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October 6, 2010

As Far as I’m Concerned, 13 is a Lucky Number

I call this: On the Road Again,summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:40 pm

Today I received an email with a few photos from the production of Music Man I did this summer. I viewed them on my phone while sitting at lunch with my cast and colleagues. This one in particular caught my attention:

This was my cast. Sixty people. At the time, it was simply a large-ish cast, but with the distance of several months — and several shows — since then, I had forgotten just what it’s like to do such a big show.

Managing 13 actors and 5 crew is nothing, I don’t care how far we’re going or how many different plays we’re performing!


October 5, 2010

Big Pieces of Show

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:33 pm

Today was an unexpectedly exciting day.

First of all we began at the crack of 10AM, staging the tomb scene. Which is like, a total downer — not to mention a 13-person traffic nightmare. It’s not really something you want to jump right into, but we were working around fittings so we had to. But as they have all along, our cast picked up their blocking and executed it expertly right away, and in less than two hours we had it all done and run a couple times.

We finished up another rather complicated group scene that we ran out of time on yesterday, and staged a quick easy one, and then spent the second half of our day reviewing everything we had.

We have all but three scenes of our first act staged (and the ones remaining are short and pretty simple). We ran the act, skipping over what was missing. Aside from the jumps, we didn’t stop much, so it felt more like a run than a work-through. We didn’t stage the show in any semblance of order, so this was the first time for everyone to feel the flow of the show. I think it was encouraging for everyone to see just how much we’ve accomplished, and how solid our foundation is with the show already. We’ve been in rehearsal for 8 days, but we didn’t start staging until the end of day 4, so it’s really amazing how much we’ve done.

Our second act is where most of the work remains. We have the first scene, one scene in the middle (Act 3 Sc. 5, which is a pretty serious one), and the final scene in the tomb. However, those three scenes are the most complicated, so even running those felt like a great accomplishment.

This morning before our crack of 10AM rehearsal, Meaghan and I began fully setting up the prop tables at the crack of 9AM. One awesome thing about our rehearsal situation is that we have all the prop road boxes in our room, which includes the folding tables that travel with the show and already have the tape marks laid out to divide up and label the prop tables. Meaghan is new to the show, and I have only a passing acquaintance with how things went backstage, so it was a good opportunity for us to bumble around figuring out exactly where everything goes. We set up the tables on the appropriate sides of the stage and populated them. It’s great that we have this opportunity to get the actors accustomed to which tables to go to for each prop before they ever enter the theatre — and basically all the work was done for us.

The room feels much more alive to me with the prop tables out. I think it’s because it very much resembles a stage. The set is just tape on the floor, but the prop tables are all in the right spot, and I can pretty easily imagine a set and a theatre surrounding us, and it feels like an old friend.

It’s very comforting to return to a production I remember fondly. One of the best things from a professional perspective, is that I’m finding I don’t have my head buried in the book all the time. When I want to make sure the actors are speaking and moving correctly, for most scenes I can do it by looking up at the stage, instead of down at the book, and that allows me to be more aware of everything that’s happening. I also don’t have to look up the answers to a lot of questions, or look at the script when someone calls “line” (which has caused me to step on Meaghan a couple times, because my mouth says the line before my brain says, “you’re not on book”!)

Tomorrow we stage a good deal of the remaining scenes, and it looks to me like we’ll finish staging as hoped on Thursday. That will give us two days to review so we have something nice to show Penny (our director) when she arrives on Monday.


September 30, 2010

Early Rehearsals

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:35 pm

Today was our fourth day of rehearsal remounting the Acting Company tour of Romeo and Juliet. Our process has begun somewhat unconventionally because our director, Penny Metropulos, is finishing up a show in Oregon and won’t be joining us until about halfway through rehearsals. But because this is a remount, Corey (our staff director from last year) and I can get our new cast up to speed on the basic structure of the show before she arrives. We also have four returning cast members who can help us, two former cast members who will help teach choreography and fights, and our original fight director, the amazing Felix Ivanoff (for a little more on Felix, see Nick’s post from last year — and we’re not crazy, he’s changed the spelling of his name since then).

We have one new major addition leading our cast through the first couple weeks: Liz Smith is our voice and text coach, and she is really great. She’s one of the most respected people in her field, but also has been working with the Acting Company since its inception nearly 40 years ago, because she was running the voice program at Juilliard when the company was founded. Her job is to help the actors in their interpretation of the script, both in technical matters like making sure they pronounce things correctly and place emphasis on the right syllables, but also in their understanding of the meaning of the text, and how an analysis of the words Shakespeare chooses can help to explain the meaning. Even our returning cast members are learning a lot of new things.

We also have the wonderful Andrew Wade returning as our voice and text coach at the Guthrie, who I miss very much, but it’s a great opportunity for the cast to draw on the talents of both of them over the course of this year.

Picture Day

One of the first things we did this week was a photo shoot. It seemed a bit premature, but venues need images to go with their publicity, and our first tour performances are less than a month away. We took a number of shots of our new Romeo and Juliet, and a group photo of the whole cast.
Don’t they look like a nice group?

They are:
back row: Whitney Hudson, Ray Chapman, Sid Solomon, Jason McDowell-Green, Kaliswa Brewster, Benjamin Rosenbaum
middle row: John Skelley, Jonathan C. Kaplan, Alejandro Rodriguez, Jamie Smithson
bottom row: Elizabeth Stahlmann, Elizabeth Grullon, Stephen Pilkington

Below is a shot of how the magic is made. Our new touring wardrobe supervisor, Mariela, adjusts Kaliswa’s hair before another round of photos. It was really cool to have them in costume on the second day of rehearsal. I think stuff like that early in the rehearsal process always makes the experience more real. We hadn’t even read the play at that point, but already we’re made aware that someday there will be a finished product and these pictures are very close to being seen by people, who will be inspired to spend their money on tickets and will have their butts in seats ready to be entertained when we come to their town very soon. It reinforces the importance of all the messing around in jeans and sneakers, walking between lines of colored tape. It will be real before we know it.

We spent a day-and-a-half on table work. The script has been cut a bit since last year. The hope is that we have eliminated 10 or 15 minutes, to make it easier for schools to attend the show and talkbacks afterwards. The running time of the first read-through was much improved. Obviously that doesn’t always translate to the finished product, but it’s a good sign.

Hooray for Skype

Yesterday we had a video conference with Penny. The internet at her house had been having trouble, but she soon found a spot where the video signal was good enough to make it work. There was a slight delay, which seemed to get better as we went on, so it wasn’t as fluid a conversation as it would have been in person, but the video wasn’t choppy, and she was able to speak to the cast for a while, and ask what we had been working on, and then everybody in the room stepped close to the camera and introduced themselves and what they’re doing on the production. I think it must be very helpful for her and the new people on the production to put a living, breathing, talking face to the other people they’ll be collaborating with.

As Skype conferences go, I considered it a great success (which is not really saying much). We knew she might have connection problems and had planned that we might have to do audio only if the bandwidth wasn’t good enough, so I’m just happy we got intelligible video, even if it was a bit like watching a TV journalist reporting in by satellite.

I also was able to borrow some cheap computer speakers from the office which were more than loud enough to let everybody in the room hear. That’s usually the main problem with full-company conference calls for me. The MacBook Pro speakers don’t do well if you’re not sitting right near the computer.

Staging

Today we finished our table work earlier than expected, and after lunch began staging! Meaghan and I were caught a little bit off-guard, but we jumped in, and everything went pretty well. All I can say is that I’m glad I got in a little early and put most of the furniture spike marks down before rehearsal.

Recreating an exact production is something new for me, so I’m excited to try it. We began with the prologue, which doesn’t really leave a lot of room for personal exploration, blocking-wise. It’s very much an “enter at this time, hit this mark, talk, and exit this way” type of thing. You are umbrella number 12. You will be assimilated. The cast did very well. They seem to be picking up on the ground plan quickly. It may help a lot that some of them saw the production, and there are many photos available of what the set looks like.

When they got that down, we continued staging onward. We quickly hit the first brawl, and sketched out the basic shape of it, without actually addressing detailed fight choreography. So everybody pretty much understands what’s happening, what weapons they have, where they go, and who they fight with. Then we let most of the cast go, and finished the day with the following scenes between Montague and Benvolio and Benvolio and Romeo, which are both more free-form, and in fact changed blocking numerous times (much to my dismay) during the rehearsal process. Corey pretty much let the actors feel it out, but it was actually really fascinating to see some very surprising similarities pop up on their own.

I hope that we can continue to strike a good balance between recreating the previous production while letting our new actors feel like they’ve been given ownership of their roles.

Tomorrow is our dance and fight choreography day, and we also have some scene work happening. I’m actually really intrigued to see how well we can all collectively put the huge puzzle of the party scene back together.


September 24, 2010

PrePro Week Over!

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:37 pm

It’s Friday night, when all those normal people who work in offices don’t have to do anything for the rest of the week. Thankfully, I have been enslaved by such people all week, and am now free, and starting next week can resume being a touchy-feely artisty-type person for the next seven months.

As much as I hate the idea of working in an office, I actually find preproduction to be a great and very important part of the process. And while I lose two hours of my day commuting and sometimes think, “couldn’t I just do this from home?” there is a lot to be said for the ease of collaboration that happens from being in the office.

Having everybody no more than 50ft away from each other certainly speeds up the process, and allows quick consultations that probably wouldn’t always happen if you had to pick up the phone or write an email every time you had a question.

My process also involves some stuff that is decidedly office-y, such as copying the scripts for first rehearsal, putting them in binders, assembling some basic office supplies like pens, pencils and paper, and making copies of the various paperwork that’s going to be distributed on the first day. It’s times like that that make actually being in a fully-functional office a great advantage.

Here are the actors’ scripts, ready to go. Nick and I always had a thing we did where we gaffed a postcard of the show onto the front of the binder and wrote the actor’s name on it. I’m pretty sure it was his idea, so I have to give him credit for that. It’s been very popular with actors, and it’s also useful for us because when somebody leaves a script behind somewhere, it’s easy to know who to return it to.

In the middle of the day today, I took a walk over to Barbizon to buy some gaff, glow and spike tape. That’s $72 of tape right there. I also picked up lunch on the way back.

Spike tape and sushi. I really can’t think of many more things I would rather have.

The very last thing I did before leaving the office was to send out my first real email to the whole production team. I’ve been in touch with the cast more consistently to get them prepared for the start of the process, but this was my first contact with a lot of our creative and production team. Most are Acting Company and Guthrie regulars who I’ve worked with before, but there are a few I don’t know, and at least a couple I don’t expect to meet for several months. I sent out the contact sheet, a calendar showing the R&J rehearsal process up until we head out on the road, and a detailed schedule for the first day of rehearsal. In the body of the email I also added a few notes about the rehearsal studio and other business.

I still have a few things to do from home, such as print the wallet cards (which I designed while at the office, but I keep my business card paper at home), and a pseudo-wallet card with the addresses of the two costume shops we’re using, so that actors who have to go to fittings will always know where they’re going. I also have a few things to add to the database before first rehearsal, and I need to gather up all my stuff to bring with me on Monday.

When I got home I got a call from our Production Manager / Tech Director, who’s arriving in New York on the day of the first rehearsal. We’ve worked together before, but he’s just coming on board for this show, and it was our first real chance to talk about work stuff, and for me to mention a few issues that I think require careful attention to make sure everything goes smoothly.

I’m looking forward to finally getting started. Everything I’ve heard is that this company of actors is wonderful, and I’ve had an opportunity to meet many of the new actors when they came into the office to sign their contracts during the past week, and everyone seems very eager and excited for rehearsal to start. The whole season seems to be a very nice mix of a comfortable return to a familiar production, and frequent collaborators, with the injection of new people, a new production, and a new season of tour cities, which will make the process fresh at the same time. Honestly I think that’s really why I’m here. I’m at a point where I feel continued touring is harmful to my New York career, but from the earliest conversations I had with our producers, at the bar celebrating the start of previews for R&J at the Guthrie last year, the things I’d heard about this season were too good to pass up. It continued that way all through last year’s tour. It was just too much fun, and there are many people at The Acting Company and the Guthrie that I just love working with, and I had to stick around for this year.

Everything’s pretty much set for first rehearsal. Bring it, I say!


September 20, 2010

On the Clock

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:25 pm

Today marks the official start of my contract for The Acting Company 2010-2011 tour. We start rehearsal a week from today. I celebrated by getting up at 6:30 for a day in the office. The good news is, I’m actually getting paid now. The other good news is that it’s pumpkin spice latte time at Starbucks, and that made the second half of my day awesome.

In the Office

Almost the entirety of my day today was spent on the script. What is believed to be the final draft of the first rehearsal script came back from the director early this morning. So with something we think we might actually be distributing, I went through it with a fine-toothed comb, removing all the multicolored notes and strikethroughs from all the people who had been collaborating on it, renumbering the pages, and making the formatting absolutely perfect, checking every single character, space and margin, as well as reading every word for content to make sure there weren’t any obvious errors.

I’m very happy to know that is under control, and it’s exactly how I want it set up. I initially lobbied to keep the old page numbers in case our returning actors and staff wanted to use their old scripts, but I was convinced that we should encourage people to start from scratch. Both scripts have the act & scene number as part of the page number, so even if people are using their old scripts, they can still turn to the correct page or very close to it, as most scenes are only a few pages long. Some cuts have been put in, but they’re relatively small. It should make the show feel a little faster without removing too much content.

I was given control of the contact sheet today, although with the priority put on getting a final script ready today, I wasn’t able to finish double-checking the contact sheet I’ve been working on in my database against the final one from the office. Other than a little bit of work on that, I participated in a few discussions about travel, the early rehearsal schedule, and the technical education workshops I’ve been trying to get going this year. It’s nice to be in the middle of the action as things are coming together.

Remounting

This is the first time in a long while that I’ve remounted a production I’ve done before. Definitely the first time on a production of this scale, keeping the same design elements, and on which I knew at the time of the previous production that I would need to recreate the show again. It’s kind of fun.

When I found out that I would be spending the day on the script, it was pretty daunting to get started. Since April I hadn’t done more than glance at the script when I’d been asked to submit my copy of the final script about a month ago. This is a three-hour show that I did 82 performances and 30 days of rehearsal of within the past nine months. I thought I would be sick of staring at those words. But it was actually very comforting. There’s definitely something nice about doing a show you know. As I read through the script, I heard the whole show in my head as performed by my friends from last year, and enjoyed the memories of my favorite moments, or funny things that happened during the process surrounding certain parts. I was sad to think that some of those people would be gone, but curious to see what new people will bring to those roles. And I’m looking forward to seeing our returning actors’ performances again, and to see what they may discover that’s different this time.

After reading literally every word, I definitely feel like I have the show back in my body. The more I can remember and see the show in my mind, the easier my job will be, and the less I’ll have to worry about being able to make sense of my paperwork!

After Hours

Tonight, theoretically I’m watching football, but I’m not really, I’m working and blogging. I’m scanning a few paper documents that I was given today: the rules packet for New 42nd Street Studios, and the Letter of Agreement (LOA) between the company and Equity, which modifies our rehearsal rules (which are based on the LORT agreement). I have never in my years of stage management been able to get a digital copy of an LOA. No general manager I’ve worked with has ever been given one in their lives. So I always have to scan it, because having the printed copy with me when I need it never works out. Needing it at the bar at 1AM is just as likely as needing it in rehearsal or at my apartment when I wake up in the morning. When I’m done scanning I will upload the PDFs into Evernote and put them in my DropBox, where Meaghan and I can reference them.

By the by, I really wish I had a scanner that was less than 8 years old, and that I didn’t have to use Windows to use. But it’s just one of those things that I’d hardly ever be home to take advantage of. We do tour with a printer/scanner combo thing so I’m pretty well covered as far as work goes right now. Maybe someday when I stop all this touring. Or if I get a production contract.


September 13, 2010

Event Management and Me

I call this: theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:29 pm

My Weekend

I had been awake for about 10 minutes on Friday morning when I got a call from a friend. A stage manager he’s worked with needed to find a replacement to do a festival over the weekend. Everything about that sentence was unpleasant to me, especially when I’ve just woken up.

But as soon as I could wipe the sand out of my eyes and take some more sips of my energy drink, I called said stage manager and learned what the deal was. Actually it was a bit different than I pictured.

When you stage manage a show as part of a festival, it almost always means the pay is absolute crap. I’ve done shows early in my career that paid less than a dollar an hour. I don’t care who’s doing those kind of shows, I just don’t do them anymore. Higher-end festival shows might make it a little more worth your while, but are still too low on the work vs. pay scale to be something you really look forward to having to do. Generally you do it out of absolute financial desperation, or getting to work with well-known actors or directors, or doing a show that you have somehow deluded yourself might go somewhere — more accurately, you may not believe it will go somewhere, but enough people are saying it will that you would feel stupid if you turned it down and a year later it’s on Broadway.

Anyway, as it turned out, this job had nothing to do with that kind of experience. It was not a festival of shows, but an outdoor festival of poetry, performance art, music and just a tiny bit of musical theatre. And I wasn’t managing a show. I wasn’t even managing one of the two stages at the festival. I was managing the festival. So it wasn’t stage management at all, it was event management.

My feelings on Event Management

I’m not one of those stage managers who really does event management. I know some people who have fallen in with the right crowd, and do so many high-quality events that they hardly ever do shows. The point of event management is that you can make inconceivable amounts of money in a very short period of time. Whether it’s actually “less work” is debatable, but I would guess at the very least, it allows you more free time because you do tons of work over the span of a few days, and then you’re done and can leisurely roll around in all your money for the rest of the month before you pay your entire rent with it.

For example I have a friend who went to Costa Rica for something-or-other for like a week, and in addition to getting a trip to Costa Rica, was paid very well for the experience. Another friend once worked an NBA event. He’s probably 5’10” and incredibly skinny, and at one point had to hold the players in a certain area. His claim to fame is that when Shaq wanted to go somewhere, he very gently lifted my friend up in the air and deposited him somewhere else so he could get by. Anyway, a number of my friends really like doing events because sometimes they’re easy, and often take you to interesting places or among interesting people, and pretty much always pay very well.

I’m not on anybody’s list to get called for really amazing events, nor have I ever particularly tried to be when I’ve had the chance. I like money. I like money a lot. If you click on any of the tech- or computer-related topics here you’ll see I have a thing for expensive electronics and software. Money would allow me to enjoy my hobby more. But I also have a thing for theatre, particularly musical theatre, and if I knew I could pay the bills either way, I would take an average-paying show over a paid trip to Costa Rica.

I have been thinking about this since Friday, and I think what it comes down to is that in my mind, an event is work. You do work, you receive money. It’s like what most people think of as work: not necessarily fun or pleasant, but you get through it and at the end of the day you have money, so it’s worth doing. And I realized that as much as I think that I think of stage management as work, as in “Aw, why do I have to go to rehearsal? Can’t I just sit in my pajamas and play MMOs all day?” it actually is something different in my mind from real work. I have this expectation that a job should be something exciting and inspiring, in addition to being someplace you go solely for the purpose of coming out with money at the end.

The entire theatre industry is also constructed to beat into you that you’re an artist and should expect sub-par pay for your skills because the producer is doing you a favor by giving you an opportunity to practice your art. This is why we have unions, by the way — to say “No, actually it’s also a job, and you have to pay people.” Stagehands generally fall in the other category — of people who are there to do work and get money. Somehow producers understand this in a way that they don’t understand it about actors and stage managers. Which is why it’s not unheard of for the guy running the light board to make more than the PSM.

My point being, that event management is the way that stage managers get to be a part of that “I’m not doing that unless you pay me what I’m worth” thing that most of the world inherently understands. But to me, it uses the same skills of organizing people, solving problems, being diplomatic, and keeping things on schedule, but without the “let’s put on a show!” payoff at the end. You’re always putting on a show of some sort, whether it be a wedding, a concert, a sales presentation, or an NBA halftime show, but it doesn’t strike a nerve with me in the same way as the legitimate theatre. I’m sure somebody who does rock concerts, like Nicky, who was my stage manager on the mainstage at this festival, would be bored out of his mind stage managing a production of Romeo and Juliet. I get that. I may, perhaps, in a theatre with a very quiet stage right, have once called the entire balcony scene while lying on the floor, just for a change of perspective. But you will also note that I am about to remount that production and take it out for another seven months, and I wouldn’t be doing that if it wasn’t rewarding in other ways besides money.

Being on the Outside

I don’t do a whole lot else besides stage management. Honestly, I could probably name on one hand the number of jobs I’ve done in the last 5 years that were not stage managing legit theatre productions.

I was the production coordinator for Bingo in Florida, and did a little bit of preproduction on the Chicago premiere as well. That was sort of a hybrid of long-distance stage management and company management. It was immensely educational to sit in a general management office that was busy producing several shows, to see what goes on on that side of things during production. After two months, I was more certain than before that unlike some stage managers, I have absolutely zero interest in ever being a company manager or GM. It was also the first and only time I’ve ever worked in an office. It was kind of like playing “grown-up” for the first month, then it started to get old. It should be noted that the reason I was asked to do the job was that I had been ASM of the Off-Broadway production (and had also called the show many times). I was even offered PSM of the Chicago production when they had somebody back out during pre-pro — and I would have gladly taken it, but they couldn’t provide housing for me.

I subbed on followspot (by which I mean a Source Four with handles on it) for the Off-Broadway production of My Secret Garden for a day or two, before later replacing the PSM (I had been the ASM for an earlier workshop, so my main association with the show was stage managerial). I have always liked running spots. I haven’t run a real spot since I was in high school, with the exception of a photo shoot for a production on which I was PSM, because the spot ops weren’t called for the photo call, and I really wanted to.

A friend was the ASM on the Off-Broadway play Substitution, and his crew person bailed on the first day of tech. He called me desperate for a warm body wearing black to appear at his theatre by the end of their dinner break. As I had nothing to do for the rest of the day, and welcomed the opportunity to hang out backstage with my friend, I changed into blacks and got down there as fast as I could. I worked the show through tech and first preview, until a new crew person was hired and trained. During that time, the PSM got another gig and would have to leave the production in the middle of the final week. Since I already had at least a crew member’s familiarity with the play, the fastest way to cover that situation was for me to learn to call the show, since I would only need to watch it once. I was technically just an ASM sub, but I got to be the calling SM for the end of the run. I also got to work with the amazing Jan Maxwell, so that was a fun experience.

Same friend, same situation: crew member quit. We were both PSM-ing shows at the NYMF Festival, both in the same venue at the same time. He lost his crew person, and I filled in for the last week of the run, since I was sort of already there, and had no conflicts since our shows were on the same stage.

And… that’s all that’s coming to mind as far as non-stage-management jobs, and as you can see most of them came out of or ended up resulting in real stage management jobs anyway. My career has always been pretty narrowly focused on stage management. Some of that is personal preference, and some of it is just the way it’s happened.

Advantages

The nice thing about doing events is that they take place in a very short period of time, and don’t really require you to clear your schedule much. I lost most of the day Friday (going down to the park to be shown around by the outgoing production manager), and all day Saturday and Sunday, but now I’ll most likely be starting the tour with my debt already paid off. Yay!

I missed a whole lot of football over the weekend, I didn’t get any preproduction done for the tour, my favorite vest is covered in soggy dirt, and I can barely walk from standing on uneven pavement for 12 hours a day, but now it’s over and it would have taken me months on tour to save up that money.

Events are good things to have access to when you need them. I’m glad that I have steady employment as a stage manager coming up, but this is a great example of how you can throw a few days of work in between your “real” commitments and supplement your earnings. Also, in this crazy business, sometimes you have to lose money to make money — taking a lesser-paying job in the hopes that it will lead to a greater-paying job. Any money you can save gives you more flexibility to take a chance when faced with those situations. Or you can buy an iPhone every year, or find out what the hell a $50 mouse pad feels like.


September 7, 2010

Pre-Production Progress

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:03 pm

Days till first rehearsal: 20

Currently working on: just tidying up my files & notes while watching TV before bed

Upcoming projects:
Clean up last year’s R&J script
Put contacts in address book
More database work

Recently Finished:
putting performances / cities / travel into Google Calendar
Contact sheet (still have questions)
Entry of performances & venues into database


September 4, 2010

Cross-Platform Stage Management

I call this: mac,On the Road Again,pc,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:16 pm


This tour is going to be something of an experiment, and an opportunity for new stage management technical discoveries, as I have an ASM who uses Windows — I know!

Contrary to popular belief, I will actually choose ASMs who use Windows. And the people I most often assist use Windows, so I’m used to the cross-platform thing, although it’s been a while since I’ve been the PSM in that case and had to decide what software to use for the show. So I had no reservations about Meaghan not being a Mac user. I knew she was a PC user when we worked together two years ago, but I couldn’t remember if she had since switched, and I didn’t ask until this week when I was trying to nail down what software I’m going to use for the tour. Well she has a PC, but she assures me she has an iPhone, which is comforting somehow, and is an advantage I never had with Nick and his cursed-trackball Blackberry.

In day-to-day life I don’t find the OS to make that much of a difference. There were a couple events over the course of two years on tour where I remember saying to Nick, “thank God you have a Mac, or we’d be screwed!” but those were situations where we were already screwed and managed to avoid further screwing. Which is good. But those situations are rare, and if you are lucky enough not to be screwed in the first place, then you have nothing to worry about. The big one I remember was when my computer just up-and-died one day, an hour before the show. I was able to install all the software I needed on Nick’s and carry on. It was great, but in reality if that happened again, especially in the more cloud-based world we have now two years later, most things would be fine on a PC, and if I really needed a Mac, there will be like 15 more of them on tour and I could borrow somebody else’s to get what I need converted into PC-friendly form. But those kind of contingency plans will be part of the decisions I make when setting up our digital world.

The first of which is that there needs to be a backup of all our critical files on a drive formatted for FAT32. My backup drive, which uses Time Machine, is formatted for HFS+, which is the format required for Mac-bootable drives. I think I may keep all our files and installers on an 8GB thumb drive that I just purchased. Our show files are on DropBox so we both have access to them, so that’s a pretty good backup right there, but it might be smart to have an offline copy as well. I’ll probably keep that backed up every day or two.

I also have Windows running on my Mac (both natively, and alongside Mac OS using Parallels), which might come in handy if we need to share something in a Windows-only way. I was still using XP for compatibility with older games, and out of cheapness, but when I had the money, wanted to buy Windows 7. I would hate to find us in a situation where we can’t share something because I was still on XP, so I started to think of it as a business necessity to invest in the upgrade at this point. So I just installed Windows 7, and it seems to run well on my machine so far. Maybe this whole collaboration will help me to educate myself on changes in the Windows world that I’ve glossed over since I switched to Mac in 2002. That would be helpful, cause I sell myself as a computer geek stage manager, and if you sat me down in front of a machine with Vista or Windows 7 I don’t think I’d be much of a geek, and at this point it’s starting to feel like false advertising.

Meaghan and I are now pretty much caught up as far as being set up with all the software we’ll be using. Here’s what we’ve got:

  • FileMaker Most of the actual paperwork for the show will go in my database. Thankfully FileMaker is cross-platform, so we should have no problem with that. When at work, we will work off the master copy served from my computer, but I have recently added a feature to upload a copy of it to DropBox, so if she needs to reference the information inside when away from the theatre it will be in the cloud. Plus we could both access it from our iPhones if we wanted. If she was going to do some homework of her own, she would have a copy to work in, as long as I know not to be making changes at the same time on my copy, and to make the Dropbox file the master after she’s done. Nick and I sent the file back and forth over email sometimes, but this way should be a little cleaner.
  • DropBox This summer I started using DropBox as an alternative to MobileMe’s iDisk. The main difference between the two is that DropBox works. It works well enough that I could put my folder for each show on my DropBox and trust it not to get corrupted or out of sync. After three shows using that method, I’m now taking it a step further: I’m sharing that folder with Meaghan, so we will both be able to work off the same files.
  • Evernote For more on Evernote, you can see my first impressions post. I’m storing a bunch of stuff on Evernote, everything from the show logos to essential emails from office staff, to my shopping list for Staples. Meaghan can then check it to see all the information I have, and when we’re actually working she can add notes to my notebook for the tour with information and paperwork that she generates. I’m hoping between this and DropBox, we’ll never have to worry about me forgetting to pass on a file to her.
  • Microsoft Office Obviously. I don’t create all that many Office files, but it’s always necessary at some point. Our script will be the biggest one, and changes will be tracked throughout the rehearsal process.
  • Skype It may come in handy from time-to-time, but what I really intend to use it for is to teach the database before we start rehearsal. Meaghan only arrives in New York the day before we start, so using screen sharing will have to do.

In addition to getting us set up for rehearsal, I’ve been trying to make Windows a little more hospitable for my own use. The problem I have when gaming is that I become completely useless for anything else, because in order to access, well, anything, I have to reboot into OSX. The use of all these cloud-based, cross-platform tools has made it much easier to spend hours and hours in Windows without being prevented from doing anything else. The one major element I’m missing is OmniFocus, which is cloud-based, but only compatible with Mac and iPhone. However, the act of creating or checking off a task is so quick and simple that doing it on my phone is almost as fast as doing it on the desktop. Overall I’m excited to play with some new ways to organize.


June 15, 2010

Tech Complete!

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:56 am

Well we just finished tech.

It was a long few days. Things moved along quite smoothly, but just slowly. The show is a unit set, and as such, it’s very simple in terms of moving scenery, but a lot of care had to be taken to create new looks for each scene, and that takes time. The show is also LONG. I think most people probably aren’t aware of it, but Into the Woods can apparently reach three hours with intermission in many productions. The script is 188 pages long. And the show switches setting sometimes several times per page, so there’s a lot of tech to be teched.

Today was supposed to be our first dress rehearsal, but we ended up using the day to finish teching Act II, and then we ran Act II, which was all we had time for. The run actually went very well. It’s one of those shows that goes like a freight train, and it was a very smooth ride, that felt much shorter to me than the hour and four minutes it took.

I’ve been very wound up for three days, because my job is to tech the show, and the difficulty we were having keeping to our timetable has been very heavy on my mind. The first night I got a very restless sleep, dreaming about mics breaking and other assorted theatrical disaster. Last night I slept a little better, mostly because we had already sketched out a contingency plan for tonight, and it was one I wasn’t too worried about being able to pull off. Today for the first time since Saturday morning, I felt I could walk out of the theatre with my head held high, knowing that we have something resembling a show, and that at least Act II is proven to be in good shape for where we are in the process.

Because of the pressure, I haven’t actually been enjoying tech as much as I usually do. Once we began the run, and it started to feel like a run, rather than just an especially long unbroken stretch of tech, I started to have fun. Act I is a lot more complicated, so once we get there tomorrow — with costumes, wigs and makeup, and an orchestra on the clock — I will be more nervous, but tonight really cheered me up.

Obligatory tech table photo:

Several fun things about this tech table: I have to give credit to Justin Scalese, who is a loyal reader of this blog, and although I can’t get him program credit, I can at least acknowledge here that he has been dubbed “Ms. Parlato’s Personal Technical Advisor.” The program will refer to him as “Sound Engineer,” but we know the truth. I’ve asked for a number of creature comforts this season. First of all, knowing how many fly cues there would be in this show, I said I really wanted a working cue light system. Reagle had one in the past, but it hasn’t been functional in the five years I’ve been around. Justin was able to get me one cue light on very short notice for this show, and by the next show, we should have at least two, and will steal an idea from a theatre I toured to in Texas, and use rope light along the length of the rail, rather than a few light bulbs. The other complexity I threw at him was that the controls for the lights had to be able to be used not only in the booth (where the wires already ran through the ceiling), but also to the tech table, or else there would be no point to the whole thing. He came through.

With just one light, I’m using it on most of the cues, but for the really complicated sequences, it’s a combination of verbal cues, by cue number, for the flypeople on headset, and the cue light for those who aren’t. I think there’s one section that requires six people on the rail.

A few days after Project Cue Light, I posed one more challenge to Justin, which I thought would be impossible, or at least impractical: to get the conductor video monitor at the tech table. The cues in this show are all very musical, and there are a lot of vamps and safeties, where the only way to know what’s coming is to see the conductor. Apparently there’s a large surplus of BNC cable, and that project was completed before I knew it. Both improvements made the tech much easier, and will contribute to the overall quality of the show when it’s seen by audiences, because it was able to be teched with more precision.


May 31, 2010

Because It’s MY Database

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:03 pm

Still doing paperwork. Now I’m working on the weekly schedule. One of the hardest things in the first week is learning people’s names. This is like 10 times harder in preproduction because you don’t even have faces and performances to associate with who is playing what role.

So I’m going through the schedule trying to fill in who is called for what scenes, and I’ve decided in this case it’s easiest to go with actors’ last names rather than characters. Only problem is, I get to the first one and I know it’s Little Red and the Wolf, but I’m drawing a total blank on both their names. So I took 15 minutes and decided to solve this problem once and for all by adding a feature to the database.

I could have given it a very professional name, such as “Name / Role Cheat Sheet” or something like that. But this is my database, and until such time as it becomes someone else’s database, this particular feature is going to be called “ZOMG HALP!!!” because that’s what I’m thinking when I need it. Yeah, I do think like a lolcat sometimes. What of it?

I have placed a big red ZOMG HALP!!! button on the main page, which pops up this screen in a little window, that can then be tucked off in a corner where it’s always visible. It can display all the contacts associated with the show, but I’ve added a button which narrows it down to just the cast, since that’s the most common use. Here it’s showing the cast in the order I added them to the DB, which is an approximate of order-of-importance list, which I decided to leave as-is because it might be handy. It can also be sorted alphabetically by any of the fields which would be more useful at other times.


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