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December 23, 2010

Dropbox is the Shiznit

I call this: computers,mac,pc,phones,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:57 pm

Over the past six months or so, I’ve written a couple posts which mentioned my interests in incorporating cloud computing into my stage management life a little more. I talked about the wonders and terrors of cloud computing in general, and mentioned in passing about the software Meaghan and I are using on this tour.

Over the summer — I don’t think I talked much about it — over the course of three productions, I quietly and tentatively began using Dropbox to store my folder of show files on the cloud. I used to use MobileMe’s iDisk for this purpose, but being slow as all hell, and just as likely to corrupt and delete your data as to save your bacon when you need remote access to a file, I would periodically back up to MobileMe, but never actually trust it with the primary copy of the show files.

At the urging of several of my colleagues (and readers), I tried out Dropbox. As I said in one of my other posts, “It’s just like MobileMe, except it works.” So while it’s redundant, it’s also completely life-changing. Over the summer I went from cautiously putting my show files on it while keeping backups elsewhere on my hard drive, to using it as the primary storage point. I also back up to a Time Machine drive, of course, so in theory there is an isolated copy that’s at most several days old, even if Dropbox totally fails and deletes an important file both from the server and from my local copy.

The Acting Company tour this year is the first production I’ve done where every file related to the show (except the backup of our SFX files, which is over 2GB) is kept on the Dropbox, and is shared with my ASM. The files are also stored locally, so we also have offline access to the most updated files on our hard drives, for those times when we’re in a basement theatre or the bus has driven into a patch of wilderness, without ever having to think about making manual backups or syncing.

For all intents and purposes, as far as the show is concerned, it’s like both our computers share a single hard drive. And our iPhones can access that drive if they need to, as well. It’s like the most exciting thing to happen to stage management since the headset. Only once have I seen a situation where we both tried to edit the same file at once, and it seemed to have been handled safely, if a little clumsily, with a copy being saved in each of our names. For the most part, Meaghan has things she keeps paperwork on, and I have others, so the odds of us needing to edit the same file at the same time are surprisingly low. We tend to reference each other’s paperwork a lot, but not necessarily collaborate heavily on the same thing. In a different situation the limitations of this system might get more annoying.

Also, here in Minneapolis, Meaghan has been using the Guthrie-provided laptop. She can’t install Dropbox on it, sadly, but can still access and upload files through a web browser, which is not nearly as convenient, but still a great option to have when you’re using somebody else’s computer that’s locked down.

My favorite story comes from the New York rehearsal process of R&J: we made a change to the script, and some hours or days later, I went to add the new text to our Word file of the script. When I got to the appropriate page there was a happy purple bubble pointing to the already changed text telling me that Meaghan had made such-and-such an edit on such-and-such a date. After last year’s extensive re-writes, which Nick and I took turns updating by emailing the file back and forth to each other (and having to be very meticulous about who had the absolute most current file), I was actually stumped for a moment at how this had happened. But it’s so simple. There is really only one copy of every file, so there’s virtually never an issue of “my copy”/”her copy.” We’ve been working this way for three months now, and I can’t imagine how stages were ever managed before this!

So I just want to say to any stage management team: Dropbox. Do it. It will change your life. In the good way!


Let Me Tell Ye: Words No One is Allowed To Say For Two Days

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:17 pm

Let me tell ye. I have been working for ten days straight. I am going to burn the metaphorical yule log for two days, and I hope I do not hear the following words for at least 48 hours:

1. groceries
2. shoes
3. handcuffs
4. bowler [hat]

That is pretty much my week-and-a-half summed up in four words. None of which has particularly much to do with the fact that today we completed our second full run of the show, and it’s falling-down funny (I keep waiting for something to make Ian actually fall on the floor — he’s come almost all the way out of the chair a couple times, but we’re not quite there yet).

But such is life that the things that take up most of my time are the little details that go on in the background, and if I’m lucky, most people on the production never know or need to worry about any of the convoluted process by which they’re made possible.

Yesterday, after I slapped a metal door frame a little too hard in response to #1, Meaghan was like, “can I help?” to which I responded, “there is nothing that can be done for this, it can only be solved by my death.” There is no way I know of to avoid these kind of situations short of not becoming a stage manager. Run away! Hit the back button on your browser while you still can! And if it’s too late to save yourself, well, take comfort in knowing that everyone is going through it.

And with that, I wish all you dear readers a safe and happy holiday. And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then even better — you probably got a couple days off for free just to chill. Which, after a video chat and remote present-opening with the fam in the morning, is what I intend to spend it doing!

And no, I don’t have the same Christmas tree on my desk as I did last year. That’s a recycled picture, cause I never got around to taking a shot of the cute ornament my mom sent me. It’s made all of glass, with a palm tree and flamingo inside a glass ball with sand and a couple shells loose at the bottom. It’s so that we think warm thoughts in rehearsal. It seems to be working.


December 16, 2010

Comedy of Errors: Staging Rehearsals

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:15 pm

At the end of each rehearsal we have a little pow-wow lasting about a half hour to 45 minutes (if we’re lucky!) with the rather many people who are in the room, behind the tables each day.

There’s me and Meaghan, Ian our director, our two Jesse’s, both assistant-directorial types, who, in the style of our show, we have taken to referring to as Jesse of New York and Jesse of Los Angeles (and our two Elizabeths as Elizabeth of New York and Elizabeth of Minneapolis). Jesse of New York is our Staff Director, who maintains the show on the road, and Jesse of Los Angeles a former company member and budding director. Andrew Wade, our voice and text consultant, is also there, as well as Allie, the Guthrie’s Literary Intern, who assists our dramaturg and is in the room with us almost all the time.

At this meeting we talk about how the day went, and what we hope to accomplish the following day. We make the next day’s rehearsal schedule, including any costume and wig fittings that have been requested, and go down our respective lists of notes for the report and anything else we need to bring up with each other. Then I send the report, Meaghan and I publish and print our respective schedules (she handles the Guthrie format for the stage door), and we go home.

Tonight after this meeting, as Meaghan and I were walking out the door, Ian mentioned that there was one more thing he had been meaning to discuss with me, namely, “What has happened to your blog?”

Indeed, I haven’t been blogging nearly enough in proportion to the exciting things I should be talking about. Apparently when Ian recently spoke to a class of the Guthrie’s BFA students, it was mentioned by a student as a good source of information about the tour, lending further embarrassment to my lack of posting. The truth is I’ve been gathering material for an epic post about our rehearsal process, and then, well, we had a day off and I got lazy.

So without further ado, here’s what’s been going on, up to Day 9 of rehearsal (you can already read about Day 1.)

The big news is that by tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, we should have staged the play, maybe even run it. This play is a very different experience for me in my time with the company, because it’s short and has relatively few scenes (only 11). It’s estimated to be about 90 minutes with no intermission, so the rehearsal process has felt much more productive because we can focus in on things more at length without worrying about staging three hours’ worth of text. We only do about two scenes a day, which on paper looks slow, but without the pressure of having to cover 30 scenes, we’re able to spend much more time refining what we work on, taking chances, and changing our minds.

The Set

The biggest boost to our productivity is that we have most of our set in the rehearsal room. And now I have pictures.

The basic element of the set is three sets of full-stage silk curtains which are suspended across the stage at varying heights between two towers. Black aircraft cable is strung between the towers and the curtains ride on them basically in the manner of a shower curtain. The engineering of this has been a huge ordeal for months — we can’t assume a theatre has a fly system, so the curtains must be supported from the ground, but then how do you counterweight a 30-foot-long expanse of cable with huge curtains hanging from it, without the towers being pulled over?

The answer: water. We thought we’d be carrying literally tons of counterweights on the truck, much to everyone’s dismay. What we ended up with is six large Pelican cases, which are watertight. When filled with water they weigh about 200 pounds each, and have wheels and handles for easy movement. The truss attached to the offstage side of the towers gets progressively longer the taller the tower is, allowing that 200lb box at the end to balance the load. I’m really glad it’s not my job to figure that kind of stuff out (I wanted to be a director, I thought my career would involve no math), but it works.

This view is offstage looking upstage-right. Because our rehearsal room is not as wide as the stage, the third tower is constructed a little differently. That piece joining the 2nd and 3rd towers is actually the extension of the 3rd tower’s leg that will run straight offstage when there’s more room. As you can see, there’s not a lot of offstage space here, but our cast has very quickly gotten adept at stepping between the bars and under the cables without jostling anything, which bodes very well for backstage life in tech and on the road.

Trying to stage this show without the curtains would have been nearly impossible, so I’m very grateful (as I’m sure the actors and the creative team are also) both to the money people and the technical people who have made it possible for us to have our actual set to play with for our entire rehearsal process. During the final week in the studio, once the scenic load-in begins, obviously the set has to go upstairs, but by then we’ll have had plenty of time to learn how it will be used and can mark it.

The other element we have in the room is the metal contraption shown upstage in the first photo, which in great understatement, is called simply “the ladder.” The platform is eight-and-a-half feet high (incidentally the exact same height as the balcony in R&J, which gives us a handy point of reference for how tall it will feel on stage), made of steel and wood, on locking castors. Much like our platform in R&J, named Fred, the unit has so much inertia and the castors are so solid, that it never needs to be braked, which is a great advantage, though it’s nice to have the option. The platform at the top is large enough for some furniture, and the inner triangle underneath provides an interesting space to duck in and out of. The height of the railings means it can only travel under the yellow curtain, but we haven’t felt the need to cut it down. It’s actually really cool how it can hide behind the yellow or white curtains for different effects. It was very imposing on the first day it arrived, but we have found it to be effective in many scenes, and the actors took to it right away and began experimenting with ways to use it. From a technical perspective, my experience has been that it’s a solid and well-built piece of work, constructed right here by the Guthrie’s prop shop.

So so far, all of our potentially problematic scenery is working great, and here we are on Day 9 using all of it. The only other scenic elements are an upstage wall with double doors at the center, and a painted deck with an apron extension, made to look like a tile floor. As far as props we also have three luggage trunks of varying sizes (built from scratch to be stood on, opened, and rolled by picking up from either end, so they’re very versatile), and a number of chairs, tables and hand props that appear in the room as we find the need to request them. We’ve been very well-supported on this show, and it’s been enormously helpful, since so much of the discovery of the staging and the comedy is born out of interacting with the set and the props. We even have a dimmable lighting instrument in the room to work on a particular scene that heavily relies on shadows made behind the curtains. Consider me a happy stage manager.

Otherwise

As far as everything else going on, we’re done with costume fittings until tech. We have a few wig fittings here and there, and are adding a beard for Ageon, which he just had a consultation for the other day. Nothing gives me stress more than trying to work fittings into a rehearsal schedule, so despite the fact that I wanted to kill myself in New York when trying to schedule fittings for two shows around a rehearsal schedule, I’m glad it’s been very low-key here.

The shoes went to be rubbered today. We don’t have a wardrobe person in Minneapolis, so this has become a stage management problem, which earned a name. Scenic people like to name particularly problematic pieces of scenery (R&J has Fred the platform, and Betsy (a wall), and then there’s Wall 3B, which we call by its proper name, but affixed a photo of fossilized dinosaur dung to, to make our feelings about it known). Anyway, much like this, when a project starts to become disproportionately difficult, I give it an official name. This one has been known as Project Rubber. I received word this morning: “Project: Rubber: Part One: The Reckoning (aka There but for the Grace of God) is complete.” So that’s off my plate.

We’ve rescheduled our weekly grocery runs around our somewhat brutal Christmas schedule. This is always an issue, because we rearrange the days off to give us both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, followed by New Year’s Day. That’s great, but it means we work ten days straight. Also our only days off for two weeks are national holidays, and no one wants to go grocery shopping (or drive us to the grocery store!) on those days, so we have to work the grocery runs into our rehearsal days. This year it’s infinitely easier because we’re doing 6-hour days, starting at 9:30 (to the chagrin of some), so we’re done for the day at 3:30 with time for groceries remaining. But it’s something I always have to work out with the Associate Company Manager, and I’m glad it’s out of the way and less of a pain for all involved than it usually is.

Straight 6’s

I just wanna talk about straight 6’s. For those not down with the lingo, a “straight 6” is a kind of rehearsal day allowed by a vote of a 3/4 majority of an Equity cast wherein you’re called for six hours, and instead of a real lunch break you make one of your breaks 20 minutes. And then you’re done. Unless you’re really far from food and/or have no fridge or microwave available, it’s a pretty awesome way to work. Usually the resistance comes more from directors, who do lose an hour or more of each rehearsal day by doing it that way, depending on the contract. But especially in a case like this where we’re rehearsing a comedy that requires the actors to be inventive and spontaneous, sometimes you get more work out of people in 6 good hours than in keeping them around the building for a 9 or 10-hour day.

A lot of it is just psychological. Here in the dead of winter where it’s dark before 5:00, it feels really good to be done for the day at 3:30. Not to mention that every day kind of feels like a day off in a way, because there’s still so many hours left to do shopping, watch TV or be productive in other ways. I have only very rarely gotten to do shows where the straight 6 was the status quo, and I’m totally in love. I was telling Meaghan the other day, I’ve done about 60 shows, and I think this is the 2nd or 3rd that has done so. It’s not appropriate in many cases (musicals especially), but when it is, it’s wonderful.

In fact, last year after the first preview of R&J at the Guthrie, I was having a drink with Ian when he first started trying to sell me on the 2010-2011 tour. All I remember about what he said was, “and when we’re doing Comedy at the Guthrie I want to do straight sixes.” I don’t think I heard anything after that, because I was penciling in “2010-2011 Acting Company Tour” from September 2010 to April 2011 in my mental calendar. Honestly, that was a huge mark in favor of doing the tour this year, and it has been everything I dreamed it would be. What should be the most stressful month of this job has been really nice — partially because things are truly running more smoothly than they ever have — but in large part because I don’t feel like I spend every useful hour of my day locked up in rehearsal.

I think it’s really important as a stage manager to stay attuned to your own sanity. I have learned that there are certain things that seem minor but greatly contribute to my sanity. The length of my commute is one. Length of the rehearsal day is another — they’re kind of related, they both ultimately determine how much free time I have. And I have learned in touring that the added expense of having my own hotel room is more than made up for in the reduction of stress it provides. These are just things to consider when weighing the pros and cons of a job, and not to be underestimated.

In summary

That’s what’s been going on this week. I think I’ve covered enough that I can show my face in rehearsal tomorrow morning. Next week we start fight rehearsals — this show isn’t as traditionally fight-heavy as R&J but our good friend Felix Ivanoff will be back to lend his insight to the various beatings and physical comedy throughout the play, which I’m sure will be lots of fun.

And as always happens, Christmas will distract us and then all of a sudden OMG we’re loading in, we’re doing designer run-throughs, and the next thing we know we’re on stage. But things seem to be on track and I’m excited to get to the next stage of the process. I can see a clear path ahead to bring this thing upstairs and show it to many thousands of people, and then for our truck and our rockstar buses to show up in the parking lot and take us to Brainerd and onward.


December 8, 2010

First Rehearsal, Minneapolis

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:10 am

Today we began rehearsal for The Comedy of Errors, the second of the shows we’ll be touring with this year. After our successful remount and fall tour of last year’s Romeo and Juliet, we’re starting from scratch with a new and very different production.

As is the custom in recent years, it’s co-produced with the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis, who invite us to use their amazing facility and staff to rehearse and premiere one of our shows.

I got into town on Sunday, and yesterday Meaghan and I spent the day at the theatre, meeting with people and setting up our rehearsal room.

In the lobby I got my first look at our new posters. The Guthrie did their own logo for R&J last year, and now we have a Comedy logo to match!

This morning we had the great pleasure of having our truck show up bright and early to unload part of the Comedy set, which consists of a series of curtains suspended by towers at varying depths across the stage. Because of the very specific design of the curtains and the intricate uses they’re expected to have, we have taken the rather ambitious step of having the actual scenery in our rehearsal room for almost the entire process (from day 1 until the day they’re needed to go upstairs to the stage). The arrival of the truck also allows us to have some of our road boxes in the building, namely the much-appreciated stage management workbox, and some other boxes which contain useful items, and things of a fragile nature that would not benefit from spending a month in a frozen trailer parked in a field in St. Paul (such as wigs).

The Guthrie crew set up the towers and curtains this morning, under the direction of our TD and set designer, who are also in for a few days to oversee the beginning of the process.

At noon-ish, Meaghan and I went up to one of the classrooms in the building, where we conducted the Equity meeting, to allow the crew time to finish in our rehearsal room. It was a casual and fun-filled meeting (it’s quite easy when the whole company has already been working together for months), the highlight of which was one of our actors who had clipped an article from the Equity newsletter by union president Nick Wyman, and read aloud this very funny and accurate piece about what usually happens when it comes time to elect a deputy, and encouraging members not to dread this duty.

With the meeting done, we returned downstairs to our rehearsal room for the meet & greet, which at the Guthrie is a big production involving the whole community of staff, not just those involved in a specific production. Artistic director Joe Dowling introduced Acting Company artistic director Margot Harley, and both spoke about the continuing collaboration between the two companies. Our director, Ian Belknap was introduced, and he spoke a bit about the play and his ideas for it, before introducing brief design presentations from scenery and costumes. It was really cool that in addition to the set model, the gathered audience was actually sitting within most of the actual set in 1:1 scale. The cast and the rest of the creative team were introduced, and then there was some time for mingling, before we were left to begin rehearsal.

It was a good day of table work. I find it really interesting to start a process with a bunch of people who pretty much all know each other intimately already. The whole cast, stage management team, and our staff repertory director have been through a 4-week rehearsal process together, followed by weeks of touring, so it’s already very much a family. Ian hasn’t been our director, but as associate artistic director of the company, he’s been very much a part of our lives throughout the process, so there’s not that usual weirdness of everybody feeling out the director’s personality. The majority of us have worked at the Guthrie before, so there’s a familiarity with many of our “new” collaborators already. I definitely feel the difference that it makes in the early hours of rehearsal when everyone already feels safe and has nothing to prove in the rehearsal room.

Most of our costume fittings were done in New York during the R&J rehearsal process, and tomorrow and Thursday we’ll finish them up. It was a huge pain trying to get everyone into the shop outside of R&J rehearsal time, but the payoff is that we don’t have to deal with it now. We have some wig fittings later this week, and then hopefully that should pretty much be it.

All-in-all it was a very smooth first day. It was a lot of fun to see everybody at the Guthrie. It definitely feels like coming home. We don’t have a stage management intern to guide us through the Guthrie system this year, but between Meaghan’s experience spending a full year as intern and ASM (including the initial Acting Company/Guthrie collaboration on Henry V), and my two previous shows as PSM, we have pretty much learned all the procedures and people that need to be known to stage manage here.

As much as I generally find it frustrating to go back into rehearsal when we’ve already rehearsed, teched, opened and toured a show, I’m actually looking forward to this process. So many of my collaborators are old friends by this point that I’m just excited to work on it. Also, this is the first comedy I’ve done with the company, and it’s short, so that’s a nice change from the 3-hour tragedies and histories we’ve done before!

I think Comedy and R&J are such polar opposites that this tour will be incredibly fun to perform in rep. One show will be easy to load in, funny, short, but probably more hectic and stressful to run. The other will be hard to load in, emotionally intense, long, but more easy and slow-paced to run. There will be things to look forward to every time we switch shows, and I think that will keep us always looking forward to whichever one we’re doing.

And I’m once again staying in what I have come to call my “winter apartment,” which I will have lived in for six months of my life by the time we leave for the road. Sometimes I think a change of scenery might be interesting, but I had loads of fun getting dropped off at the garage door with my suitcase and my groceries, and just busting in and unpacking everything in about 10 minutes. Everything already has its place, its shelf, its drawer, which outlet it gets plugged into, as comfortably as if I’ve lived here all my life. Almost every time I come home to my NY apartment (which I moved into in 2006) I fumble around for the lightswitch on the wrong wall. So I feel at least as comfortable here. It’s nice to have some consistency in my rather inconsistent domestic life.

I think I’ve said before that I believe that when you tour a certain part of your brain gets set aside solely for remembering your hotel room number and which way to turn when you get out of the elevator. Usually, for me at least, this works surprisingly well, even when you have to memorize a new 3- or 4-digit number every day or two. I think it’s somewhat related to keeping a mental picture of what the hallway looks like and that somehow helps you to remember the room number. Very seldom do I experience something that happened to me in Tucson a few weeks ago, where I went to the front desk for something, and they said, “what’s your room number?” and I went, “…uhhhhh….” (what city are we in? Tucson. 8th floor, turn left, turn left, turn right, turn left…802!). So being in an apartment that’s familiar for two straight months might as well be like owning a house.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention something about the weather. I was afraid that coming from California and Arizona, this would just be torture. The temperature has been in the teens since we got here, but so far it doesn’t bother me. I think it’s some kind of sense memory, that when I see these streets and buildings, my body just expects to be frozen solid, and 15 degrees feels warm, because it is, relatively speaking. I love this city, and I swear some day I will see it not covered in a sheet of snow and ice, and it will be awesome.

The underside of the Endless Bridge, as seen from the rear of the lobby. I love the Endless Bridge. It’s just ridiculous. It’s one of the longest cantilevered structures in the world (this photo actually makes it look much shorter than it is), and it doesn’t really have a purpose other than to be cool. Working here for the first time was a big culture shock in terms of theatre architecture. Broadway houses are so much about efficient use of space and maximizing seating capacity, that they don’t even allow room for things like an elevator, or adequate restrooms. And then there’s the Guthrie, that has a 178-foot-long, 30-foot-wide, two-storey-high bridge to nowhere, just because. It definitely makes you feel like you’re working someplace special, and by extension, your work must be important because this impossibly flamboyant building exists just to house it. Working here is kind of intoxicating. Everything is a heightened experience because the building itself is so weird and intriguing. You just go to a meeting and you’re like, “Why does this room have diagonal yellow windows?!?” It makes working anyplace else seem incredibly dreary.


November 30, 2010

Back to Work

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:49 pm

Yeah, I totally dropped off the face of the earth during our hiatus. I haven’t even done anything I normally look forward to doing for fun. I haven’t continued learning Java, worked on my database, played online games, or much of anything else. I’ve watched some movies and TV and listened to music while poking around on the internet, and went to Jersey to offer my opinion about a house a friend of mine is planning to buy, but the time went by much faster than I expected, and now it’s time to get back to work. I am actually on the clock now, after all — on LORT B scale (because I’m technically working at the Guthrie), as our general manager reminded me today — which resulted in me doing a happy dance, because I was thinking of this as part of my standard “in town” salary, which is much lower.

Today I came into the office for an hour-long meeting with our director, Ian, mostly to sketch out the schedule for the rehearsal process and touch base about a couple other things, such as how we’ll set up the rehearsal room. It was a good meeting, looks like things are under control. This is the third year we’re working on essentially the exact same schedule at the Guthrie, so all the weirdness that comes from rehearsing over Christmas and teching the week after New Year’s is old hat now. We have a very clear pattern to follow and so far we don’t seem to be straying too far from that.

Last week (or maybe the week before?) I got the draft of the script that we’ll start rehearsal with, set it all up with act-scene-page numbers and hard page breaks, and submitted it to the dramaturg at the Guthrie, who will see that it gets printed and bound for us before we arrive. That’s pretty much the extent of work I’ve been doing on the show.

This week I’ll be making an actor-scene breakdown, getting the database in shape for the new show, updating the contact sheet as appropriate, and creating a calendar to send to the cast and crew, incorporating what Ian and I discussed today.

My contract (as this is actually considered a separate production from the first leg of the tour) appears to have disappeared into the ether of the US Postal Service, so I’m still at the office, hanging out while a new one is printed. At least I can sign it here and not have to mail it back!

While I’m not thrilled about subjecting myself to the Minneapolis winter, it’s been very warm in New York — I haven’t put on a winter coat yet — and at this point I think I deserve to be cold. It should be a fun process and going back to the Guthrie now feels like going home. Actually I’m once again in the same apartment I’ve had all along, which does literally feel like home. Living there for two consecutive months a year is more than I can say about my actual apartment in New York, and naturally, not being in New York, it’s nicer than any apartment I could ever hope to possess myself. I wonder who will be below me this year to hear my chair scraping on their ceiling. And I wonder if they’ll nag me about it as much as Nick. Probably not, as it won’t be Meaghan, since she lives in St. Paul, and there’s no one else whose job description is “give Karen shit,” unless it was Daniel, but I think he’ll be in a hotel. So it will probably go unremarked, which will make me a little sad.

I kind of needed this day to get my head back in the game. The hiatus is so long (3 weeks including my pre-pro week, which thankfully they didn’t ask me to spend full-time in the office), that it feels like the show has closed. It’s going to be very weird to jump back into production with the same group, even though we’ll be working on a new show for the first 7 weeks or so. So seeing the people in the office has made it more real that this is actually happening.

Stay tuned, I leave for Minneapolis on Sunday!


November 13, 2010

100

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:55 pm

Tonight is our 100th performance of Romeo and Juliet. We did 3 previews and 77 regular performances of the tour last year, and this will be our 20th performance of this tour.

In addition to me, the others celebrating their 100th performance are:
Ray Chapman (Friar Laurence)
Jason McDowell-Green (Montague)
Jamie Smithson (Paris)
Elizabeth Stahlmann (Nurse)

I was planning to do a little something to make some acknowledgement of it, but Ray was in my office a few days ago asking me to look up some other stat from last year, when he said, “We’re coming up on 100 performances, aren’t we?” I said, “yes, we’re very close,” but up till that point I hadn’t actually bothered to figure out which performance it would be. Fittingly, it’s a Saturday night. Upon hearing this, word spread through the company and everyone is quite excited. I have heard there are plans to go out and celebrate after the show. Not that we need an excuse to go out after a show.

The joke among the crew is that after 100 performances of the balcony scene I will hit Shakespeare overflow and just start spitting out cues one after the other:
“Electrics 50, go. Electrics 51, go. Electrics 53, go. Sound 107, go. Electrics 54 and Sound 110, go, Electrics 56, go…”
And Meaghan will be running around backstage trying to figure out how to turn me off.

It’s actually been kind of nice to be with a show for so long. I’ve also done three other shows in between the two tours, which is good because I think I’d probably have gone insane by now if I didn’t have a few musicals with 600 cues thrown in to make things interesting.

I remember being in tech for Into the Woods and saying to the crew, “If in October I’m bitching about how easy my show is to call, I want you to slap me and remind me how stressed I am right now!” So it’s nice to take it easy again, and with a show that I already knew how to call.

There’s still plenty that I’m working on, though, mostly related to learning to anticipate the moves of the new actors. Meaghan is also learning the show, so that keeps me honest and makes me have to articulate my choices. There was one sound cue where I said, “Honestly, I’m calling it where Sonny used to pick up the basket,” which of course is totally not helpful to anyone but me, and while that was the easiest way for me to feel it out, that’s not why I continued to call it there. I continued to call it that way because it was still working, so I left it at that. Over the few days after that conversation with Meaghan, I continued calling it where Sonny used to pick up the basket, but watched and listened for what was really happening that made that cue work, and decided that it works because it happens at the same time the Friar speaks. I still use “where Sonny used to pick up the basket” as my way of anticipating when the Friar speaks, but now I’m more aware of what else is happening. Meaghan will have to develop her own method, which might be something like “when Alejandro reaches for his jacket,” but at least she has a more concrete goal to achieve.

For most of us, this will be the most performances of a single show we’ve done. I’ve done more performances of Phantom, but when last I checked I think I’ve only called it about 80 times. So I’m pretty happy. I’m also glad it comes so close to the end of the fall leg of the tour. The achievement kind of caps off this part of the tour and gets us ready to tackle something new in a few weeks, when we begin rehearsing The Comedy of Errors.


October 19, 2010

Tech Photos!

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:39 am

We’re five hours into tech. Here are some dinnertime pics!

Meaghan bought an awesome clipboard when we started rehearsal. It has a compartment inside, and a small pencil compartment at the bottom. I was kind of lusting for one in rehearsal, now it looks even more awesome in tech.

There’s a long stairway from the dressing rooms down to stage left, overlooking the prop tables.

Stage left. Props on the left, stage management road box on the right, sound console in the rear.

The backstage headset station. Meaghan’s beltpack, containing everything you could possibly need: leatherman, Maglite, pencil, chapstick, cell phone, Tootsie Pop.


October 16, 2010

On the Cusp of Tech

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:54 pm

We finished our three weeks in the rehearsal studio today. I don’t think I got a break all day from 9AM to 8PM, except about 15 minutes to scarf down a slice of pizza at around 4:30 while Meaghan minded rehearsal. We rehearsed lots of scenes, ran Act II, loaded out all our props, furniture and road boxes from the studio, rehearsed some more scenes, and then restored the rehearsal room to its natural condition.

As soon as we had the studio looking clean and orderly, with all the chairs and tables stacked exactly as they were when we found them three weeks ago, Meaghan and I lugged the last remains of our rehearsal supplies down to the theatre (the Schimmel Center at Pace University) to check out the set.

We’re not planning to be back until the morning of tech on Tuesday, so we wanted to stop in and make sure everything looks good. The theatre is really nice. It’s much wider and less deep than I pictured, but it seems very intimate. It reminds me of some of the venues we played in the early days of the tour last year. The deck is of a nice size, with sufficient wingspace on both sides, a large-ish shop upstage and enough room for an onstage crossover. The backstage area reminds me a lot of our venue in Philly where we closed the show last year.

I had been warned that the dressing rooms were up a long flight of stairs, but what we found up there was not at all the dark and dirty dressing rooms I pictured from my experience of narrow backstage metal staircases. The staircase, though very long and somewhat narrow, is sturdy and safe, and leads to the cheeriest backstage area I think I’ve ever seen. The color scheme and lighting create a warm and cozy (cozy as in comfortable, not cozy as a euphemism for too small) atmosphere. The green room is off the hook. Everything is red and gold — there’s an entire wall covered in gold silk. It looks like it should be Queen Victoria’s sitting room or something. I’ll have to get a picture sometime this week.

Feeling very good about the accommodations, we returned to the stage to scope out the set. If we encountered this house on the road, it would be a very good day, so it’s nice that we get to spend a week here. The set looks pretty much as it always has — it was initially a little disorienting when we first saw it from the back of the house because it’s been cut down a little, I think by 2 feet. I did my usual inspection, walking up the staircase shaking everything looking for loose bolts. It feels like we’ve never left. I feel very confident because we’ve had most of last year’s crew involved in some part of this process, so there’s a clear handing off of experience with the show to our new crewmembers.

Tuesday we’ll start tech. The cast has been running the show for about a week and a half, so they are very accustomed to the sequence of the show. We’ve had all the show props and the actual prop tables in the rehearsal studio, so I think they will adjust quickly to the stage. Navigating the stairs, and adding the element of costume and wigs will be the biggest adjustments for them. Tech-wise, the show already exists, it will just be a matter of seeing if everything looks and sounds the way it did before, and if we still like the way that was. Including rehearsals, I’ve probably called this show about 90 times in the past year. I’ve never teched a show that I already knew so well. I’m prepared that problems may crop up, or there may be things we’re asked to change, but it’s nice to have a very solid framework to follow, and to only need to make changes to that, rather than starting from scratch, as one normally does in tech. I’ve also gone through three weeks of rehearsal knowing what my cues are, and have watched this cast with that in mind.

We’re very close to our departure. Just three days of tech, culminating on the third day with an invited dress rehearsal, then three performances, and the next morning (Monday) we get on the plane to California. This weekend is our last time off before our first day off on tour, on Halloween in Phoenix, AZ. Crazy! I need to pack!

I’ve got a lot of work to do this weekend, mostly with the script. We’ve been making changes to the text up till today (and might make more), so I didn’t want to commit to a script until today’s rehearsal was done. I’m going to send the revisions to the production team so they can show up on Tuesday with all the changes, and then re-do my calling script with the current text. I’m going to start with last year’s calling script and just edit the text, as that seems easier than adding hundreds of cues into the new script (as each cue involves messing with margins, borders, underlining, colors, etc.) Check out the scripts page to see what it looks like. You can even download last year’s script from that page.

It’s still tech, but I am determined to have fun.

And as we depart New 42nd Street Studios, I want to share my favorite bit of signage:
DO NOT DISMANTLE THE PIANO.
You know for every rule like this, there’s a good story.


October 10, 2010

A Day Off

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:17 am

Day off #2 of the Romeo and Juliet remount.

We’ve now been working for two weeks, have staged the play and run it successfully, and continued tightening choreography, fights, vocal work and scene work.

Today I slept past 8AM. I didn’t need to go much further than that, because I went to bed at like 9:00PM, trying to finish a podcast (Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History,” which I’ve had in my podcast list forever, but have just recently actually started listening to, and it’s EPIC!) Anyway, when I ceased to be able to piece together Mr. Carlin’s words into coherent sentences explaining the fall of the Roman republic, I turned it off and went to sleep.

I wanted to get a good night’s sleep, but also to be able to get up early enough to be productive in the morning, because I do have something to do today which threw a wrench in my plans to sit in my apartment in my pajamas all day playing on the internet, before ordering Dominos for dinner and watching football. As I may have mentioned, my good friend Josh is the ASM for the current Angels in America revival Off-Broadway. I did some work with him on their stage management database over the summer, with the reward of getting to see the show. Well the show is impossible to get tickets for, so there were no comps to be had, and even the staff-rate tickets are hard to come by. But having never seen the show on stage before, I was pretty determined to see the two parts in order, and he managed to snag me a staff ticket to Millenium Approaches on my day off a few weeks ago, and just yesterday came through with one for Perestroika for today. So while the day off is sacred time, I do consider myself very lucky to be able to see both parts of this great production, and at an affordable price no less. How many times in one lifetime can one say they “never got around to seeing” Angels in America? I felt bad enough about it the first time. Buying tickets to multi-part plays can be daunting and discouraging (and expensive), but I really need to get better at it. I’m glad (with Josh’s help) I pushed to try to see this one properly. The first part was fantastic, so I can’t wait to see the rest! And if you really want to see it, I hear the cancellation line has a pretty good rate of success.

Otherwise today, I intend to blog (obviously succeeding so far), and will try to meet up with Nick over iChat to help him out with his wedding database woes, which I have been ignoring the pleas of in my inbox. Well not ignoring, I’ve actually been checking in on it several times a day, polling my brain activity, and deciding that it’s of insufficient power to remotely troubleshoot someone else’s database at that moment. As he correctly surmised in his post, it needed to wait for a day off.

Otherwise, I need to do laundry. Maybe I could start packing a bit. I kind of started packing when I got home in August, but obviously some things have needed to be removed since. There comes a week when the clothes that come out of the laundry don’t go back in the closet, but go into the suitcase, or neatly laid out near it, and I spend the rest of the time wearing clothes that will not go on tour. I think that’s probably next week, though. And since it will be late October in New York, and the first leg of the tour is all in California and Arizona, I actually think the clothes I wear for tech week would not be the same ones I’d need on tour anyway. I haven’t put any real thought into which clothes I’m bringing, but the nice thing is that next week we actually get two days off in a row, because of the transition from the Sunday day off to Monday off. So hopefully I’ll have ample time to prepare before the excitement of tech. We leave the day after our final show here, so there’s no stopping once we start tech. Thankfully our company manager took pity on us and got us an afternoon flight!

In the meantime, we still have two weeks left in New York: one in the rehearsal hall, and one at the theatre at Pace University. The first leg unfortunately did not get filled up with as many venues as initially hoped, so we have a three-week layoff around Thanksgiving, and will be back at home probably before we know it.


October 8, 2010

Today in Pictures

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:24 pm

This morning we did our first full run-through of the show. It’s only been six-and-a-half days since we started staging the play. It went very well. Some fun stuff has been happening around that.

This event is quickly making the rounds on everyone’s Facebook pages.

Last week when we were staging, Alejandro (Romeo) was looking for a place to sulk to get into the proper frame of mind for his first entrance (where he’s been hiding in the woods pining for the fair Rosaline). He chose one of our prop boxes, which currently sits empty in the back of the room. It soon became his favorite spot to recline during rehearsal. Today Jamie (Paris) and Ben (Tybalt) demonstrated this rehearsal room oddity for the camera.

It’s pretty common for people to develop “their” place in the rehearsal room or offstage in the theatre — usually a favorite chair or corner. Clearly this is his. So Meaghan made it official by labeling the box.

And finally, a shot of our bed / tomb, which is named Fred. Sometimes really difficult pieces of scenery attract so much discussion that somebody finally decides they need a name. Well Fred had a name months before rehearsal started last year, long before he was ever built. And he has been known as Fred to everyone who has ever worked on the production — directors, designers, cast, crew, staff and local stagehands around the country.

The real Fred is with us in the rehearsal hall this year, which is a great luxury. He also has all his blankets, pillows and padding. During today’s run, his bedding got a little disheveled in the course of all the dying and such, revealing the lovely period padding underneath. You don’t think we’d have Juliet lying on that thing motionless for a half hour with anything less, do you?

And finally, he’s a slightly weird panorama of our rehearsal room, taken with the iPhone app 360 Panorama. The concept is cool: you slowly turn your phone and it stitches the image together in real time. It works about… this well:

I have better luck getting decent panoramas with Pano, though it’s not really designed to take full 360-degree images.

That’s the stage management desk on the right, and the director’s desk on the left. The director and myself sit at the inside places closest to center, with our respective assistants on the outside. It’s also a good idea to have the stage management desk on the side by the door, because it conveniently positions the ASM in the best spot to discretely enter and leave the room.


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