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March 4, 2009

Rambling Post of New York, Week 2

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:26 pm

I have some time to kill hanging out in my office at the New Vic. Can I mention enough times, I have an office? Not like a little corner and desk in the production office, I mean an honest-to-goodness private office for the visiting company, in the hallway between the dressing rooms and the greenroom, with full paging and comms, coat hooks on the back of the door, everything.

Anyway, I am sitting here after a student matinee, waiting for a package to be delivered by UPS to the Acting Company office. In this package is the new bag I have purchased spent way too much money on, the Booq Python Pack. Ever since my main backpack got into a little scrape with the underside of our truck in St. Louis, I have been thinking seriously about replacing it (that and the fact that the plate that holds the shoulder strap pivots was already cracking and will no doubt one day come completely apart). Despite many things I don’t like about my current bag, I have never found one better (and trust me, I look for new bags like it’s my job). I bought a Jansport sling bag in St. Louis while I attempted to clean and repair my bag, but that one, while it will be very cool for some things in the future, is not designed for
a) laptop travel
b) large items
c) organizing many accessories
d) comfortable wear of 30+ lbs of stuff

all of which are my requirements for my main bag. And also, I will never again buy a bag that has a black interior. It’s just stupid. I think we as a species should recognize that a bag with a black interior serves no purpose, and stop making them.

So I did some research, and I have decided this Booq bag fits my requirements, although I have some fears — I think it may be too nice. My current bag is big and decently organized, but carries like a basic backpack. It compacts pretty well and is lightweight, and it doesn’t give the impression that there’s anything interesting in it, so I have no fear of leaving it lying around in relatively secure places with my laptop in it. This new bag is made of rather fancy fabric, and is heavy, and I worry it may not flatten well when empty. Most of all, I worry that it looks like a $300 bag, and anyone with a mind to notice a $300 bag might wonder what’s worth putting in a $300 bag. If this disrupts my life too much, I may have to settle for a less-nice bag that allows me to actually get things done. I ordered it from ebags, who have a free refund policy, so I feel OK about taking the risk on buying it without being able to see it in person. I will check it out while I’m home and if I’m not happy with it, I’m going to return it before we leave. Of course I will do a review of some kind.

The show has been going well. I’m afraid we may be getting spoiled from sitting here so long. It’s easy to get used to 1-nighters when that’s just the way life is, but now that we’ve been comfortable back home it’s going to be hard to go back to doing real work. This leg of the tour is the most glamorous, though, so it will be a good way to get back into it.

We’ve had a lot of 10:30AM student matinees, which is always hard to adjust to, but the nice part is that a lot of them are the only show of the day, so it gets me out of bed and then I feel like I have a whole day and night left to do stuff.

I still haven’t done Phantom. I had too much work to do at home last night, and enjoyed the productive time so much I just can’t do it. I plan to do two shows in the half-week before we leave, when I have the time to prepare and enjoy them. It wasn’t just the idea of adding performances to an 8-show week, it was also the approximately 2 hours I would want to spend at home reviewing. I did a little bit of review of the Journey on Monday night, which went pretty well (I can usually tell by doing that and a couple other scenes how much time if any I need to spend looking over my script). I still intend to do a pretty much real-time calling of the show in my living room, even if I don’t need to be that thorough, as it has been probably four and a half months, though it feels a lot shorter than that. If I have a specialty as a Phantom sub, I’d say it’s the ability to come in after weeks or months away and call the show as well as if I’d never left. Unfortunately, I get lots of opportunities to practice that, so I have a large bank of experience to draw on, and can tell with a quick 2-5 minute section of the show what my level of comfort is if I had to call the show at any given moment, and how much review, if any, I need.

OK, this bag is really taking a long time to get delivered. I know the office tends to get packages late in the day, around 3PM, which it is now almost 3:30. I’m feeling pretty sleepy, especially since I haven’t really had a full meal today. I hope it comes soon!


February 26, 2009

New York, NY

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:26 am


Here we are, running at the New Victory in New York. I’m having a really great time here. Much has been made of the fact that it’s “on Broadway,” but I have learned in my career that the address of your theatre has no correlation to the level of professionalism, quality of production, or size of your paycheck, so I really wasn’t buying into that hype. But I’ve been pleased to discover it actually feels something like a Broadway show. The theatre is beautiful, which I knew, but it is pretty well-appointed like a Broadway house, has a Local 1 crew, and in general feels kind of like a shrunk-down Broadway show. And by shrunk-down, I mean like 80%, not like 50%, assuming we are talking about a play here.

A few cities before we arrived I talked with the staff by phone and they gave me the option of calling from stage left or from the booth, which I was warned was “miles away.” I’ve called from miles away before, but I figured this may be the only venue where I have the option to call from backstage, due to the fact that our set is a full 180-degree wraparound wall, and calling from backstage would offer zero visibility without color and infrared monitors, which we don’t travel with, and which most of our venues don’t have. The Guthrie had a rather nice camera setup, although I also had a very oddly-placed window to see most things in real life if I needed to. This is my first time calling without any real view of the stage, but it’s working fine since I spent the first month of the run calling off monitors at the Guthrie. It’s a lot of fun to be backstage among everyone else, and it’s so much easier to get around without having to trek back and forth from a booth. We even have paging at the calling desk and in our office (we have an office!). It really does feel like Broadway! So I’m having a good time, and I’m missing home a little less.

Speaking of home, I stopped by Phantom for about an hour before their show last night, after our student matinee and tech rehearsal. All is well, there’s new carpet in the stage management office and SR quickchange room, and other than that things seem the same. The in/out sheet had at least 10 understudies on it, so it was a fairly normal day. At some point before we leave town I’m going to do a couple shows there, even if I have to do them for free. The stage managers offered to trade shows with me for the next two weeks, which I gladly accepted, but they rescinded their offer when I described calling Henry as “calling the rooftop scene for two hours and 40 minutes, and then the last 20 minutes is like calling ‘Wishing’.” It makes sense if you know the show. I think “recoiled in horror” is a better way to describe their reaction.

OK, people keep coming in and asking me questions. See ya!


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!


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.


December 7, 2008

Washington

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 11:20 am

One of the nicest things that can happen to a company, especially one that has to coexist in tight quarters for six months, is to begin to develop some sort of company identity, and this usually starts with references and jokes that arise out of the rehearsal process.

If you haven’t read my previous posts, The Spy is a new play adapted from the 1821 novel of the same name, by James Fenimore Cooper (better known as the author of The Last of the Mohicans).  If you’d like to read it, check out this link.  I’ve never actually used Google Books before, but it looks pretty cool.  Should I ever find time to read it myself, that’s probably where I’ll go (although I have recently downloaded Stanza for the iPhone, which also has it).  The story takes place during the American revolution, and suffice it to say George Washington plays a prominent part in it.

About a week or so into rehearsals, this YouTube video was sent to everyone on the cast email list, and it immediately became the defining theme of The Spy rehearsal process.

I have taken a number of still images from the video and saved them for use on our signage.  So far I’ve only used them for our dressing room signs, an example of which you can see below.


December 1, 2008

Tech Day 1

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:18 pm

We’re on the dinner break of our first day of tech.  We have a two hour break, which is very luxurious for us, as most of our rehearsals have been six hour blocks.  I’m currently sitting in the green room, where a number of crazy and humorous things are going on.

Our staff rep director, Ian, who is also our only understudy, is running lines with our company manager, Emma.  The other cast members sitting around playing cards, drinking coffee and generally hanging out are having fun shouting out lines to him.

Our production manager, Joel walks in with the business end of a noose, and asks Ron, who is one of the two actors who gets hung, if he has a moment to be sized.

Over the monitor in the greenroom we can hear our sound designer testing cues on stage.

Tech is going a little slowly, but no crises have come up.  There’s some preliminary talk of eliminating some parts of the set because it currently appears to be too complex to set up in the time we will generally have for load-ins, and with the traveling crew we will have.  That’s a discussion that’s still in progress though.

I have a lot of room at the tech table.  I have almost a whole table to myself, easily 4ft of space that is completely mine.   I think we have about 18 straight feet of tech table for stage management, lighting and sound, which is the longest unbroken expanse of tech table I’ve ever had.  Our director and staff rep director have another table a short distance away.

We have 3 wireless headsets, and a two-channel system.  It’s a nice little setup.  The only problem that has come up is that there’s something weird with the volume on the headsets, at least at my base station — instead of going from off to loud, the knob allows me to adjust from loud to really loud.  When I try to use my personal headset, which has an omnidirectional mic, it feeds back.  The gain setting on the back of the main box is already on “low.”   Tim, our sound supervisor, could not immediately figure out a solution, but I hope that we will discover one eventually.   Until then I have to wear this gigantic ear-enclosing football-helmet type thing, which can only be worn on the left ear.  It sucks royally.

That’s about all that’s happening so far!


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.


November 2, 2008

Day 5 Preproduction

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:32 am

Day 4 was kind of boring.  You didn’t miss much.  I hole-punched about 2,500 pages of script, exchanged some emails with the staff of New 42nd St. Studios, and some other mundane stuff like that.

Day 5 was the fun day.  It started with a 10AM breakfast at a local restaurant with the Associate Artistic Director, General Manager, Production Manager, Technical Director, Company Manager, and Staff Repertory Director.   The meeting was basically an opportunity for the key personnel on the tour to get to know one another and discuss what our working relationship will be on the road, and how we will communicate with the office.  I thought the meeting was a great idea, and we are already feeling like a team.

After the meeting we returned to the office where Nick arrived soon after.  After admiring the new Macbook he purchased for the tour, we began preparing to pack for the first rehearsal.  We acquired all the office supplies the office had to offer us, and then with the company’s Staples credit card in hand, we went shopping!  If you are not a stage manager, it may be hard to comprehend just how exciting a trip to Staples is.  We bought pencils (Ticonderoga, of course, nothing less!), Sharpies, a small box for hanging file folders, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a first aid kit and some extra ice packs, and a few other things.  We also discovered they had 2GB thumb drives on sale for $12, so we each bought one with our own money.  That was probably the most exciting part.

When we returned to the office with our booty, we then went upstairs one flight to Karma Productions, which is conveniently located in the same building. Karma is a tiny little hole-in-the-wall shop which is my default source for gaff and spike tape.  We bought a roll each of black and white gaff, and four colors of spike (yellow, orange, neon green, and teal).  These bright colors will be just for rehearsal.  We decided to wait before buying the colors for the show itself, since we don’t know exactly what color the show deck will be or what the spikes will be used for. Based on the model, the deck looks like some kind of rough wood planking, but it’s hard to know now how subtle the colors should be.

Then we put all the scripts in binders and found some postcards for the show, which with a little gaff tape, made nice logos for the cover of the binders.  Towards the end of the day, we piled all our belongings in the designated corner of the office where they will be picked up on Monday morning and brought to the rehearsal studio for us.  With all that completed, we finished work for the week and said goodbye to everyone until the big day on Monday.


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