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November 17, 2009

Packing for Stage Management

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:36 am

Tomorrow is the big day for me and Nick. Not the day we leave, not the day we pack our shirts, socks, and portable gaming devices. No, this is stage management packing day.

It’s a two-part process. Because we’re rehearsing at the Guthrie for a month before our truck gets there, we need to get a lot of our supplies there without having our road box. Yes, I did walk into the GM’s office and ask if shipping the road box whole was a possibility, and to her credit, she did not laugh in my face. But nevertheless, it was financially impractical, so we will have to do what we did last year, and ship a cardboard box of our most needed supplies through the regular channels that people use to ship things that don’t weigh hundreds of pounds.

So tomorrow Nick and I are meeting at the office. To the office we will bring anything from home that we intend to ship either in the box to the Guthrie, or to put in the road box for later use in tech, or on the road. Things that are going in the cardboard box are tape measures (one from each of us), my kit, pencil case, two big binders (because life is too short to use cheap binders), and our printer, which is in the road box.

Which comes to the problem that some of the stuff we need is in the road box. So we have to make a trip to Jersey, where our road boxes are stored at Spoon Group. We will then drop off our personal headsets in the box, and maybe some other stuff, and head back to the office with the things we need to ship to the Guthrie (our printer, some special paper, sheet protectors, electric pencil sharpener, another tape measure, labler, pencils, one of the four or five first aid kits, and a few other things.)

Our road box halfway through the tour last year:

Then back at the office, we will pack up the box for the Guthrie and back slowly away while other people worry about how it gets there.

Our departure date has changed recently, we’re now going Nov. 30th instead of Dec. 1. With first rehearsal on the 4th, we now have so much time that I think we’ll wind up with our arrival day off (after getting in on one of the Guthrie’s Monday grocery runs), and then maybe even another day off if we don’t totally screw up taping the floor. I just did the measurements on the ground plan tonight, and while everything is on some funky angle, the set is largely square to itself, which I guess is an improvement from the half-circle-but-not-in-the-mathematical-sense that was the Henry / Spy set last year.

I’m still working hard to finish the new stage management database before first rehearsal. I’d feel better with more time on that, but I think I’m at least pretty far ahead in my packing. I actually have a database to track what compartment of what bag all my belongings are going to be in.


October 8, 2009

On the Road Again

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 2:00 am

IMG_0833

It’s time to resurrect the Tour Mini-Blog. This year it’s being renamed “On the Road Again,” because of this iPhone wallpaper I happened to stumble across a while back.

It’s still almost two months before we begin rehearsals for The Acting Company’s Romeo and Juliet in Minneapolis. It’s three months before R&J opens at the Guthrie. And it’s almost four months before we actually hit “the road” and pack our as-yet-unborn creation into a 53-foot truck and start driving it around the country.

But the story of this process actually goes back much further. This tour was in the works long before last year’s tour of Henry V and The Spy concluded. The show has been picked, many of the venues were booked, and some of the roles were cast.

When the tour ended, my role on it went on hiatus. I had been spoken to unofficially during one of our New York visits and was given a sneak peek of what was in the works for this year and was asked to come back. I indicated I was definitely interested but my schedule and lack of time at home were things I wanted to think about.

In early summer I started talking again with the office and gave my committment. They were having meetings with all the returning people to talk about how things went last year, but as I was out of town I couldn’t attend, so I was asked to submit something written. I sent in my manifesto, but was pleased to learn that while I was philosophizing about team-building experiences, Nick was meeting with the new production manager and talking about practical stuff like the need for a wireless broadband card for stage management and/or working Internet on our bus. Nick deciding to return was also a great relief, and when that happened (maybe around August) I started really looking forward to getting to work. For a while I was getting concerned I might end up the only returning person on the crew bus.

Also in August I went through some drama figuring out what my fall show would be. I had kinda committed to Inventing Avi pending my final decision a few days later, when I got a call from a well-known Off-Broadway company looking for a PSM. That dragged on for at least a week while they waited to find out if their regular PSM could clear her schedule. The problem was that the show closed on November 29th. November 30th was supposed to be the day we’d fly to Minneapolis to begin R&J. Since I had more options for the fall than I knew what to do with and the tour is my biggest job of the year, I wanted to clear it with The Acting Company before pursuing the job. They thought I was crazy, but gave me permission to take the job. In the end the job went to the other person, so I was spared the stress of having to go right from one to the other. With Avi, I got a month between gigs, which is why now, a month before we begin rehearsal, I consider this the real start of my process.

When I got back in town things had calmed down again and I began a new show, which is currently in previews. Today The Acting Company had their annual flu shot scheduled, which is part of the program offered by the Actor’s Fund to provide free on-site flu shots to shows and theatre companies. Due to the cramped quarters on the tour buses and the fact that we travel with no understudies, it’s something that we are especially encouraged to take advantage of. I wasn’t especially looking forward to being stabbed in the arm, but I was very much looking forward to seeing everyone that I haven’t seen since the tour ended in May.

The best thing that happened to come up was that I got to meet the new general manager, Nancy, who I soon discovered is awesome. A-freaking-mazing. I had a single theoretical question for her, but we were soon joined by my assistant, Nick, and our company manager, Steve. I lost all sense of time, but we must have spent about an hour in an impromptu meeting, discussing a variety of topics.

My initial request was about the possibility of Nick and I traveling to Minneapolis a few days ahead of the company so we could do our preproduction at the Guthrie and get our supplies in order, tape out the floor, and generally settle in before being thrown into rehearsal. It looks like that should be no problem and our apartments will be ready. It’s currently planned that we will have two days there not counting the travel day, which should be plenty.

We also decided which days we would take off in the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s, we talked about a shared Google calendar among the various management departments, concerns about the buses, and the possibility of getting the stage management road box sent to Minneapolis ahead of the set, or at least getting access to it and shipping part of the contents. We also all left with a tentative performance schedule.

I’m very excited to get more into the process, especially after my current show opens. I have been doing a lot of work on my stage management database during Avi but it still needs a lot more work to be ready to begin rehearsals for the tour, and I think the month of having no job will go by very quickly.


May 29, 2009

Interesting Statistic

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 8:53 pm

I’m cleaning up and reorganizing all my work files and folders on my computer. After a six-month job it’s nice to be able to put some things away.

One interesting factoid: total number of emails from the Acting Company tour (not including those thrown out immediately because they consisted of the word “Thanks!” or similar sentiment):
1,781

That sounds about right, I guess.


May 23, 2009

End of Tour

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 12:33 pm

Well the end of the tour has come. I’m sorry I didn’t have any posting to do during the 6 days of our final leg. Our internet problems continued and worsened, to the point that there really wasn’t any convenient time to sit and relax with internet access that might have lent itself to blogging. On top of that, there wasn’t really anything spectacular to blog about. It was kind of same-old-same-old. We came, we saw, we did shows. We finally got to perform The Spy a bit, between the end of the New York run and the final leg, we actually did more Spy than Henry. It finally started to evolve into something as natural as it had been when we rehearsed it in New York way back in November/December. It was kind of sad to see it finally coming together too late, and to get a hint of the potential it might have had if not for all the misfortunes that befell it (and the fact that most of America’s presenters apparently had no interest in booking it).

Overall the tour turned out pretty well after its rough start. There’s a lot I think we can do better next year if we build on what we learned this year, and I hope to be a part of that. Romeo and Juliet and a workshop of a new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland are on the agenda for next season.

I think this concludes the Tour Mini-Blog, I hope you had fun reading of my adventures this season. I’d like to give one final plug to my Flickr photostream, over yonder on the right sidebar. It contains almost daily photos from life on the road, along with some pretty detailed descriptions, and it covers some aspects of the tour I didn’t blog about (and certainly was too lazy to post photos of in the blog).


April 29, 2009

Baruch Revisited

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:27 pm

Late last night we departed Frostburg, MD, and this morning we woke up home-sweet-home on 24th St. and Lex. We said our final goodbyes to Bart, and unloaded all our luggage and other belongings from the bus into a hallway by the loading doors at Baruch College (see photo).

Last night in Frostburg was a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out.  This is something we do every now and then, where the whole crew will wear our Save the Ta-Tas shirts that Daphne got us for opening night in New York.  Like so, in Tucson:

We decided pretty much at the start of this leg that Frostburg would be a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out since it was the last venue before returning to New York.  The interesting advantage of this was that the next morning when we got up in New York, it was easy to tell who had decided to sleep in their clothes, as they were the ones still wearing their Ta-Tas for load in.  I didn’t exactly count, but I’d say it was four or five of us, including me. Speaking of which, we have submitted our photo to savethetatas.com, but it hasn’t been published yet.  I did have a nice email conversation with their customer service lady about our company — she wants to see us when we come to California — and she assured me it would go up “soon.”  That was like a month ago.

Baruch is kind of the most hellacious load-in situation ever. Unloading the truck on the street, followed by a lot of ramps and hallways, to a rather small freight elevator, and then down some more winding and public hallways to the theatre. Apparently it took 5 hours to unload the truck. Sadly for my friends, Nick and I did the stage manager thing and helped unload the road boxes, then broke off with our box and did our jobs and went home. We both felt bad for our friends, but my personal philosophy is that when you’re playing Poplar Bluff, MO and the show must go on, and you need a few more hands, that’s one thing. When opening a show in New York, there’s no reason stage managers should be needed to work as stage hands, without compensation and when their home is just a subway ride away. At any rate, I feel slightly less bad since I also had to come back at night for a late-night cueing session for The Spy. Due to the tightly packed schedule (if performances and film shoots manifested themselves as fish, this week’s would be sardines), there was no other time to do it but late tonight on load-in day, and as this is the New York premiere, we want to try to show it a little more love than it’s been given on our very Henry-heavy touring schedule. At least I had a chance to shower, change, and show up nicely dressed and clean like a normal person. I even have some simple jewelry on.

My first task upon coming back to Baruch at night was to set up our wireless network. As I have reported before in this post from December, Baruch’s theatre is in the third basement of their main building, surrounded by more concrete than any radio wave can get through, so cell service is a complete impossibility, and setting up a router in one room and expecting it to work three rooms down the hall is sketchy. When we teched The Spy here, it took me the better part of three days to get a reliable wireless signal to reach the theatre from the single ethernet cable in the production office. The solution I came up with was to bring in two of my own personal routers — an old UFO-shaped Airport Extreme, and an original Airport Express — and to place the Extreme on top of a filing cabinet in the production office, where the ethernet was, and to plug the Express in in the shop, which is just behind the stage. The signal from the Extreme went just far enough to reach the Express, which then passed it on just far enough to reach the tech tables in the house, but not quite enough for a steady signal in the booth. I may see what I can do about that this time, as I will be spending pretty much all my time in the booth.

This whole day has been deja vu. So many things have changed since we began our journey here, and yet there are other things that are exactly the same. When I came back at night, I found a couple of the tiny Spy columns, which we call “nubblies,” nestled against a diagonal wall, where six months ago another pile of short unused Spy columns sat when it was decided they weren’t needed (or something). This time they will be needed, but because we’re repping Henry and Spy, they are simply waiting there while Henry takes the stage. As soon as I glimpsed the greenroom through an open door I was instantly taken back to our final post-invited-dress notes session, on the eve of beginning the tour, and thought of all the people who were there who are no longer with the company. It’s been kind of a bittersweet return. But with all the drama along the way, the very fact that we are back here and performing both shows is an accomplishment in itself, so we can be proud of that.


April 23, 2009

Foooooood

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:16 pm

With my last remaining bits of energy I will attempt to write a post. Tonight we took part in the traditional final crew meal for the Acting Company tour. The tour still has almost a month left to go, but we are losing Bart for the last leg because he’s starting another tour, so we are celebrating now. It has been tradition that at the end of the tour the crew goes out to a ridiculously expensive dinner.

We went to Barclay Prime, a fancy steakhouse in Philly. We’re not playing Philly, we’re just here for 3 days so we could have steak tonight. No, I’m not kidding. We also did a lot of shopping today. Half of us, including me, got new shoes at the Puma store.

All told, we spent over $1,300 on dinner, which lasted for three hours. The food was amazing, and the restaurant and service was very nice. I had the salmon, but also got to try kobe steak for the first time, as well as a madeira, which we ordered because there is a bottle of madeira which is a plot point in The Spy.

As soon as we got back to the bus, I fell into my bunk and have not moved since.


April 18, 2009

The Tour: Leg 3

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

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

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

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

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


April 13, 2009

We Have a New Bus!

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 8:01 pm

Somewhat candid photo of us watching TV just now (taken with Photobooth on my computer):

Bart parked the bus at a hotel in Nashville and then went to sleep, so when we arrived we had to explore the bus on our own and figure out how everything works. It was pretty funny. I felt a little bit like lab rats placed in a new environment with hidden cameras to study how we adapt and discover how things work. I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We figured out how to tune in to the second satellite feed so the rear lounge TV can watch a separate channel from the front. Then our internet went down, and it seemed like the router needed to be restarted. On the old bus, the router sat on a countertop in the open. Well we looked all over the bus and couldn’t find it. In hindsight I suspect it might be in one of the luggage bays, but I stopped looking because we connected into it through a browser and looked up the default password for that model of router, which thankfully was unchanged. From there we could reboot it, and all was well.

Updated list of good things about this bus vs. bad things, as presented in a Harvard outline:

I. Good Things:
A. front lounge feels larger, has more windows
B. larger kitchen
C. nicer bathroom
D. ice chest in back lounge is easy to open
E. mirrored ceilings with accent lighting all throughout the bus
F. two fridges!
G. DVD players in bunks have softer edges so we won’t whack our heads as hard
H. pouches for our phones, wallets, etc. on walls of bunks

II. Bad Things:
A. bathroom door lock is broken
B. trash chute door is too small and has a weird ledge so things don’t easily fall down the chute
C. bunk mattresses seem thinner
D. no foot rest on the seat next to the driver

E. the power outlets in the bunks are at our feet, not near our heads
F. we hate the bunk curtains
1. they are too short, designed for when the bunks are stacked 3 high
a. light spills into bunk
b. lack of privacy due to 5″ gap at bottom of curtain
2. they have single snaps, not full-length velcro to keep them closed. The snaps don’t line up in 2-bunk tall position, so they are useless
3. curtains, which are unable to be snapped shut (see above) slide open with movement of the bus (update: we have taken to gaff-taping them shut from the inside)
G. we can’t find the router, which seems to always be giving us trouble (update: we found it, sealed behind a panel behind Bart’s head, which had to be screwed off to get to it. we have since run the power cord out so the router is now on the windowsill in the front lounge.)
H. door handle is acting like it’s going to break any minute

I. only one outlet at the front lounge table (!!!) which we have rectified with a power strip


April 5, 2009

The Acting Company Crew, Circa 1940

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 7:14 pm

While wandering in Tucson, I found a railroad museum.  Inside I found this photo of a sleeper car from the 1940s:

I immediately recognized this scene as a typical day on our bus, at approximately 7:30AM on a load-in day, as everyone rolls out of their bunks and puts their shoes on.  It would be pretty cool if we had a crew train instead!


Phoenix & Tucson

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:06 pm

In all the chaos surrounding my computer breaking, I haven’t gotten a chance to say much about Phoenix and Tucson. This is sort of the low-stress portion of the tour. We have back-to-back sitdowns of one week each in these two cities, which are less than two hours apart from each other. Both venues are run by Arizona Theatre Company, which is obviously a high-class professional company, as opposed to, say, a community college. We have had great experiences at community colleges as well, but it has been very comfortable to be in two venues run to such a high level of professionalism. In fact, I suppose technically you could say they are more professional than us. During these two weeks, all the Equity members are bumping up to the LORT B salary, because that’s the level at which ATC operates. And that, I declare, is very cool. We are now in Tucson, and two performances away from our week’s vacation. Here’s our theatre:

Even more so than Phoenix, we have been having a great time here. Probably the biggest reason is that our hotel is truly walking distance to the venue, which frees cast and crew from being tied down by the schedule of bus or van calls (we don’t actually have our buses here, just two 15-passenger vans). Unlike Minneapolis, where we were walking distance to the Guthrie and said walk would make your skin bleed and your nose hairs freeze together, this walk is warm and breezy and incredibly pleasant. We are also in the downtown area with lots of great food.

Spending a whole week in each city has given us the opportunity to explore what there is to do in town and outside town. Some of the activities have included hiking, a dude ranch belonging to relatives of one of our actors, the Titan Missile Museum, and spring training baseball games. Throughout the tour I have pretty much laid back and gone wherever I was taken when it comes to recreation. The Titan Missile Museum was my first foray into taking over as cruise director for a day, and planning and arranging our activity. Five of us went, and all agreed it was really cool.


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