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June 27, 2009

Dolly – End of Run

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

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

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

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


June 24, 2009

Equity Stage Managers and AFTRA

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

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

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

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

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


June 12, 2009

Dolly Week 2

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:48 pm

Sorry I haven’t been around much. I’ve been so busy, I don’t feel like I ever have any free time. I actually have a decent amount of time off, but I don’t ever feel like I have time to be alone and uninterrupted long enough to attempt something that requires more than a few minutes of intense focusing. I have been trying to ensure I get enough sleep, especially since I have forsworn soda and to a large extent, coffee, and can’t rely on caffeine to make me functional. I also don’t have exclusive use of my car on this show, so I never go anywhere on the meal break and don’t accomplish much outside of the theatre and the housing, and when I’m at the theatre I never seem to be able to find a quiet place to work without disruption. Everything else in my life is falling apart, but I’m in better shape and the show is going smoothly, so I guess that’s something.

Rehearsals are going really well. The show is going to be great, and Rachel York is going to be an amazing Dolly. I’m very proud of what we’re accomplishing. We’re a little behind where I’d like to be in that we start tech tomorrow and there are still new things to teach today, and we won’t get to do a run before tech (though we will have done something resembling a run for each act — a week apart), but I think tech will go relatively smoothly.

My suspicion about tech is that it will be a show like Carousel, where each act only has a few scenes, and things will progress much more quickly than it seems because really not that much changes. The few changes are huge, but once they’re done, the majority of stage time sits in long scenes. At least it’s my hope that that’s the way it will go. I’m a little nervous starting tech, but the show is going to be so good, all we have to do is get through it.


June 6, 2009

Dolly – 1st Weekend

I call this: summer stock — Posted by KP @ 6:56 pm

We’re into our first weekend of Dolly rehearsals, and things are going really well. I have had hardly any time at all to see the ensemble, but they seem to be moving quickly. We’re all together this afternoon, so I can begin learning the full-company musical numbers.

Rehearsal with the principals has been great. They are all very talented, but most of all have great chemistry together. We are still deep in the stage of blocking and learning lines, but I’m very anxious to see just how good the show gets once everybody is secure in what they’re doing.

Tomorrow we’re going to do a workthrough of Act I. Should be exciting!


June 2, 2009

Day 1 of Dolly

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:26 pm

dollysetOne rehearsal down, 14 to go!

The first day went very well. We had a production meeting in the morning, which was very productive. I think we’ve got a great team for this show, and started off on the right tone of friendly collaboration. A bit of the set has been assembled on the deck, which is always fun, and gets some good discussions going.

Our afternoon consisted of music rehearsals with the principals. Some old friends, one new friend I made while sharing a bottle of wine until 2AM last night, and our leading lady and leading man — Rachel York and Jamie Ross, who I met for the first time today, who were both lovely. Again, a great atmosphere in the room — I think we’re going to have a fun time.

In the evening, we had the full company — not quite all 51 of them (I think that’s the latest count), but enough — and did a read/sing-through of the show, and some fittings. So far the vibe is relatively relaxed and friendly. I’m really looking forward to doing this fun show with this fun group of people.

It’s kind of fun — in the way that being on a roller coaster is fun because you think you might be killed — to be PSMing a giant musical again. The challenges of touring were interesting, but there are lots of stage management muscles that have had a chance to atrophy in the last six months, and it felt good to work them out again. As much as every day on tour was a new adventure, I’ve forgotten the absolute terror that comes with pretty much every day in a summer stock season. Every day is a battle — you can feel great about a victory at the end of one day, but the next day you have to suit up again and start over, and earn that day’s victory. This is not to say that it’s an unpleasant work environment, or a battle against other people — the battle is you against the show, and overcoming whatever complications the day might throw at you.

Our director said something today which I appreciated: “People say that good casting is the most important thing in the success of a show. It’s not. It’s the PSM, then the casting.” I’ve never heard anybody say that before, but I like to think it’s true. I hope that the show makes my life easy, but if it doesn’t, I hope I have the presence of mind to make all the right decisions and make the process go as smoothly as possible for the other hundred or so people who depend on me.


May 31, 2009

On the Move Again

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:22 am

Well that was a nice little unpaid vacation. Just as I was about to forget why I have so much free time, and why I couldn’t pay off my whole credit card bill last night, it’s time to hit the road (or in this case, the rails) once more.

I think everyone on this train had the same idea I did — pay for business class and it won’t be crowded! Well that failed. It’s 9AM on a Sunday, I have no idea why this car is so packed. I do this every year and there are usually like 7 people in the whole car. Of course I sometimes take the ungodly early train at like 7AM. Since there is only one business class car, and a whole bunch of coach cars, I have my suspicions that I could have gotten a better seat in coach.

If I haven’t mentioned it, this summer at the Reagle Players brings us a full season of Jerry Herman: Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. Despite my furor that they still haven’t done South Pacific in the last 20 years, I am determined to enjoy myself.


May 29, 2009

Crazy Pre-Pro Day!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I’m Using

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

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

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

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


May 10, 2009

My Week “Off”

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:11 pm

I feel like I hit a milestone in my career this weekend. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to call a show in performance without any rehearsal, based on having called a different production of the same show.  

Last summer you may recall I was PSM for a production of No, No Nanette starring Donna McKechnie. If not you can read about it in the August 2008 archives. Anyway this week we are laid off from The Acting Company, and my friend Brian is PSM for a production of Nanette for Amas, who in addition to producing Off-Broadway, also run a program for high school kids where they get to learn about theatre and at the end of the school year put on a full-length musical with a creative team and tech staff of working professionals. I have worked with Amas a lot, and worked as ASM on one of these shows a few years back.  So due to having the week off, I decided to support my friends and see what the kids were doing with Nanette.

Brian’s assistant couldn’t make a few hours of tech on Thursday, so I agreed to stop by to be a warm stage managerial body, and then stayed to watch the final dress. Which is a good thing. After the run, Brian found out the next night his other show, which his sub would be calling for the first time, would be welcoming the Times critic.  How could Brian call the show for the Times when he was supposed to be calling opening night of Nanette at the same time?  Unless of course there was someone who already had a working knowledge of calling Nanette and preferably had at least seen this production. The next morning at 9AM I got the confirmation that they wanted me to call. I finished reading through the script about ten minutes prior to the show, then listened to a couple bits of the original cast recording to remind myself of a couple bumps I didn’t remember and the end of the overture.

The show went fine and I didn’t have any major regrets upon actually seeing what the cues do. I came upon a couple funny situations due to the fact that the show was slightly cut down.  I had a restore cue and wasn’t sure if the tag at the end of the number was kept or if they would go straight on.  So I took the cue to be safe, and sure enough they did the tag.  A few bars before the end of “Hubby Gone Blues” I couldn’t quite tell from the markings if the entire boys’ section was cut or if the last bit was in, which greatly affected where the final cue went. So I had to ask on headset, “um, strange question, but do the boys come in in this number?” “No.” “Ok, so this is the end right here then.” “Yes.”  It was a fun time.


April 29, 2009

Red Flag

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:00 pm

I got an email today forwarded through several people, about a company looking for a stage manager for an upcoming production.  When I got to where it said, “This is a paid position,” like there was any question that it might not be, I stopped.  Of course I wasn’t available for all the dates, and I doubt this gig was Equity-approved anyway.  However…

Being that it’s a paid position, I’m sure it would be a great job for somebody just starting out.  But honestly, nobody deserves to stage manage for free EVER, unless it’s in school, or for charity.  Whenever I see that in a job description it makes me crazy.  The implication that under other circumstances a “professional” company or individual producer might have been looking for a stage manager for no pay is just sad.  Come on, if you’ve got the money to put up a show, however small, you can find $100 to give to the person doing the hardest and most thankless part of it.  I know some people really do need the resume and experience, but I think anybody has the right to refuse to work for free.  In fact it would be nice if enough people did it that producers wouldn’t think to ask.

Sorry, I had to vent about that peeve.  Am I being overly sensitive?


April 18, 2009

The Tour: Leg 3

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:42 pm

This is the leg of the tour that is going to kick all our asses.  It consists almost exclusively of one-nighters, few of them having days between performances.  We were lucky in a sense to lose our scheduled performance in New Brunswick, NJ, as that’s where we’d be right now, rather than enjoying our first day off.

Since I last blogged, we left Nashville at night and awoke on the campus of Mississippi State, where we performed The Spy.  After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke on the campus of Auburn University in Alabama, where we performed Henry.  After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke in the loading dock of the Opera House in Newberry, SC.  As sad as it is, we were fortunate at that point that our set did not fit at Newberry, so very little had to be loaded in or out.  Having not showered in close to four days, it was very nice to have a dedicated load-in day, and a day that ended early at that.  The following day, we had a one-hour Henry performance in the morning, which gave us a chance to try out some of our ideas for staging the Big Henry that night.  Without the set, a lot of our staging actually borrows a bit from the one-hour, such as having many of the entrances that happen on the upper gallery occur in the aisles.  The Opera House is a beautiful little theatre of about 400 seats, built in 1882, and beautifully restored to keep its historic feel.  We all decided it felt almost like a town meeting hall where the Declaration of Independence would have been read — and regretted that we weren’t performing The Spy there.  After the Baby Henry, we had a two-hour rehearsal (yuck — but everyone was in good spirits and ready to bang out a restaged 3-hour show), and we blew through the entire show, mostly a cue-to-cue of the beginnings and ends of scenes, and in less than two hours we were done.   Then we did the Big Henry, an 8:00 show, which everybody usually dreads because it means we don’t get done until 11.  But with the short load-out, we were actually closing the doors of the truck before midnight, and were able to join the cast at a local bar, drink, chat and play some pool together.  It’s a very, very rare thing that our schedules allow us to all socialize in the same place, so it was a fun end to the Newberry experience.

That was last night.  Then we went to bed on the bus in the parking lot of the hotel we had stayed at the night before (which incidentally was only the second night in a real bed we’ve been able to sleep in on this leg), and woke up to the familiar alarm clock of Bart yelling “GET THE F*** UP!!!” at 10AM.  We were in a parking lot at Ashville Airport in North Carolina, where we have decided to spend our day off (had we not lost the gig in New Bruswick, we’d have been rushing to get there instead).  We rented a minivan, which Bart drove like a race car, up the winding roads of the mountains to visit some waterfalls and other sights where the bus would not have easily been able to fit.  After that we checked into a crew room at a Holiday Inn Express, and at night went to eat at a Middle-Eastern restaurant where Joel’s brother used to be the chef.  It was really good.  Tonight the bus departs at 2:30AM, and we’ll wake up in University Park, PA, where we’ll have an honest-to-goodness day off, and then a full load in day at Penn State, followed by a two-show day of Henry.  And as is usually our custom, that two-show day means a 10AM student performance, followed by a 7:30 evening performance.  At least it’s not 8:00.

This week has been pretty rough on us, but we’re all aware that the tour is winding down, and soon we’ll be back performing in New York, and then after that we’re laid off for a week, and then have just one more week of touring the Northeast before we’re done.   I’m sad for the tour to be ending, but I will be very happy to be able to stay put in one place for a while, even if I’ll still be away from home.


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