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June 17, 2008

A Quick Observation on Technology

I call this: mac — Posted by KP @ 6:10 am

As I pack my bag for a day trip to Maine, I thought of something. My car. Here is my car of the moment, a ’08 Chevy Aveo, which I love despite the fact that it’s got absolutely manual everything. In past years my cars have had CD players, sunroofs, power locks and windows, and that little remote to lock and unlock the car. But none of them made me as happy as the little baby blue ’05 Aveo I had my first year at Reagle.

The Aveo comes with a key. That’s it. You get a key. You want in, use a key. You want to lock it, close the door and use the key, because obviously Enterprise doesn’t want to come picking you up when you lock your keys inside, so it’s very difficult to do that.

So to cut to the chase, I’m packing for the day. I’ve been driven to Ogunquit before, but never done the drive myself, so I was going to use the GPS on my phone (AT&T Tilt, for the next however-many-days until the 3G iPhone comes out). But I thought of how long I’ll be gone and worried that an hour and a half of GPS could kill my battery before the end of the day. If only I had a phone charger in the car. My previous few rental cars, which were of a higher class, had AC outlets in the car, which was awesome. The Aveo has a cigarette lighter. No way I’m buying a car charger for a phone I intend to use for less than a month, when I don’t even own a car to begin with. I really don’t understand why any car would still feature a cigarette lighter and not an AC outlet these days. Less people smoke, more people need gadgets in their cars. Why, Chevy, why?

I said to myself, “It’s 2008, why do I need to power my phone off the cigarette lighter?” Then I realized it’s 2008 and to get the window open I need to contort my arm and roll a little crank down. To open the door for a passenger I need to unbuckle myself and launch myself across the car to pull up the lock. Why should I be upset that I can’t plug in my phone? But then I packed the other gadget I was bringing — my iPod. For whatever reason, this car has a crank to roll down the window, no CD player, no tape deck or anything that could be considered a “feature” other than four wheels and an engine, but has a jack in its bare-bones radio for an iPod. Sure it’s for whatever audio device you choose to plug in, but let’s be honest, it wasn’t added to the design specs for an iRiver whatever, it’s for an iPod. Thus proving that the iPod is a more culturally important invention than apparently power windows, doors, alternating current and the compact disc.


June 19, 2007

Going home… wait, what?

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:51 am

I’m one of those people who will be on tour in a city for a week and refer to the hotel room as “home.” So it doesn’t really surprise me that when I slept in my own bed last night I felt like I was in a hotel room, and I’m now looking forward to going “home” to the Hardy Apartments in Waltham. I love my nice soft mattress and my nice soft sheets and my nice soft pillows, but I know that creaky twin mattress at the Hardy is where I’m supposed to be. In fact I just realized last night that I’m much more productive at Reagle mostly because it’s usually more comfortable to get out of bed than to stay in it.

So I’m looking forward to getting back to Waltham, mostly because that’s where a lot of my stuff is and I’m used to it. Plus it’s hot and I want to throw my heavy backpack in the trunk of my car and crank the A/C instead of standing on a hot train platform for 15 minutes, only to remain cramped in a subway car for another 45 minutes, only to walk up and down steep hills with my heavy backpack and up five flights of stairs. I would never want to live anywhere else but New York, but being in the suburbs, especially in the summer, has its advantages.


I took this photo as we left, and decided to mess around with my new version of Photoshop on a fake macro effect that I’ve been wanting to try for a while. I took the picture and then between New York and New Haven, worked on it using tips I found here and here. I probably spent about half that time on the sky. I have learned that suspension bridges are not your friend when you need to alter the sky behind them.

My night at Phantom was interesting. I walked in to a usual night of chaos: too many people out, not enough understudies. This is a fairly regular occurrence, and after nearly 20 years the process of covering the show is routine. This one was almost really messy, though. Since I was present for no other reason than to get my photo taken, I was placed in charge of stage-managing the photo shoot with the various departments. Because of the tight deadline due to the loss of our original photos, we needed to turn the captions in to Playbill by the end of the next day. I took it upon myself (because I’m crazy?) to see that it was done. Again, a little computer skill goes a long way, as does the convenience of an all-Mac office. We had to have a way to get a copy of the photos printed in order to do the captions. They had a card reader, we had a Mac. We plugged it in, grabbed one photo from each group and printed them.

With the photos in hand, I brought them around to the various departments to get names and spellings for each person, and then typed them up. This took the entire first act. I literally was stapling the final caption sheet to the back of the last photo as the chandelier was falling. So how to get them to Playbill in time? I had a hunch, and asked them where the office was. 7th Ave. between 38th & 39th. That was pretty much what I was hoping to hear. It seemed the easiest way to make sure the material was delivered was for me to drop it off personally on my way to Penn Station. That was very easy, and I got a Playbill pen for my trouble.

Anyway, with my work done, I watched the second act from the sound board. I was mostly interested in seeing the new pyro effects, which have finally gone into the show after some planning. I guess there’s a new law which has banned the effects originally used in the show (something to do with the fuses). I had been warned for months it would be lame. It wasn’t quite as lame as I was expecting, but it’s definitely not as good. All I can say is that I kept my eyes open for the flames at the end of the mausoleum scene and I could still see when the lights came up. And apparently it smells worse, but I was too far away to tell. It’s sad that future audiences will lose that part of the Phantom experience. So many people say, “I was in the back row and I could feel the heat on my face!” It was never that big of a deal for me, but I hate to see any part of the original show be lost.

It will be nice to get back to Singin’ in the Rain after clearing my head a bit by spending a day with Phantom.


June 18, 2007

My Weekend Vacation

I call this: summer stock — Posted by KP @ 11:12 am

Somewhat against my will, I’m spending my 36 hours off taking a little vacation. I’ve never been a fan of doing anything crazy on my days off at Reagle. I’m usually just catching up on basic things like sleep, laundry, groceries, and general relaxation. So today it’s Monday, and I don’t have to be back at work until Wednesday night’s show. And I’m currently on a train to… New York. Not at all where I would be going were I going somewhere. A lot of our New York-based actors go home on the days off, because they tend to have kids or spouses or some compelling reason to be there. I’m going to get my picture taken.

This is the stupidest reason I have ever had to do anything. On April 25 — I say again April 25, the photos were taken of the Phantom company for the Playbill Broadway Yearbook. This past Friday, I was at our opening night afterparty at a Waltham restaurant appropriately named Margaritas, just being served my margarita, when I received a phone call shortly before midnight. This was June 15. Apparently “due to a corrupted disk” they have lost the photos for the yearbook. I haven’t been able to get any more details about who lost them or when or how, or if it’s just Phantom or every show, or something in between. All I know is that in 52 days, somebody managed not to make a reliable backup of photos intended for publication.

The bottom line is that I was very pleased that the photos were originally taken while I was in town and available (as opposed to the first edition of the yearbook when I managed not to be in the book at all, despite having worked on three or four shows, and spent the entire year answering people’s questions of, “How come I don’t see any pictures of you in the yearbook?”). It was also a nice intimate photo of the Phantom stage management team, as opposed to the large group photos we’ve had in the past (see my profile pic for example). I was looking forward to seeing how it came out, and had made inquiries about getting a digital copy. So I was rather not-happy when I got this phone call telling me the pictures were lost and had to be retaken. The one good thing is that they happened to reschedule picture day for a Monday. At first I wasn’t intending to spend my weekend and a bunch of money dragging myself to New York just to get a picture taken. But I was so furious about the whole thing the more I thought about it overnight, I decided the money was replaceable, and if I threw enough money at it, I could make it a rather relaxing couple days off instead of a hassle. And I’d get to see my friends and sleep in my own bed, and most importantly, be in the picture for posterity and not have to be bitter about it the rest of my life.

I thought about driving, but I hate driving, and I didn’t feel comfortable parking the rental car in my neighborhood, and certainly wasn’t driving through midtown. I thought about the bus, but the whole prospect of five to six hours each way on a bus was unbearable. So I went with the train. I took the cheapest trains each way, and the ones in the most reasonable hour of the day. I’ll arrive just in time to take the picture and depart in the late morning tomorrow, and should be back in Waltham around 3:30, with more than 24 hours left in my weekend. Not so bad, really, and it’s more interesting than what I’d be doing if I weren’t going anywhere.


May 28, 2007

Settling In

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 5:23 pm

My train actually arrived a few minutes early, and I have spent the day settling into my apartment. This year we’re back at the Hardy Apartments, longtime home of the Reagle Players’ out-of-town artists. The building used to be a grad student dorm for Bentley College, but was sold to the city of Waltham two years ago, and due to complications from that, was not used by Reagle last year. We spent the first month of last season at the Holiday Inn Express, before moving into a brand-spanking-new building owned by Bentley, which was quite nice. The washing machines could e-mail you when your laundry was done — need I say more? The story I got today is that the city has other plans for Hardy and this will be the last year it’s used by Reagle, and we’ll probably wind up back at the new Bentley dorms in the future. The Hardy isn’t swanky, but it’s such a part of the Reagle experience that last year everyone referred to the new building as “the new Hardy.” I’m sure the college has a name for it, but nobody ever bothered to find out.

My car this year is the Dodge Caliber, in sort of a dull gold color, which would not be my first choice of color if I were buying a car, but it’s growing on me, and will definitely make it easy to spot in a parking lot. It’s a nice car, the stereo even has an audio port for an iPod, which I’ve never had before. I still find using an iPod in a car to be more trouble than it’s worth most of the time, but it will definitely be useful. I’m just thrilled it has power locks and windows. I’m not much of a car person (usually I’ve never even heard of the model I wind up with), but I do get kind of attached to them.

Tomorrow is the first rehearsal. We’ll be at the studio down the street from the theatre until the weekend. My assistant Paul and I will be meeting at the theatre two hours before rehearsal to look over the props and figure out what we need to bring to the studio. I’m told the drops are already hung, but not much of the set is up because the stage is still needed for events at the high school. I’m anxious to see whatever’s there though.


All Aboard!

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:00 am

Help! I have too much legroom! First of all, the train is deserted. I guess nobody’s traveling at 7AM on a holiday. I think I mentioned before, I upgraded to business class, and as a rather talkative elderly woman just informed me, there are five people in the car. But the real problem is that these seats are great for someone who’s 6’6″, but being about a foot and a half shy of that, having to hunch across the distance between the seat and the tray table is giving me a back ache.

We just left New Haven, and I have the contact sheet in a state I’m happy with. I still haven’t gotten an actual contact sheet from the theatre, just a list of names and roles, but after doing six shows at Reagle, I have several hundred actors’ contact info and that allows me to get a significant portion done just by copying and pasting. It looks like this cast will have 39, with one female dancer still uncast. Twenty of those are people I already know, so this was a pretty quick process. Paul and I have become experts at going into the first rehearsal without any official contact info and distributing a finished contact sheet at the end of rehearsal. Because so many of the names are already filled in it should go quickly tomorrow, as half the cast will only have to verify their existing info and make updates as needed.

I also have updated my contacts on my computer in Entourage, and on my Treo. Here’s the way I set up my contacts for shows:
Company name = name of show, USUALLY. At Reagle, because there are many shows involved, I need to group everyone who works for the company. So the company name for everyone is “Reagle Players.” You might wonder why I don’t just use a Reagle category, and then make company the show. Well, I tried that at first, but as I have mentioned, I have everyone I’ve ever worked with in my phone, and I like to keep the categories for each show clean, so I can see just the people who are currently involved (this makes it useful when I need to call the whole company, for instance). So I have a Storage category where people go once we’re done working together for the moment. So having Reagle set up as the company allows me to still filter my contacts to all Reagle people, while using categories for something else.

Title = Role. Because I can’t use the company name for the name of the show at Reagle, I preface the Title field with the name of the show, so I can still sort by show. In the case of Singin’ in the Rain, the actor playing Don Lockwood has a title of “SITR – Don.” Ensemble are almost always broken down into singers and dancers (“SITR – Dancer”), and if/when they are assigned specialties those are added. For actors who have done multiple shows during my years at Reagle, I generally just erase over their old show/role, but if I have too much time on my hands, I may preserve the previous role in the note associated with the contact. It’s not really of much use, though. If I really needed to know I could dig out an old contact sheet. I also use the title field for production personnel, although I don’t usually bother with the show name since people tend to return for multiple productions.

Category=current show. So my Reagle category, as I said, is for permanent production staff, and creative team and cast for the current show only. In the middle of the season in the transitional period between one show and the next, I will form a temporary category for the upcoming show and then when the previous show closes, people not staying on go into the Storage category, and the new people come into the Reagle category.

So how do I organize it?
The reason I use Entourage is for its powerful rules feature, and address views. Basically I have a rule called “Reagle highlight” which I keep year-round, which identifies any incoming e-mail that is from someone in the Reagle category, or in which any of the other recipients are in the Reagle category (which covers most cases where I’m being contacted by someone I don’t know yet — setting up an interview with a reporter or something, usually someone else is CC’d on it). I wish one of the rule options was “if contact company is…” but it’s not. I have a pretty close to perfect rate of success with these rules, though. Once Entourage has identified an incoming e-mail with this rule, it assigns the e-mail to the category Reagle, which causes it to be highlighted in red. It also assigns it to the project Reagle, but I must confess I don’t take much advantage of the project feature in Entourage 2004, but if I ever do it’s there. Finally, the e-mail is moved to a separate folder called, appropriately enough, Reagle. In the off-season I remove this part of the rule and get rid of the folder and just have the e-mail go to my inbox, where I’ll still see it because it’s highlighted in red.

I also have a subfolder to the Reagle folder called Reports, which I re-use for most shows I do (at least as PSM). It looks for an outgoing message beginning with a subject line I currently use for reports (“SITR rehearsal report”, later “SITR performance report”) and saves it in that folder, so I can quickly review previous reports. I’ll leave the details of the reports to another post.

And finally, I like to highlight my sent messages in red with the Reagle category, so I have a rule that checks if the sender is me, and if any of the recipients are in the category Reagle, and marks that message with the category Reagle. This also winds up catching personal e-mails to those people, which is not necessary, but I don’t really mind it.

So that’s what I’ve been doing, and I’m as set up as I can be for that so far. I’m off to read the script again, now knowing who the cast will be.


May 27, 2007

Moving Day

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:02 pm

So tomorrow morning I depart bright and early on a 7AM train from Penn Station, off to start my summer at Reagle. It’s 10:50PM and I think I’m actually packed. I’m not sure how that happened, as I’ve been very busy with closing Back from the Front, and horribly procrastinating about getting my apartment in order and packing. Stay tuned to find out what really obvious thing I’ve forgotten.

My day tomorrow involves getting up around 4AM, maybe 4:30, leaving the house around 5:30, and getting on this 7:00 train. I’ll arrive at Rte 128 station outside Boston at 10:53 (so they say), where I will be picked up and driven to Waltham to the guest artist apartments, where I will find my car (I always feel like a game show contestant at this point — last year I won big, I had a Sebring for the first month, and then a Hundai Sonata, both great). Hopefully the apartments will be move-into-able when I get there, I might have to kill a few hours while the crew finishes up, but that’s OK because I have a few hours of shopping to do. Basic apartment things like toilet paper, soap, shampoo, etc. and some stage-management-y stuff like scissors and pencils and scotch tape, and probably a trip to the mall for things like black jeans. Why is it that nobody sells black jeans anymore? I haven’t been able to find them in a year or two, and the last time I had to order them online from the Gap. Now they don’t even have them online.

Well I’m going to bed now to get ready for the big day!


May 20, 2007

Packing

I call this: computers,gaming,mac,summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:58 pm

OK, I’m really going to do something productive now. I’m going to think about packing. My task is made a bit easier because I have a crate up at Reagle with a lot of my stuff in it. At the end of my first season there, I found I had accumulated a lot of stuff that there was no point bringing back to New York — apartment things like a hairdryer and Brita pitcher, stage management-y things like pencils, paper and blank CDs. It was silly to throw the stuff out, and I had been told early on that I was welcome to come back the next year, and I wanted to come back too, so I asked if it would be OK if I bought a storage crate and kept some stuff in it. If something else came up and I couldn’t return, they would be free to give the contents to the next stage manager. They were happy to accept it, probably because they figured if they had my stuff I’d be more inclined to come back!

As luck(?) would have it, the Broadway show I had booked for last spring/summer was canceled before rehearsals began, so I found myself back at Reagle, and my crate was waiting for me. At the end of that second year, it expanded from just essential supplies that would be of use to anyone, to my own personal box of goodies. Does anyone else want my hairbrush? I think not, but I do, and the likelihood that I would be the PSM in possession of the box the following year seemed high enough that I packed just about everything in there.

What’s in there? I don’t know. But I learned from my mistakes last year — having unnecessarily purchased or brought from NY things I had forgotten were in the box — and at the end of last summer, made a complete inventory of what I was putting in the box, with a hard copy in the box itself, and saved in a document in my “Reagle” folder, cryptically titled “What’s in my storage box.” Let’s see…
Household Supplies:

  • 2 sponges
  • can of apple cinnamon air freshener
  • 2 boxes Snuggle fabric softener [this was one of the things I bought by mistake]
    Bottle of unopened hand soap [probably that, too]
  • Bathroom clock radio
  • Corkscrew
  • Approx. 4 sq. ft of bubble wrap
  • partial box of large trash bags, mostly full box of kitchen bags
  • hairdryer
  • hair brush
  • nightlight
  • Approx 200 Q-tips
  • GNC Women’s Ultra Mega vitamins
  • Alarm clock w/ 9-volt battery
  • Deodorant (degree)
  • razor & 1 spare blade

Office Supplies

  • Approx. 30 business-size envelopes
  • 4 6×9” manila envelopes
  • Approx. 20 crappy yellow pencils
  • Approx. 15 ballpoint pens<
  • 1 red roller-ball pen<
  • 1 blue, 1 orange highlighter
  • 1 glue stick
  • Unopened pack of post-it page markers
  • 1/2 roll of packing tape w/ dispenser
  • disposable wipes for electronics
  • spool of 7 CD-R, 7 DVD-R
  • iPod firewire cable [that I can’t even use with my nano – why did I keep that?]
  • Significant amount of blue construction paper
  • Approx. 500 sheets white paper
  • Package of photo paper
  • Perhaps 150 business card templates SINGLE SIDED
  • AEA Stage Manager packet
  • 11 thank you cards w/ envelopes [think anyone notices I keep using the same ones?]
  • Approx. 6ft continuous cable wrap
  • 4 binder clips
  • 1 keyring
  • 25ft coax cable
  • ethernet cable
  • 1 6-outlet vertical power strip

Hmm… Looks like I brought the contents of my personal pencil case home with me and just left the bulk supplies for the company. WTF was I thinking? That’s heavy, why didn’t I leave it there and replace the stuff when I got home? I don’t have any of my favorite pencils, or scissors, or scotch tape, or anything like that. Well now I have some Staples items to add to my shopping list (which is a memo on my Treo called “Reagle Shopping Day 1.”) The other puzzling omission is the two binders for my scripts — a large one for my blocking script, score, and technical documents, and a more svelte 1″ binder for my calling script. While the Reagle office supply closet always has a good supply of cheap binders for my temporary needs, I only use these for my main scripts, and I know I had them — a white 2″ one, and a 1″ blue one. I’m sure I didn’t bring them home (what a crazy idea anyway) because I don’t even have a white 2″ binder in my apartment right now. I’m inclined to think it’s a typo, but I remember being very thorough about this list. They would have been the last thing packed after the final performance, and maybe I just felt it was so obvious I didn’t write it down. I sure hope they’re there, they’re expensive.

I like to pack really light, so it’s always a huge to-do the night before when I decide the suitcase is just too heavy and/or won’t close, and stay up all night obsessing about reducing the weight in such minute detail you’d think I was planning to launch it to the moon.

The Kit
I love-love-love-love-love the container I currently use for my kit. I got it at the Container Store, which is like a porn shop for stage managers. Here it is. Ooh, it’s so sexy! I have the large one. It’s not here at the moment to be experimented with, as it’s currently living on my desk at the Riverside Theatre, but the big challenge is that it just barely fits in my suitcase. It actually has to be at a little bit of an angle to fit, which requires some creative packing to make use of the space around it. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure I brought it last year. I think I used (gasp!) a ziplock bag, and just brought the things that couldn’t be easily obtained at the theatre (i.e. no paperclips, push-pins, screws, etc.).

In New York the design of this case is wonderful because it’s so thin and easy to carry while navigating crowds and packed subways and stuff. It’s a fact of life that sometimes I work in places where I don’t have a place to store even something that small, and the need to carry it everywhere makes portability very important. But in Waltham it just sat in my trunk most of the time, and I do believe I had more success last year with a bare-bones ziplock bag that stayed in my backpack. I guess that’s the plan again.

I won’t decide exactly what to take from my kit until the night before, when we load out of Riverside and I have it back at home, but here’s my rough guess:

  • Leatherman (Charge XTi) and flashlight (Surefire 6P) in combined holster
  • lithium batteries for said flashlight, as they’re way too expensive when not bought in bulk
  • maybe a couple binder clips, since I only have 4 in the box up there
  • LED keyboard light — my Powerbook has its own backlit keys, the light is for my script
  • laser pointer (don’t use it often, but it’s great for pointing out exact positions at a distance — which light I’m talking about, position on stage, etc.)
  • stopwatch
  • this weird tool I have with tiny blades and screwdrivers — I can’t even describe it
  • maybe a pair of earplugs — was PSM for a rock musical years ago, still keep multiple kinds of earplugs, guitar picks of all thicknesses, and a drum key in my kit. It used to be a necessity, now it’s my favorite thing to be comically over-prepared for. The earplugs are light and sort of health-related, so I may throw them in just in case we’re using the little-known Metallica orchestration of The King and I.

A lot of the things in my kit are there on the assumption that I am essentially stranded on a deserted island and have to be able to fix any problem with its contents. When working in a professional and well-equipped theatre like Reagle, where people are employed to do the things that aren’t my job, there’s a lot less I have to carry since I can just do what a rational person should do — if an actor breaks a shoelace, I’m sure a wardrobe person can help me. I don’t need to be able to produce a spare shoelace at a moment’s notice.

The last thing that is show-related is my headset, which will not travel with my kit or computer supplies because it gets packed gently in my suitcase between my clothes. I have a little leather pouch I use to keep it clean, but I have to be careful not to crush it. My headset of choice is the Telex PH-88, which I first fell in love with when it was at the calling desk at Phantom. Now they use one of those huge Sennheiser things that feel like wearing a football helmet — ugh. Anyway, when I first arrived at Reagle, Lori asked if I owned a headset because she was preparing to place an order for some replacements if I wanted to get one. I spent the first show of the season swapping between the Telex and the Clear-Com CC-26, which I have always liked for it’s very light weight, but as they get older the booms tend to get floppy, and I have this nervous habit of always having to hold onto them to make sure they’re actually in front of my mouth before I talk. I decided to go for the more expensive but more sturdy Telex, and I was able to get in on the discount pricing with the theatre’s order.

The computer stuff
As I may have mentioned, I’m planning to buy a Macbook Pro over the summer (hopefully June 11 will see the announcement of new models). My trusty Powerbook will limp through one more trip to Reagle, and hopefully by July will be enjoying retirement recording TV shows while I’m at rehearsal. Yes, it’s a bit disappointing to not have been able to make the transition before the season started, and to lug two laptops home at the end. On the other hand, you should see what the difference in sales tax is when buying a computer in Massachusetts. More than makes up for the inconvenience.

So… the Powerbook, of course, in its MacCase sleeve (I might need a new one to fit the slightly longer MBP, I think — but the old one is stained from when a certain director spilled his smoothie into my computer bag, so I guess it’s OK). The power cable for the Powerbook obviously, especially since the elderly machine has its original battery, and starts threatening to shut down after five minutes of use. Also in the main compartment of my computer bag will be my script for Singin’ in the Rain, without a binder. I carry an assortment of cables, many of which are in cute little retractable spools: firewire, USB, mini-USB, ethernet, phone cord, iPod, Palm sync/charge cable. My Canon i70 printer, which is the same age as my Powerbook, besides needing some serious percussive maintenance over this past winter, is still going strong after years of hard work. Along with that is the Airport Express. See this post for the whole story on how they’re used. My Nintendo DS Lite and charger — I had a lot of fun last year playing Animal Crossing with the kid playing Chip in Beauty and the Beast. We actually inspired two people on the crew to buy the game, too. Everyone else in the building thought we were dorks. …What?

Low priorities
And finally, if there’s any room in my bags left over, I might not have to walk around naked. I pack exactly eight sets of clothes (including the one I’m wearing on the travel day). That leaves me a one-day grace period to do the laundry every week. One of those is my “nice outfit” which is not intended to be part of the normal clothing rotation, as it’s too nice to wear on an average day. It’s only for occasions when I know I can sit in my ivory PSM tower and not get dirty. Opening nights, parties on the day off, etc. I usually wear a sweatshirt of some kind on the travel days (so the sweatshirt doesn’t have to fit in the suitcase, of course), that way I have one heavier thing to wear should it ever be cold. This year I’m sure it will be my 1-up jacket. I love that thing. I also pack a lightweight windbreaker for rainy days. I bring only one pair of shoes, due to space and weight constraints. This depresses me because one of the best things about Reagle is that I never have to dress in all black for three whole months. On days I don’t have to wear black I enjoy wearing a nice bright pair of white sneakers, but because white sneakers aren’t classy enough to be worn with the “nice outfit,” that means my one pair of shoes must be plain black sneakers that are subtle enough to pass for dress shoes if no one looks too closely. I just bought a new pair to cheer myself up about this (and because the old ones had a huge hole in them).

Usually a few stray items also find their way into my suitcase. A small notebook mouse went up the first year so I could do a little bit of computer gaming. The sad state of Mac gaming and the age of my Powerbook made that a joke, but this year it might make the trip again for the new computer. I might bring another cheap little mouse I got for free instead of the good one — then I can leave it there.

Well that should more or less cover it. It certainly is nice to have a consistent experience and know exactly what I can expect to have available to me up there, and where I can obtain all the other things I need. It’s a big difference from my first year where I packed a lot of stuff not knowing whether I would need it.


May 18, 2007

Anatomy of a Summer Stock Season

I call this: summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 12:00 pm

Hey, it’s a new feature! This is the first post of what will become something of a sub-blog here for the next few months. I intend to blog frequently over the summer to give a complete picture of my season as production stage manager for The Reagle Players in Waltham, MA. There’s a new “summer stock” topic over on the sidebar yonder —->, which will narrow down to only these posts.

So how did I get this job?
I first came to this company two years ago when I received a phone call from Scott Mikita, one of the actors in Phantom. He was calling to see if I’d be interested in stage managing at a theatre he and his wife Sarah Pfisterer (who I knew from her days as Christine in Phantom) had worked with before. They were going to be performing in the shows that season (he had gotten a leave from Phantom to do the first one, she was doing the second and third), and the producer had asked them if they could recommend any stage managers in New York.

Going off into the unknown like that is a little scary when you don’t know the company, and living in the suburbs for three months without a car could have been miserable, but I knew Scott and Sarah wouldn’t be returning if it wasn’t a great place to work — hell, Scott was giving up his Broadway paycheck to do it — so I was convinced it was something I wanted to do. A lot of my remaining anxiety was eased at the last minute when it was determined that I should have my own car, which in hindsight was an absolute necessity. One thing I really appreciate at Reagle is that even when the budget is tight, they will always make sure I have what I need to do my job.

A brief history of The Reagle Players
Reagle is celebrating it’s 39th season this year. The founder and producer is Robert Eagle, or R. Eagle. REagle… get it? They started out as a community theatre, and now operate under an Actors’ Equity Letter of Agreement contract, which means that the company consists of a mix of professional Equity actors, professional non-Equity actors (mostly from New York and Boston), and local actors who work for free, many of whom have been with the company for a long time. So it’s a nice mix of community theatre and various levels of professionals, from college students to Broadway and movie stars, with lots of talent at all levels.

    Equity-speak for anyone who cares: The contract is an LOA referenced to COST. Generally there’s a requirement of seven Equity actors per show, two of whom must be in the chorus. This does not include me, and I can never remember if it includes my assistant, who is an Actor/ASM. I believe it does not, as I seem to recall always having to count to 9 in matters involving Equity members. Non-Eq actors are able to work for Equity Membership Candidate (EMC) points, and we’ve had a couple actors earn their cards during shows in the two years I’ve been there (EMCs who are expected to earn their cards during the run don’t count toward the required 7 Equity members).

The Theatre
The Robinson Theatre seats about 1,100 and is situated inside Waltham High School, and is supplemented by a recent multi-million-dollar addition that Reagle helped to pay for, including a dance studio of the same size as the stage, an enlargement of the scene shop that I’d say at least doubled it, as well as the basement storage where a lot of the costumes, props and drops are stored. In addition, the lobby was enlarged to double its original size, with a full-length glass wall looking onto a courtyard. Waltham High also uses the theatre and dance studio, so the first show of the season always has to take into account activities like dance classes during the school day, graduation events, etc. The whole theatre wing of the building is kind of separate from the rest of the school — just the box office, theatre and related backstage areas, dance studio, and a few music rooms which are used as additional rehearsal space. It’s really a very nice facility, and there’s nothing “high school” about it. When rehearsal space is tight there’s also a nearby dance school with two studios in this old schoolhouse type building that we rent. I much prefer being at the theatre though, because on most breaks I like to stroll down the hall to the stage or the shop to see how things are going with the set and other technical matters, and there’s usually somebody who wants me to take a look at something. Oh, and P.S. the old schoolhouse has no air conditioning.

The Schedule
Thankfully, this is not the crazy summer stock schedule of doing a new show every week while rehearsing the next during the day. Every show takes four weeks. The first two weeks are rehearsals. On the Saturday of the second week, tech starts. (I’ve developed a little something I call “pre-tech,” but I’ll save that for when the time comes.) The beginning of the third week is dress rehearsals, and the show opens on Thursday. Performances run the rest of that week, and all of the fourth week. The show closes Sunday and the following Tuesday rehearsals begin for the next show. It could be much, much worse, and for that I am grateful!


OK, enough background, start blogging!
So what have I done so far? Well I like to go in knowing the show itself as well as possible. What I learned the hard way on my first show at Reagle is that because there are almost always two or three simultaneous rehearsals going on (actors, singers, dancers), and my assistant is a dancer in the show, I can’t bounce around very easily and see what everyone is working on. I’m almost always in the acting room with the principals and the director, taking blocking. This is all well and good, but when it comes time to put on a show, I’m going to be the world’s expert on some long, boring book scene with no cues, and there will be a massive 10-minute dance extravaganza with 50 cues that I’ve never seen.

Life Lesson #1: Sometimes I just need to leave my rehearsal.

My helpful assistant, Paul, keeps an eye on what the ensemble is doing, and we check in on breaks and via text message during rehearsal, and if they’re running a finished number, or large chunk of a number, he’ll tell me when to stop in so I can see the most stuff in the shortest amount of time. I don’t need to be there when they’re learning step-ball-change, though if there’s no blocking rehearsal I need to be at instead, I do enjoy sitting in on the dance and music rehearsals, because learning it as the dancers and singers learn it helps it to sink in better, instead of trying to absorb it all at once as a finished product. Anyway, the willingness to stand up and say, “I need to be in the other room right now” has helped me a lot in preparing myself for tech and performances, and usually doesn’t inconvenience the blocking rehearsal very much, if at all.

All that to say, I try to go in ideally with the score memorized from the start. That almost never happens, unless I’ve done the show before, but I try. This year we’re doing 42nd Street, which I will confess I haven’t listened to a note of since it was chosen, because I’ve done it before. My big concern for the last few months has been King and I, because it’s a great big classic show that I really don’t know. I have this friend Amy, who has like every show CD ever, or at least it seems that way. Around February, she’s taken to asking “So what CDs are you going to need to borrow for this summer?” When I ask if she has a certain show, the response is usually, “Broadway or London? Original or revival?,” followed by her recommendations of which one I should be spending more time listening to. Because Singin’ in the Rain has no cast recording, I only needed King and I, so predictably, a day or two after my request, I find waiting for me at the Majestic both the original and the Donna Murphy/Kevin Gray revival. I put them both on my iPod and start listening to them as much as possible.

In my head, I think I know the season: 42nd Street, King and I, Singin’ in the Rain. I know King and I is second, because Sarah Pfisterer is playing Anna, and whenever I’m at Phantom Scott Mikita keeps me updated on anything at Reagle I may have missed, and this is one of the things I had heard from him. I ASSUME (you know what happens when you assume) that Singin’ in the Rain is last, because the story I’ve heard is that it always has to be last, because the rain ruins the deck, and this way the deck gets rebuilt at the end of the season. Makes sense, right? One thing I knew but was somehow in denial of the significance of, is that the deck was already a mess last year. I said to myself, too bad we have to do another whole season on it before putting it out of its misery with the rain. So last week I was on the phone with the producer’s assistant just checking in, and he asked if I knew the season, and I said yeah. “42nd Street is first, right?” “No, 42nd Street is last.” Uh oh. I know King and I is the middle show, so that can only mean Singin’ in the Rain is first. Of course it is, because that way the deck gets replaced mid-season (big job for the crew, but I’m sure they can handle it), and then we have a nice new deck for the rest of the shows. Only problem is I had been comfortable in the knowledge that I have the first two months of the season to prepare for that monster of a show, pore over the script and score, watch the archival video a million times, question all the experts in each department who have done it before, and I should be fine. Well now I have to do it first.

Life Lesson #2: Make sure you’re absolutely positively completely certain you know the order of the shows.

Ever since I first set foot in Reagle-land, Singin’ in the Rain has been something of a legend. It might be the most award-winning show Reagle has ever done, so much so that the first time they did it (2002), it was so popular that they did it again the following year. It’s the show every other show is compared to, certainly internally, and I’ve also heard it when walking through the lobby at intermissions and after shows. “I think this one might have been as good as Singin’ in the Rain!” “Really? No! Nothing could beat that.”

It’s also legendary in a different way with the crew. Since the day I arrived, I was told, “God help you if we ever do Singin’ in the Rain again! Run away! Run away!!” I’m always up for a challenge, though, and when rumors began flying at the end of last season, I was looking forward to confronting the beast and conquering it. The set is huge. Everyone gets wet. That’s basically what I’ve gleaned from them. My take on this is: We know the set fits. Maybe not easily, but it fits. And I will be dry in the booth. My expectation is that it will be much worse for the crew than for me, and hopefully we’ll keep everything on track and it won’t be so bad for them either.

So what I’m currently doing is waiting for a package to arrive with my emergency Singin’ in the Rain-learning supplies. I’m comforted that pretty much everyone but me has done the show before, and the last production was very well documented. There is a wealth of knowledge at Reagle, both in paperwork and oral history, on any show they’ve done before (which is most of them), so when I need to know how something works there’s always someone I can talk to with firsthand experience.

I also booked my train ticket on Amtrak this week. We’re provided with bus fare from New York, but I never use it. I like trains, I hate buses. It’s worth it to me to pay for it. I actually got a good fare this year, so I upgraded to business class. I use those four hours to get a lot of work done. I have traditionally used the train ride to do the first show’s contact sheet and put all those names and numbers into Entourage and sync them to my Treo. That deserves a post in itself. Maybe I’ll write it on the train.


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