booth and front of house positions, and where in the show it happened, were in our favor, and we didn’t miss any cues.

We loaded out this morning instead of last night, which is rather unusual. That also took an abnormally long time, partly because we had a student crew who had to work around their classes, and partially because we’re working on our truck pack, and were moving slowly to make sure we were making the best choices. We still have room for improvement, but we did a good job, I think. The truck is definitely full, although we have quite a few excess road boxes that are going away when we return to New York.

My job for load out officially was to stand around with a notepad and document the truck pack. In addition to this, I did some labor myself. The highlight of the doing-things-that-aren’t-my-job day was getting to run the hydraulic lift that brings things from ground level up to truck level. The vast majority of the time, I was on the truck, but I did get to run the lift once up and down, just because I wanted to. My proudest moment of the day came when I was successfully the Person Who Can Cram Into a Small Space. We were storing our stair pieces overhead and needed to strap them around the load bars, but had already packed the balcony and stair landing underneath them before we decided to do that. Nick was looking hopelessly at the spot on the wall of the truck where we needed to attach the strap, but I felt I might able to climb up and reach it. I don’t always feel very small or very light, but in this case I was small and light enough.

We have checked out of our hotel in Fargo, and are hanging out on the bus until 2AM when Bart will wake up and drive us to Grand Rapids, MN for our next show tomorrow night. Some people are napping, some playing/working on the computer, and some chatting in the front lounge. I think there are plans for dinner, which would be our first dinner as a crew. Right now I’m going to get out of my bunk and snack on some Goldfish and/or jerky until dinner time.


February 1, 2010

On the Road

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:15 pm

This morning was our first load-in. We finished load-out from the Guthrie around 2:30am, and after saying goodbye to our local crew, were on the road and in bed by around 3:30.

At around 7:45am I was greeted by a voice outside the curtain of my bunk saying, “Good morning! Happy first load-in! It’s one degree outside!”

In some sort of tour-booking cruelty, after two months in Minneapolis we’re going north, to Moorhead, MN. It’s right next to Fargo, if that helps you place it on the scale of places-you-know-are-generally-cold-in-February.

It is indeed cold, but not as windy as Minneapolis tends to be. The entire surface of the ground is covered in about a half-inch sheet of ice, and it’s been snowing all day. To add to this, our bus could not park near the theatre, so it’s either a long walk or a short drive away. Nick and I searched for it for an hour, missing it by just a few yards at one point, but we did get to see the four corners of the campus of the University of Minnesota at Moorhead while looking. That was hours ago, and my feet are still frozen.

We’ve been working on our signage today, and once we leave the bus, we’ll be hanging it up, and then getting ready for the arrival of the cast. The crew here seems great — very eager and friendly, so I think it will be a fun show.

I already miss our Guthrie friends a lot, but I’m also excited to see who we’ll meet in all our other cities.


December 28, 2009

Load In

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:30 pm

One of my favorite stories from the tour so far:

This morning I came into the rehearsal room to find a shipping receipt folded on my desk. This isn’t completely out of the ordinary. Sometimes things get sent to the theatre in my name, such as props, the payroll/mail packet from New York, and so forth, and whoever receives it leaves the receipt for my records.

I didn’t recognize it, so I picked it up to see what it was. The delivery was itemized thusly:

Qty Description of contents Weight
1 trailer load of theatrical effects 21,000lbs.

It was a slightly bigger package than what I was imagining when I saw the receipt. I think the dimensions of the box are something like 53ft(L) x 8ft(W) x 13ft(H). I wonder if the Postal Service offers a flat rate box for that.


April 29, 2009

Baruch Revisited

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:27 pm

Late last night we departed Frostburg, MD, and this morning we woke up home-sweet-home on 24th St. and Lex. We said our final goodbyes to Bart, and unloaded all our luggage and other belongings from the bus into a hallway by the loading doors at Baruch College (see photo).

Last night in Frostburg was a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out.  This is something we do every now and then, where the whole crew will wear our Save the Ta-Tas shirts that Daphne got us for opening night in New York.  Like so, in Tucson:

We decided pretty much at the start of this leg that Frostburg would be a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out since it was the last venue before returning to New York.  The interesting advantage of this was that the next morning when we got up in New York, it was easy to tell who had decided to sleep in their clothes, as they were the ones still wearing their Ta-Tas for load in.  I didn’t exactly count, but I’d say it was four or five of us, including me. Speaking of which, we have submitted our photo to savethetatas.com, but it hasn’t been published yet.  I did have a nice email conversation with their customer service lady about our company — she wants to see us when we come to California — and she assured me it would go up “soon.”  That was like a month ago.

Baruch is kind of the most hellacious load-in situation ever. Unloading the truck on the street, followed by a lot of ramps and hallways, to a rather small freight elevator, and then down some more winding and public hallways to the theatre. Apparently it took 5 hours to unload the truck. Sadly for my friends, Nick and I did the stage manager thing and helped unload the road boxes, then broke off with our box and did our jobs and went home. We both felt bad for our friends, but my personal philosophy is that when you’re playing Poplar Bluff, MO and the show must go on, and you need a few more hands, that’s one thing. When opening a show in New York, there’s no reason stage managers should be needed to work as stage hands, without compensation and when their home is just a subway ride away. At any rate, I feel slightly less bad since I also had to come back at night for a late-night cueing session for The Spy. Due to the tightly packed schedule (if performances and film shoots manifested themselves as fish, this week’s would be sardines), there was no other time to do it but late tonight on load-in day, and as this is the New York premiere, we want to try to show it a little more love than it’s been given on our very Henry-heavy touring schedule. At least I had a chance to shower, change, and show up nicely dressed and clean like a normal person. I even have some simple jewelry on.

My first task upon coming back to Baruch at night was to set up our wireless network. As I have reported before in this post from December, Baruch’s theatre is in the third basement of their main building, surrounded by more concrete than any radio wave can get through, so cell service is a complete impossibility, and setting up a router in one room and expecting it to work three rooms down the hall is sketchy. When we teched The Spy here, it took me the better part of three days to get a reliable wireless signal to reach the theatre from the single ethernet cable in the production office. The solution I came up with was to bring in two of my own personal routers — an old UFO-shaped Airport Extreme, and an original Airport Express — and to place the Extreme on top of a filing cabinet in the production office, where the ethernet was, and to plug the Express in in the shop, which is just behind the stage. The signal from the Extreme went just far enough to reach the Express, which then passed it on just far enough to reach the tech tables in the house, but not quite enough for a steady signal in the booth. I may see what I can do about that this time, as I will be spending pretty much all my time in the booth.

This whole day has been deja vu. So many things have changed since we began our journey here, and yet there are other things that are exactly the same. When I came back at night, I found a couple of the tiny Spy columns, which we call “nubblies,” nestled against a diagonal wall, where six months ago another pile of short unused Spy columns sat when it was decided they weren’t needed (or something). This time they will be needed, but because we’re repping Henry and Spy, they are simply waiting there while Henry takes the stage. As soon as I glimpsed the greenroom through an open door I was instantly taken back to our final post-invited-dress notes session, on the eve of beginning the tour, and thought of all the people who were there who are no longer with the company. It’s been kind of a bittersweet return. But with all the drama along the way, the very fact that we are back here and performing both shows is an accomplishment in itself, so we can be proud of that.


March 17, 2009

Back on the Road, Baton Rouge

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:38 am

I apologize for not writing my usual load-in day post, but I completely messed up my computer that day, so I spent the entire day reinstalling the Mac and Windows partitions of my hard drive.  So here’s a recap.

We (the crew) left New York last Friday, and flew to New Orleans, where we were met at the airport by Bart and the same bus we had for the first leg of the tour.  We were hoping for the mythical “orange bus” which is reportedly the best one that Pioneer has, but our bus is pretty cool too, so we were happy.  The broken microwave has been replaced, and although all the pocket doors between rooms still don’t lock open, and slam shut when we go around corners, it’s home sweet home.  Soon after getting on the bus, we were en route to our destination, Baton Rouge.

We weren’t actually getting per diem for Friday, it was sort of a voluntary vacation day that we requested, so we slept on the bus.  We wanted to arrive a day early so that we could go to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Baton Rouge.  Bart drove the bus over to the parade route sometime early in the morning while we were still sleeping.  We were able to see the parade pass by without even having to leave the bus.  Which was good because I’m not much for St. Patrick’s Day, or mingling with the drunken masses.  Unfortunately the party outside migrated onto the bus a bit too much for my taste, so I finally packed my bag and walked the mile and a half to our hotel and checked in early.  Nick, Daniel and I had a nice dinner and margaritas at Chili’s down the street, while the rest of the crew partied at one of Bart’s friends’ houses until who knows when.

The next morning everyone was surprisingly awake for our 10AM load-in at Baton Rouge Community College.  The theatre was really nice — a loading dock and plenty of parking for the buses, which is always the first step.  The dock was on an incline, with the stuff coming off downhill, which is something we’ve never really had to deal with before.  The stage management workbox was actually first off the truck this time, so I don’t really know how hard it was to unload everything else with all the weight rolling downhill, but it presented some challenges for packing the truck at load out.  We had to put ratchet straps between every two rows of road boxes so there wasn’t so much weight wanting to roll back off the truck that a person couldn’t hold it back.  Joel has a funny picture of about four of us holding a wall of boxes back while waiting for a strap.

The show went well.  We restored some of the original staging that had been changed for the New Victory.  It was nice to see it again.  I was a little worried about the dreaded “traitors sequence” which is probably the hardest thing in the show to call.  The cues were totally different at the New Vic, so I basically had not called it in almost four weeks.  It went fine.  It’s just one of those things that you have to have the whole thing in your head before you begin and know exactly what comes next without needing to think about it or look at the script.

The Baton Rouge crew had obviously been told that the record load-out time for Henry stood at three hours, and decided early on that they were going to try to beat it.  The city that set it, Glenn Ellyn, IL, had about the same setup as far as onstage space and proximity to the truck.  They had a great crew, but we may have had some more bodies here.  I thought it was possible, but it could be tight.  With the truck being packed uphill, that could add an additional challenge.  One thing we had going for us was that our plywood cart, which broke during our 3rd load-out back in early February, was finally fixed, and for the first time since then, we had a venue with a loading dock.  It’s just too heavy to go down a ramp, so it often means the plywood deck has to be loaded one piece at a time (there’s about 30 pieces).  So that saved us time.  After sending the show report and packing up the stage management stuff, I took up my usual place at the front of the truck and began packing the walls in.  We had a really nice truck pack this time.  We altered the middle area of the pack recently, and I think Daphne discovered a few great breakthroughs this time.  When all was said and done, we had soooo much space in the back of the truck.  The final load bar was put in two hours and 44 minutes after the show came down, breaking the record by 16 minutes!  The crew was rightly very pleased with themselves, and that load bar now bears a commemoration in Sharpie, reading “Baton Rouge 2:44 Baby!”  I got to do the honors of handing out our swag, Acting Company bottle opener keychains.

Now it’s the next morning and we’re on the bus for our big cross-country drive to Telluride, CO, a distance of about 1,400 miles.  We have to load in on Thursday morning, so the timing will be pretty tight.  It looks like we have just arrived at our prospective stopping point in Wichita Falls, TX.  The cast has just left Baton Rouge, and will arrive here later today and spend the night.  We will hang out in town and get a crew room to shower in while Bart gets some sleep, then when he’s ready we will hit the road again.


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 10, 2009

TOUR STOP 3: Poplar Bluff, MO

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:05 pm

After several days of hanging out and slowly making our way west, we have arrived and loaded in in Poplar Bluff, MO.   I have yet to figure out what there is here, except for a Holiday Inn that beats the pants off the one we stayed at in Lafayette (for the first time in months, I had a good enough internet connection for uninterrupted online gaming). Unfortunately we were only there for one night. We are playing Henry V tonight at Three Rivers Community College, which seems like a nice place. The theatre is a single-level proscenium, I’d guess maybe 600 seats, but then I suck at estimating capacity. Everything is clean and spacious, and close together (we didn’t even bother putting up directional signage).

Nick and I made new laminated name signs for the dressing room mirrors, using some of the parchment paper used in the show (we have a colonial-era theme in our signage, utilizing still images from our favorite YouTube video). Now that we had the time to make them laminated and nice-looking, they will be reusable, which has been a goal of mine for a while. We set up our stuff in the dressing rooms — signs on the doors indicating men and women and the names of the actors inside, valuables bags, and the names over the mirrors (sometimes assigned at random, sometimes located at the request of our wardrobe supervisor).

Our crew breakfast, which is required in our rider for load-in day, was delicious, and everyone here has been very nice. We are in the last hours of load-in. The small electrics stock of the theatre has made it a difficult show to light, but I just went inside to check in with Dan and he thinks we’ll be ok with only a tiny bit of restaging for one moment.

When I was in there it looked like the set was almost assembled, there were a bunch of ladders up on the gallery. Nick and I spend about the first hour of load-in working, and then sit around trying to be useful for about five hours, waiting for the set to be done and the ladders to get off the gallery so we can lay the sound-dampening carpet. Nick also replaces the pipe insulation that protects the actors from whacking their heads on low-hanging scaffolding supports. Some of it travels intact, but some can’t, and then there are tiny pieces that cover the bolts once they are assembled, to keep the actors from snagging their costumes on protruding bolts.

Looks like it’s time to go help with focusing lights. See ya later!


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!


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