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!