Why Yes, We ARE a Rep Company!

Despite the fact that we've been together for almost three months and have so far only performed Henry V for a paying audience, we are quickly coming upon the first performances of The Spy in less than two weeks in West Lafayette, IN.  As soon as Henry was up and running at the Guthrie, we began "brush-up" rehearsals for The Spy, which due to unforeseen circumstances, have become more of "put-two-actors-into-the-show" rehearsals.  We are also rehearsing the 1-hour version of Henry which will be performed sans set and costumes for younger school groups who aren't up to the 3-hour real thing.

The above photo shows the Henry set with the jagged platform and two of the columns for The Spy roughly taped out on it.  Yes, it has to be done anew every day.  And yes, the tape does pull up the finish on the floor!

iPhone Apps for Stage Managers, Round 2

For my initial review of helpful apps for stage managers, read this.

I've now had the iPhone for about six months, and the App Store has grown exponentially with new and updated apps, so here is another check-in on what I'm finding useful for stage management and life. All links will take you to the App Store page.

TimeCalc ($1.99) still remains the greatest single contribution of the iPhone to stage management, as far as I'm concerned. I use it every single day. Right now I use it most because the Guthrie requires an 18-minute intermission. Sucking at math as I do, I prefer to input the time the first act ended, and add 18 minutes to it.

Night Camera ($0.99) is a really cool camera app that has completely replaced the built-in camera for me. The gist is that it uses the accelerometer to tell when you are holding the phone perfectly still and takes the picture at that moment. It is so named because it creates much better pictures in low light (which is great for theatre), but also takes better pictures in any light, in my experience. Below is an example of a picture I took in tech, during a very dark cue. I'm no Joan Marcus, but for a midrange phone camera, you can see what it's a picture of, and I think that's the most anyone can ask for. The regular camera app would probably have shown a black screen with a red blob in the middle.


MobileFotos is more of a fun app -- it is a Flickr upload client, which I'm sure you could justify as a work-related app if you used Flickr to upload and share work photos of some sort -- which now that I think about it is not a bad idea for things like documenting the proper look of light cues or scenery on stage). I use the app to update my Flickr stream, which is linked in the sidebar, with photos from my tour. It also is a nice way to pass the time by looking at other people's photos. It's very full-featured and nicely laid out.

Night Stand (Free) is used for one thing in my world: it tells the time down to the second. For some reason the iPhone doesn't seem to have an app or an option somewhere that can show the time in seconds. A minute is a very long time when your director wants to know why the 2nd act got 30 seconds longer today. Personally, I take my running times down to the nearest 5 seconds. I've just started using Night Stand, and it's very good at the one thing it does. Just a few days ago it was updated with some alarm features, but because apps can't stay active in the background, there's not much point to using a 3rd-party alarm app, since you can't do anything else with the phone while waiting for the alarm to go off. I'm also looking at getting LCDClock or Table Clock, which are both $0.99.

Delivery Status Touch ($1.99) is the iPhone companion to the dashboard widget Delivery Status, which has long been a favorite of mine. It tracks packages from the major delivery services, and when you sign up on the developer's site, it will sync your deliveries from the desktop widget with your phone (which is invaluable for entering tracking numbers since the phone doesn't have copy/paste).

On the jailbroken front, I use PowerTool to restart my springboard when the phone gets a little sluggish. It can also trigger a full reboot or power down.

The most useful app, whether official or jailbroken, in my mind is PDANet (link goes to website), which has a long history of allowing tethering on Palm devices and others, and is now available for jailbroken iPhones. If you create an ad-hoc wireless network with your computer and join said network with your iPhone, PDANet will allow you to use the phone's internet connection through your computer. Since AT&T has decided they don't want our money (yet?) for this service, after a 14-day free trial, you can instead pay PDANet's one-time registration (I think it's about $30) for the ability to tether anytime and anywhere. This comes with all the usual warnings about tethering -- it's not allowed under your contract, don't use enough data that AT&T will wonder where it's going, etc. If you're jailbreaking your phone you probably know all about what AT&T doesn't want you to do already. It's pretty expensive for an app that violates your data contract and could cease working with a future update, but in my mind there is no price that can be put on this feature.

I often hear people talk about how tethering is useless (or not useful enough to be bothered with). I think these people must get paid a regular salary, file one or two W-2s per year with the IRS, and spend most of their time at a "desk" or in an "office" or "the same place of business every day" where things like "phones" and "internet" are provided by their employer. For those of us whose jobs are a little less predictable, but still desperately need full desktop internet access HERE and NOW, not in 10 minutes, not at the Starbucks down the street, and who have to provide this level of efficiency but aren't paid enough to afford a wireless broadband card for the laptop, tethering is the only option. I once distributed a rehearsal schedule while sitting in the trunk of my car in a restaurant parking lot. And I have done plenty of shows which rehearsed or performed for weeks in a room (or a building) with no internet available. For reasons such as this, I refuse to have a phone incapable of tethering, whether legally or illegally. When the 3G iPhone came out, before the tethering apps were available, I had to carry my previous phone, the AT&T Tilt, around in my bag so I could swap the SIM card into it if I needed to tether in an emergency. Obviously it was a huge pain, and I am very glad to see that PDANet has pretty much perfected the art of tethering on the iPhone to make it as reliable and simple as it can be without official support.

A Sonnet

Tonight I write a poem with pen and pad
Upon this two-show day of Henry V.
My iPhone rests behind my chair plugged in,
The cord supplied of insufficient length.
O what can I with simple paper do
Of import that would match my Facebook's state?
An email might for many minutes sit
Unknown, unread, devoid of swift reply.
Tomorrow's weather stays a mystery,
No picture sent to Flickr when it's took.
I fear a post comes from my favorite blog,
And yet I'll know it not upon this hour --
Perhaps to wait until I reach my home.
And oh for shame, however will I know
One of my apps perhaps is obsolete,
An update waiting in the App Store now
That was not there to get an hour past.
The world is changing, yet I can't be told,
But sit and call a show five centuries old.

Thoughts at Half Hour

Oh God, seriously I haven't posted anything since Day 2 of tech? Well, again I refer you to Nick's Blog, which has been kept up slightly better (I think between the two of us we might make up one fairly regularly-updated blog about stage managing this tour).

I am writing from the booth during half hour of an evening performance on an average Saturday here at the Guthrie. The matinee was a very good show. We have been rehearsing The Spy and the 1-hour student version of Henry V like crazy this week, as well as doing 8 performances of the 3-hour Henry V at night, and everyone is very tired, both physically and mentally, but the cast gave a great show to one of our best audiences yet (which is saying a lot cause we've had some awesome audiences). We found out at the post-play discussion that they were largely made up of a group of college students who were working on Henry V for an English class, so our talkback focused pretty much exclusively on questions about the text and the task of performing Shakespeare. I love doing talkbacks, so the heavy focus on education with this tour is a lot of fun for me.

Next week we have an additional student matinee, which means a 9-show week (and the corresponding increase in pay), in addition to our intense rehearsal schedule. Everyone is worried about getting worn out from it, especially since at the end of the week we are leaving Minneapolis and traveling to West Lafayette, IN, for another tech for The Spy. I'm anxious to actually start touring, though. It will also be our first ride on the bus, which should be really fun, at least until the initial effect of feeling like rockstars wears off and gives way to "gee I'd really like to sleep in a real bed."

Tech Day 2

Our first 10-out-of-12 hour day. We are making very good progress, and everyone is pleased with how smoothly it's going. The picture above is one I have entitled "Henry Cast and Crew in Repose." There are several more like it on my Flickr page, linked in the sidebar. This was taken while a light cue was being written.

The set is rather complicated as it's got lots of little doors that open and things that can be climbed on, which were bound to require time to get used to that just can't be prepared for in the rehearsal room. We've had to restage some things, but we have also discovered new ways to play with the set that we didn't imagine before, and none of it is taking too long. We're at our dinner break, only 9 working hours since we began tech from the top, and are through the majority of Act I. We're shooting for a run (perhaps an invited dress with some students who will be at the Guthrie) in two days, then our first preview the following night.

Most of our touring crew are here this week (some are going back to New York for a while before rejoining us for the tour), so that has been a nice reunion. Our two local backstage crew are great, and the large and valiant wardrobe crew have done a great job tracking a ridiculous number of costume changes, with the assistance of Nick's paperwork. When we're on the road, we'll have Nick, our TD, wardrobe and props supervisors, as well as a local crew of two stagehands and two wardrobe people backstage. This tech will be the final test to make sure the shows can be run by the number of people we are budgeted for.

Today we were treated to the Guthrie's traditional tech dinner, which is a homecooked buffet provided by volunteers. By some fluke of scheduling, the Guthrie is teching two shows at exactly the same time -- A Delicate Balance also started tech yesterday, so the two companies shared the enormous meal in one of the rehearsal studios. I don't think any of us have ever seen so much food. With the rest of my two hour break, I am letting my food coma wear off by sitting with my laptop in a nook of the 9th floor lobby of our theatre. It's this crazy room surrounded in yellow glass, that is cantilevered out from the side of the building -- it even has a glass floor in one spot. I have a thing for colored glass in architecture, so this has been my favorite place in the building even before I got here, when I saw it on the photo tour on the Guthrie website. You can see it from the outside in this picture, which is also my current desktop wallpaper.

At night the yellow glass casts a tint on all the lights of the cars and buildings below. It's quite cool. This picture doesn't do it justice at all. At some later time I must try to do better.

The Truck

I know I haven't been posting much. Things have been rather busy and crazy. This morning was a huge event in our process -- our truck showed up at the Guthrie loading dock. I've been looking forward to this moment for a while. Partially because everything that's of any use in the world is on it -- ask the question "Do we have _________?" and the answer invariably is "It'll be on the truck."

Our load-in for Henry V began today, and by 3PM when Nick and I stopped by for a while, the "gallery" scaffolding and the first level's walls were up. Nick gave me the grand tour of backstage (which I missed while minding yesterday's rehearsal, when we brought the cast for a field trip to the theatre with our vocal coaches, so they could play around with making sound in the actual space). The booth is in a rather strange spot, high up over the stage above stage right, but the view is unobstructed, and there's a very nice set of infrared and color cameras with a frontal view.

Tech starts tomorrow, and I'm off to get a good night's sleep!