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).

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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.