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January 24, 2009

Thoughts at Half Hour

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:19 pm

Oh God, seriously I haven’t posted anything since Day 2 of tech? Well, again I refer you to Nick’s Blog, which has been kept up slightly better (I think between the two of us we might make up one fairly regularly-updated blog about stage managing this tour).

I am writing from the booth during half hour of an evening performance on an average Saturday here at the Guthrie. The matinee was a very good show. We have been rehearsing The Spy and the 1-hour student version of Henry V like crazy this week, as well as doing 8 performances of the 3-hour Henry V at night, and everyone is very tired, both physically and mentally, but the cast gave a great show to one of our best audiences yet (which is saying a lot cause we’ve had some awesome audiences). We found out at the post-play discussion that they were largely made up of a group of college students who were working on Henry V for an English class, so our talkback focused pretty much exclusively on questions about the text and the task of performing Shakespeare. I love doing talkbacks, so the heavy focus on education with this tour is a lot of fun for me.

Next week we have an additional student matinee, which means a 9-show week (and the corresponding increase in pay), in addition to our intense rehearsal schedule. Everyone is worried about getting worn out from it, especially since at the end of the week we are leaving Minneapolis and traveling to West Lafayette, IN, for another tech for The Spy. I’m anxious to actually start touring, though. It will also be our first ride on the bus, which should be really fun, at least until the initial effect of feeling like rockstars wears off and gives way to “gee I’d really like to sleep in a real bed.”


December 11, 2008

TOUR STOP 1: Minneapolis

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:34 pm

Minneapolis (or “Minnennapolis” as our flight attendant said, over and over), is not really a “tour stop” per se, but where we will be spending two months rehearsing and opening Henry V, before setting out on the real heavy touring. It is home to several of our cast members, as part of the co-production with the Guthrie it was agreed that many of the cast would be actors drawn from the Guthrie’s talented pool of actors and former students. Those of us not from Minneapolis, or who have not spent time studying or working at the Guthrie, have lived in terror for at least a month at the very thought of suffering through the infamous winter weather.

Although we arrived in a snowstorm (which resulted in our plane aborting landing several seconds before touching down), I think we are all pretty much agreed that it’s not as bad as we thought. I don’t think you can put a limit on the extent of frozen horrors we expected, so I guess it should be no surprise that the reality is not as bad as the city’s reputation would suggest. Below is a view from the back of our 3-vehicle caravan bringing the company from the airport to the apartments.

Temperatures have been regularly in the single-digits in the mornings and evenings, and yet the four-block walk from our apartments to the theatre doesn’t feel any different than an average winter walk in New York. Today on my morning walk I was considering how this is possible. First of all, I have found the main point is that we are taking the cold very seriously. Before I get in my elevator, I have on warm clothing, a fleece vest, leather-and-wool show jacket, scarf, hat, and leather gloves, and I think this warms me up before I step outside. I decided this morning that it takes me longer to put on all my outer layers than to actually get dressed in my basic clothes. I also think the walk is too short to get really bothered by the cold. There are only two streets to cross, so there’s not much time standing still, letting the cold sink in. Also, there aren’t many large buildings along the way, which I think cuts down on the wind, and allows more direct sunlight to warm the path, than one would encounter on the same walk in New York.

The apartments are pretty amazing. The building is an old glass factory which has been converted into stylish industrial-inspired lofts with stainless kitchen appliances and lamps and things. I think the well-designed furnishings set these apartments above any other company housing I’ve seen. It looks like something out of an interior design magazine, instead of a pile of hand-me-down furniture donated by friends of the theatre. Or maybe they are, but it’s very clear, in all regards, the Guthrie has friends with very deep pockets!

On to the theatre itself. The building is only a couple years old, and by one account I heard cost about $120 million. It surely must be the most expensive building dedicated solely to the production of theatre ever in the history of ever. If there’s a bigger one, I’d like to see it!

The best way I can describe the building and the way it functions is that it’s like if the Starship Enterprise were designed primarily for the production of classical theatre. It really gives the impression that at any moment it could blast off from its mooring on the bank of the Mississippi, and take off into space as a fully self-sustaining habitat and theatre company. Everything is designed to be sleek, beautiful and interesting, while still being completely functional. Many times when working in a theatre, one may ask, “Why the hell would anyone design a theatre like this?” I have not yet had any of those moments here. Everything from lamps in the restaurants in the building, to the hardwood floors in the costume shop, to the bathrooms in the rehearsal room hallway are absolutely perfect.

The facility is run with a level of organization that I imagine works wonderfully if one is doing a show at the Guthrie and nothing else. It’s been a little hard for me because we are a separate company in residence here, so we have separate needs and methods of communication for the majority of our people who are not at the Guthrie and linked into its computer network. In fact they don’t allow outside computers on the network, so I have chosen to have our fabulous intern, Meaghan (they give us an intern!!!) be master of the Guthrie computer and keep me on track to make sure I do all the little things that are expected of me to assimilate into the Guthrie collective. It’s been a lot of fun working here and enjoying this amazing building.


HENRY Rehearsal Week 1 Minneapolis

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:40 am

We have begun rehearsals for Henry V at the Guthrie. This is incredibly strange for all of us, because we just finished four weeks of rehearsal and a week of tech for The Spy, concluding with a very successful invited dress, just a few days ago. Now we’re back at square one, doing tablework for a different show, with a new director, vocal advisors, and other collaborators. We definitely benefit from the month that many of us have been working together, though. The core of the touring company — the cast, stage management, and Ian our staff rep director, have all been together now for a while and work well as a group. We also have had our documentary crew with us for the flight and the first few days, and the director, Sara, has become a familiar member of our team. She surely has hours of footage of us dying of hunger, sitting in traffic between the airport and our apartment building on the night we arrived. She’s leaving today and will rejoin us closer to opening, and for one of the tour stops and a trip on the bus with the cast.

Yesterday was the day from hell for me. It was a combination of relatively small things that just made the entire day miserable and never a dull moment of things just going well. It started when I woke up to a message that one of our actors had overnight gotten a terrible stomach bug and wouldn’t be able to be at rehearsal. This is not really my problem beyond a certain point, but the few communications it added to my morning made me almost late for my production meeting with the Guthrie tech staff, where I was asked tons of questions that really were better addressed to our production manager in New York (like how many crew we need for the load-in and the run). Then we had to spend the entire morning during rehearsal taping out these handholds that will be on the walls, so we can play with them and send the desired changes to the shop, which MUST MUST MUST build them immediately. It’s a long story, but it’s been a huge ordeal about these things. Add to that the fact that New York is an hour ahead of us, so our work day ends an hour and a half after the people in the office go home. Simultaneously, I’d been trying to schedule a production meeting among a bunch of people in Minneapolis, and a bunch of people in New York, on either Thursday or Friday, with many of the people involved flying between the two cities on Thursday or Friday, so which date we picked would affect who was in what city at the time. It’s happening today, and I will be glad to have it in the past. All that really needs to be said about this day is that after rehearsal, Nick and our awesome intern, Meaghan, were crawling on their hands and knees taping the floor while I finished the report, and both expressed relief that they were not me. I actually went to bed at 9:30, not because of tiredness, but because I knew nothing good would come from remaining awake. So I plugged my computer in at my bedside table with the volume cranked up so an email would wake me, and set my alarm for every hour until midnight so I could double-check for email, and then once again at 3AM. I didn’t think I’d get any restful sleep, but I actually slept quite well.

Other than that, rehearsal has been going well. The meet & greet was attended by probably a hundred people, as the Guthrie opens these events to their whole staff, from the artistic director to the maintenance people. It was nice to see such a community come together to give a new show a good sendoff (OK, there was free food, too, but still). The read-through was great, and the tablework and other exercises the cast has been doing are really fun to watch and listen to. Our vocal consultant, Andrew Wade, has lots of great ideas that are bringing a lot of good stuff out of the actors.

For stage management’s part, things are really going well. Having an intern is sooo nice. Meaghan is awesome, and there is something natural about the setup of PSM, ASM and PA/intern. It’s the natural order of things. Delegating just makes sense more than it ever does with just two people. Meaghan also has the advantage of having interned and ASMed at the Guthrie for a while, so she knows the way things work and does all the Guthrie paperwork for me, based on my report to The Acting Company. The Guthrie is kind of a Borg-like entity with all these interlocking systems that I’m sure work wonderfully, but the nature of our production makes it not very efficient to bend our paperwork to fit the needs of the collective. So Meaghan does that translation for me, with my input.

The floor is taped out, the props will be arriving from New York tomorrow, and we’re almost ready to begin blocking.


November 24, 2008

Weeks 2 and 3 and the Beginning of 4

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:39 pm

I’m a terrible blogger. See I’m PSMing this tour, which is preventing me from blogging about PSMing this tour. And we’re working a lot of straight 6-hour days, which doesn’t give me a meal break to spend those ten minutes writing a blog post like a real lunch break would.

But enough excuses, here’s what’s going on.

The show is coming together really well! At the end of Week 3, on Saturday, we scheduled a stumble-through. For those not in the business, a stumble-through is generally when you have staged the whole show, and determine that there’s a slight possibility that there might not be a complete train wreck if you tried to run a few scenes at a time. The goal is to get through the end of the show in however many hours you have to work with, with the understanding that an entire day might not be enough. Well our stumble-through on Saturday began, and first stopped when we reached intermission. People called for “line” occasionally, and once or twice there was a slight delay in a scene change when an actor forgot they were responsible for taking a stool or table off with them (which they had only learned at the end of the previous day), but we did the show in almost real time. I have seen many bona-fide run-throughs that were more stumbly than our stumble-through.

I was really proud of our cast. They had clearly done their homework, and came in with lines word-perfect that had never been up until that point, and mastered their scene change assignments overnight. They are a really great company, and very generous with each other — always working off in a corner on some physical business, or drilling each other on lines in the hallway. I think spending WAY too much time with them in the middle of nowhere is going to be a lot of fun!

This week is a little stressful because it’s our last week in the rehearsal room, and things are starting to get serious. Our company manager comes in with “greenies” which is a list comparing two hotels in a given city that we have to choose from. The ones we’re currently getting relate to our stop in Indiana in February. I am hammering out the tech schedule with the production manager, as well as juggling the requirements of photo and video shoots and invited dress rehearsals. We don’t actually perform The Spy here until late April. We will do our invited dress and then fly out to Minneapolis to begin rehearsing Henry V. So it’s also kind of a bittersweet time because we’re having a good time with the show and starting to realize that there’s a whole other show we still have to rehearse, and The Spy is actually the minority of the performances we’ll be doing on the tour. It feels like such an accomplishment to get the show up, but it’s just a relatively small part of our job.

The main thing you missed in Week 2 and 3 of rehearsal was costume fittings. At one point during that period I said on my Facebook status that, with apologies to my friends who do wardrobe, I believe costume fittings exist to make me miserable. They really are the stage manager’s worst nightmare. It’s hard enough to schedule rehearsals, now all of a sudden the costume designer wants to take someone (always the person hardest to spare at that moment) not only out of rehearsal, but usually to send them to some costume shop that is rarely in the same neighborhood as the rehearsal space. Figuring out how to get everyone to the necessary fittings in a timely manner, and without disrupting what the director wants to rehearse, and taking into account that the rehearsal or the fitting could take less or more time than expected, is probably one of the hardest activities a stage manager ever has to do. For the most part it’s over, although we do have some final wig fittings to work in on Saturday. I have a hunch how I could make that work, but John (the director) may have a reason not to want to do it that way. We’ve had a very good collaboration with scheduling, which I always appreciate.

Today our playwright, Jeff Hatcher, returned from Minneapolis to visit us again. I can’t remember exactly when he left but it’s probably been at least two weeks since he’s been in rehearsal, so a whole show has sprung up while he was gone! He seemed very pleased to see how things are coming along. It must be quite the change for him to go from seeing his work read off the page by actors struggling to remember their new blocking, to coming back and seeing a show almost ready to be put in front of an audience.

We’ve had increasing visits from designers, our fight director and vocal coach. It’s always nice to have other collaborators in the room.

Stay tuned for more excitement as we approach tech!


November 4, 2008

Recommended Reading

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 6:12 pm

Are you SO curious to know what it’s like to be a stage manager on The Acting Company’s 2008-2009 tour that reading one blog about it isn’t enough?  Well then you need to head over to Nick Tochelli’s Blog! Nick is my ASM, and he’s recently started his own blog just for the tour.  He has some interesting time and temperature widgets which don’t do much of anything while we’re in New York, but once we’re on the road they’ll illustrate how much we are freezing our asses off in Minneapolis relative to if we were sitting comfortably at home.   I’m sure as things progress I’ll be linking to some of his posts to further illuminate stuff that I write about.


October 27, 2008

OK the Job…

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:19 am

As I wrote in this teaser post, I am starting a new job.  I think now is a good time to tell you what it is.

I’m going to be the Production Stage Manager for The Acting Company’s 2009 tour.  In a very brief history of The Acting Company, they have been producing classical theatre and new works for 36 years, and every year they do a tour, bringing classic plays and educational workshops all over the country.  In 2003 they were given a Tony Award Honor.  Much more information is available at their website, linked above. 

The tour this year is Shakespeare’s Henry V, and a new play called The Spy, based on a novel from 1821 which takes place during the American Revolution.   The shows will be performed in rep by a cast of 12.  

The touring company will consist of the 12 actors, as well as the company manager and the staff rep director, who basically functions as the resident director of the company, meaning I don’t have the responsibility for the artistic integrity of the show.  These 14 folks will be traveling on the cast bus.  On the crew bus will be me, Nick, the tech director, lighting, sound, props and wardrobe supervisors.  We’ll be living on the bus part of the time, which I expect will be kind of annoying and kind of like being a rockstar.  The cast will be staying in hotels.  

There’s also going to be a shortened school version of Henry V, which will be performed out of a trunk that travels under the cast bus.  Occasionally the trucks and the crew bus will leave town to head to the next city while Nick and the cast stay behind to perform the smaller show for students, followed by workshops.  This sounds kind of fun.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever get the opportunity to do one of these performances.

Budding stage managers always want to know how to get jobs, so I’ll tell my little story about this one.  It’s pretty standard for the business.  Back in July, I was contacted about the show by Bill Fennelly, who was the director of Frankenstein last year, and had just taken a new position as Associate Producing Artistic Director of The Acting Company.  When they were looking for a PSM for the tour he sent out a brief summary of the job to me and some other people (via Facebook of all things) asking if anybody was interested.   I was out of town doing summer stock at the time, and not coming home anytime soon, but I called him and he told me what he knew about it.  It was hard for me to consider touring when I was already away from home, but the job fit some of the experience I’m looking for in my career.  We touched base about once a week for the rest of the summer, and a couple days after I got home I met with the production manager, who gave me a more detailed picture of how the tour would operate.  I liked what I heard, but since my suitcase wasn’t even unpacked, I still wanted a little more time to think about it.  A short time after that meeting, I met with the artistic director, who gave me the A-OK, and I accepted the job.

The moral of the story is, of course, you usually have to know someone.  The selection of a stage manager is such an important decision in a production that few people want to take a chance on someone who they haven’t personally worked with before.

On the bright side, my ASM got the job by submitting a resume in response to a job listing, I’m not sure where exactly they listed it.  Basically I couldn’t get any of my colleagues to do it, so I was ready to open it up to the world, confident that there’s somebody great out there that I just haven’t met yet.  The three guys I interviewed all had no prior history with the company and were selected for interviews just based on submitting their resume.  So there is an chance to get your foot in the door with new people, you just have to get lucky and hope the PSM’s friends all have better things to do!

As we will be all of over the country and doing a lot of one-nighters, this presents a perfect opportunity for some serious blogging, so stay tuned to the category “Tour Mini-Blog” to come along on the journey.

Also watch the sidebar, I’m experimenting with using Flickr to quickly take photos with my iPhone and upload them instantly to the interwebs, creating a real-time “KP’s-Eye-View” photostream of where I am and the interesting, or interestingly mundane, things I see.  Once I get some time with it, I’ll do a technical post about the apps I’m using and stuff.


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