{"id":4448,"date":"2013-03-15T18:23:16","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T22:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/?p=4448"},"modified":"2013-03-15T18:23:16","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T22:23:16","slug":"in-which-i-have-a-long-run-with-a-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/in-which-i-have-a-long-run-with-a-show\/","title":{"rendered":"In Which I Have a Long Run with a Show"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re a longtime reader of this blog, you probably know that my luck with open runs is, shall we say, abysmal.  In <a href=\"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/why-phantom-will-run-forever\/ \u200e\">this post<\/a> from 2007, I proposed a theory that <i>Phantom<\/i> sucks the long-run karma from everyone who works on it, taking whatever luck they had in their career to feed its insatiable appetite for a longer run. Six years later, I don&#8217;t see any real reason to change this theory.<\/p>\n<p>Except, I&#8217;ve managed to get through six months as PSM of <i>Silence! The Musical<\/i>, and despite the fact that we&#8217;re not currently doing 8 shows a week, my job doesn&#8217;t seem to be going anywhere soon.<\/p>\n<p>I have some observations about my first experience of just getting to sit and relax into a run, in no particular order:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I just agreed to ASM a benefit. Not for the money, not for who&#8217;s performing. It&#8217;s ultimately a favor to a friend, but I don&#8217;t take every favor to a friend I&#8217;m offered! I said yes because I feel like I need to do something different to keep myself on my toes.  I need to load in and tech a show in a day. I need to be backstage worrying about whether the right black stool is set for the next number.\n<p>One thing I&#8217;ve been seriously concerned about for a while is how long it&#8217;s been since I&#8217;ve called a <i>big<\/i> musical.  The kind of musical where you can kill people.  Calling a small show has many perks (the biggest of which is not having to worry about killing people), but I wish I could get a little exercise at all the other types of theatre I haven&#8217;t been doing lately. The benefit won&#8217;t give me that exact experience, but it&#8217;s one variant of stage management to mix things up a little.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve spent my whole life thinking my career is a journey to the promised land of sitting down on a show that will run for years and eliminate so much of the uncertainty and chaos that comes from starting a new show. I still think that&#8217;s a worthy goal, and constantly being in production isn&#8217;t my style either, but I find myself strangely enjoying my job when it gets &#8220;interesting.&#8221;\n<p>I value my free time very much. I <i>love<\/i> having multiple days off a week.  But when I have to put a new actor in, or go to a meeting, or coordinate something out of the ordinary, I always sigh at the prospect of having to do extra work, but also get surprisingly invigorated when I actually have to <i>do<\/i> the work.<\/p>\n<p>This is a totally masochistic career, but I&#8217;m conditioned to it, and when I have to buckle down and actually do the harder parts of my job, it feels right. It&#8217;s like how exercise is exhausting, but afterwards you actually have more energy.<\/li>\n<li>Our happy home at Times Scare is growing, as we begin sharing our stage with the new show <i>Fucking Up Everything.<\/i> Which is an ominous title for a show that&#8217;s coming into a space you used to have exclusive access to, but has so far proven to be untrue!\n<p>FUE is in tech right now (first preview tonight), and while I&#8217;m glad not to be in tech, I also kind of miss it.  <i>Silence!<\/i> was in a bit of a transitional period when I took over, having recently moved to Times Scare, but I basically came into a long-running situation.  The last show I teched was <i>Triassic Parq<\/i> nine months ago, which was a blast, and not really that long ago. But long ago enough that the prospect of going back into tech sounds fun rather than miserable.<\/p>\n<p>I spent about an hour at the theatre today before FUE&#8217;s final dress, working with their PSM and Production Manager to look at what they&#8217;ve done during tech and address any final concerns, and it was cool to hang out at somebody else&#8217;s tech. I don&#8217;t often get to spend time at techs that aren&#8217;t mine.  In this case, I do feel a bit of personal investment in it, as I&#8217;ve been having meetings, walk-throughs and exchanging emails with their team (several of whom I&#8217;ve worked with before) for over three months, and can sympathize with anybody going through tech.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, I remain stunned that I&#8217;m working steadily in New York, as PSM of an Off-Broadway show, a show that would have been my top choice out of all the Off-Broadway shows that are running, and have been doing so long enough that I can safely say if anything happens, it wasn&#8217;t the fault of my infamous Show Karma.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m really enjoying finding out what it&#8217;s like to just <i>do<\/i> a show for a while.  I hope this won&#8217;t be the only time in my career that I&#8217;m so lucky, but I&#8217;m just grateful that I&#8217;ve gotten a chance to learn all the things I&#8217;ve never gotten to do before.  Out of the ten tracks in my show, I&#8217;ve already taught two of them three times each, which is definitely not something I&#8217;ve ever had time for before.  It&#8217;s equal parts &#8220;didn&#8217;t we just do this?&#8221; and &#8220;oh that&#8217;s no big deal, it&#8217;ll be fun.&#8221;  Which pretty much sums up everything I&#8217;ve learned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re a longtime reader of this blog, you probably know that my luck with open runs is, shall we say, abysmal. In this post from 2007, I proposed a theory that Phantom sucks the long-run karma from everyone who works on it, taking whatever luck they had in their career to feed its insatiable [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[228,18,242],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4448"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4448"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4457,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4448\/revisions\/4457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}