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April 22, 2007

Further Adventures with the Rubik’s Cube

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:34 pm

So since my first day with the Rubik’s Cube which concluded with me spending two hours at home fixing it, I think I have had a total of one day of rehearsal which did not involve me having to solve the cube at least once. Many days I have had to do it two or three times. I have saved the site I use to help me to my Treo’s web browser, so I can call it up during rehearsal to fix the cube as we work. Since my duties right now basically consist of taking prop notes and being on book, any time we stop to talk about blocking or character work, I use that time to follow the directions and fiddle with the cube. Of course viewing a graphically-intensive page on such a small screen can get confusing, especially when the diagrams to show the moves don’t all fit on the screen at once. I have hopelessly screwed up an almost-solved cube numerous times because I got distracted at some point and obviously did something wrong.

Today I realized the need for a cheat sheet, and I made a crude pencil one during rehearsal, which worked very well. Tonight I arranged the graphics from that site into a concise page, which should eliminate a lot of the delays in restoring the cube during rehearsal.

The actor who uses the cube in the show has really taken to it, and perhaps due to the fact that he spends a lot of rehearsal sitting around, has come up with a good system to screw up the cube enough that it appears to be sufficiently jumbled-up, but he can solve it in six moves without getting confused. Unfortunately our cube is rather cheap and gets jammed a lot — it’s quite comical that when he practices he solves the cube easily while delivering his dialogue, but as soon as he gets in front of the director, the cube refuses to work smoothly and makes the whole endeavor look like a bad idea. But we’re confident we’ll get it to work. I’ve been trying to break the cube in for him during rehearsals when he’s not around. Which is how I got it screwed up today — the first time. The second time was because my PSM was messing with it and handed it to me saying, “Here, see if you can figure it out — it’s only two moves away.” I failed. Miserably.

I hate doing props, but one nice thing about it is that you can pick up really random skills.


April 17, 2007

Prop Master’s Nightmare — The Rubik’s Cube

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:01 pm

So my show has a Rubik’s Cube in it. And it needs to be solvable on stage by the actor in just a few turns. How exactly this is going to be set up so it works every night, we haven’t quite figured out yet. My instinct is to let the actor take it home and play with it, and figure out what works best for him. There’s been some concern about the possibility of the Rubik’s Cube getting hopelessly mixed up, but I assured everyone that in the unlikely event something happened to it, there are sites on the internet that show you the moves necessary to solve it. No big deal.

So today… the Cube wasn’t needed in rehearsal, so it sat on the stage management desk the entire day, and to stay sane while being on-book, I began spinning the cube, always in one direction, unless I was looking right at it, at which point I would spin it once the other way, and then quickly restore it.

After four hours of safe operation, I started to get a little too daring, and you can guess what happened. Long story short, if you need to solve a Rubik’s Cube, this site is the best I found for simple instructions and illustrations. But I will never get back the last two hours of my life, and I leave you with this bit of wisdom: the easiest way to solve a Rubik’s Cube is not to mess with it in the first place!


March 30, 2007

Creating a wireless network for the rehearsal room

I call this: computers,mac,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:37 pm

I’m about to start rehearsals for a new show, which has got me thinking about getting all my goodies set up to take with me to rehearsal. One of my favorite ways of making things more efficient in the rehearsal room is to set up my own wireless network for the use of the stage management team, creative team, or even the actors who want to use a laptop or other wireless device on their breaks.

Unfortunately, below a certain level, most theatres and rehearsal spaces don’t offer much in the way of internet access. If there’s wi-fi, it’s probably by accident, that the hotel across the street might has an open network or something. And it seems to be one of Murphy’s Laws that the signal never reaches to the area of the room where you have to set up your table. It’s even hard to find a phone line (or one you have access to) to use dial-up. Most of the time I use my cell phone as a modem, and connect by Bluetooth from my laptop. This gives speeds about the same as dial-up, but also wears down my phone’s battery, and can sometimes interfere with incoming calls.

Should I be lucky enough to find an ethernet connection somewhere in the building, that’s where I will set up my network. The key piece of equipment here is Apple’s Airport Express router. It’s not the most fully-featured router, but it’s tiny! At just a little bigger than the power brick of a Mac laptop, I can shove it in my bag — or as I usually prefer, in my printer carrying case — and forget it’s there until I need it. I also carry a retractable ethernet cable which likewise stays out of the way until it’s needed.

In a perfect world, the place I like to set up the router and printer is:

  • not in the rehearsal room, where the printer will make annoying printer noises
  • close enough to get a strong wireless signal through the wall (~50 ft.)
  • in a location occupied only by people who won’t steal stuff

Once I’ve found my location, I plug in the router and printer. Finding two outlets, one of which is big enough to fit the brick of the router, is sometimes the hardest part — stealing a power strip from somewhere is often the result. If the ethernet connection is a jack, I use my own cable to connect to the router. Then with the USB cable I carry, connect the printer to the router. The printer I use is the Canon i70, which is no longer made, but the i90 is the current equivalent. The only thing I really dislike about it is that it doesn’t have one of those little slots for a computer lock to be inserted. I leave the printer lying around unsupervised much more often than my computer, and yet there’s no way to secure it.

So now that everything is plugged in, it’s time to set up the software. Using the Airport Admin Utility, I create a network, which I usually call something very simple and easy for other people to remember. I always create a closed network, meaning that it won’t show up to random people as an available network. Each person has to know the name of the network and type it in manually. I generally don’t bother with encryption, as I have had more headaches trying to get it to work for everyone, especially when some people are on PCs or other devices. If I really want security I will set it to allow only the hardware that I specify, which means every time I add a new person having to get the MAC address of their computer or mobile device. If all has gone well, the router will be displaying its happy green light, meaning it has an internet connection, and everyone should be able to access it for internet and printing.

Being able to give reliable internet access to everyone in the theatre or rehearsal room makes everything much easier. The last two shows that I was PSM for were workshops of musicals in development. Every day, every hour, sometimes every half hour, there were new pages of text, new songs, new arrangements e-mailed from the copyist, and all of it had to be distributed to be worked on NOW. The musical director would decide to change the key of a song, the composer would transpose it on his Powerbook in Finale, e-mail me a new PDF, and I’d send it to the printer. The whole process could take less than five minutes, and nobody had to get up from their chair, except to go out to the lobby, grab the pages from in front of the printer, and hand them out. Theoretically the composer could have even sent the file to the printer himself, although I never bothered with the few seconds it would have taken to add the printer for anyone besides my assistant, and I would have needed the PDF for my records anyway.

Even in situations where internet access is not available, just having the printer on the network can be a big help. Being able to send print jobs out of the room and have them waiting whenever I feel like picking them up is great for spaces where the noise of the printer is too distracting, not to mention the ability to let others also use it. And the best part for someone like me who often works in many different locations and is not always given storage space, is that everything is very easy to carry. I bought an unfinished carrying case from the Container Store, and shaped the foam padding to hold my printer securely, with a little extra room for its cables and the Airport Express. Then I throw some blank paper on top of it all.


March 22, 2007

My Life in Theatre

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:23 pm

I’m a stage manager. I work almost every day, but I don’t exactly have a “job,” per se. I sub on a few shows, on Broadway and Off-, and I’m often doing other events or short shows like workshops and such. I much prefer going to the same place every day and having some kind of consistent experience, but as long as I make a living I guess it’s OK. It just leads to a really long answer when people say, “So what are you working on?”

I generally don’t know what I’m doing two days from now. I don’t even attempt to remember, because it’s never a predictable schedule. My Treo 650 runs my entire life. I honestly wouldn’t know where to go tomorrow. That’s why multiple backups are important. A lot of times I don’t know where I’m going to be in two days because I actually don’t have anything booked. Sometimes my schedule fills up really fast and I have to turn stuff down, and other times I’ll find myself sitting at home for days on end, or getting a call at 10AM to come in at 12:30 for a matinée. I get frustrated when I go more than a few weeks without a day off, but then when I have them I tend to think of them as “days I am lacking employment” rather than something earned. This is another reason I like having a steady show that pays me a living wage — I get one day off a week, and I don’t have to feel guilty if I don’t book other work on that day.

Last fall I worked in an office for the first time in my life, as the production coordinator for the musical Bingo in Ft. Lauderdale. It was fun at first having a desk and my own phone extension and stuff, but the whole office existence is not really for me — especially the getting up at 8AM every day! I worked in the general management office, where my job was really more like long-distance stage management, except without the fun parts of actually doing the show, or getting to go to Florida. I fell in love with the show while doing the Off-Broadway production, and it was great to see it expanding across the country, and to work with many of the same people again. I recently did a little bit of part-time work on the Chicago production, which is currently in previews at the Apollo Theatre.

I have a number of things in the works for the next few months, so many in fact that I’m not really sure which will end up working out, but it should result in a few “real” jobs, which will be nice.


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