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January 27, 2011

Getting Out of Town

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:05 pm

Today is suitcase-packin’ day. I imagine that holds true for many of my traveling companions as well.

We had our final performance of Romeo and Juliet here at the Guthrie (we did an 8-show week of it, Friday thru Thursday). This morning we had a student matinee, and now that we are mercifully are done with brush-up rehearsals, we were able to do the show and go home! I tried not to celebrate that fact too much during the show, as the crew is busily changing over from R&J to Comedy of Errors today and tomorrow. The R&J set will be piled up again upstage, and last I heard the plan was to have the truck come in around 2:00 on Sunday and the set would be loaded during the evening performance of Comedy, so that we don’t have to load both sets at the end of the night. The Comedy set has been hanging around in the wings and upstage, mostly intact. Meaghan and I have been using the tower that’s stored in our corner as a coat rack and I’ve made the counterweight for said tower into my computer desk on numerous occasions. I made a brief attempt to lie down on the pile of Comedy flooring between shows last weekend, but it was rather uncomfortable. But now it’s time for it to go back to work. The R&J set is far less useful in its storage position.

Meaghan and I will go in at an earlier but still reasonable hour for tomorrow night’s show. Well Meaghan will go in early to check spike marks, props and safety stuff — I will go in a little later mostly out of sympathy, and to do my usual load-in job, which I have given the very honest name of “That Looks Like Ass / That Looks Dangerous,” because all I do is walk around the theatre looking out for anything that fits either of those criteria. I even found one this morning, when doing my pre-R&J ritual of walking up the balcony stairs and down the escape stairs just before opening the house. I’m mostly looking for tools, actors’ belongings, or anything that might have been left behind on the stairs, but in this case I found the escape stairs unusually dark, and discovered that the ancient half-dead ropelight running up the railing had completely given up the ghost, and it was replaced during half hour.

Now I’m at home, and have been tidying up my apartment in preparation for our departure. We have a special treat this year — we’re leaving on Monday morning like the actors, instead of Sunday night right after load-out, because we have a short drive to Brainerd and then a day off (where we wouldn’t have a hotel room until Monday night). So we get an extra day in our nice apartments instead of a night sleeping on the bus, and can begin our first load-in of the spring tour like civilized people who have showered.

When a time such as this comes after a long sit-down, a couple days in advance I move my suitcase out of whatever dark corner it’s been living in and start putting things away in it, to get a first taste of what will fit and what may not. I’ve already put away some of the clothes that I know I won’t wear again (some that I haven’t worn at all since we got here two months ago, because they’re not climate-appropriate), and I’m making a list in OmniFocus of things I can’t pack yet as I think of them (especially the ones that are less obvious, like my supplies in the laundry room).

I wasn’t sure if I’d have enough unnecessary stuff accumulated that I should mail a package home. As it turns out, it seems unnecessary. I only have a few things, which can probably go in my suitcase without causing a huge pain, or could live on my shelf in the workbox (I got my shelf back today now that I banished the unused company manager printer to a spare road box).

So my preparations are done for the day. I’m going to spend part of the time between now and tomorrow night’s show finishing typing the rest of the cues in my Comedy calling script (I did the first 13 shows with only the most complicated sequences typed out, and the rest still handwritten), and creating the alternate first and last pages to be used in the venues where we don’t use a house curtain (which may start with Brainerd).

R&J was very easy to get back into after 2 months away, since it all came flooding back from 100-something prior performances. It will be interesting to see how I feel about Comedy after a week off. I think putting the cues in the script will serve as a good reminder. And honestly aside from five very difficult minutes, it’s incredibly simple to call.


December 25, 2010

Why it’s Christmas Day, sir!

I call this: computers,gaming,On the Road Again,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:26 am

Tis Christmas morning. I have an 11AM (my time) video conference scheduled with my parents for the opening of gifts and exchanging of Christmas wishes. As crazy as that sounds, it actually works quite well. This will be our third consecutive year celebrating in this way. There are maybe a half-dozen presents sitting on my couch right now, the remnants of a large package that arrived at the Guthrie earlier in the week. Some of the contents were meant to be shared, like food, and a cute, and rather beautiful ornament with a palm tree and flamingo that my mom sent so we would have something warm to look at during the blizzard. So that stuff has been in the rehearsal room pretty much all week.

There are a few wrapped gifts that I have no idea about, and those are waiting for this morning. One of them is totally a portable pack of tissues. I’m pretty good at telling my mom’s traditional stocking stuffers just by weight and feel, so I try to pick them up very lightly so as not to give it away. But I grabbed the tissues a little too forcefully and spoiled the surprise. I also got one for Thanksgiving/Christmas, which is the other holiday the Parlato clan celebrates on the Acting Company schedule, in which there is a tree, and presents, and family members all see each other face-to-face and have a big dinner together. The only difference is we celebrate it on Thanksgiving because that’s when I’m in town. That’s when the real presents are exchanged.

Last year my big gift was a super-warm coat from Eddie Bauer. It’s still awesome. I have yet to be cold this year. This year I couldn’t really figure out what I wanted until a few days before, when I decided to get something not very exciting, not something I can take on the road, but practical: a 2TB hard drive and enclosure for my desk at home. I was doing a little too much juggling of files between all my hard drives (aside from my Time Machine drive, which is half a terabyte, all the others are either 160 or 320GB) and it was starting to get dangerous in terms of losing track of data and deleting something. So now I have a place that can hold everything, and it’s also at a different location (usually) than my primary drives, so it’s safe against theft or other destruction. Of course I got an enclosure that’s very Mac-like and attractive. It has USB, FW400 & 800, and SATA. The HD is from Western Digital, which is my go-to brand in the superstitious art of deciding who to trust with your data (Fujitsu is the other brand I’ll buy if I have to, and in fact is what my Time Machine drive is). I only had a week to play with it and dump all my files onto it before leaving town, but so far it seems great.

For myself for Christmas, while ordering gifts for everybody else, I finally bought myself an account for Eve Online. I’ve gone through at least three 14-day trials trying to learn the damn game enough to where I could even decide if I liked it or not. I like the idea of a game that’s impossible to learn, but once you crack it open the possibilities become kind of limitless. The last trial I just finished convinced me that it was indeed fun, although there’s so much I have yet to learn, it’s really hard to tell long-term. The other thing it convinced me of is that it has really low bandwidth requirements, and at least in the small battles I’ve been involved in, can actually run in virtualization so well that you forget it’s not Boot Camp.

It seems like the perfect game for somebody on the road with questionable internet. If nothing else, you can log in for a few minutes a day to set your skills training, and still be progressing all day long. If I were home with a real computer, I don’t necessarily think I’d prefer it over Fallen Earth or Battleground Europe, but it seems to me like a game I can play without feeling like I’m fighting against my screen size, processor speed, lack of peripherals and bandwidth. Great FPS action is nice, but it requires all those things or else it totally sucks and you spend all your time pissed off that you got killed by lag or your connection dropped out just as you were supposed to do something really cool.

Also, despite my ranting about Parallels (I still think they’re greedy bastards), out of curiosity, when I started playing Eve pretty seriously a few weeks back, I tried it in Parallels 5 to compare it to Fusion. Perhaps not surprisingly, it ran a little better. I also really prefer Parallels’ UI, and the feature “modality” which shrinks your windows screen into a tiny semi-transparent floating window that you can keep an eye on and click things in. So having discovered a game I could actually play — and enjoy playing — without ever booting into Boot Camp, I decided that tipped the balance a bit, and I went back to using Parallels. After a few days of wonder at the miracle of virtualized gaming finally being playable, I took my $10 coupon that had been clogging my inbox, and bought Parallels 6 for $40, which honestly is at least close to reasonable. My beef with them is not that they charge for yearly upgrades, but that they charge more than $40. Out of principle I had refused to buy it at all, but honestly I installed Parallels 6 and it was so much better than Fusion that the experience of being able to fully play an MMO while not only booted into OS X, but with enough power left over to use OS X normally, with the MMO running in the background in full screen… well, it’s amazing. So I didn’t even do the whole trial of Parallels before I put the money down. If you’re interested, the upgrade price is $40 until the end of the year. And as I said in that link above, I needed to buy 8GB of RAM to make Parallels really run flawlessly, so that’s another requirement of getting this to work. It was a great investment, though.

Eve really wouldn’t have been worth buying except that it works so damn well virtually. It’s really low-maintenance tour gaming. So I guess you could say Parallels was the other part that made my Christmas gift possible, though I think of it more in terms of being a LORTmas gift. LORTmas is kind of like Chanukah, actually, in that it’s not celebrated only on one day. I celebrate LORTmas every Thursday at midnight for our two months’ time at the Guthrie, when that sweet, sweet LORT B salary drops into our bank accounts. As I interpret it, the point of LORTmas is that it’s a time when if you want something you don’t really have to think about it, you can just say, “Of course I can afford that, it’s LORTmas!” Which ends up being great fun because sometimes you say that about enough things that you lose track of how much extra money LORTmas actually creates, and you’re like, “Where did my rent money go?” But that’s all part of the LORTmas spirit.

EDIT: OK, here’s the ornament:

I hope you’re all enjoying the holidays! Back to work for us tomorrow!


December 12, 2010

SNOMFG: The Minneapolis Blizzard of 2010

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:09 pm

We found out Friday during rehearsal that there was a storm a-comin’. Some people thought it would be the storm of the decade. Some people were like, “it’s Minneapolis, they’re not afraid of snow.” We devised our rehearsal schedule for Saturday in such a way that if the people who weren’t staying within walking distance of the Guthrie got snowed in, we wouldn’t be totally screwed. Then we went to bed.

The storm began around midnight Saturday. Before I left the house at about 8:30AM, I looked out the window and could barely see the Guthrie. I live about two diagonal blocks away.

Out the Window

Here’s my typical view:

Here’s the view on Saturday morning (the camera is panned a little more to the right):

When I left the house there seemed to be about 6-8″ already on the ground. We began our rehearsal day, occasionally peeking out the window (we keep the blinds down usually) to see that our usual view of the Mississippi and the factories across the river was a view of total whiteness. You couldn’t see the river at all. One of the bridges was the faintest shadow. Then we decided this needed to be seen from the Endless Bridge (which I spoke about a bit at the end of my last post).

The Endless Bridge

On our lunch, I walked out to the end of the bridge.

Here’s a picture of me in 2008, also during a snowstorm apparently.

Note that you can see the snow-covered river, the bridge, and buildings on the other side.

Here’s the view on Saturday. I didn’t go outside because the snow was about a foot high in front of the door, so I had to take a picture out the blue window. The bench in the foreground is the one I’m standing against in the above picture. The whiteish spots are the reflections of the other windows on the bridge.

We finished rehearsal at 3:30, with the snow forecasted to continue until midnight. By the time we left rehearsal the snow was over a foot. I walked home through sidewalks completely covered in a foot of soft snow, that had had barely any covering them when I walked them in the morning. That was exhausting. Around the same time the city/county stopped bus service and recalled the plows from the roads. I think this is when people started to realize how screwed we were. I was just glad all our actors could get home.

This morning we woke up and had to make it back in for another 9:30 rehearsal, with the city covered in snow and temperatures now hovering around zero. Meaghan called me just as I was about to leave the house to report that her car was stuck in an unplowed driveway to the Guthrie’s parking garage. I joined her — thankfully she had a shovel in her car, and I cleared a neater path as she guided her car between the snowbanks.

One of our actors’ car was snowed in at home, but he couldn’t take public transportation as he did the day before, because bus service wasn’t resuming until 10AM. He eventually managed to get a cab, and was miraculously only about 15 minutes late.

After getting my morning workout shoveling the parking garage, we finally got to the rehearsal room, where our director told us about the Metrodome roof caving in overnight. I was staring right at it while shoveling snow, and didn’t notice. So before rehearsal I took a quick trip up to the 9th floor lobby, which provides a perfect view out its crazy yellow windows.

The Metrodome

Here it is last year, just before the final Vikings playoff game:

And today, as one of my actors described it, “Like a souffle that couldn’t.”

Also, there’s a crazy video of the inside as the roof came down:

All in all I believe it was recorded as 17″ of snow. The streets seem pretty clear, at least around here, but the sidewalks have taken all of the snow that was plowed off the street, and are still piled up several feet high on some blocks, especially at the corners. I will have to be more selective about which streets to walk down. Getting home today was a bit of a mountain-climbing adventure.

Towards the end of rehearsal today I got creative with my water bottle, which seemed to sum up what this weekend has been like:


November 11, 2010

AT&T vs. Sucky Hotel Internet

I call this: phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 12:46 am

OK, AT&T. You win. The Holiday Inn Express in Palm Springs, the Hilton in Northridge, the Sandman Inn in Santa Barbara, the Hilton Suites in Phoenix, and the Hotel Arizona in Tucson have finally broken me. Take your $10, and be happy.

My iPhone provides so much more of a reliable internet connection than the wifi at any of these establishments, that I have exceeded my 2GB data allowance for the month for the first time since giving up the unlimited plan.

I could have made it, I think. I was on day 28 of my month. If things had gone well, I might have just snuck in under the wire. But trying to stream TV shows on my night off sent me over the edge. It’s physically impossible. And it’s really pathetic that I could connect with a freaking phone and watch shows without interruption. On AT&T, no less! So I decided that the internet this month has been so sucky that I deserve to be able to watch a show I want to see on my night off, and I don’t care if I have to pay ten bucks to do it.

This is why I tolerate AT&T’s tethering plan. I know what happens when you tour. You get screwed over by every hotel you enter — blocking ports (this one blocks my favorite MMO, and AIM, of all things, and God knows what else), terrible bandwidth, and things that load so slow that whatever you’re trying to do just plain times out, even if that thing you’re trying to do is check your email. And then there’s the Herberger Theater, which blocks email ports. There are times when you are so frustrated by lack of bandwidth that paying $10 per GB for a connection that works and is yours alone is actually worth it. I knew this day would come, and I am not upset at AT&T. I kind of wish I hadn’t hit this limit on something so frivolous like a 500MB TV episode, when I have plenty of other TV shows on an external hard drive, but it was more about expressing my freedom to do whatever the hell I feel like on the internet, when I want to.

So there. Are you happy now, AT&T? I’ll be giving you your 10 bucks, and I said something nice about you. Mark this day on your calendar.


November 8, 2010

Life Lessons for the Road

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:12 pm

When you’ve just gotten into a city, and are determining what time you need to wake up the next day, don’t make any assumptions until you know how the water pressure is at the hotel.

If it’s normal, your normal time will be OK.
If it sucks, you will need more time.
And if it’s awesome, you will probably want more time.


November 6, 2010

Phoenix – Round 2

I call this: On the Road Again,phones,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:23 am

We’ve spent this week in Phoenix, AZ, where we spent a week two years ago with Henry V, playing at the Herberger Theatre, presented by Arizona Theatre Company (who will also welcome us to their other venue in Tucson next week).

One of the highlights of the Henry tour, it’s once again great to be here with Romeo and Juliet. Here’s our set, as seen from the spot booth.

Last night was our official opening here. We had done three morning shows for school groups, performing for thousands of students, but last night was the first show open to the general public. The artistic director of ATC, David Ira Goldstein, welcomed us and introduced himself to everyone before the show, and then provided champagne and conversation in the greenroom afterwards. Here’s a picture of him with the cast and crew (I’m in the middle in the green shirt).

It’s always nice to get such a warm welcome and personal interaction with the presenters who have brought us in.

Here’s a shot of our upstage crossover, looking from stage right to stage left. There’s so much room that we have a full-length black traveler between the back of the set and the crossover, with just a little hole in the middle for entrances within the set. This allows the crossover to be fairly brightly lit for quickchanges and general hanging out. You can see the line of chairs set up and draped with costumes. Behind them are the workboxes for props and carpentry, easily accessible.

And finally as a bonus, I have a new iPhone wallpaper. The booth that I call from is also the audio booth, and the console sits right next to me (unmanned, since all the show sound is run from our console backstage). The venue’s console is a PM1D, which is very pretty when it’s lit up in the dark. I found it made a very nice wallpaper. Click on the thumbnail to see it full size (it’s big enough for the iPhone 4’s retina display). Enjoy, use, steal, but please give me credit if you share it!


November 1, 2010

Wheels Across the West

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:28 pm

At our first venue for the big show, on the campus of Cal State Northridge, a bunch of us on the crew decided we needed a better way to get around in sunny California. As foreshadowed in this post, we sought out portable transportation to make life on the road a little easier and more fun.

Tim bought a skateboard off a college kid, Meaghan and I ordered Razor scooters on Amazon, and Mariela picked one up from Target. Daniel was seeking out a used bike on Craigslist, but after some failed attempts, is finally getting one today, we hope.

I’ve been making good use of my scooter, running errands farther away than I would really want to venture walking.

Our scooter / skateboard parking at the Granada in Santa Barbara:

The Granada also has a sign insisting that if you block in somebody else’s vehicle you have to inform them. So this is me informing Tim. He didn’t take it well.

At night we had a production meeting at a seaside restaurant. After dinner we walked along the docks, where we sadly found a sign prohibiting skating, scooting, biking and any other forms of fun.

Our skating / scooting crew:

Me (PSM), Meaghan (ASM), Tim (Sound), Mariela (Wardrobe)


October 30, 2010

Travel Day

I call this: On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 11:58 pm

Today was our only long drive of the fall leg of the tour: Santa Barbara to Phoenix. It’s about eight hours of driving. I believe I’ve mentioned that we don’t have our “rockstar” buses on this leg. Because the cities are for the most part close together, the schedule contains no back-to-back one-nighters, and the majority of the schedule is sit-down weeks in Phoenix and Tucson, it was impractical to rent the usual two entertainer coaches. Instead we have a single coach bus, where cast, crew and staff travel together by day.

Today’s journey is the first long trip I’ve taken with the cast. The crew bus rarely travels by day for very long. We did it once last year as part of a two-day drive, and it was boring as hell. The cast has stricter regulations about breaks and such, which can sometimes be frustrating, but it definitely is nice to stretch your legs. You also get to get out and actually experience the places you drive through.

Most of our day was spent driving through completely empty desert. At one point we stopped at an unmanned rest stop at sunset. Here are some pics.


I was very worried about how we would pass the 8 hours without satellite TV, power outlets, refrigerator, or our bunks, but it was better than I thought. I listened to music and looked out the window for the first two hours, slept for the next two hours, which took us to lunch at a strip mall area in Indio, CA. When we got back on the bus we watched the movie Hook. We don’t have TV, but the bus does have small screens and a DVD player, at least. The movie ended just as it was getting dark and the dim glowing interior lights were turned on. I was lucky that I had no one in the row behind me, so I could recline my seat way back and curl up with my pillow into a pretty comfortable position.

We traveled through a little more desert in the dark, and then hit the outskirts of the Phoenix area, which seemed to wake people up a bit. We arrived at our hotel around 7PM, so there was still time to grab a nice dinner and go exploring. The crew went out in search of margaritas, which after much walking and many closed restaurants in the downtown area, we found at a quiet place called Mi Patio.

We actually get a day off here, our only one (for the crew) on this leg of the tour. Yippee!


October 27, 2010

Crew Transport

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 6:54 pm

Being in sunny California, on a nice sunny college campus (Cal State Northridge), we have collectively decided we need a better way to get around.

Tim, our sound supervisor, wanted to buy a skateboard. He called a bunch of local people on Craigslist, to no avail (since we don’t have transportation to meet anyone). So he sat on campus with a sign saying “Need skateboard, will pay $$” and two $20 bills clipped to it. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes later, he had a skateboard.

Meanwhile, Meaghan and I have decided that we want Razor scooters. One of the guys on the crew at the Guthrie had one last year, and it was cool. We were trying to get to a sporting goods store or a toy store to find one, but suddenly realized the wonders of Amazon Prime. So within about 10 minutes we had ordered two scooters (a red one for me and a purple one for Meaghan) and had them overnighted to our next hotel in Santa Barbara. We’re both very excited to play with our new toys on Friday!

Load in is going well. The crew here is very nice. The beautiful weather and relaxing campus atmosphere has definitely made a potentially stressful day more relaxing. I still think it will most likely be a 20-hour day, but am hoping for the best!


October 26, 2010

California

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:59 pm

We arrived last night in Palm Springs, CA. We knew right away that we were someplace nice because the airport had an outdoor plaza separating the gates from the baggage claim. For this group of mostly New Yorkers and Minnesotans, such architecture was completely inconceivable.

Here we are at LaGuardia, waiting for our first trip as a company.

This morning we had our first tour performance, of our 1-hour trunk show of Romeo and Juliet. This is done out of costume, with basic props. For a brief primer on how this works, this post is a good introduction (bear in mind it refers to last year’s tour). Because we don’t have any performances of the big show here, the truck has gone on to Northridge from New York. So the 1-hour trunk had to go on the plane as checked baggage. The trunk is huge and weighs about 100 pounds. We were very concerned about it. We also almost missed our connecting flight, and everyone’s biggest concern was the 1-hour trunk making it onto the plane, nevermind our own luggage. But my seat was perfectly positioned to confirm the good news:

The most concerning thing about it is that due to the fact that we’re doing the actual show fights in the 1-hour this year, we need to use the show weapons. So the stakes for losing or damaging the 1-hour trunk are far greater than they would be otherwise. The cane swords used by Mercutio and Tybalt are handmade for this production and essentially irreplaceable. The other swords would take some time to get duplicates of. We’re hoping to have duplicates of the fighting swords made before the spring tour, but for now we just have to be really careful with the show swords.

We’re performing two back-to-back performances of the 1-hour at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, CA. This theatre is awesome, and I was immediately sad that we won’t be doing the big show here. This would be a wonderful venue to play.

The green room is by far the greatest I’ve seen. Here are some pictures:

After being slain, our dead characters hang out in the greenroom watching the show on the big screen:

There’s also an enclosed patio (with a grill!) just off the greenroom, where John, Stephen, Jonathan, Whitney and Ben relax between our back-to-back performances.

There’s even a lady on staff who serves drinks and provides other food services. Not only an amazing greenroom, but someone to serve you! Crazy!

As is the custom for the 1-hour, Meaghan is in charge and I’m here to help set up props and wrangle actors. Since this is a big venue, it’s very good that I’m able to be here, as the distance between where she’s calling from and the stage is quite large, and the setup and turnaround time between the shows is short.

Everyone was very happy to find such a nice place for our first shows out of New York. The student audiences seemed to enjoy themselves. The talkbacks were brief but the questions were very good. The 1-hour is always kind of a weird thing, but so far it seems to be a good experience for all of us, and I’m glad for the new people that it’s starting out this way. People are prepared for the fact that it can be performed in less-than-ideal conditions, but it’s nice to start at pretty much a perfect venue.


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