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December 11, 2008

HENRY Rehearsal Week 1 Minneapolis

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:40 am

We have begun rehearsals for Henry V at the Guthrie. This is incredibly strange for all of us, because we just finished four weeks of rehearsal and a week of tech for The Spy, concluding with a very successful invited dress, just a few days ago. Now we’re back at square one, doing tablework for a different show, with a new director, vocal advisors, and other collaborators. We definitely benefit from the month that many of us have been working together, though. The core of the touring company — the cast, stage management, and Ian our staff rep director, have all been together now for a while and work well as a group. We also have had our documentary crew with us for the flight and the first few days, and the director, Sara, has become a familiar member of our team. She surely has hours of footage of us dying of hunger, sitting in traffic between the airport and our apartment building on the night we arrived. She’s leaving today and will rejoin us closer to opening, and for one of the tour stops and a trip on the bus with the cast.

Yesterday was the day from hell for me. It was a combination of relatively small things that just made the entire day miserable and never a dull moment of things just going well. It started when I woke up to a message that one of our actors had overnight gotten a terrible stomach bug and wouldn’t be able to be at rehearsal. This is not really my problem beyond a certain point, but the few communications it added to my morning made me almost late for my production meeting with the Guthrie tech staff, where I was asked tons of questions that really were better addressed to our production manager in New York (like how many crew we need for the load-in and the run). Then we had to spend the entire morning during rehearsal taping out these handholds that will be on the walls, so we can play with them and send the desired changes to the shop, which MUST MUST MUST build them immediately. It’s a long story, but it’s been a huge ordeal about these things. Add to that the fact that New York is an hour ahead of us, so our work day ends an hour and a half after the people in the office go home. Simultaneously, I’d been trying to schedule a production meeting among a bunch of people in Minneapolis, and a bunch of people in New York, on either Thursday or Friday, with many of the people involved flying between the two cities on Thursday or Friday, so which date we picked would affect who was in what city at the time. It’s happening today, and I will be glad to have it in the past. All that really needs to be said about this day is that after rehearsal, Nick and our awesome intern, Meaghan, were crawling on their hands and knees taping the floor while I finished the report, and both expressed relief that they were not me. I actually went to bed at 9:30, not because of tiredness, but because I knew nothing good would come from remaining awake. So I plugged my computer in at my bedside table with the volume cranked up so an email would wake me, and set my alarm for every hour until midnight so I could double-check for email, and then once again at 3AM. I didn’t think I’d get any restful sleep, but I actually slept quite well.

Other than that, rehearsal has been going well. The meet & greet was attended by probably a hundred people, as the Guthrie opens these events to their whole staff, from the artistic director to the maintenance people. It was nice to see such a community come together to give a new show a good sendoff (OK, there was free food, too, but still). The read-through was great, and the tablework and other exercises the cast has been doing are really fun to watch and listen to. Our vocal consultant, Andrew Wade, has lots of great ideas that are bringing a lot of good stuff out of the actors.

For stage management’s part, things are really going well. Having an intern is sooo nice. Meaghan is awesome, and there is something natural about the setup of PSM, ASM and PA/intern. It’s the natural order of things. Delegating just makes sense more than it ever does with just two people. Meaghan also has the advantage of having interned and ASMed at the Guthrie for a while, so she knows the way things work and does all the Guthrie paperwork for me, based on my report to The Acting Company. The Guthrie is kind of a Borg-like entity with all these interlocking systems that I’m sure work wonderfully, but the nature of our production makes it not very efficient to bend our paperwork to fit the needs of the collective. So Meaghan does that translation for me, with my input.

The floor is taped out, the props will be arriving from New York tomorrow, and we’re almost ready to begin blocking.


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 8, 2008

End of Week 1

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:34 pm

Today is the last day of our rehearsal week.  We did a straight 5 hours of staging, with a little bit of rewrites from the playwright.  We have now blocked 9 of the 21 scenes in the play, of which many of the more complicated ones remain, but still it’s a nice sense of accomplishment.

Right now we are on a long lunch/dinner break, followed by a movement education workshop, where selected members of our cast will be instructed on how to teach movement classes to students while we are on the road.  Part of our usual “performance” schedule is to conduct workshops with schools in between performances, so the cast will be receiving training throughout the rehearsal process on how to run the workshops.

I have sent Nick home (he’ll be attending next week’s class, on stage combat), and I’m just here to mind the breaks, so it will give me a chance to catch up on whatever organization I can get done in the room.  My paperwork is pretty caught up, but there’s a lot of work I want to do on our filing cabinets, which have almost no organizational concept or labels at this point.  The stage management road box arrived from the company’s storage earlier in the week, and it contains lots of goodies that we’re still discovering.  One of the goodies Nick discovered this morning was an inventory of what’s in the box!  Because we only have access to the studio for an hour before and an hour after rehearsal, I haven’t yet found the time to tear everything out and see what’s there and put it all back how I want it.  Maybe tonight I can do that without being too disruptive.  I did, however, add my first sticker to the collection of decorations already on it — one of those white Apple stickers you get when you buy a new computer or other Apple product.

I’m looking forward to having a day off tomorrow.  Whenever I take on a really big project, I tend to forget that they actually do come with a day off.  So now I have no idea what to do with it.  I better figure it out, though, because I don’t get one next week — I agreed to do two shows at The Fantasticks next Sunday, just because I miss the show and it will be fun to do it again.  And they needed a sub.  The show has closed and reopened under new management since I last worked its closing performance in February, but I’m told it’s pretty much the same — enough that I can walk in and be told the changes to the deck track when I get there.  Apparently I have two new cues.


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.


July 25, 2008

No Pressure

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:52 pm

In every rehearsal for the principals of No, No, Nanette we have:
1. The Mayor of the city
2. A Tony winner
3. A retired English teacher
4. A retired history teacher

So we’ve got an expert for everything!


May 29, 2008

Notes on Joseph

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:47 pm

See, I’m making a blog post now because something is happening. As you can see from this ridiculous photo of me wearing an amazing technicolor dreamcoat, I’ve begun my fourth summer as PSM of The Reagle Players in Waltham, MA. Last year I did a whole fancy mini-blog about the whole season. I don’t think I’m going to be quite as detailed this year, as it would just be more of the same, but I will post my thoughts as they come.

Some observations about our production of Joseph:

It’s a very weird show to rehearse. There are only four principals, first of all: Joseph, the Narrator, Jacob/Potiphar, and the Pharaoh. Then we have the 11 brothers and their 11 wives. Oh, and the 53 children in the choir, but that’s another story. Another thing we’ve been realizing is that the principals don’t actually do as much as you’d think. The story is structured as a narrative, and what really happens is that the chorus is really moving the story along while the principals interject their parts. It doesn’t really seem like that in the finished product, but it’s basically impossible to rehearse for very long without involving the chorus. It’s been a bit of a challenge to not have the principals sitting idle, because there’s very little they can work on while the chorus is learning something else. It doesn’t help that our principals are very quick learners, and some of them have played their roles on tour, so the little they can work on doesn’t even need much rehearsal.

Things are going really well. The whole cast is both talented and nice, which always makes me really nervous, because that never happens and I’m always wondering when the problems are going to arrive, but so far so good. Everyone seems to be having a great time. It’s a very fun show, so that may be helping as well. I’m really enjoying it because it’s one of the shows I grew up knowing every word of. Aside from Phantom, this is the first time I’ve done one of those shows that was such a part of my childhood. Some other people in the company also said that they had a similar experience with the show. We’ve decided that those of us that memorized all the colors in Joseph’s coat at the age of 12 are biologically more disposed to remember them than those who are trying to learn them now as adults.

Reagle has done the show twice before, although apparently we’re among the first (if not the first) company to do a new version of the show licensed by R&H. I hate hate hate the way the score is printed. First of all, since the show is through-sung, we didn’t get scripts, just scores. Step 1 was to make a copy reduced to 80% and stuck in the upper-left side of the page so I have room to write blocking and other notes. To make matters worse, it’s got the lyrics written so that multiple verses are written to the same bars of music (i.e. it wraps back around and you read the second line of lyrics the second time.) That’s all well and good for a lot of purposes, but I think it’s going to be a disaster to call a show that way. If the show were going to run forever the solution would be to duplicate the pages and white out the lyrics and cut and paste as needed to make it read in a linear fashion, but for 8 performances I’m trying to avoid that. I think it will depend how many cues I have in a specific section, and if I have to clean it up some other way I will. But it definitely looks like I’ll have to be following the score the whole time, which reduces the amount of time I can look up at the stage. Basically I’m in denial about the whole issue until I see what a mess it is at the paper tech. I may try to schedule the paper tech a day or two early since all the cues exist from the previous production.

One other issue we’re dealing with is that due to other events happening on our stage, we don’t get the deck until the night before tech. It happens sometimes. It happens on every Broadway show, but in our limited rehearsal time it certainly helps to have done it on stage before tech. It also makes the cast feel good to have done a run-through on stage before tech starts, so they can see the big picture before we get bogged down in the details for two days. Due to the 53 children, we’re thinking spacing may take most of our time and we may not get a run that night.

Stay tuned for more!


March 7, 2008

It’s 29 Hours. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:57 pm

My Views on Small Gigs

After several weeks of unemployment, I have a little job. Actually, even Equity admits that a stage reading does not constitute “employment.” What they mean by that is, if you’re doing a show that allows you to miss rehearsal due to other employment in the industry, this is not a good enough excuse. But also, a week of work for $100 isn’t really a job. Still, I much prefer doing a reading to a showcase, as I recently turned down a 6-week showcase, even though it would have paid $600. My philosophy about jobs in theatre that don’t pay actual money is that if I’m not doing anything, I can dedicate a week of my life to meeting some new collaborators, learning a new show that might have a future, working with well-known actors I admire, and putting my full effort into making a 1-page contact sheet, putting together 29 hours of schedule, and helping them to coordinate the moving of music stands and chairs around a bare stage. I might even take the house lights up and down for the actual readings.

Contrast that to a showcase, which despite its name and original intentions, is a full production with a full design team, essentially a full-time job for usually six weeks, culminating in an actual production which needs to be loaded in, teched, and loaded out. And it still usually pays only $100 a week (if you can get it — that’s seldom the original offer). Not to mention for someone like me who subs on Broadway and Off-, I could lose far more money in lost sub work than I make doing the entire run of the Showcase. It’s happened to me several times. And lest that sound like it’s all about the money, let’s remember that if I’m taking a Showcase it means I don’t have a job. So yes, at least until the rent is accounted for, it has to be at least partially about the money. Personally I feel I’m making more art in the 8,125th running of the Phantom Overture than in many showcases I’ve done, so I actually feel no guilt about the art either.

But back to the reading. I don’t mean the title to sound like it’s going badly. It’s not at all. It’s actually something I’ve said many times, in fact to the director of this one when we first met for coffee. It really is my philosophy about doing readings. When you take a show, you don’t know if it’s going to be a good experience or a bad one, if it will go somewhere or be forgotten about forever, or if the people you meet will lead you to bigger jobs, or never call you again. In my opinion, if the show turns out to be a bad experience, there are two ways to rationalize getting out of bed in the morning: either they’re paying you a fair wage, or it will all be over soon. This is why showcases are bad — they satisfy neither criteria, so if you’re not having fun, you’re screwed.

I truly believe the process of putting eleven actors standing at music stands for 29 hours can’t possibly create the kind of unpleasantness that would make it not worth the risk. Thus, I took the job, no questions asked. We start rehearsal tomorrow, and so far I like the director, who I’ve met, I like the composer and musical director who I’ve gotten to know quite well via e-mail, and I like the cast — one of whom I’ve worked with and am thrilled to be working with again, one of whom I’ve spoken to on the phone, and the rest through e-mail. I’m excited to start meeting people and get to work.

The other great thing about this job is, as I said in an earlier post, I’ve missed being a PSM for the last six months or so. A reading doesn’t allow for the full use of PSM skills, but I’m hoping it will be enough to tide me over until summer, when I will have more responsibility than anyone could ever want, as PSM of a summer stock season.

I will share one other thing I’ve learned from being unemployed for the first time in about a year. Having a week or more to myself has reminded me how valuable my time is. I am an only child, I learned at an early age how to entertain myself. I am not bored at all. If I could be paid to do nothing forever, I would never leave my apartment. So I feel no desire to take a so-called “job” just for the sake of having one, if the money offered is not remotely worth the value of my time. I believe I provide Broadway-quality stage management to every show I do, big or small. That doesn’t mean I expect every employer to be able to pay me $1,500 a week, or anywhere near that. I know how much money I need to live, which is not much by New York standards, and I need health insurance, and I will never turn down work that meets those two requirements. But for anything below that I realize now that the only reason to take such a job would be if I wanted to. For whatever reason — believe in the show, want to work with one of the actors, like the director, trying to get in with the producer. There has to be a reason I want it, so badly that I’d rather do the show than sit comfortably at home doing something else. And in the last month I’ve learned that there’s nothing wrong with saying no to working your ass off when there’s little or nothing to be gained. In no other industry would anyone be made to feel guilty over such a decision. Should I call up an accountant and ask him to do my taxes for $5 in his spare time at night? If he tells me he’s actually quite busy watching American Idol, do I have a right to question his devotion to developing his accounting skills?

Now that I’m spending some time back at the bottom of the industry, just wanted to share the view. It’s easy to forget when you get used to a weekly paycheck.


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 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.


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.


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