Random Note of the Day 2

K[elley] + G[eorgia] act like horses

New Feature: Random Note of the Day

I have an idea for a new feature: I will pick one note that I write every day (either in the blocking book or elsewhere) to highlight what's going on with the show.

Today's Note:
[Line] 2063 - Blows giant tuba

This Should Not Happen. Ever.

Part of my interest in touring is to spend more time outside Manhattan and see regions and climates I've never been to. One of the things I have learned so far is that this planet of ours is crazy. In the grand scheme of things, New York and Minneapolis aren't that far apart, and yet at the same moment in time there is a difference in temperature of 70 degrees!!! Another thing someone pointed out is that the position of the sun in the sky here makes it always look like it's about to be sunset. I noticed it especially today as I was walking to the train around 2PM, and was blinded by the sun low in the sky over the street ahead. I don't really understand why that happens, as it's only 4 degrees more north in latitude than New York, you wouldn't think it would be a noticeable difference.

Well today was our first day off here, and of course the temperature dropped about 40 degrees overnight. It was our first real sub-zero day. A few of us went on the morning grocery run provided by the Guthrie, which was very cold. Then I set out alone to take the light rail to the Mall of America, which was incredibly convenient, and I had a good time and got all the items I set out to find. I probably saw less than half the mall, but it was very nice. It's not really that different from most malls, except for the giant roller coaster in the middle, and the fact that it's so big that many of the standard mall stores actually have two or three locations within the mall.

Stage Management Stardom

I must blog about the fact that Nick's blog got blogged about. Yesterday Nick discovered that his blog is rather prominently linked to on the front page of the Guthrie website. Apparently my blog just isn't good enough. But I think Nick has been posting a little more frequently than me, and his blog is dedicated solely to the tour, so it's probably a good choice. Anyway, it's nice to see a little stardom for the stage management team.

TOUR STOP 1: Minneapolis

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

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.

Washington

One of the nicest things that can happen to a company, especially one that has to coexist in tight quarters for six months, is to begin to develop some sort of company identity, and this usually starts with references and jokes that arise out of the rehearsal process.

If you haven't read my previous posts, The Spy is a new play adapted from the 1821 novel of the same name, by James Fenimore Cooper (better known as the author of The Last of the Mohicans).  If you'd like to read it, check out this link.  I've never actually used Google Books before, but it looks pretty cool.  Should I ever find time to read it myself, that's probably where I'll go (although I have recently downloaded Stanza for the iPhone, which also has it).  The story takes place during the American revolution, and suffice it to say George Washington plays a prominent part in it.

About a week or so into rehearsals, this YouTube video was sent to everyone on the cast email list, and it immediately became the defining theme of The Spy rehearsal process.   

I have taken a number of still images from the video and saved them for use on our signage.  So far I've only used them for our dressing room signs, an example of which you can see below.

An Observation on iPhone Battery Life from the Bowels of the Earth

We're teching The Spy at Baruch college, at the Nagelberg Theatre which is on level B3, so somewhere in the earth's mantle, which I can only assume is why the A/C is always cranked so high.  Of course cell service is nonexistant, and since the internal walls are made of generous helpings of concrete, even getting wifi from our production office to the house (probably about 60ft, if crows flew underground through concrete) took two days and two routers to pass the signal so we can get it at the tech tables.  I never quite managed to get it to the booth.


Once I had established our lifeline to the outside world, I kept my iPhone with wifi on and the cell radio off all day (if you don't know how to do this, put it in airplane mode first, then turn wifi back on.) I was expecting that keeping an active wifi connection all day would kill the battery, so much so that I negotiated an electronics deal with Ian, that I would lend him my Macbook 2-prong power adapter if I could charge my phone from his tech table's power, since the power strip on mine was being taken up by frivolous things like the light board, sound computer, and LittleLites.  As it turns out I have never needed to charge it in the middle of the day.

During tech I've been underground for 12-15 hours a day, off the charger for 18 hours or more, and only once did I come home with the 20% battery warning.  Some days the battery was hardly drained at all.  On an average day above ground, using only 3G and maybe a little bit of wifi, I almost always am pushing the limits of the battery by the time I get home. Plus, my commute to Baruch is longer, so the phone spends more time per day playing music.

All of this just to say that I was surprised to find that the wifi radio uses so much less power than the cell radio.

Tech Day 1

We're on the dinner break of our first day of tech.  We have a two hour break, which is very luxurious for us, as most of our rehearsals have been six hour blocks.  I'm currently sitting in the green room, where a number of crazy and humorous things are going on.

Our staff rep director, Ian, who is also our only understudy, is running lines with our company manager, Emma.  The other cast members sitting around playing cards, drinking coffee and generally hanging out are having fun shouting out lines to him.

Our production manager, Joel walks in with the business end of a noose, and asks Ron, who is one of the two actors who gets hung, if he has a moment to be sized.

Over the monitor in the greenroom we can hear our sound designer testing cues on stage.

Tech is going a little slowly, but no crises have come up.  There's some preliminary talk of eliminating some parts of the set because it currently appears to be too complex to set up in the time we will generally have for load-ins, and with the traveling crew we will have.  That's a discussion that's still in progress though.

I have a lot of room at the tech table.  I have almost a whole table to myself, easily 4ft of space that is completely mine.   I think we have about 18 straight feet of tech table for stage management, lighting and sound, which is the longest unbroken expanse of tech table I've ever had.  Our director and staff rep director have another table a short distance away.

We have 3 wireless headsets, and a two-channel system.  It's a nice little setup.  The only problem that has come up is that there's something weird with the volume on the headsets, at least at my base station -- instead of going from off to loud, the knob allows me to adjust from loud to really loud.  When I try to use my personal headset, which has an omnidirectional mic, it feeds back.  The gain setting on the back of the main box is already on "low."   Tim, our sound supervisor, could not immediately figure out a solution, but I hope that we will discover one eventually.   Until then I have to wear this gigantic ear-enclosing football-helmet type thing, which can only be worn on the left ear.  It sucks royally.  

That's about all that's happening so far!

Weeks 2 and 3 and the Beginning of 4

Home Sweet Home
Originally uploaded by KP's-Eye-View

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!

My Life in Speeddial

Another in the continuing series of snapshots of my life based on who is currently on my speed-dial list.

1. My assistant (Nick)
2. Our company manager
3. The Acting Company main office number
4. My parents
5. Good stage manager friend
6. Another good stage manager friend
7. The Phantom stage management office

End of Week 1

Today is the last day of our rehearsal week.  We did a straight 5 hours of staging, with a little bit of rewrites from the playwright.  We have now blocked 9 of the 21 scenes in the play, of which many of the more complicated ones remain, but still it's a nice sense of accomplishment.

Right now we are on a long lunch/dinner break, followed by a movement education workshop, where selected members of our cast will be instructed on how to teach movement classes to students while we are on the road.  Part of our usual "performance" schedule is to conduct workshops with schools in between performances, so the cast will be receiving training throughout the rehearsal process on how to run the workshops.

I have sent Nick home (he'll be attending next week's class, on stage combat), and I'm just here to mind the breaks, so it will give me a chance to catch up on whatever organization I can get done in the room.  My paperwork is pretty caught up, but there's a lot of work I want to do on our filing cabinets, which have almost no organizational concept or labels at this point.  The stage management road box arrived from the company's storage earlier in the week, and it contains lots of goodies that we're still discovering.  One of the goodies Nick discovered this morning was an inventory of what's in the box!  Because we only have access to the studio for an hour before and an hour after rehearsal, I haven't yet found the time to tear everything out and see what's there and put it all back how I want it.  Maybe tonight I can do that without being too disruptive.  I did, however, add my first sticker to the collection of decorations already on it -- one of those white Apple stickers you get when you buy a new computer or other Apple product.

I'm looking forward to having a day off tomorrow.  Whenever I take on a really big project, I tend to forget that they actually do come with a day off.  So now I have no idea what to do with it.  I better figure it out, though, because I don't get one next week -- I agreed to do two shows at The Fantasticks next Sunday, just because I miss the show and it will be fun to do it again.  And they needed a sub.  The show has closed and reopened under new management since I last worked its closing performance in February, but I'm told it's pretty much the same -- enough that I can walk in and be told the changes to the deck track when I get there.  Apparently I have two new cues.

Week 1 of Rehearsal

The rehearsal floor,
originally uploaded by KP's-Eye-View.

We've really started blocking now. We did the prologue for a little while on Thursday, but today we spent the whole day staging. We got about a fifth of the play staged. It feels good to see a lot of it on its feet. The actors have come pretty prepared and are either off book or comfortable enough not to be buried in their scripts. We've been dealing with a few actor conflicts for people who are still performing in their previous jobs, but after tomorrow all of that is over so we should be able to schedule more freely without having to jump through hoops to find scenes we can do with the people we have.

A lot of what I'm starting to work on now relates to the schedule for next week -- scheduling production meetings, fittings, voice and stage combat sessions.

Start of Rehearsals

Forgive me for being a day and a half behind.  The start of rehearsals has kept me very busy and exhausted, but we're starting to get into a routine.

We began rehearsals on Monday, with our meet-and-greet.  We had about 60 people in attendance, including the cast, office staff, production staff, creative team, and board members and other friends of the company.  The opening speeches were made by founder and Artistic Director, Margot Harley; director of The Spy, John Miller-Stephany; and Harriet Harris, who was a member of the company early in its life and still stays involved.  They spoke about the history of the company, its mission to bring high-quality classical theatre to parts of the country that may not normally have access to the arts, and the importance of this tour in continuing that work.

Everyone in the room was introduced and spoke a little about themselves and their involvement with the show and how they came to the company.  The designers spoke a bit about their vision for the show.  Our set designer was not able to be there, but we had the model and some photos to show, as well as costume sketches which were also shown on a projection screen.

We also had a camera crew in attendance, taking initial footage which hopefully will be used to create a documentary about the tour.

After all the guests left, we finished the day with a read-through of the play.  Once that was done, we used the few remaining minutes for the Equity meeting, where we elected the deputy, and voted on a few issues pertaining to rehearsal hours (straight 6 hour rehearsal day, 1 hour lunch, and rehearsal on a two-show day -- all passed).

-----------------------------------

Day 2
We began table work.  In attendance, besides Nick and myself, were the entire cast, John, the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, and staff repertory director Ian, who will maintain the show artistically on the road (which I must admit I'm kind of glad to have taken out of my hands).   They spent the entire day reading slowly through the script, discussing questions about plot points and character relationships, while Jeff made many small script changes after hearing each scene read aloud.  Act 1 was finished by the end of the day.

After the main rehearsal was done, we had two special meetings of an hour each.  The first was with our publicists and communications staff, preparing the actors for the interviews and other publicity events they may have to do on the road.  After that was the first session with our education staff, which provided a brief overview of the educational workshops the cast will be leading with students in the cities we play.

Recommended Reading

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.  

Day 5 Preproduction

Day 4 was kind of boring.  You didn't miss much.  I hole-punched about 2,500 pages of script, exchanged some emails with the staff of New 42nd St. Studios, and some other mundane stuff like that.

Day 5 was the fun day.  It started with a 10AM breakfast at a local restaurant with the Associate Artistic Director, General Manager, Production Manager, Technical Director, Company Manager, and Staff Repertory Director.   The meeting was basically an opportunity for the key personnel on the tour to get to know one another and discuss what our working relationship will be on the road, and how we will communicate with the office.  I thought the meeting was a great idea, and we are already feeling like a team.  

After the meeting we returned to the office where Nick arrived soon after.  After admiring the new Macbook he purchased for the tour, we began preparing to pack for the first rehearsal.  We acquired all the office supplies the office had to offer us, and then with the company's Staples credit card in hand, we went shopping!  If you are not a stage manager, it may be hard to comprehend just how exciting a trip to Staples is.  We bought pencils (Ticonderoga, of course, nothing less!), Sharpies, a small box for hanging file folders, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a first aid kit and some extra ice packs, and a few other things.  We also discovered they had 2GB thumb drives on sale for $12, so we each bought one with our own money.  That was probably the most exciting part.

When we returned to the office with our booty, we then went upstairs one flight to Karma Productions, which is conveniently located in the same building. Karma is a tiny little hole-in-the-wall shop which is my default source for gaff and spike tape.  We bought a roll each of black and white gaff, and four colors of spike (yellow, orange, neon green, and teal).  These bright colors will be just for rehearsal.  We decided to wait before buying the colors for the show itself, since we don't know exactly what color the show deck will be or what the spikes will be used for. Based on the model, the deck looks like some kind of rough wood planking, but it's hard to know now how subtle the colors should be.

Then we put all the scripts in binders and found some postcards for the show, which with a little gaff tape, made nice logos for the cover of the binders.  Towards the end of the day, we piled all our belongings in the designated corner of the office where they will be picked up on Monday morning and brought to the rehearsal studio for us.  With all that completed, we finished work for the week and said goodbye to everyone until the big day on Monday.

The Tour: Day 3

Day 3 of my preproduction week.

A recap:
Day 1 I spent most of the day at home doing some light paperwork and emailing, then went into the office for about an hour to read and fill out about a thousand forms.  For those curious, this includes the regular stuff you have to fill out when you start a job: W-4, I-9, NYS tax withholding form, employer's info sheet for their records, and direct deposit paperwork.  Then the contract, which in this particular case consists of the Equity contract itself, the basic Letter of Agreement rider, and a very extensive rider which covers mostly matters related to touring -- what kind of housing, per diem, etc.  A lot of it was new information, and the only surprises were pleasant ones, so that made me happy.

Day 2 I went into the office for about 3 hours and started off making copies of some research packets we're giving the cast at the first rehearsal.  The first show we rehearse, The Spy, takes place during the American Revolution, so the packets are all historical information, timelines, and maps from that period.  Then I spent the rest of the day catching up on some paperwork, getting more accurate information about actors' conflicts and passing it on to the directors (each show has a different director).

Today is Day 3, and my first full day at the office.  Because there's not a spare desk for me I've wound up parked in the conference room, trying not to look like I'm taking over the entire thing.  But essentially, yes, I have the corner office.

In the meantime, the first rehearsal draft of the script landed in our inboxes during the day.  The play is a new adaptation, and will be changing during the process, but this is the version we will begin rehearsal with.  So I threw that in the fancy and so-far-very-dependable copier and made 20 copies.

There was also a staff meeting today, which I was invited to attend.  Most of it was about the company's upcoming annual gala, which I have nothing to do with, but there was an opportunity to talk about  arrangements for our first rehearsal.  After the meeting concluded I discussed a bit more in depth in a side meeting with the production manager and general manager.  The company manager and I have been meeting periodically for a few minutes here and there over the last couple days, as issues come up.  Subjects have included my flight to Minneapolis (to which my answer was, "sure, whenever." I'm easy like that), hospitality info packets for our stay in Minneapolis, catering for the meet-and-greet.  She's totally on the ball, and I feel fantastic about that.

I also got my first paycheck today.  My ASM, Nick, showed up at the office in response to my email that his check was waiting, and I loaded him up with the new copy of the script fresh off the presses, the Equity LORT rulebook, and the 6-page stage manager's guide to rehearsing at New 42nd Street Studios.    He's officially on contract starting today, but I'm trying to go easy on the workload with him because honestly I don't really think there's that much for him to do right now.  On Friday we're going to meet at the office and spend the day preparing boxes of office supplies, spike tape, and whatever else we are going to be loading into the studio on Monday.  The "we" of that component actually means Nick and I show up at the studio at 10 on Monday and the stuff we left in a corner of the office will magically be delivered, along with all the props, by our production manager and crew.  We agreed that this is indeed a very high-class production.

Most of what I've been dealing with today is the deadline to get some paperwork in to the New 42nd Street Studios, where we'll be rehearsing in New York.  A lot pertains to our meet-and-greet on Monday.  The studio is pretty much the premiere place to rehearse a show, and since they deal with high-profile productions, they are used to this kind of event being a big undertaking.  Apparently they reserve the right to hire a fire guard at additional cost if they think your meet-and-greet is a little too ambitious.  I don't think we're going to have that problem.   But they need a head count and they need the names of all our attendees, which includes the cast and production staff as well as invited guests such as board members and guest speakers, because from all I've heard, if you're not on the list you'll have a hell of a time getting past the front desk.  They also need to know who is delivering our catering, and at what time.  So since all that information was constantly being updated, it took me literally the entire business day to fax these forms.

Another full day at the office for Day 4.

OK the Job...

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.

iPhone Wallpaper

I've created a wallpaper for my iPhone that I'm liking so much, I might as well share it.  Here it is.  I have no idea what it is.  I guess it's some kind of rainbow laser beam, which as far as I know is a physical impossibility.  But it looks kind of cool as a lock screen wallpaper (especially when an alert pops up in front of it).  If you have a jailbroken iPhone and use Winterboard to customize your home screen, it also looks pretty cool as a background behind your icons.  It's a good fit for me because I like the default look of the home screen, so I don't want to customize it with something too crazy.  This keeps the basic appearance the same, but just adds a nice extra touch (see below).

If you like it you can click on the thumbnail above and get it in full size. If you want to post it somewhere feel free, but please link to this site, and don't sell it or do anything stupid like that, and that's fine with me.

Cycorder Tutorial For Mac Users Who Hate Terminal

I mentioned in my roundup of useful iPhone apps, the video recording app Cycorder.  It requires your iPhone to be jailbroken (which I'm not going to get into, but this is the blog of the team of hackers who develop the jailbreaking software, which will have the latest software and info).  

I'm going to assume that your iPhone is jailbroken and you're on a Mac (there are ways to do this on the PC, I just don't have the experience or interest to do it just for the hell of it).  I am also doing this in Leopard, so the part about the Finder would look a little different in other versions of OS X.  

Cydia is the primary app for downloading unauthorized software onto your jailbroken iPhone.  It will appear in your list of apps once you have jailbroken.  The apps you will need to download in Cydia are:

OpenSSH (so you can access your iPhone through Terminal on your Mac)

Cycorder (the app we're talking about here)

Netatalk (so we don't have to use terminal anymore)

You can go ahead and install them all at once.  Only Cycorder will show up as an icon with your apps.  The other two are background apps.

Cycorder will function as an app on its own, happily shooting videos and playing them back for you on the phone.   If you want to move the videos off the phone, this is where the other stuff comes in.  Netatalk gives your phone support for standard Apple file sharing.  Once it's installed, if your iPhone is on the same wireless network as your Mac, it will show up in your Finder under "shared."  (If you don't have access to a wireless router, just create a network with your Mac using the "Create network" option in the airport menu, and call it whatever you want.  Then have the iPhone join the network.)  

So now you see your phone in the Shared section of your Finder, and when you click on it it will probably say "Connection failed." Click the button "Connect As" in the upper-right and it will bring up a username/password window.  Make the name "mobile" and the password "alpine" (the default iPhone password) and it will give you access to your files.   The folder you're looking for is Mobile/Media/Videos, in there you will find the videos you took with Cycorder, in handy .mov Quicktime format.

Now you have what you want.  You would be done, provided you never find yourself on the same network as someone who knows something about iPhone hacking and wants to take a look at your files.  So it's a good idea to change the password for the iPhone's "Mobile" user from "alpine" to, well, anything else.   Now we have to use the Terminal, just for a second.

1. Make sure your phone is on the same network as your Mac.

2. On the phone, go to settings, wifi, and then click the little ">" arrow for the network you are on to bring up details.

3. Look at the IP Address.

4. On your Mac, open Terminal

5. Type ssh mobile@[the IP address from the phone] and hit enter.

6. Terminal will probably think for a minute, then ask if you're sure you want to connect.  Say yes.

7. It will then ask for the password.  Type alpine and hit enter.

8. You will now be at the command prompt.  Time to change the password.

Type passwd mobile and hit enter.

9. It will ask for the original password (alpine), and then for the new password, and then for the new password again to confirm.  Make the password whatever you want.

10. We also need to change the password for the phone's "root" user, which is also "alpine," because the same random hacker on your network could also get in there and cause lots of trouble.  The process is the same.  Follow the steps again, except type "root" instead of "mobile" and change the password to whatever you want.

11. When you're done, type exit and hit enter, and close Terminal forever.

From now on when you connect to the iPhone through the Finder you will enter the name "mobile" and the password will be the new one you chose.  You can check "remember this password" and never have to enter it again if you like.  The important thing is that some random person who connects to your network won't know what the password is.  

Enjoy!

Next Job Teaser

One of the destinations of my next job.   Details to come later.  It should lead to some interesting blogging.

Incidentally, this view of the topography also pretty much sums up how the walk from my apartment to the subway feels, except without the pretty flowers and sky and stuff.

The iPhone App Store and Stage Management (and Fun)

Well I'm in music rehearsals for a NYMF show (Twilight in Manchego), so this means you get some blog posts while I sit doing mostly nothing to the soothing sounds of Chuck Cooper learning his music.

Today my topic is a roundup of what I'm using on my iPhone to make my job, and life, easier.  My initial reactions can be found in this post.

Time:Calc $1.99

Some people reviewing on the app store don't seem to get this.  "Why would you need a calculator to work with time?  Just do it in your head." These people obviously don't understand that there are people who suck at math, or the enormous amount of time calculations a stage manager does all day long, and moreover, that there are stage managers who suck at math.  This app is so amazing, I use it all the time.  I've gotten pretty good in my career at calculating in 1hr 20 min blocks (the standard Equity break schedule), but for more difficult calculations, like running time down to the second (i.e. 8:05:30 - 9:21:35), there is much more room for error.  Some conductors will drive themselves crazy over a few seconds variation in the running time, no need to freak everybody out with bad math when it can be done with instant accuracy on the calculator.  This is of course for situations where you don't enter the run times in a report that calculates it for you.  But whatevs, I don't spend my whole life on Broadway, you know, and I don't need to create a database for a show that runs 10 performances or less.  This app is attractive, cheap, and works exactly how you think it should.

OmniFocus $19.99

This app is pretty expensive at $20, but I find it worth the cost.  I can't afford the desktop companion, but I like keeping everything on my phone in one place anyway.  It also backs up to my iDisk, which is great, since I'm often updating my firmware and reinstalling my apps because the App Store/iTunes is busted.  I was looking for a simple Todo app, and found all the ones I tried suck.  So I decided to go for a very not-simple app instead.  I won't go into all the details, but it's location-aware (so you can see a list of tasks based on which are closest to your current location), very powerful with multiple ways to organize projects and contexts in multiple sublevels, and it's a neat and clean interface that's very finger-friendly while containing tons of information.   Considering I stopped using Todos altogether with Windows Mobile because the app was such a pain, I feel my life getting a bit more organized already.

iTransNYC $4.99

Much better than the cheaper alternative, it contains a very clean subway map, on which you can tap on a station to see a list of the trains that stop there and their schedules (which are never right, but I blame that on the MTA, not on the app).  It can put your current location on the map.  It gives you service changes as well as current alerts, like trains skipping a station because of police activity.  It can also do directions from one station to another (not from addresses, but I don't find this to be a big problem in my life), and it will tell you where you need to transfer if necessary and give you a time estimate.  I have no idea if the time estimate is accurate, probably not, but again that's the MTA's problem.   It's got my daily commute at 23 minutes, which is pretty damn close to my estimate of 25 mins, on a good day.  But if all estimates are assumed to be on a good day, at least that gives you an idea.   The best part of the app is that most of the features (including the route calculation, impressively) can be used offline, which is essential for anyone living in New York, where the majority of the time I'm looking something up on my phone I'm underground.   The service advisories are cached, although you have to remember to open the app above ground and download new ones if you want them to be up to date.  That other app, CitytransitNYC, looks up service advisories, but does it live, it can't show them to you once you're underground, which is close to useless if you're debating whether or not to change your travel plans en route.

Weatherbug Free

I don't trust the built-in weather app for a second -- literally I don't trust it to tell me what's going on right now, much less in an hour or tomorrow.  Weatherbug is more detailed and also gives advisories on serious weather conditions.  At Reagle I used it to warn me when I was about to get struck by lighting in the parking lot.  This isn't exactly job related (unless you're doing outdoor theatre, in which case it might be the most important app you have), but I feel it's one of those secondary jobs of the stage manager to have an answer for everything, including whether it's going to rain on our day off.

Flashlight Free, requires jailbreak

There are a number of flashlight apps.  The one I use requires the phone to be jailbroken, because it makes the screen brighter than Apple will allow the official apps to be.  But if you don't want to go that route, there are some on the App Store, many free.  Personally I think if you have to resort to this you have failed as a stage manager, but not as epic of a failure as if you don't have a flashlight and don't have this app.

Files $6.99

When I was looking for an app to put documents on my phone, I had three requirements: doesn't require a proprietary desktop app, displays the documents well, and has a pretty interface.  This app has all three, so I'm happy.  If you've got your phone on the same network as your computer, it tells you what address to put in to mount your iPhone in the Finder (I assume it works on a PC, probably not as simply).  I keep a PDF of the Equity rulebook for whatever contract I'm working on, the script, calendar, schedule and contact sheet for my current show, and whatever else I need.

Wikipanion Free

An app to easily search Wikipedia without having to load the rather phone-unfriendly web page. I suppose this could be used for legitimate rehearsal research, but what I find myself using Wikipedia most for while working is looking up trivia that comes up while running a show.  It can be hard to do while calling some shows, but generally you can find someone on the crew who plays on their laptop while doing their not-so-demanding job. For example when I was doing Annie this summer, during the cabinet scene Morganthau is introduced as "Acting Secretary of the Treasury." Why was he acting secretary, and what happened to the real secretary of the treasury?  Wikipedia can tell you.  I expect this app to make it much easier to answer these kind of burning questions when it's not practical to have a laptop backstage.

UPDATE: 1 More!
Cycorder Free, requires jailbreak
This is a video-recording app which takes very good quality video for a phone camera.  It did not originally support audio in its first release, but it does now.  It's free, and supported by advertising which is very subtle and non-intrusive, and very much appreciated as an alternative to the other video app which costs money (which I think is rather silly for an app that is technically not supported on the phone and could be disabled by Apple at any point in the future). The app doesn't have a built-in way to get videos off the iPhone, so it requires a little more computer knowledge to do that.  I don't know much about UNIX and I'm not a fan of using the terminal to work with files, so the method I prefer is to install an app through Cydia called Netatalk, which makes your iPhone able to communicate with a Mac through standard Apple filesharing, so if the phone and Mac are on the same network, you will automatically see the phone in your Finder under "shared."  From there you can log into the phone and browse to the folder where the videos are stored.  Check out this post for a tutorial on how to do this.

The Penny is Relevant Again!

This may be the only thing giving purpose to coins in the 21st Century.

Coinstar has begun offering gift certificates in place of cash receipts for coins. Doesn't sound that interesting yet, right? OK, Coinstar is now offering iTunes gift certificates for coins, AND, you don't pay any kind of fee on the amount you deposit. If you have $4.28 in coins sitting in a drawer or bowl somewhere, you get $4.28 to spend on the music or iPhone/iPod apps of your choice. This, combined with the fact that Duane Reade is now installing Coinstar machines in many of their stores, has made my app purchases for my iPhone essentially free.  I even bought the one that looks like a lighter, just because I can (iLightr, it's much more realistic and interactive than the others, though I don't recommend buying it with money that didn't come from your metaphorical couch cushions).

Anyway, this development has brought me great happiness, and turned change from a nuisance into an easy way to pay for apps and music.

Flying in an empty pipe with 400lbs of counterweights.

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

Early photo call for Nanette

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

Nanette ensemble in their snazzy costumes.

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

No Pressure

In every rehearsal for the principals of No, No, Nanette we have:

1. The Mayor of the city
2. A Tony winner
3. A retired English teacher
4. A retired history teacher

So we've got an expert for everything!

A Snapshot of My Life

I've had my iPhone only a few days, and haven't completely set everything up permanently, but here is who's currently on my favorites list on the phone app:

1. My assistant
2. My parents
3. A stage manager friend from NY
4. Another stage manager friend from NY
5. The tech director at Reagle
6. OK sushi place in town
7. Better sushi place in town

Draw whatever conclusions from this you will.

3G iPhone!!!!!!

So I got a 3G iPhone this weekend. In brief, it's everything I thought it would be: incredibly cool, and lacking a number of obvious features that I hope I can live without.

Things I LOOOVE:
MobileMe (when it works). Push seems to work sometimes and not others. Sometimes my phone receives mail before the desktop, and sometimes it seems to forget to check. The other thing to know (which Apple never really made clear) is that push only works on the iPhone and the MobileMe servers, your desktop will not push out to the "cloud," only at 15 minute intervals. I can see how this will result in things getting completely out of sync.

I woke up this morning to see that about 700 of my contacts were gone. They still existed on my Mac and on MobileMe, so everything was fine, but somehow the phone lost them. Not sure what's going on with that. I love the idea of what MobileMe is, and I can't believe it's taken Apple so long to get something going on the concept of "Exchange for the rest of us." I don't work in a corporate environment, but my job could sure benefit from Exchange-type features, and Apple was just the company to do it. I'm glad to see that's finally taking shape. I just hope it's more reliable than .Mac was. So far it would seem... no. But it's only been like 4 days.

Coming from AT&T's Tilt (aka HTC's Kaiser), which has horrible video performance, the UI is just gorgeous. This is not something really particular to the new iPhone, but it's nice to finally get to experience a responsive UI. There are a lot of things that are just iPhone-specific that I'm now getting to enjoy for the first time. Like a wifi setup that's easy enough to do that I actually bother to activate it to take advantage of the higher speeds. On the Tilt it was such a pain that using AT&T's network everywhere was faster and more reliable in the long run.

The camera is actually really good so far. It is what it is, and I know other people expected an upgrade, but this 2MP camera takes much better photos than the 3MP one on the Tilt. It seems to do pretty well in low light conditions as well.

Google Maps -- so much better than the versions available for other phones. Most of all, the bookmarks. I don't understand why all the other versions don't have an easy way of saving locations you use all the time. It works basically like other versions, I haven't tried the turn-by-turn directions on the road yet. I did get completely lost driving in Boston last night and the GPS helped me escape back to the safety of the Mass Pike in just a few minutes, using just the time I had while stopped at red lights. I didn't actually do a search for directions, just pressed the button to find my location and looked at the map to figure out which street I had to get on. The GPS link is very fast (probably using a combination of cell location, that wifi-search-thing they're using, and actual GPS -- but I think the real GPS must work quickly because the location is too accurate to be anything else). My Tilt could take minutes to get a GPS lock, if ever.

The App Store I'm a bit addicted to the App Store at the moment, seeing all there is to see. I have always bought tons of software for my phones, but this is the first platform I've used where free trials aren't the norm. I haven't made any purchases that I really regret, but I know they're coming.
So far I have: Super Monkey Ball (just because it's the "in" thing to buy -- it's cool)
MotoRacer (just to play with the accelerometer in a racing game)
Enigmo (a puzzle game which got great reviews -- I like it)
SplashID (a secure password and personal info app which I've used for probably 7 years now on Palm)
Citytransit New York (I'm away from home right now, but this is a really cool subway / train map and service advisory program which I can't wait to put to use)

I haven't gone crazy with the free apps, but these are the ones I have:
Remote (Apple's own app to control iTunes on your Mac or AppleTV via wifi)
NY Times (nice format for checking out what's going on in the world while bored)
IGN Reviews (for those times when I'm in a game store and need to read a review fast)
Shazam (listens to a song and tells you the name and artist -- seems to work well, even on showtunes)
Facebook (quite limited, but good for quick status updates and stuff)

BAD THINGS:
No ability to send mail from an alias. I have 3 aliases in addition to my main account on MobileMe. Unlike on the desktop Mail app (or any other phone app I've ever used) there's no way to send an outgoing message from one of the other aliases. It's not something I need too often, but it's making me consider switching away from my MobileMe account and getting a bunch of gmail accounts for my secondary emails instead.

Copy and paste (of course). Have only needed it once so far in the last 3 days, when someone texted me and asked for someone else's phone number.

Tethering: I would gladly pay AT&T more if I had to in order to get Bluetooth tethering support. I use it CONSTANTLY at work, and kind of can't live without it. I often work in places without internet access, so I need to bring my own, and doing everything on the phone is not enough -- I need my laptop to be able to get online. The only way I managed to buy the iPhone at all is with the hope that if I had to I could stick the SIM card in my Tilt and tether that way (I hope). But that involves carrying the Tilt around and keeping it charged. Once the new software is jailbroken there should be a way to do it. I just hope that happens soon. I really wouldn't mind doing it legally, if AT&T were willing to take my money, but I guess they're not.

I read on a theatrically-minded review that you can't turn off the cell radio without going into airplane mode, meaning you can't use wifi with the cell radio off. I have happily found that this is not true! You go into airplane mode and it will shut off all radios, but you can then turn the wifi radio back on. This is very helpful for theatrical types because phone radios (particularly GSM) cause interference with speakers and wireless headsets, and the sound people and anyone on headset with you will hate you if you leave your phone on during a show. But wifi frequencies do not cause this problem, so I'm used to using wifi to continue to have data access when I need to turn my phone off, and I'm glad to see the lack of this was just a false alarm.

Anyway, so far I'm very happy, and I know this is just the beginning for MobileMe and the App Store, and there should be some new stuff coming soon.

A Quick Observation on Technology

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.

Notes on Joseph

See, I'm making a blog post now because something is happening. As you can see from this ridiculous photo of me wearing an amazing technicolor dreamcoat, I've begun my fourth summer as PSM of The Reagle Players in Waltham, MA. Last year I did a whole fancy mini-blog about the whole season. I don't think I'm going to be quite as detailed this year, as it would just be more of the same, but I will post my thoughts as they come.

Some observations about our production of Joseph:

It's a very weird show to rehearse. There are only four principals, first of all: Joseph, the Narrator, Jacob/Potiphar, and the Pharaoh. Then we have the 11 brothers and their 11 wives. Oh, and the 53 children in the choir, but that's another story. Another thing we've been realizing is that the principals don't actually do as much as you'd think. The story is structured as a narrative, and what really happens is that the chorus is really moving the story along while the principals interject their parts. It doesn't really seem like that in the finished product, but it's basically impossible to rehearse for very long without involving the chorus. It's been a bit of a challenge to not have the principals sitting idle, because there's very little they can work on while the chorus is learning something else. It doesn't help that our principals are very quick learners, and some of them have played their roles on tour, so the little they can work on doesn't even need much rehearsal.

Things are going really well. The whole cast is both talented and nice, which always makes me really nervous, because that never happens and I'm always wondering when the problems are going to arrive, but so far so good. Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a very fun show, so that may be helping as well. I'm really enjoying it because it's one of the shows I grew up knowing every word of. Aside from Phantom, this is the first time I've done one of those shows that was such a part of my childhood. Some other people in the company also said that they had a similar experience with the show. We've decided that those of us that memorized all the colors in Joseph's coat at the age of 12 are biologically more disposed to remember them than those who are trying to learn them now as adults.

Reagle has done the show twice before, although apparently we're among the first (if not the first) company to do a new version of the show licensed by R&H. I hate hate hate the way the score is printed. First of all, since the show is through-sung, we didn't get scripts, just scores. Step 1 was to make a copy reduced to 80% and stuck in the upper-left side of the page so I have room to write blocking and other notes. To make matters worse, it's got the lyrics written so that multiple verses are written to the same bars of music (i.e. it wraps back around and you read the second line of lyrics the second time.) That's all well and good for a lot of purposes, but I think it's going to be a disaster to call a show that way. If the show were going to run forever the solution would be to duplicate the pages and white out the lyrics and cut and paste as needed to make it read in a linear fashion, but for 8 performances I'm trying to avoid that. I think it will depend how many cues I have in a specific section, and if I have to clean it up some other way I will. But it definitely looks like I'll have to be following the score the whole time, which reduces the amount of time I can look up at the stage. Basically I'm in denial about the whole issue until I see what a mess it is at the paper tech. I may try to schedule the paper tech a day or two early since all the cues exist from the previous production.

One other issue we're dealing with is that due to other events happening on our stage, we don't get the deck until the night before tech. It happens sometimes. It happens on every Broadway show, but in our limited rehearsal time it certainly helps to have done it on stage before tech. It also makes the cast feel good to have done a run-through on stage before tech starts, so they can see the big picture before we get bogged down in the details for two days. Due to the 53 children, we're thinking spacing may take most of our time and we may not get a run that night.

Stay tuned for more!

Thank You, Bootleggers

I have two things to tell you:
The first begins in the stage management office of The Phantom of the Opera, a few short hours ago. We were talking about songs about months of the year, which after exhausting May, led to June, which of course led to "June is Bustin' Out All Over." This subject invariably leads to someone mentioning the infamous clip of Leslie Uggams performing said song at some event in Washington, DC and completely and utterly going up on the lyrics. It's one of the most famous theatre-related moving pictures ever, it seems. We all got a good laugh just at the thought of it, so I swung around in my chair and headed over to YouTube so we could all enjoy it. But IT'S GONE!!! We searched under several different names and phrases. We did a Google search, which only led to broken links of YouTube videos that have been removed. If anyone reading this can point me to a working link for this video, many people in the Phantom company will be grateful. Bonus points if it's the one with the subtitles speculating on what she might be trying to say.

After our disappointing failure, someone who had popped their head in at the prospect of seeing Leslie Uggams mentioned that on YouTube there was allegedly a video of the performance of Phantom where a certain Joseph Buquet had missed his entrance in "Magical Lasso", and Meg (Heather McFadden) jumped up and sang the whole song. We found it quickly, and soon the halls of the Majestic were echoing with screams, laughter, and applause at this miraculously preserved moment in theatre history. Embedding is disabled so you will have to click the link to go directly to the page, but it's well worth it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrzAKtZxK44

Heather is my new hero. Sally Williams is the Madame Giry, who is mostly holding herself together, even under the scrutiny of a close-up.

Flashlight Discoveries

This is a recap of some stuff I discovered, mainly while working on Frankenstein.

Being a stage manager, I'm naturally somewhat obsessed with flashlights, and at some point earlier in my career when searching for new toys, stumbled on the site photonlight.com. I had purchased a Photon Microlight II much earlier, at Eastern Mountain Sports or one of those places, and wore it on a chain around my neck as an all-purpose last-resort flashlight that would always be on my person. I considered it a step up from a bite light, as it had a pushbutton for momentary use, and a tiny switch so it could be left on. Thus, you could hold it in your teeth or in your hand, but without the need to actually bite on it or squeeze it to make it work. This was all well and good until I discovered the rich variety of small LED lights they sell online.

Specifically, the Photon Freedom Micro. It's insane. It does all sorts of complicated things with only one button, I don't even remember how to use them all.

The ones that I use:

1. Press the button, the light comes on. Press again to turn it off. Simple enough.

2. If you're like me, and reading Howard McGillin's crossword puzzle while stuck for 10 minutes on a bridge over the stage of the Majestic Theatre, you might not want to turn the light on to its full power, even when using a colored LED. If the light is off, simply hold down the button. This will slowly increase the brightness from nothing, and when you let go it stops at that level. So if you want only a teeny-tiny amount of light, let go as soon as it starts to light up. It's awesome. It also works in reverse, if the light is on and you hold down the button, it dims until you let go. Once you turn it off it will return to full brightness next time you press the button.

3. It can also do crazy things like flash at different rates, or even automatically flash SOS over and over.

Next comes the ability to customize your light. For the housing there are obvious colors like black and various camo shades, but you can also get it in more funky colors. The one I use for the stage is the black covert housing, which has a little plastic hood that covers the sides of the LED, so you can only see the light when it's pointed right at you, and the beam doesn't spill all over the place. I have a second light with a white LED, which I keep on my keychain for general illumination, and that's in the "fashion blue" color, just because it looks cool.

Then you get to choose the color of the LED, which offers a wide variety of choices. It should be noted that not all the colors are available with all body styles. You may have to get black or camo to get the color LED you want. The full list of colors are: white, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, purple, and for a few dollars more, you can even get IR or UV light. I went with turquoise for mine, because it has night vision properties, but it's not as dark as blue, so it gives more natural illumination. I am completely opposed to using red-gelled flashlights onstage. Unless perhaps you're doing Sweeney Todd, if the red spills anywhere that the audience can see it, it will stick out like a sore thumb, whereas shades of blue will probably blend in with your lighting better. So I've been really happy with the turquoise color.

Finally, you get some accessories in the box. I didn't think much of these, since I was accustomed to using the small keychain ring on the old one to wear it on a chain around my neck. The Freedom comes with two clip accessories that the light can pop into. The first has a simple loop on it to be used on a lanyard or anywhere else you might want to tie a string through it. I still use this through the chain around my neck, but now with the advantage that I can pop it off at a moment's notice to point it at something far away from my neck, or (gasp!) let someone else borrow it. And despite my initial fears, I have never had it pop out of the clip unexpectedly.
The other accessory is this amazing device that has an alligator clip with a magnetic base, so you can either clip it or magnetically attach it to something, and the light is held on a swivel so you can aim it wherever you want. As you can see the guy in the picture is wearing it on his hat. This summer I didn't have a bedside lamp at the apartment I was staying at, so I stuck mine to the metal bedpost and used it as a reading light. But the moment that changed my life was when we started tech for Frankenstein and I attempted to clip it to my headset, on the side of the not-covered ear. I had one of the really lightweight Clearcom headsets, and the clip jiggled around on the thin metal band. I rolled a thin strip of gaff tape around the band until it was just thick enough for the clip to hold firmly, and there it remained until the show closed. Words cannot express how helpful that clip was. I was wearing way too many hats on that show, and the ability to turn on the light with one press and then be able to work handsfree was amazing. Thanks to the ability to turn the light at any angle, I could give it a quick twist and have it point exactly where I was looking, or at a different angle, so my head could be looking down at the cue light while the light was aimed up at the tape marks on the ropes I was pulling. The other cool thing was that because of the clip-in holders, at the end of the show I was able to easily pop the light out of the holder on my headset and place it back in the holder around my neck, so I didn't have to leave it at the theatre.

Surefire
Because I'm obsessed with flashlights, I often use two during a performance -- one for when a small amount of light is needed, and one for when I need a lot of light. My light of choice for the "a lot of light" category has always been the Surefire 6P. It's reeeeeaaaalllly bright. With a Xenon bulb the battery life is pretty terrible (something like 1 hour), and the camera batteries it takes can be expensive, even when purchased in bulk. I noticed on Frankenstein that my batteries for both flashlights were running out too quickly for my tastes. I was getting less than two weeks out of the Surefire, and this distressed me, especially since I wasn't even using it for the vast majority of my cues. I was bitching about it one night on headset, when our electrician mentioned that she had an LED Surefire, and it got much better battery life. I wasn't even aware that Surefire had made an LED equivalent of the 6P, and I doubted it could come anywhere near the brightness of the Xenon bulb. She assured me that it was at least bright enough to see into a grid, and offered to let me play with it. A few days later I stood on the stage with my 6P and hers (which is called the G2), and shone both of them around the theatre -- up to the balcony, into dark corners, etc. What I found when comparing them against a spot in the back of the balcony was that the G2 exhibits that weird murky gray-blue quality that all white LEDs have, and that the 6P was more naturally picking up the vibrant colors of the walls and doors, etc. But while the 6P was more pleasing to the eyes, the G2 was illuminating the same area well enough, and the tradeoff for better battery life seemed worth it. I ordered a G2 the next day.

The other fun thing about having a Surefire is that we had a little bit of a shadow play at one point in the show, and during understudy rehearsals I would stand behind our "Creature" and hold the Surefire next to the instrument that would be illuminating him, and the beam was strong enough even under worklight to allow him, the PSM and dance captain sitting in the house to see the shadows and work on his performance of them. You can't do that with a maglite.

I should also mention that I also have the flip-off blue filter for the Surefire. Mine is the older style, from my 6P, but I found with some elbow grease it fit on the G2 as well. Most of the time when I use the flashlight during performance, it's with the filter on.

Batteries
Since all my batteries had been sucked up by the show, I placed a bulk battery order at the same time as I ordered the G2. When my Photon light would die, it was a tragedy. Radio shack charged something like $6 for each watch battery, of which I needed two. Twelve dollars in batteries for that tiny little light, it was almost as expensive as buying the batteries for the Surefire at retail. So I ordered a bunch of the lithium batteries for the Surefire, and also found that I could get the same watch batteries for the Photon that I bought for $6 at Radio Shack, for 51 cents!!! Needless to say I ordered a ton of them. I found the G2, and the batteries at Brightguy.com.

I hope you'll find these products as useful as I did. I was so excited the day the order from Brightguy arrived at the theatre, I stabbed myself with my Leatherman while trying to pry off the battery door on the Photon light. I recommend the small screwdriver tip for that now, not the point of the huge freakin' razor-sharp blade.

And finally, frequent readers will know I hate posting pictures of myself, but I feel this really requires an illustration of the headset mounting trick for the Photon light, and it so happens the only pictures of it I have include my head within the headset, so here you go: