The Go Button has moved!

Transition Complete! This blog is now closed!

2009-05-26T15:34:00.008-05:00

Well it turns out Wordpress has a rather nice auto-import feature that takes all your posts from Blogger and imports them with images, tags and everything intact. So the whole blog is duplicated over at the new site, ~~thegobutton.net/blog~~ HeadsetChatter.com/blog. There's even a new post today.

This will be my last post here, so please update your bookmarks to the new site, and be sure to check out the new features (some are still under construction, but you will see an idea of what's coming).

Thanks for reading, I hope you like the new site, and if not, feel free to let me know!

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

2009-05-23T19:53:00.006-05:00

It is with great fanfare that I announce the birth of

thegobutton.net!

Since I created this blog, I have long dreamed of having a full website where people would go for stage management tips, tricks, stories and downloads. I was held back only by my complete inability to properly design web pages.

A while back I purchased Macheist Bundle 3, which includes lots of fun software. One of the more popular apps is Espresso, which is a new app for web developers. While on tour I started feeling a little bit inadequate as a geek because I didn't know any modern programming languages. So since I have this random free copy of Espresso, I thought I'd take some time to start out small and work my way through hand-coding websites in HTML, CSS, and onward from there. With nothing but free time between the tour and the Reagle season, in just a few days I had progressed through HTML to basic and intermediate CSS, and I decided to go ahead and buy the domain I've had my eye on for over two years, thegobutton.net (thegobutton.com, unfortunately, was taken, otherwise I probably would have bought it when I started this blog).

Along with that I purchased a hosting plan from godaddy.com, and uploaded the little site I developed onto it, and began expanding it. As of this writing, I have been working on this little project for three days, and I am ready to announce it on the blog. It's very much a work in progress, there are a lot of placeholders, but if you're curious to see what I'm working on, you can browse around, and there's a forum that's up and running, too (what I need a forum for at this point, I don't know, but I like forums).

This blog will eventually move over there, as soon as I figure out exactly how to do that. In all likelihood I will install Wordpress and transfer all the posts over.

And I promise, the banner will calm down. I needed to design a dummy one to get started, I had new Photoshop filters to play with, and things just kind of went from there.

End of Tour

2009-05-23T14:33:00.000-05:00

Well the end of the tour has come. I'm sorry I didn't have any posting to do during the 6 days of our final leg. Our internet problems continued and worsened, to the point that there really wasn't any convenient time to sit and relax with internet access that might have lent itself to blogging. On top of that, there wasn't really anything spectacular to blog about. It was kind of same-old-same-old. We came, we saw, we did shows. We finally got to perform The Spy a bit, between the end of the New York run and the final leg, we actually did more Spy than Henry. It finally started to evolve into something as natural as it had been when we rehearsed it in New York way back in November/December. It was kind of sad to see it finally coming together too late, and to get a hint of the potential it might have had if not for all the misfortunes that befell it (and the fact that most of America's presenters apparently had no interest in booking it).

Overall the tour turned out pretty well after its rough start. There's a lot I think we can do better next year if we build on what we learned this year, and I hope to be a part of that. Romeo and Juliet and a workshop of a new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland are on the agenda for next season.

I think this concludes the Tour Mini-Blog, I hope you had fun reading of my adventures this season. I'd like to give one final plug to my Flickr photostream, over yonder on the right sidebar. It contains almost daily photos from life on the road, along with some pretty detailed descriptions, and it covers some aspects of the tour I didn't blog about (and certainly was too lazy to post photos of in the blog).

My Week "Off"

2009-05-11T00:11:00.000-05:00

I feel like I hit a milestone in my career this weekend. It's the first time I've been asked to call a show in performance without any rehearsal, based on having called a different production of the same show.

Last summer you may recall I was PSM for a production of No, No Nanette starring Donna McKechnie. If not you can read about it in the August 2008 archives. Anyway this week we are laid off from The Acting Company, and my friend Brian is PSM for a production of Nanette for Amas, who in addition to producing Off-Broadway, also run a program for high school kids where they get to learn about theatre and at the end of the school year put on a full-length musical with a creative team and tech staff of working professionals. I have worked with Amas a lot, and worked as ASM on one of these shows a few years back. So due to having the week off, I decided to support my friends and see what the kids were doing with Nanette.

Brian's assistant couldn't make a few hours of tech on Thursday, so I agreed to stop by to be a warm stage managerial body, and then stayed to watch the final dress. Which is a good thing. After the run, Brian found out the next night his other show, which his sub would be calling for the first time, would be welcoming the Times critic. How could Brian call the show for the Times when he was supposed to be calling opening night of Nanette at the same time? Unless of course there was someone who already had a working knowledge of calling Nanette and preferably had at least seen this production. The next morning at 9AM I got the confirmation that they wanted me to call. I finished reading through the script about ten minutes prior to the show, then listened to a couple bits of the original cast recording to remind myself of a couple bumps I didn't remember and the end of the overture.

The show went fine and I didn't have any major regrets upon actually seeing what the cues do. I came upon a couple funny situations due to the fact that the show was slightly cut down. I had a restore cue and wasn't sure if the tag at the end of the number was kept or if they would go straight on. So I took the cue to be safe, and sure enough they did the tag. A few bars before the end of "Hubby Gone Blues" I couldn't quite tell from the markings if the entire boys' section was cut or if the last bit was in, which greatly effected where the final cue went. So I had to ask on headset, "um, strange question, but do the boys come in in this number?" "No." "Ok, so this is the end right here then." "Yes." It was a fun time.

Turning 30

2009-05-02T12:49:00.002-05:00

You know when you're playing an RPG, where you have to complete some side tasks before moving past a certain point in the game, or not make any mistakes, or else you'll never be able to achieve the good ending? And once you've failed to do that, you might not even be halfway through the game, but from then on you know the best you're going to get is the generic ending. And maybe you bother playing the rest of the game out, but you're not really enjoying it, because you screwed it up and no matter what you do you can't get to the result you want. That's how I feel about turning 30.

Red Flag

2009-04-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

I got an email today forwarded through several people, about a company looking for a stage manager for an upcoming production. When I got to where it said, "This is a paid position," like there was any question that it might not be, I stopped. Of course I wasn't available for all the dates, and I doubt this gig was Equity-approved anyway. However...

Being that it's a paid position, I'm sure it would be a great job for somebody just starting out. But honestly, nobody deserves to stage manage for free EVER, unless it's in school, or for charity. Whenever I see that in a job description it makes me crazy. The implication that under other circumstances a "professional" company or individual producer might have been looking for a stage manager for no pay is just sad. Come on, if you've got the money to put up a show, however small, you can find $100 to give to the person doing the hardest and most thankless part of it. I know some people really do need the resume and experience, but I think anybody has the right to refuse to work for free. In fact it would be nice if enough people did it that producers wouldn't think to ask.

Sorry, I had to vent about that peeve. Am I being overly sensitive?

Baruch Revisited

2009-04-29T20:27:00.003-05:00

Late last night we departed Frostburg, MD, and this morning we woke up home-sweet-home on 24th St. and Lex. We said our final goodbyes to Bart, and unloaded all our luggage and other belongings from the bus into a hallway by the loading doors at Baruch College (see photo).

Last night in Frostburg was a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out. This is something we do every now and then, where the whole crew will wear our Save the Ta-Tas shirts that Daphne got us for opening night in New York. Like so, in Tucson:

We decided pretty much at the start of this leg that Frostburg would be a Save the Ta-Tas Load Out since it was the last venue before returning to New York. The interesting advantage of this was that the next morning when we got up in New York, it was easy to tell who had decided to sleep in their clothes, as they were the ones still wearing their Ta-Tas for load in. I didn't exactly count, but I'd say it was four or five of us, including me. Speaking of which, we have submitted our photo to savethetatas.com, but it hasn't been published yet. I did have a nice email conversation with their customer service lady about our company -- she wants to see us when we come to California -- and she assured me it would go up "soon." That was like a month ago.

Baruch is kind of the most hellacious load-in situation ever. Unloading the truck on the street, followed by a lot of ramps and hallways, to a rather small freight elevator, and then down some more winding and public hallways to the theatre. Apparently it took 5 hours to unload the truck. Sadly for my friends, Nick and I did the stage manager thing and helped unload the road boxes, then broke off with our box and did our jobs and went home. We both felt bad for our friends, but my personal philosophy is that when you're playing Poplar Bluff, MO and the show must go on, and you need a few more hands, that's one thing. When opening a show in New York, there's no reason stage managers should be needed to work as stage hands, without compensation and when their home is just a subway ride away. At any rate, I feel slightly less bad since I also had to come back at night for a late-night cueing session for The Spy. Due to the tightly packed schedule (if performances and film shoots manifested themselves as fish, this week's would be sardines), there was no other time to do it but late tonight on load-in day, and as this is the New York premiere, we want to try to show it a little more love than it's been given on our very Henry-heavy touring schedule. At least I had a chance to shower, change, and show up nicely dressed and clean like a normal person. I even have some simple jewelry on.

My first task upon coming back to Baruch at night was to set up our wireless network. As I have reported before in this post from December, Baruch's theatre is in the third basement of their main building, surrounded by more concrete than any radio wave can get through, so cell service is a complete impossibility, and setting up a router in one room and expecting it to work three rooms down the hall is sketchy. When we teched The Spy here, it took me the better part of three days to get a reliable wireless signal to reach the theatre from the single ethernet cable in the production office. The solution I came up with was to bring in two of my own personal routers -- an old UFO-shaped Airport Extreme, and an original Airport Express -- and to place the Extreme on top of a filing cabinet in the production office, where the ethernet was, and to plug the Express in in the shop, which is just behind the stage. The signal from the Extreme went just far enough to reach the Express, which then passed it on just far enough to reach the tech tables in the house, but not quite enough for a steady signal in the booth. I may see what I can do about that this time, as I will be spending pretty much all my time in the booth.

This whole day has been deja vu. So many things have changed since we began our journey here, and yet there are other things that are exactly the same. When I came back at night, I found a couple of the tiny Spy columns, which we call "nubblies," nestled against a diagonal wall, where six months ago another pile of short unused Spy columns sat when it was decided they weren't needed (or something). This time they will be needed, but because we're repping Henry and Spy, they are simply waiting there while Henry takes the stage. As soon as I glimpsed the greenroom through an open door I was instantly taken back to our final post-invited-dress notes session, on the eve of beginning the tour, and thought of all the people who were there who are no longer with the company. It's been kind of a bittersweet return. But with all the drama along the way, the very fact that we are back here and performing both shows is an accomplishment in itself, so we can be proud of that.

Dear Apple

2009-04-29T15:05:00.000-05:00

Thank you for your recent emails suggesting that I get my mother an iPod Touch for Mother's Day. Were it not for your almost daily reminders, I would not actually have been aware that Mother's Day was approaching, or that I needed to be planning gifts for both my parents (as I'll be out of town by Father's Day). I've been quite busy on the road and thinking of days in terms of load ins and load outs, and completely oblivious to weekends, birthdays or national holidays. Actually I'm turning 30 in a few days, and the most I can tell you about that date is that we have performances of The Spy at 2 and 8, with a seminar prior to the matinee. So you can see how I greatly appreciate your reminders that I need to get a gift for my mom.

However, while my mother is a Mac user and might have an iPhone except that AT&T sucks at her house, I don't believe that the iPod Touch is the ideal gift for her. She's not much of a music lover -- I think she still has yet to spend all of an iTunes gift certificate I got for her several years ago -- and I don't imagine she'd enjoy watching videos or TV shows on such a small screen. Personally, I don't see the point of an iPod Touch for anyone who doesn't intend to use it first as an iPod. I would like someday to be able to get her an inexpensive Macbook, as she would truly use that, but this would be exceedingly more difficult if I now spent $300 on a gift she won't really use. And P.S. Mr. or Ms. Apple Marketing Person, I have a feeling you have a larger and more regular income than I do and can afford to drop $300 on a Mother's Day gift -- and then presumably match that gift a month later when Father's Day rolls around. Well good for you.

In brief, I appreciate that you're looking out for my mother, and for my own preparedness, but the next time you feel the need to send me 5 or more emails suggesting I buy a specific gift for someone, please pick something more appropriate. Thanks!
Love, KP

My Newfound Love of OmniFocus

2009-04-24T23:40:00.002-05:00

Among my favorite types of computing applications has always been the organizer/checklist/outline kind of app. Back in my PDA days, the Palm apps Bonsai and ShadowPlan competed for my heart with each new update. When I got a Mac it came with a version of OmniOutliner which I loved a lot, but alas because it was one of those "came-with-the-Mac" things, as soon as I tried to install a new update it broke my fragile registered version, and I was pissed about it and refused to pay for it, so it was gone (I'm currently having that relationship with ComicLife).

The other problem I have with tasks in general is that the default Apple apps have a really stupid way of handling them, or at least stupid to me, growing up with Palm's big four apps: Datebook, Contacts, To-Dos and Memo. Apple seems to hate to-dos and memos, so much so that after what seems like centuries in technological time, we may soon finally be seeing them sync between iCal, Mail and the iPhone. What, I ask, was the damn point of using them at all until now? First I stopped using tasks, because I could never get them to sync properly between iCal and my Treo. So I just wrote everything as a note. Now as an iPhone user my notes don't sync with anything (???!!!!WTF??!!), and yet I still write everything as a note. Occasionally I will email that note to myself if I really need it in another format.

So of course I looked to the App Store to see what the third party developers had come up with that might serve as a basic tasks app. I honestly wanted a basic tasks app -- a list and a bunch of giant checkboxes. I tried, I really did. But at the time the basic apps were either ugly, overpriced, or reported buggy and lacking basic features. Who knows, since there are no free trials. But the one that sounded the best to me was the most complicated of all -- OmniFocus. At $20, it's one of the more expensive apps in the App Store, but that was back in the day when an average game was $10, so it didn't seem as expensive to me then as it might now when everything else is 99 cents.

Using OmniFocus brought some kind of order to my life. I use it sometimes for shopping lists, generally more of the long-term stuff, not like "what I need to get from Duane Reade in 3 hours," which is usually a straight list. I write down things I want to work on with my computer, like reinstalling Parallels, which I forgot to do the last time I was home; and things I need to pack for the next leg of the tour, or what I hope to accomplish during my down time on the next load-in day. I also have a special project for fight call, which is really not what OmniFocus is designed to do, but I tried it anyway. With both Henry V and The Spy, we have a rather extensive fight call, running through distinct sections of fight choreography with different actors. There is a standard order which we have developed for that, and especially because we perform The Spy so infrequently, Nick and I needed a way to keep track of that order and make sure we've hit all the proper scenes. So I have a project for Fight Call and a sub-project for each show, and inside each are the actions representing each individual fight and the actors needed. I'm not sure exactly what app Nick uses for his list, but he has it on his Blackberry. This allows both of us to open our phones at the top of fight call and Nick runs the current fight while I can let the actors know who is up next and which scene it is, and make sure they have their weapons ready when it's their turn. This is sort of a recurring checklist rather than a regular list of tasks, and the blending of the two types of lists is kind of weird to me, but I think OmniFocus can be made useful for things like this, or prop checklists, with a little work.

Anyway, I was very happy with my purchase. Of course it's designed to sync with the desktop version of the app. That is, if you're willing to pay $80(!!??!!WTF??!!) for it. It's kind of all or nothing. There's not a way to say "Gee I'd like to be able to see and edit my OmniFocus file on a desktop machine" without fully committing to using the software to run your life. I'm not sure exactly what happened to me, I think it was a conversation over drinks with a few of my colleagues about organization and task lists that led me to question if the fact that my technology has failed me, and is driving me closer and closer to having to etch my tasks on tablets, might someday result in me screwing something up. I've done OK with this seat-of-the-pants way I've been running my life and career with the occasional iCal appointment (with or without an alarm) to remind me to do things, or with a plain-text list in my iPhone's notepad. But really, how far I have fallen since the days when there was a checklist for home and shopping, and work stuff was laid out in fancy outlines with multi-part projects and due dates and things!

So I decided -- by way of writing an action in OmniFocus on my iPhone -- that when I got a chance I would download the 14-day trial of OmniFocus desktop. I have been using it for about two days, and so far I am hooked. It's got an even steeper learning curve than the iPhone version, but the larger screen in some ways makes the relationship between the different views and types of data clearer. I've also been watching some of the introductory videos on the website. After that, I discovered a great set of video podcasts called ScreenCastsOnline, which do in-depth screencasts of popular Mac apps. I've only watched a couple, but they have tons available that I want to see. They also offer podcast subscriptions in HD or iPhone-compatible sizes. I sense this will be a new favorite podcast of mine. You can get the links to either of these feeds on their website here.

In all, I've been having fun trying to think of every little thing I need to accomplish and entering it into OmniFocus and categorizing it. I think I'll be much more efficient using the desktop app since the majority of what I need to accomplish either requires me to be at my computer, or in an environment where my computer is out. This way, the iPhone app, which is a little more cumbersome to use due to the fact that it can't run in the background, is only really needed when I'm out and about. More thoughts to come as this experiment goes on...

My Week in Computing

2009-04-24T00:17:00.005-05:00

The biggest event of my week was yesterday when we visited the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. As befitting a giant mall, of course there is an Apple Store. I decided to take my chances on a walk-in visit to the Genius Bar to see if anything could be done about my Macbook Pro battery.

A little background, because I don't bitch about my battery nearly enough for you to have known it was going on: my computer is not quite two years old, and its second battery has withered and died. The first battery lasted pretty much a year exactly, before the battery life got to a point where it was really negating the purpose of having a laptop (somewhere around a half hour). I probably had a case for premature failure, but I just bought a new one, and was happy.

Cut to ten months later. While the battery life on the second one had not become quite so brief (maybe an hour to an hour and a half), the battery was all confused. Diagnostic programs reported the battery health at 40% after 90-something charge cycles, which based on my perusal of the Apple Support forums, is way worse than a lot of people who were able to get their batteries replaced. Worst of all, instead of simply dying quickly, it was misreporting its charge, so that the computer would show it maybe 30% full, and instead of showing a low battery warning or forcing the computer to sleep, it would completely shut off without warning, which is, um, terrible, in so many ways. It had just started doing this before the logic board failure, so when the computer died I thought maybe the battery was not to blame after all, but the problem continued after the repair.

While my computer is sadly without Apple Care, the battery is less than a year old, and thus has its own warranty. It's clearly indicated on the receipt, which I made sure to have on my iPhone in PDF format before going to the store.

So I walked into the store and was able to get an appointment right away, and within 5 minutes was talking to the genius. He booted my computer from an old iPod nano which had some diagnostic software on it (as I tried to stifle my excitement at this idea of using my old nano as an 8GB flash drive), and after a few seconds, the screen popped up with this big red box with the word "BAD" in it in huge letters (artist's rendering above). It was really comical. Well that settled that! I showed him the PDF including the warranty date, signed some papers and walked away with a brand new battery. Between the logic board and the battery I feel like I have a brand new Mac.

Right now I'm using my days off to be a good little girl and train the battery properly. It's probably going to want to be shut down soon -- oops, there goes the warning -- so bye!

Foooooood

2009-04-24T00:16:00.001-05:00

With my last remaining bits of energy I will attempt to write a post. Tonight we took part in the traditional final crew meal for the Acting Company tour. The tour still has almost a month left to go, but we are losing Bart for the last leg because he's starting another tour, so we are celebrating now. It has been tradition that at the end of the tour the crew goes out to a ridiculously expensive dinner.

We went to Barclay Prime, a fancy steakhouse in Philly. We're not playing Philly, we're just here for 3 days so we could have steak tonight. No, I'm not kidding. We also did a lot of shopping today. Half of us, including me, got new shoes at the Puma store.

All told, we spent over $1,300 on dinner, which lasted for three hours. The food was amazing, and the restaurant and service was very nice. I had the salmon, but also got to try kobe steak for the first time, as well as a madeira, which we ordered because there is a bottle of madeira which is a plot point in The Spy.

As soon as we got back to the bus, I fell into my bunk and have not moved since.

The Tour: Leg 3

2009-04-18T22:42:00.000-05:00

This is the leg of the tour that is going to kick all our asses. It consists almost exclusively of one-nighters, few of them having days between performances. We were lucky in a sense to lose our scheduled performance in New Brunswick, NJ, as that's where we'd be right now, rather than enjoying our first day off.

Since I last blogged, we left Nashville at night and awoke on the campus of Mississippi State, where we performed The Spy. After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke on the campus of Auburn University in Alabama, where we performed Henry. After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke in the loading dock of the Opera House in Newberry, SC. As sad as it is, we were fortunate at that point that our set did not fit at Newberry, so very little had to be loaded in or out. Having not showered in close to four days, it was very nice to have a dedicated load-in day, and a day that ended early at that. The following day, we had a one-hour Henry performance in the morning, which gave us a chance to try out some of our ideas for staging the Big Henry that night. Without the set, a lot of our staging actually borrows a bit from the one-hour, such as having many of the entrances that happen on the upper gallery occur in the aisles. The Opera House is a beautiful little theatre of about 400 seats, built in 1882, and beautifully restored to keep its historic feel. We all decided it felt almost like a town meeting hall where the Declaration of Independence would have been read -- and regretted that we weren't performing The Spy there. After the Baby Henry, we had a two-hour rehearsal (yuck -- but everyone was in good spirits and ready to bang out a restaged 3-hour show), and we blew through the entire show, mostly a cue-to-cue of the beginnings and ends of scenes, and in less than two hours we were done. Then we did the Big Henry, an 8:00 show, which everybody usually dreads because it means we don't get done until 11. But with the short load-out, we were actually closing the doors of the truck before midnight, and were able to join the cast at a local bar, drink, chat and play some pool together. It's a very, very rare thing that our schedules allow us to all socialize in the same place, so it was a fun end to the Newberry experience.

That was last night. Then we went to bed on the bus in the parking lot of the hotel we had stayed at the night before (which incidentally was only the second night in a real bed we've been able to sleep in on this leg), and woke up to the familiar alarm clock of Bart yelling "GET THE F*** UP!!!" at 10AM. We were in a parking lot at Ashville Airport in North Carolina, where we have decided to spend our day off (had we not lost the gig in New Bruswick, we'd have been rushing to get there instead). We rented a minivan, which Bart drove like a race car, up the winding roads of the mountains to visit some waterfalls and other sights where the bus would not have easily been able to fit. After that we checked into a crew room at a Holiday Inn Express, and at night went to eat at a Middle-Eastern restaurant where Joel's brother used to be the chef. It was really good. Tonight the bus departs at 2:30AM, and we'll wake up in University Park, PA, where we'll have an honest-to-goodness day off, and then a full load in day at Penn State, followed by a two-show day of Henry. And as is usually our custom, that two-show day means a 10AM student performance, followed by a 7:30 evening performance. At least it's not 8:00.

This week has been pretty rough on us, but we're all aware that the tour is winding down, and soon we'll be back performing in New York, and then after that we're laid off for a week, and then have just one more week of touring the Northeast before we're done. I'm sad for the tour to be ending, but I will be very happy to be able to stay put in one place for a while, even if I'll still be away from home.

iPhone Case Review: iSkin Solo FX

2009-04-13T23:46:00.000-05:00

I'm not a big fan of iPhone cases. I prefer to install the Zagg InvisibleShield, which is like a millimeter thin skin with a somewhat grippy surface, and be done with it. It adds almost no thickness to the phone, and is pretty much invisible.

However, my InvisibleShield has started to peel in a couple places, and that, combined with the fact that we have 5 iPhones on our crew bus, and all but mine are in cases of varying coolness, somehow got me researching iPhone cases again.

The only one I liked was the Solo from iSkin, which is pretty much only available online. There's the regular Solo, and the Solo FX. I will let their graphic explain:

They are basically the same case, except the solo is a solid primary color, and the FX comes in more funky colors, with a circular pattern. I went with the orange one.

The other difference you can't see is in the screen protector it comes with. The regular solo is a plain clear protector. The FX comes with a mirrored screen protector. This inherently sounds like a bad idea to me, and when I received the case this was proven. The mirrored finish looks cool, and would be pretty handy as a mirror, but it creates a pinkish cast to the screen, and similar to a glossy screen on a computer, picks up reflections which make it harder to read the screen. Most of all, though, I don't know why anyone would want a protector that affects the tint of the screen. I've never felt it necessary to use a screen protector on the iPhone due to its glass surface which is very resistant to everyday scratches, so trying the protector on was more of a curiosity.

As someone not a fan of cases in general, I really like this one. The material is somewhere halfway between a hard plastic case and the more rubbery ones. It's kind of a jelly-like plastic, which is very flexible, but doesn't have the extreme grippy powers that make other cases hard to get in and out of a pocket. It has enough tack to it that it easily keeps the phone still on a tabletop or in your hand.

All the buttons are covered by the case except the silencer switch, which has a cutout. There is also a cutout for the camera and headphone port. I'm not sure how it would do with more chunky headphone connectors than the one the iPhone comes with, but if you really had to I don't think it would be hard to cut the hole out bigger. There is also a long cutout at the bottom for the dock connector and mic and speaker openings. The case does not fit in the standard Apple dock (like pretty much any case I've ever heard of, except for the InvisibleShield and similar products), which is a bit of a compromise for me, since I like having the dock at my bedside. I also found that my old-style iPod cable (with a larger connector and the two tabs you have to push in to disconnect the cable) is a teeny bit wider and took a little forcing to get through the gap in the case, so I recommend using a newer cable like the one that comes with the phone.

One other minor complaint is that the power button is a little tough to press through the case. Personally I find that button harder to press than it should be under any circumstances, so I don't think it's really the fault of the case. It just requires a firmer press than usual, and gives little feedback that you've actually depressed the button, until you see the screen react.

Overall I think the case looks cool. It's semi-transparent, so you can still see the Apple logo on the back, if that matters to you. I'm sure it looks even better on a white iPhone where the color will really come out, but it adds some color and personalization to the black phone as well. It also does a cool thing when it's under a strong light, it almost seems to glow, and the color becomes brighter.

Here are some pics of mine. I purposely left the flash off because it was making the color seem a little brighter than it is under normal light.

We Have a New Bus!

2009-04-13T22:01:00.008-05:00

Somewhat candid photo of us watching TV just now (taken with Photobooth on my computer):

Bart parked the bus at a hotel in Nashville and then went to sleep, so when we arrived we had to explore the bus on our own and figure out how everything works. It was pretty funny. I felt a little bit like lab rats placed in a new environment with hidden cameras to study how we adapt and discover how things work. I think we've done a pretty good job. We figured out how to tune in to the second satellite feed so the rear lounge TV can watch a separate channel from the front. Then our internet went down, and it seemed like the router needed to be restarted. On the old bus, the router sat on a countertop in the open. Well we looked all over the bus and couldn't find it. In hindsight I suspect it might be in one of the luggage bays, but I stopped looking because we connected into it through a browser and looked up the default password for that model of router, which thankfully was unchanged. From there we could reboot it, and all was well.

Updated list of good things about this bus vs. bad things, as presented in a Harvard outline:

I. Good Things:
A. front lounge feels larger, has more windows
B. larger kitchen
C. nicer bathroom
D. ice chest in back lounge is easy to open
E. mirrored ceilings with accent lighting all throughout the bus
F. two fridges!
G. DVD players in bunks have softer edges so we won't whack our heads as hard
H. pouches for our phones, wallets, etc. on walls of bunks

II. Bad Things:
A. bathroom door lock is broken
B. trash chute door is too small and has a weird ledge so things don't easily fall down the chute
C. bunk mattresses seem thinner
D. no foot rest on the seat next to the driver

E. the power outlets in the bunks are at our feet, not near our heads
F. we hate the bunk curtains
1. they are too short, designed for when the bunks are stacked 3 high
a. light spills into bunk
b. lack of privacy due to 5" gap at bottom of curtain
2. they have single snaps, not full-length velcro to keep them closed. The snaps don't line up in 2-bunk tall position, so they are useless
3. curtains, which are unable to be snapped shut (see above) slide open with movement of the bus (update: we have taken to gaff-taping them shut from the inside)
G. we can't find the router, which seems to always be giving us trouble (update: we found it, sealed behind a panel behind Bart's head, which had to be screwed off to get to it. we have since run the power cord out so the router is now on the windowsill in the front lounge.)
H. door handle is acting like it's going to break any minute

I. only one outlet at the front lounge table (!!!) which we have rectified with a power strip

Bag Review: Booq Python Pack

2009-04-13T18:13:00.005-05:00

It all started under the truck.

This is me, in St. Louis, being cute and acting like I'm pulling the truck. Oh, so funny! What a great Facebook picture! But this fun Facebook picture did not come without sacrifices. As we had just left the bus, I had my usual computer backpack on my back, and I specifically left it on for this picture, hoping it would sort of look like I had some kind of harness on helping me to pull the truck. Well what ended up happening was that all the grease under the trailer (which I assume is what makes it able to slide onto the tractor so easily) got all over my bag. I mean all over. If you have not crawled around under a truck, I don't think you can conceive of this much grease. At first I thought my bag might be a total loss, but over the two or three days in St. Louis, I decided to clean it, with a variety of products suggested by my colleagues. I had some success with dishwashing detergent, but the bag was still stained and vaguely slimey. I bought a cute Jansport sling-style bag in the college bookstore to use until my bag either dried out or was given up on, and while I'm glad I have that bag for other uses, it was never big enough to replace my primary computer bag (which was a Victorinox laptop backpack that I can't even find a picture of anymore.) My bag had these kind of cool rotatable straps that were connected to a flexible plastic plate inside the bag. The plate had started cracking, and I was growing concerned that one day the whole thing might crack off and the bag would become a useless pile of jello. So I was starting to keep my eyes open for a suitable replacement. You may know, I'm a bag whore -- I'll buy a bag for any specific purpose or situation, but my computer bag almost never satisfies me, because it must be able to do everything. So I stick with the same one for a long time, not because I'm being frugal or rational, but because I rarely find one I find acceptable for such an important job.

All this to say, this is not just any bag review of some bag I saw that I thought might be cool to try. This is the decision to replace the bag, the one that in a few cubic inches allows me to bring my stage managementy goodness wherever I go -- safely, comfortably, and with the ability to fit and organize every item that I deem must be with my person at all times.

Needless to say, I did a lot of research. One major factor that immediately excluded a lot of bags is that I refuse to buy a bag with a dark or black interior. There is no good reason that the interior fabric of a bag should make it difficult to find things inside. There aren't that many companies that take this seriously, and Booq stood out as one of the few that had an obvious understanding of the benefit of a brightly-colored interior.

Booq is a small company that seems to aim their products at Mac users without exactly excluding others. I'm guessing the reason for this is that their M.O. seems to be that they make really really expensive bags. Really nice, really thought out, really expensive bags. And the mentality of the average Mac user is probably more in line with that philosophy of "Yeah I spent a whole lot of money on it, but look, it's awesome!"

They seem to have a lot of cool bags for different purposes. What I wanted most in mine was capacity and organization for lots of small accessories, while not being too huge for my small body. I found the Python Pack most to my liking. It's designed for photographers, and comes with a matching camera case that has dividers which can be arranged to fit camera, lenses, and other accessories, and then the whole case slips into the bottom of the main compartment. The idea as best I can tell is that you have your laptop, accessories, memory cards, and camera gear, and then a little room for some extra stuff. I wasn't so interested in the camera bag, but the size of the spacious compartment, and the many pockets and slots for storage appealed to me, so I gave it a try. Because it doesn't seem to be carried in stores, I had to make something of a leap of faith. Thankfully, I ordered it from ebags.com, who I've always had good luck with, and who happen to have a generous return policy, so if I decided that this bag I paid $300 for, sight unseen, was not the perfect bag for all my needs, I could return it.

Due to my laptop dying on me, it's taken me longer to finish this review than I had intended, which is good because I have had more time to truly live with the bag. I am still completely happy with my purchase, and this is definitely going to be my main bag for a while. Now on to the details.

List of Pockets and Compartments
I'm a little too happy to have Photoshop back, so I made a fancy list. Do you hate me? I hate me a little. Click for full size.

I didn't get so fancy for this one. There's just a pocket on each shoulder strap. Because the straps get bent around your body, I wouldn't really advise putting anything in them that might not like getting bent. I usually keep gum in them. It would be good for an iPod smaller than an iPhone.

The right-side flap has a lot more little pockets than the other side. I keep things like my computer's remote, a few thumb drives, my camera (not shown unfortunately because I was taking the picture with it), and some assorted cables. There are two pen slots, but neither is big enough for a chunky pen or pencil, and one of the slots is really only appropriate for a standard #2 pencil. As a stage manager and fan of mechanical pencils, this is pretty useless.

Basic exterior view. Henry V luggage tag not included!

PROS:

Very nice quality construction. The fabric, zippers, seams and pockets feel sturdy. They're also kind of sexy. The spandex-like material on some of the pockets, which is also functional for its elastic effect, and the magnetic closure on the flaps inside the main compartment, are just pleasant to use.

Rubbery base, which wraps around onto the back. It not only protects the bag from whatever may be on the ground, it provides a little traction on the back to keep the bag from sliding around.

Orange interior -- easy to find things. Unfortunately the large side pockets have a partially black interior, which sucks a lot, but I suppose due to the construction of the bag it probably couldn't be avoided.

It has waist and sternum straps -- and just as important, they are removable. I use the sternum strap a lot. I originally took it out on the road with the waist straps stowed in a pocket. But since I never used them, I now travel without them altogether.

Comfortable straps

CONS:

Overall most of the pockets are too tight. What I mean is there are tons of pockets, but it doesn't feel like much thought went into what happens when there are contents in them. Suddenly they are very small and many of the little pockets overlap, so when one is filled, the one in front of it becomes almost impossible to get anything into. This is helped a bit by the fact that many of the pockets are made of a spandex-like material, so they expand when things are in them. The ones that are not made of this material have very little give.

The two slash pockets on the front are so thin, small, and strangely shaped, I'm not sure what is intended to go in them. Right now I have my business cards, a pack of gum, and my Advil/Tylenol box.

The camera case is too big to get in and out of the bag easily.

Camera Case

The camera case is really too big for the bag. Even with all the interior pockets empty, the case has to be forced just to get through the opening of the bag. Also, it's too tall to have it sitting in the bottom of the bag and still be able to get a binder upright above it (you can kind of fit one diagonally, but it's awkward.) I try to travel with my script in my bag as little as possible, but to be unable to makes me uneasy. While experimenting with this, I discovered that my printer (Canon i70) does indeed fit sideways in the bag, just barely, which helps justify using the camera case in certain situations. Case, printer, script and laptop is never going to happen, though.

I'm not a photographer, so I really had no use for the case, but I thought it might be fun to play with the provided partitions and use it to hold other goodies of an electronic nature. On my first attempt I came up with this:

It holds most of the gaming peripherals I travel with on the road: mouse, USB hub, and gamepad, as well as my backup hard drive. I brought the case on this leg of the tour, and it was a stupid idea. It takes up way too much space for its usefulness. Keeping it in the bag on a daily basis is not a good use of space, and the important stuff, like my mouse and backup drive, live perfectly well in the pockets within the main compartment of the bag itself -- pockets which ironically can't be filled when the camera case is in the bag.

At any rate, the case would definitely be useful to bring along in more casual situations where I would not need to carry a binder. For an overnight trip, for instance, there would be just enough room left in the bag for some clothes and other small items.
Here's how I set up the dividers for my HD and gaming stuff (that's mouse on the left, HD top center, USB hub upper right, and gamepad at the bottom.)

Below is a picture of the bag with the camera case in it, and my printer on top.

Commuter Report:

My first commute with the bag went surprisingly well. All I had in it was my laptop and the accessories I permanently carry (which is a lot of stuff). The bag was very well balanced, and as a result felt much lighter than it was. My morning train was pretty packed -- I got a seat, but I was crammed in, so it was a good opportunity to check how well the bag can be contained on one's lap without spilling over into someone else's personal space. While it is much more rigid than a normal backpack, it can still be squeezed into a smaller footprint if need be. The sturdy handle on the top is also nice. It's big, padded, and strong enough to really be used to drag the bag around with a lot of heavy stuff in it.

World Traveler Report:
The bag has been nice to fly with. Again I was nervous about the fact that it's kind of rigid, but I have found it fits beneath the seats of every plane I've been on, including some tiny puddle jumpers. On a couple it has been really tight, though. It does fit in the overhead compartments well, too, if you can tame the straps from going everywhere. When I fly I tend to take the little tiny electronic crap out of my bag as much as possible so the TSA people don't freak out and have to look at all of it. On my first flight with this bag, I didn't really do that, and sure enough it had to be hand searched. But because there are enough pockets for everything to have its proper place, that didn't take long.

Work Report:
I really love the fact that the bag naturally stands upright. It just makes getting into it easier. The rigidity is also nice since you don't have to dig around, everything is exposed. I keep my laptop charging cable in the inner pocket on the flap, which makes it very heavy. When the bag is largely empty and the charger is still in the pocket, it does have a tendency to fall over, but that probably serves me right for packing it that way. The handle on the top is very sturdy for wrestling with the bag and dragging it under my desk, into the junk bunk on the bus, or anywhere I need it to go.

In Conclusion:
I have no regrets about buying this bag. It's very expensive, but so far it's been worth it, as I haven't seen another bag that meets my needs so well.

And finally, here's a view of the bag carrying a theoretical load of two large scripts, my printer, and computer (for those who really care about the distinction, that was my 15" Powerbook standing in for the picture, my Macbook Pro was busy doing something -- it's a little bit longer and thinner than the PB.) You can also see one of the padded inserts that comes with the bag, so that it can fit Macbooks from 13" (where you would use both pads) to 15" (with one pad) to 17" (no pads needed).

You can see in some of the other pictures that I have an inner sleeve in the laptop slot. That is one I just bought, also made by Booq, although it's not particularly marketed as an accessory for this bag. It's their Taipan Skin sleeve, which comes in a couple colors. The black one pretty much matches this bag. It has three little rubbery stripes sewn on it, which give it a little more protection and grip. The zipper wraps around two sides of the bag, so you can take the computer out horizontally or vertically. There are also two zippers. I have the medium model, designed for the 15" MacbookPro. If you're curious, Booq makes it clear that it fits both current (unibody) and previous-gen MBPs. Mine is previous-gen, and the fit is very snug, but not too snug. I don't have a current-gen model to test it with, so I can't say for sure how it would fit, but I'd guess it wouldn't be swimming in it. It's a little tight to just slip the computer in when it's inside the laptop slot in the bag, but I like traveling with a sleeve because it allows me to carry the laptop around by itself with some protection, when it's overkill to take my whole bag, such as running into the theatre for a minute from the bus, or going up to the booth during a show.

Pics below:

The Acting Company Crew, Circa 1940

2009-04-05T21:14:00.000-05:00

While wandering in Tucson, I found a railroad museum. Inside I found this photo of a sleeper car from the 1940s:

I immediately recognized this scene as a typical day on our bus, at approximately 7:30AM on a load-in day, as everyone rolls out of their bunks and puts their shoes on. It would be pretty cool if we had a crew train instead!

Phoenix & Tucson

2009-04-05T21:06:00.001-05:00

In all the chaos surrounding my computer breaking, I haven't gotten a chance to say much about Phoenix and Tucson. This is sort of the low-stress portion of the tour. We have back-to-back sitdowns of one week each in these two cities, which are less than two hours apart from each other. Both venues are run by Arizona Theatre Company, which is obviously a high-class professional company, as opposed to, say, a community college. We have had great experiences at community colleges as well, but it has been very comfortable to be in two venues run to such a high level of professionalism. In fact, I suppose technically you could say they are more professional than us. During these two weeks, all the Equity members are bumping up to the LORT B salary, because that's the level at which ATC operates. And that, I declare, is very cool. We are now in Tucson, and two performances away from our week's vacation. Here's our theatre:

Even more so than Phoenix, we have been having a great time here. Probably the biggest reason is that our hotel is truly walking distance to the venue, which frees cast and crew from being tied down by the schedule of bus or van calls (we don't actually have our buses here, just two 15-passenger vans). Unlike Minneapolis, where we were walking distance to the Guthrie and said walk would make your skin bleed and your nose hairs freeze together, this walk is warm and breezy and incredibly pleasant. We are also in the downtown area with lots of great food.

Spending a whole week in each city has given us the opportunity to explore what there is to do in town and outside town. Some of the activities have included hiking, a dude ranch belonging to relatives of one of our actors, the Titan Missile Museum, and spring training baseball games. Throughout the tour I have pretty much laid back and gone wherever I was taken when it comes to recreation. The Titan Missile Museum was my first foray into taking over as cruise director for a day, and planning and arranging our activity. Five of us went, and all agreed it was really cool.

On Apple Repair

2009-04-03T17:29:00.001-05:00

I am typing this from my Macbook Pro. If you've been following my continuing adventures, you will know that last Friday, a week ago, a day that will live in infamy, I opened my computer at the theatre and found that the graphics had crapped out. This was in Phoenix. Since we were leaving Phoenix Sunday, I decided to wait until we arrived in Tucson on Monday (which also has an Apple Store) before taking my poor electronic friend to the Genius Bar to see just how screwed I was.

Monday morning at 11AM, I went in, and was saddened to be told the logic board needed to be replaced, and inconveniently, this graphics failure doesn't happen to be the same Nvidia graphics failure that would have offered me a free out-of-warranty repair, it's just one that looks exactly like it. Now I've heard horror stories of logic board replacements that cost more than a new computer. I was really surprised to be quoted about $350 for said repair. Considering I don't even like the current version of the MBP (mostly due to the glossy screen) I was far happier to pay a relatively small amount to get my current computer back rather than have to buy a newer one. So I counted myself lucky, and bid farewell to my friend for a while. Because we're only in Tucson for a week, and the repair was estimated at 4-6 days turnaround, I felt it unwise to have it sent back to Tucson, so reluctantly I gave the Acting Company's office as the return address. I expected it to arrive today (Friday) or maybe Monday, and then I would pick it up first thing Tuesday morning when I got home on vacation.

Then yesterday morning I awoke around 9AM, and grabbed my now-incredibly-important iPhone off the nightstand to check my email. I had an email from our office manager in New York, saying my computer had arrived, and did I want it shipped out to me, or would I pick it up? Well I had every intention of keeping it simple and picking it up when I got to New York, but I never imagined it would be there Thursday morning. I counted, "Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday..." and made a quick calculation that perhaps the cost of overnighting an object of such value, while excessive if it were anything else in the box, might be worth the benefits of having my computer for four and a half days when I otherwise wouldn't have it. So I asked for it to be sent to our hotel, and it arrived during our morning matinee. So far everything appears to be fine, although it's hard to tell because the internet here at the Hotel Arizona is an embarrassment to the entire hospitality industry.

Anyway, I have never had a computer so utterly crap out on me in my life (well once, in 1993, and it was a Packard Bell, and it sucked). It has always been my absolute nightmare to have such a catastrophic failure while out on the road. And I am so impressed at how smoothly the process went to get it fixed, at every step of the way. Like most things Apple, it just works. Make an online appointment at the Genius Bar, show up, they tested it on site, took some basic information, and sent it off for me. I see now from my receipt that came back with the machine, the repair center in Texas received it the following day, and repaired it that same day. Two days later it was in New York first thing in the morning. For a computer out of warranty to need the replacement of its most essential part, and to be processed so quickly, and have it only cost about $350 including tax, is pretty amazing. I hope never to have to go through it again, and I know there are horror stories out there, but I feel really good about how it all went, and God forbid I should ever have something like this happen again in my computing life, I will at least feel like Apple will make the process go as easily as such a huge inconvenience can be.

So now I'm back, and can get about the business of catching up on my tour blog, and my big review of my new computer bag.

Oh, and P.S. -- bravo to the iPhone. I can't believe a person as geeky as myself could survive for a week without a computer and not go completely insane. This was only made possible by the fact that the iPhone provides so much of the essential connectivity that a person such as myself relies on. It can't do everything, of course. There were things that I had to borrow Nick's computer for, such as doing the show report, blogging, and other things like paying my credit card bill, that I just felt better about doing on a full computer. But for email, calendar, Facebook, keeping my Flickr photos updated with my traveling adventures, reading emails and documents, podcasts, my phone was sometimes a little more cumbersome, but it allowed me to continue doing most of the things I needed to do. The quality of Safari on the iPhone is also pretty amazing. Although it doesn't support all the more advanced functions of certain web pages, and can be unwieldy to use with pages of unconventional layouts, I was surprised at how many pages I was able to use that I figured would just not work. It wasn't always pretty, but when I had no other option, I was glad just to be able to keep running my life at all.

The Ongoing Adventures of a Geek Without a Computer

2009-03-31T12:24:00.001-05:00

Day 5 without computer. The 4" iPhone screen is feeling extremely claustrophobic. I don't mind it so much for reading web pages, but for any page that requires input and typing (blogs, forums, etc.) it can be really frustrating to use, and usually doesn't render properly.

I'm currently using Nick's Macbook. It's load-in day, and we're basically done after an hour, as usual. So I'm grabbing this opportunity to bogart his computer once again. It's kind of comical how many copies I have of my "TAC" folder with all the show stuff in it. It's still on my computer somewhere out there in the bowels of Apple repair world, it's on my backup drive, on Nick's computer, and on two thumb drives. The only thing left for me to do would be to hide the two thumb drives in different places -- like put one of them in my suitcase. Which is probably a good idea since normally all three of my thumb drives live side-by-side in my computer bag (which I suppose should now be referred to as "bag").

We're loading in in Tucson, where the Arizona Theatre Company has another venue. A lot of the department heads are the same folks we worked with in Phoenix, so it's been very easy. The theatre is not quite as fancy, but it seems very nice so far. I took some video of our truck driver, Scotty D., backing the trailer at a crazy angle to their loading dock.

Well I must move on and do all the other things that one does while one has a computer.

Technical Difficulties

2009-03-29T13:56:00.000-05:00

Greetings from Phoenix. My beloved Macbook Pro has had a graphics failure and is pretty much out of commission (I think and hope it might be the known failure of the 8600M which would mean it's still covered under warranty). This has happened before. Last time it magically fixed itself on the morning I was to bring it in to the Genius Bar. We shall see. I have an appointment at the Apple Store in Tuscon tomorrow.

The computer is completely functional except that the internal and external displays don't work. I'm actually typing this on it now, by screen sharing from Nick's laptop. Like an idiot I had turned screen sharing off about a week ago, and had to do some Terminal hackery to enable it through SSH. I don't know much about unix, so that made me feel pretty damn cool.

Anyway, as the only way I can access my computer is by borrowing someone else's, I'm pretty much restricted to necessary purposes, so I may not be blogging much for a while. We are home in a week, so whatever happens, I'll have my PC and my poor Powerbook, which surely can't withstand another tour. Or can it?

Tour Stop: Telluride, CO

2009-03-27T19:19:00.000-05:00

You may remember way back in September, I made a teaser post about my upcoming job. It basically consisted of nothing but a picture of a small town nestled among towering mountains, indicating that this would be one of the destinations of the mystery job. That town was Telluride.

I had my concerns about taking this job -- the timing wasn't great, I wasn't sure if being on the road was the best thing for me at the moment, I wasn't sure how I felt about doing a play. But when I saw pictures of Telluride I became more convinced that this was an experience that would be about more than "x" amount of dollars for "x" amount of work for "x" amount of weeks. I've always wanted to go to the Southwest, and this tour spends a pretty good deal of time there. So as I think I've said before, this leg of the tour is the one I have been looking forward to most.

The drive from our last venue in Baton Rouge to Telluride was a very long one (about 1,400 miles), with a day spent at a crappy hotel beside a highway in Wichita Falls, TX, while Bart got his sleep. We then pulled out around 11PM and drove for 14 hours straight to Telluride. Most of us were awake before 10AM, anxious to wake up and get out to the front lounge to see as much of the scenery as possible. It was really beautiful and fascinating. We passed a lot of isolated ranches with some cattle or horses. Very rarely did we see any people except the occasional car coming in the opposite direction. At one point we stopped briefly at the side of the road where some horses were grazing down a hill. After a few minutes we realized that all the horses had kind of gathered together to stare at us. I guess if you were a horse in the middle of the Rockies and some noisy giant gold tube-like thing stopped a few hundred meters in front of you, you'd probably wonder what it was. So Joel opened the window, stuck his head out and flipped them off. That seemed to confuse them more.

The drive was mostly on narrow roads with one lane going in each direction, with lots of twists and turns. Stuff was flying all over the bus. Pretty much every few seconds, someone was catching something falling off a table or countertop. Someone's coffee thermos thing must have fallen off the kitchen counter at least four times. I think it took me a half hour to get dressed and ready in the morning because I kept having to stop what I was doing to hold on. Thankfully the bathroom isn't that big, so there wasn't really anywhere to fall to. Tonight when we leave I am going to make sure everything in the kitchen and front lounge is stowed somewhere where it can't fall over, since we will be asleep for the reverse trip. With all this going on in the bus, we wondered how our truck was faring. Thankfully because we had loaded it on an incline, it had more load straps between items than it normally would, but we still managed to demolish one edge of a flat, and had some pipes come loose from their cart.

The cast had a tight schedule for their arrival in town, and actually arrived later than their required hour-and-a-half rest period before half hour, so we had to get dinner ready for them at the theatre. The venue very kindly provided an oxygen tank for them, since they had not had any time to adjust to the altitude. I really think any place where you need an oxygen tank in your dressing room just to breathe properly is probably not the best place to do theatre, but it sure is beautiful.

Some photos from our drive:

The dots in the sky are not UFOs, just the reflections of the overhead lights on the bus.

The load in situation was kind of crazy. In a addition to not being provided with sufficient oxygen for physical activity, there was no dock, and a large downhill slope leading to the loading door. Having loaded the truck in Baton Rouge on a slope, we had no desire to unload it on an even steeper one, so we parked the truck flat at the top of the hill and then pushed the stuff down the ramp, and then down the hill. It was actually not as hard as it seemed at first. And somehow, under those conditions, the Telluride crew broke the record for load-out set by the Baton Rouge crew, who had the advantage of a full dock. They also did it without gasping for breath, as all of us were!

I had a really hard time adjusting to the image of giant picturesque mountains as the backdrop everywhere we turned. I realized that I don't think it's at all special or unusual to see the Empire State Building sticking up down the street, but the idea of seeing a mountain is completely insane.

View from the gondola over the mountains:

Back on the Road, Baton Rouge

2009-03-17T10:38:00.000-05:00

I apologize for not writing my usual load-in day post, but I completely messed up my computer that day, so I spent the entire day reinstalling the Mac and Windows partitions of my hard drive. So here's a recap.

We (the crew) left New York last Friday, and flew to New Orleans, where we were met at the airport by Bart and the same bus we had for the first leg of the tour. We were hoping for the mythical "orange bus" which is reportedly the best one that Pioneer has, but our bus is pretty cool too, so we were happy. The broken microwave has been replaced, and although all the pocket doors between rooms still don't lock open, and slam shut when we go around corners, it's home sweet home. Soon after getting on the bus, we were en route to our destination, Baton Rouge.

We weren't actually getting per diem for Friday, it was sort of a voluntary vacation day that we requested, so we slept on the bus. We wanted to arrive a day early so that we could go to the St. Patrick's Day parade in Baton Rouge. Bart drove the bus over to the parade route sometime early in the morning while we were still sleeping. We were able to see the parade pass by without even having to leave the bus. Which was good because I'm not much for St. Patrick's Day, or mingling with the drunken masses. Unfortunately the party outside migrated onto the bus a bit too much for my taste, so I finally packed my bag and walked the mile and a half to our hotel and checked in early. Nick, Daniel and I had a nice dinner and margaritas at Chili's down the street, while the rest of the crew partied at one of Bart's friends' houses until who knows when.

The next morning everyone was surprisingly awake for our 10AM load-in at Baton Rouge Community College. The theatre was really nice -- a loading dock and plenty of parking for the buses, which is always the first step. The dock was on an incline, with the stuff coming off downhill, which is something we've never really had to deal with before. The stage management workbox was actually first off the truck this time, so I don't really know how hard it was to unload everything else with all the weight rolling downhill, but it presented some challenges for packing the truck at load out. We had to put ratchet straps between every two rows of road boxes so there wasn't so much weight wanting to roll back off the truck that a person couldn't hold it back. Joel has a funny picture of about four of us holding a wall of boxes back while waiting for a strap.

The show went well. We restored some of the original staging that had been changed for the New Victory. It was nice to see it again. I was a little worried about the dreaded "traitors sequence" which is probably the hardest thing in the show to call. The cues were totally different at the New Vic, so I basically had not called it in almost four weeks. It went fine. It's just one of those things that you have to have the whole thing in your head before you begin and know exactly what comes next without needing to think about it or look at the script.

The Baton Rouge crew had obviously been told that the record load-out time for Henry stood at three hours, and decided early on that they were going to try to beat it. The city that set it, Glenn Ellyn, IL, had about the same setup as far as onstage space and proximity to the truck. They had a great crew, but we may have had some more bodies here. I thought it was possible, but it could be tight. With the truck being packed uphill, that could add an additional challenge. One thing we had going for us was that our plywood cart, which broke during our 3rd load-out back in early February, was finally fixed, and for the first time since then, we had a venue with a loading dock. It's just too heavy to go down a ramp, so it often means the plywood deck has to be loaded one piece at a time (there's about 30 pieces). So that saved us time. After sending the show report and packing up the stage management stuff, I took up my usual place at the front of the truck and began packing the walls in. We had a really nice truck pack this time. We altered the middle area of the pack recently, and I think Daphne discovered a few great breakthroughs this time. When all was said and done, we had soooo much space in the back of the truck. The final load bar was put in two hours and 44 minutes after the show came down, breaking the record by 16 minutes! The crew was rightly very pleased with themselves, and that load bar now bears a commemoration in Sharpie, reading "Baton Rouge 2:44 Baby!" I got to do the honors of handing out our swag, Acting Company bottle opener keychains.

Now it's the next morning and we're on the bus for our big cross-country drive to Telluride, CO, a distance of about 1,400 miles. We have to load in on Thursday morning, so the timing will be pretty tight. It looks like we have just arrived at our prospective stopping point in Wichita Falls, TX. The cast has just left Baton Rouge, and will arrive here later today and spend the night. We will hang out in town and get a crew room to shower in while Bart gets some sleep, then when he's ready we will hit the road again.

Sort of Week Off in New York

2009-03-13T19:16:00.001-05:00

Well I ended up being sick for almost all of our time off between the New York run and the continuation of the tour. It was really sad, but on the other hand I survived two months in Minneapolis, many load-outs in freezing temperatures without a jacket, and never got sick when it mattered, so I couldn't complain too much about losing my free time.

I had planned to do two performances of Phantom during the four days off -- one to deck and one to call. Since I was sick, I was only able to do the Thursday one, which I called. It was very nice to be back. The funny thing was that I kept getting similar reactions from many people when they would be told, "Karen's calling the show tonight."

2nd ASM: (maniacal laughter)

1st ASM: "Are you serious?"

Conductor: "You're kidding!"

Automation Carpenter: "They're letting you call the show?" (this doesn't really count because he says this in response to my check-in every single time I call)

I was fully confident that I was ready to call, but yes I did have some butterflies. Most of all, I wanted to stretch different stage management muscles than are required on Henry.

I once asked a sound man friend if his show was difficult to mix, and his response was, "it's three hours long, it doesn't matter if it's an easy show, three hours of concentrating on anything makes it a hard show." I find the same to be true of Henry. It's not hard to call at all, and it's not so boring that you can lose your place entirely, it's just hard to have the stamina to care about every cue, and stay interested and engaged. So I found it funny at Phantom when I reached intermission after a first act that clocked in at 1:13:45, and felt more exhausted than I ever have after all three hours of Henry, with almost half the show left to go. By the end I was wiped out, but it felt good, like after a hard workout. It was a good show, and thoroughly uneventful, except for a report from the cast of conspicuous picture-takers in the fourth row, which I relayed to the house manager. Then the next morning I got on a plane to continue our tour.

New York, End of Week 2

2009-03-07T09:51:00.005-05:00

Well it's getting to be that time. Since yesterday, people are starting to think of our stay at the New Vic in the past tense. Conversations revolve around airline reservations, packing of luggage, and what people are bringing from home to put in their road boxes so they don't have to carry them to Baton Rouge. When I look at my belongings at the theatre, I'm always making a mental list of what can be packed when.

The run here has been absolutely perfect. Every day Joel pops into my office at least twice and says, "Is everything OK? Need anything?" and every day I have absolutely nothing to say. I don't think there has been anything unexpected or undesirable that has happened during the run except that our center footlight went down early in the first week. The folks here, and the well-designed facility, have definitely spoiled us, but it will also be fun to get on the road again and see what new experiences await us at each venue to come. It helps that this leg of the tour coming up is the most comfortable and the most scenic, so that's some motivation to get up from our cozy place here at home. We're only out for four weeks before we have our vacation week, so it's not even too much time away from home.

The cancelation of the performances in North Carolina next week also affords us some extra (paid) free time in New York, which is pretty amazing. I will be doing two shows at Phantom, as well as spending a day visiting my parents. It's amazing how much there is to do when you haven't been around in a while. I was expecting to have a lot of down time to just sit at home and sleep, but everybody wants you to come see their show, come have a drink, come over and watch a movie. I haven't been able to fulfill all those requests because I'm really trying to take it easy and take advantage of this time to rest before our life of 20-hour work days begins again.

Rambling Post of New York, Week 2

2009-03-04T14:26:00.003-05:00

I have some time to kill hanging out in my office at the New Vic. Can I mention enough times, I have an office? Not like a little corner and desk in the production office, I mean an honest-to-goodness private office for the visiting company, in the hallway between the dressing rooms and the greenroom, with full paging and comms, coat hooks on the back of the door, everything.

Anyway, I am sitting here after a student matinee, waiting for a package to be delivered by UPS to the Acting Company office. In this package is the new bag I have ~~purchased~~ spent way too much money on, the Booq Python Pack. Ever since my main backpack got into a little scrape with the underside of our truck in St. Louis, I have been thinking seriously about replacing it (that and the fact that the plate that holds the shoulder strap pivots was already cracking and will no doubt one day come completely apart). Despite many things I don't like about my current bag, I have never found one better (and trust me, I look for new bags like it's my job). I bought a Jansport sling bag in St. Louis while I attempted to clean and repair my bag, but that one, while it will be very cool for some things in the future, is not designed for

a) laptop travel

b) large items

c) organizing many accessories

d) comfortable wear of 30+ lbs of stuff

all of which are my requirements for my main bag. And also, I will never again buy a bag that has a black interior. It's just stupid. I think we as a species should recognize that a bag with a black interior serves no purpose, and stop making them.

So I did some research, and I have decided this Booq bag fits my requirements, although I have some fears -- I think it may be too nice. My current bag is big and decently organized, but carries like a basic backpack. It compacts pretty well and is lightweight, and it doesn't give the impression that there's anything interesting in it, so I have no fear of leaving it lying around in relatively secure places with my laptop in it. This new bag is made of rather fancy fabric, and is heavy, and I worry it may not flatten well when empty. Most of all, I worry that it looks like a $300 bag, and anyone with a mind to notice a $300 bag might wonder what's worth putting in a $300 bag. If this disrupts my life too much, I may have to settle for a less-nice bag that allows me to actually get things done. I ordered it from ebags, who have a free refund policy, so I feel OK about taking the risk on buying it without being able to see it in person. I will check it out while I'm home and if I'm not happy with it, I'm going to return it before we leave. Of course I will do a review of some kind.

The show has been going well. I'm afraid we may be getting spoiled from sitting here so long. It's easy to get used to 1-nighters when that's just the way life is, but now that we've been comfortable back home it's going to be hard to go back to doing real work. This leg of the tour is the most glamorous, though, so it will be a good way to get back into it.

We've had a lot of 10:30AM student matinees, which is always hard to adjust to, but the nice part is that a lot of them are the only show of the day, so it gets me out of bed and then I feel like I have a whole day and night left to do stuff.

I still haven't done Phantom. I had too much work to do at home last night, and enjoyed the productive time so much I just can't do it. I plan to do two shows in the half-week before we leave, when I have the time to prepare and enjoy them. It wasn't just the idea of adding performances to an 8-show week, it was also the approximately 2 hours I would want to spend at home reviewing. I did a little bit of review of the Journey on Monday night, which went pretty well (I can usually tell by doing that and a couple other scenes how much time if any I need to spend looking over my script). I still intend to do a pretty much real-time calling of the show in my living room, even if I don't need to be that thorough, as it has been probably four and a half months, though it feels a lot shorter than that. If I have a specialty as a Phantom sub, I'd say it's the ability to come in after weeks or months away and call the show as well as if I'd never left. Unfortunately, I get lots of opportunities to practice that, so I have a large bank of experience to draw on, and can tell with a quick 2-5 minute section of the show what my level of comfort is if I had to call the show at any given moment, and how much review, if any, I need.

OK, this bag is really taking a long time to get delivered. I know the office tends to get packages late in the day, around 3PM, which it is now almost 3:30. I'm feeling pretty sleepy, especially since I haven't really had a full meal today. I hope it comes soon!

New York, NY

2009-02-26T10:26:00.003-05:00

I have nine minutes before I have to call 15, so you get a post.

Here we are, running at the New Victory in New York. I'm having a really great time here. Much has been made of the fact that it's "on Broadway," but I have learned in my career that the address of your theatre has no correlation to the level of professionalism, quality of production, or size of your paycheck, so I really wasn't buying into that hype. But I've been pleased to discover it actually feels something like a Broadway show. The theatre is beautiful, which I knew, but it is pretty well-appointed like a Broadway house, has a Local 1 crew, and in general feels kind of like a shrunk-down Broadway show. And by shrunk-down, I mean like 80%, not like 50%, assuming we are talking about a play here.

Before we arrived they gave me the option of calling from stage left or from the booth, which I was warned was "miles away." I've called from miles away before, but I figured this may be the only venue where I have the option to call from backstage, due to the fact that our set is a full 180-degree wraparound wall, and calling from backstage would offer zero visibility without color and infrared monitors, which we don't travel with, and which most of our venues don't have. The Guthrie had a rather nice camera setup, although I also had a very oddly-placed window to see most things in real life if I needed to. This is my first time calling without any real view of the stage, but it's working fine since I spent the first month of the run calling off monitors at the Guthrie. It's a lot of fun to be backstage among everyone else, and it's so much easier to get around without having to trek back and forth from a booth. We even have paging at the calling desk and in our office (we have an office!). It really does feel like Broadway! So I'm having a good time, and I'm missing home a little less.

Speaking of home, I stopped by Phantom for about an hour before their show last night, after our student matinee and tech rehearsal. All is well, there's new carpet in the stage management office and SR quickchange room, and other than that things seem the same. The in/out sheet had at least 10 understudies on it, so it was a fairly normal day. At some point before we leave town I'm going to do a couple shows there, even if I have to do them for free. The stage managers offered to trade shows with me for the next two weeks, which I gladly accepted, but they rescinded their offer when I described calling Henry as "calling the rooftop scene for two hours and 40 minutes, and then the last 20 minutes is like calling 'Wishing'." It makes sense if you know the show. I think "recoiled in horror" is a better way to describe their reaction.

OK, people keep coming in and asking me questions. See ya!

Reflections on Being Home

2009-02-23T14:55:00.004-05:00

1. I've been living on a bus which has independent thermostats for three different rooms. I've been in hotels, where I had to first figure out if the heat was controlled by a little knob under the window unit, or a panel on the wall. So I get home to my apartment and think, "I'm cold." And then I realize that I pay $1200/mo. so that my landlord gets to decide when the heat should be on.

PHOTO: The corner of 45th/9th from the Acting Company offices, 8AM on the morning of our return.

2. 2/28 Today I was running late so I grabbed some breakfast at Pax: a Vitamin Water and a small rice krispy treat. It cost me $7. And I think something's wrong with that. Am I becoming a suburbanite?

3. 3/1 Of the two shows, I find Henry especially not-interesting to call. Being able to hear some of the sound cues for the first time since tech, I am discovering a few new cues that I like. But overall the idea of a play, a 3-hour play, and one in which many of the light cues take anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 minutes to complete, is just not that exciting. Being on the road has been nice because the challenge comes not from the show, but from the venue. Making sure the show looks right in every cue, and executed correctly by every crew, is a process that takes up enough of my attention to distract from the fact that there's otherwise not that much for me to do. Sitting now at the New Vic, there's not much to worry about. After the first few shows, things were settled in. The ventilation is a little odd so the haze is the only thing that I expect to have to keep an eye on -- sometimes I ask for a haze cue to be skipped, but even then, I think we've programmed them now in such a way that it usually doesn't need to be messed with, weather permitting. So as a result of all this, combined with being in New York, where you can't deceive yourself that Henry V is the only show in the universe, I am going a little bit crazy. Nick constantly has to take toys away from me. Lately I've decided I'm going to procure scraps of gel to experiment with different colored filters for my LittleLite.

I had long planned to find time for a performance or two of Phantom during these weeks, but I was concerned about either giving myself a 10-show week, or waiting until the little half-week before we fly to Baton Rouge. This afternoon's matinee has convinced me that my brain may explode before the end of our NY run if I don't call a big flashy musical with automation and pyro and 13 cue lights RIGHT NOW. So I'm aiming for Tuesday. I was even thinking about Monday, but it's our day off and I hoped to keep it that way. Plus, I decided later in today's show, I will be able to work through my tiredness at Tuesday morning's matinee if I have something to look forward to.

Hampton, VA

2009-02-21T16:01:00.002-05:00

If you've been reading this blog, you may be somewhat familiar with what our set for Henry V looks like:

This is our set in Hampton, VA:

It's a scrim. And an RP screen. And as much of our deck as we could fit. Hampton is a tiny little theatre that the Acting Company always plays, with the understanding that it's generally not big enough to hold the production at its usual size. As this is the biggest tour the company has ever mounted, the contrast is even greater than usual, but we have been told for months that this day would come, and that all the challenges will be worth it because the theatre is tiny but very nice, and the people are cool. Thus, the company comes back year after year despite the fact that the theatre doesn't meet the usual tech requirements. So far the rumors seem to be true. While small onstage, the backstage area is well-appointed and comfortable, and feels far more like a professional theatre than some other, much larger venues we've played. We do have one outdoor crossover, which I'm a little concerned about due to the possible forecast of rain tomorrow. Hopefully we'll escape having to deal with that.

Today we loaded in at 8AM as usual, except that we were done in probably less than 2 hours instead of the usual 8 or so. At noon the cast came in for a scheduled 5-hour rehearsal, with the intention of only needing 3 hours. We finished in just over 3 hours, restaging the entire show to be played on a bare stage, taking into account the limited wingspace and unusual crossover needs. A lot of the scenes that are normally played on the second story of the set are now set in the house.

The cast comes back at 7PM for an 8PM curtain, so we have some welcome down time before the show. Daniel and I will probably spend a little more time checking cues that we rushed through during rehearsal, but that's about it. Then we have a matinee tomorrow (two performances of the same show consecutively in one venue is something I don't think we've done since we left the Guthrie), and then we head back to New York for our big opening at the New Victory.

An Open Letter to the Hoteliers of America

2009-02-20T14:32:00.004-05:00

Dear Hoteliers,

I am tired of filling out those little comment cards, and quite frankly they don't leave enough room for the rant that is about to ensue, so I will address all of you in the hopes that some of you will shape up before I stumble half-asleep across your doorstep some afternoon.

First of all, I see that your comment card asks me lots of questions about things I could care less about: "overall exterior appearance of hotel," "responsiveness to your needs," "condition of furniture." Let me save you the time and tell you that when I walk into your hotel, I expect 3 things:

A bed

A shower with decent water pressure

an internet connection with sustained speeds over 1.5mbps

I don't care if the room has a TV, a couch, or a chest of drawers. I hope it has lights and maybe a fridge. A desk and chair would add to my comfort greatly, and frankly the bed is not strictly necessary, but would be preferable to sleeping on the floor. But really, the only reason I am here is to take a much-anticipated shower, and to use my little free time to play an online game that demands a reliable connection, and perhaps to download some episodes of "The Wire" from iTunes.

In my travels thus far, I have found few hotels that can meet even two of these needs. Everyone has accomplished #1, and for that I congratulate you. But Holiday Inn Express in Harrisburg, PA, and Hampton Inn in Hampton, VA, are you pumping the water into my shower with a bicycle pump? Is there a little man in the wall who pours a cup of water at a time into the back of the shower head? I haven't had a shower in THREE FUCKING DAYS, give me some damn water!!!

Ahem, now on to the most important question, and the area where almost all hotels need to improve. With the exception of the Holiday Inn Express in Poplar Bluff, MO (!!) you all failed to provide sufficient internet services. Every hotel I have stayed at has advertised "high speed internet," including the Holiday Inn Select in Lafayette, IN, which provided consistent speeds of 250kbps, which might have been considered high speed 10 years ago. Here's a tip: I have just run a speed test on my laptop using my cell phone's connection (in an area with 3G and full bars), and pulled down 818kbps / 348kbps up. I don't think it's asking too much for your rather large, stationary, and overpriced building to provide better internet service than a fucking PHONE.

A few other things of less importance:

I'd really like the soda machine to be on my floor and not sold out of everything but Diet Pepsi. And at least one snack machine in the building.

Why do some of you hide the listing of the TV channels so well that I only discover it when I'm packing up to leave?

Laundry - you must have laundry machines. When I get a spare hour or two at 2AM, I need some clean clothes. I might only get that chance once a week, and if I'm in your hotel when it happens, you better be ready for it!

So get it together, folks. I will be adding to this list as I see fit.

Day Off: Harrisburg, PA

2009-02-17T18:37:00.000-05:00

Today I spent the day in this strange place -- it's kind of like the bus, but bigger, and it doesn't have wheels. And it has showers and laundry machines. I like the bus a lot, but I could get used to spending the night in one of these places every few days!

Glenn Ellyn, IL

2009-02-15T13:50:00.001-05:00

Another post? Must be a load-in day!

Last night we loaded out from St. Louis, which took about four hours. It was a rather rough stop for us -- we had to do both shows, and the path from the truck to the stage was about as inconvenient as it could possibly be, short of having to carry the sets up stairs, so load in was absolutely painful (13 hours just to get the set up, with the entire traveling crew working as carpenters), and load out was about an hour and a half longer than it has been at venues with a more direct path to the truck. Also, the campus folks wouldn't let us park the crew bus, so we spent the entire 3 days there without our kitchen/office/bedroom available to us, which led to an endless list of problems and inconveniences.

One thing I will say about the fact that we were shorthanded, in a hurry, and without the bus is that I learned a whole lot about these shows we're dragging around the country. I participated in parts of the truck pack and unpacking that I had never seen before, and pretty much built the Henry set bolt-by-bolt, so instead of having just a theoretical understanding of how it's assembled, I literally know every action that has to be taken to make it go up, and I feel much more informed about the rather complicated structure we play on. We're still experimenting with the truck pack, and I was in the thick of it the entire night, so I now feel more qualified to help direct the process. We accidentally did some things differently this time, but our truck driver, Mike, said this morning that the trailer felt really smooth on the drive up, so we must have done something right.

Last night into this morning was the first true one-night move we've had. We had a changeover yesterday morning starting at 8AM, did The Spy, and left the theatre in St. Louis shortly before 3AM, and arrived at the theatre in Glenn Ellyn, IL (a suburb of Chicago) at 7:30AM. Until this point we've never had to load out a show and load it in the next morning to play a show that night. The delays in St. Louis were a big concern for us, especially so because it's a 7PM curtain here tonight, but we were thrilled to discover when we stepped out of the bus this morning that our truck was backed up to an honest-to-goodness loading dock, which lead in a pretty much straight line to the stage, maybe 30 feet away. And there to unload the truck were a large bunch of stagehand-looking adult men and women, who made quick work of our truck, and had the deck and part of the gallery up before Nick and I even finished putting up signage. We only had to unload Henry, which is also a blessing. I am told the lights were all properly hung, colored and patched when we arrived as well, so we are all a little bit in awe of Glenn Ellyn right now.

The bus is parked just a few dozen feet up the slope from the loading dock (as it's sort of in a trench between buildings, they didn't want the fumes from the generator getting sucked indoors all day), and Nick and I are properly able to conduct our load-in day routine of updating signage and then sleeping and playing on the internet. Nick's next project is probably going to be laying down carpet on the gallery (which gets skipped if we're pressed for time, but I don't think he'll be so lucky with this speedy crew), and my next appointment is with Daniel, our lighting supervisor, who tells me around 4:00 he'll be ready to do cueing, which is theoretically when we sit out front and step through all the cues and make sure they look right, but in the last couple venues has been more about reprogramming the show to somehow make it look like what it's supposed to, while cringing at lights wrongly focused, substitute gel colors that look nothing like the original, and occasionally saying, "What the hell is that??"when something completely inexplicable pops up, like last night when we had a single solitary house light come up in one cue! Of course this is also the most important thing I personally do during load-in, as catching these things avoids much embarrassment and danger to the cast, and results in a show that mimics as much as possible the designer's intention. I think we will find the process much easier here.

Sometime before this happens I take a few minutes with our sound supervisor, Tim, to talk about comm, which is one of my favorite topics. First of all, since without comm everything I do during a performance would just be me sitting alone in a room talking to myself, it's a matter of some interest to me. Especially on this tour I like to know whether we're using elements of the house system or entirely our own, because we have a crappy old base station which doesn't like my personal headset, and the company-supplied headsets are ridiculously uncomfortable. So sometimes it's all our stuff, and sometimes all the venue's, and sometimes we add our wireless headsets into their wired system. Often Tim presents me with a couple options to choose from -- naturally I prefer the one that gives us the greatest reliability and allows me to use my headset. So sometime in the middle of the day I grab the script(s) of the show(s) I'll be calling in the venue, and Tim and I go visit the booth or other locales where I have the option to call the show, to figure out where I'll be calling from and make sure that I have comm and monitors where I need them. I also check out the lighting in the area to see if I have enough light to read my script, and in many cases to decide if the venue's usual stage manager lighting is too bright. I prefer a very dark place to call shows from, especially these shows, as the lighting design is very dark. I tend not to want any light source higher above my script than is necessary to light it. The stage management workbox is supplied with its own LittleLite, which I try to avoid using because I'm always afraid I'll leave it behind somewhere, but with the exception of the Guthrie, I think I've ended up using it in every venue, once because there was no light for me, once because the light supplied was too bright, and once because the booth was lit by dim-able overhead lights, which I hate because they have to illuminate an entire room when all I need lit is one page. I haven't checked out the situation here yet. That's what I'm up to so far today!

Another Bag Review: Ricardo Beverly Hills Essentials 30" Rolling Duffle

2009-02-14T13:36:00.005-05:00

According to my statistics, probably the most popular post ever on my blog is the review I did of my BBP bag (which I decided I kind of hate, and never use, incidentally). It seems people are always searching for reviews of it, and I hope my rather lengthy post on it has helped them make a decision. So since I'm an admitted Bag Whore, and recently purchased a new bag that I'm very excited about, I will give another review.

For this tour I'm now on, I decided I needed a snazzy new piece of luggage that I could lug around for six months, that would be bigger than the small suitcase I use for summer stock, but small enough that I can still get around with it easily. I haven't selected a piece of luggage for myself since I was about 12, so I really didn't know what my options were. After looking for ideas in some luggage stores in New York, I decided to try the rolling duffle format, as it seemed the most expandable while still being lightweight and compact when the contents allowed. I think they actually may not make this model anymore, but you can still find it for sale online (at about half of the original MSRP). Here's the Amazon link.

This is the Ricardo Beverly Hills Essentials 30" Rolling Duffle. It's MSRP is $180, but most places I've seen it online have been around $100. It comes in blue, shown above (which is the one I have), and brown. The wheels (which are Razer-scooter-style) match the color of the bag, which is a completely useless but cool feature. It has some little accents that are yellow (such as the zipper pulls, and the button you push to make the handle pop out).

As this handy image shows, it has two main compartments: there is a lower compartment that's kind of box-shaped and somewhat rigid, but not completely. The zipper that you see partially opened on top leads to the main compartment which takes up pretty much all the rest of the space. There is also a nice mesh section on the bottom of the top compartment, so you can see into the bottom compartment and air can get in there. It even zips open so you can get in the bottom compartment without opening it from the outside (my bag is always packed too tightly to make that very useful, but I'm sure it could be).

The upper compartment has two pouches on the back edge, like many suitcases have, to stick whatever it is you stick in those (toiletries mostly, I guess, though I travel with a separate toiletries bag since we don't stay in a hotel every night). These don't close, and when the bag is flipped open, due to its flexible nature, I find the pouches sometimes bend over and the contents spill out into the rest of the bag. I keep things like my little swiss army knife, apartment keys, coins for laundry, stamps, and a roll of scotch tape in there. I don't mind it too much, but they're not the most useful for keeping things separate that you really need to keep separate. Unfortunately, I'd say the one fault of the bag is there really aren't any small compartments, but I think that's true of most traditional suitcases as well.

Attached at either end of the upper part of the bag are rather large side pockets. The one on the left is kind of normal, the one on the right has a little trick. It's mostly designed to be a place to keep dirty laundry, wet clothes, shoes, or other things you might not want getting shoved in with all your nice clean clothes. The pocket actually goes much deeper than it appears -- it has a sort of sock-like shape to it that extends into the main compartment. This has advantages and disadvantages: if you don't need to fill that pocket with much, then it just compresses and doesn't take away valuable space in the main compartment. If you do try to cram it with stuff, it will expand into the main compartment, giving you less room in there. I think this is the best possible solution, but when I've got close to a week of dirty laundry, it can be tricky to shove it all in the side pouch, and then rearrange the rest of my bag to compensate for the fact that the center compartment is now reduced in capacity for clean clothes. In theory it should all work out because it's the same total volume, but I find I always have to start rearranging things as the proportion of dirty vs. clean clothes changes throughout the week. If you stay somewhere more than a day or two and actually fully unpack your bag in the hotel, it might not matter at all. Anyway, the idea of having a separate place for dirty laundry was a huge selling point for this bag. The fact that it doesn't waste space when empty is also highly awesome. UPDATE: After a recent string of nights spent sleeping on the bus, I had gotten to the point where most of my clothes were dirty. I'm happy to report the dirty laundry pocket was able to expand to about 2/3 the size of the total upper part of the bag, successfully keeping all my yucky clothes away from the nice ones until we were able to spend the night in a hotel.

These are really the only four compartments. There is a zipper at the bottom of the bottom compartment which leads into the lining of the bag. I really don't know what it's for, but you could shove stuff in there if you really want, maybe for extra security. I keep my mail in there so 3 months of bills and bank statements aren't rolling around in my way every day. On the exterior there are a few loops, and some elastic straps, which if I'm careful, I can get my toiletries bag to fit in -- by complete accident, the bags even match!

The final zippered area is on the bottom of the bag. A panel pulls down revealing some (rather thin and cheap-feeling) backpack straps. I like this feature because if I have to carry the bag up a flight of stairs, it's much easier as a backpack than as a suitcase. However, when there's 30-40lbs in the bag, the straps are not particularly comfortable, so I don't personally see this as an alternative to rolling the bag, except for a quick 30-second jaunt up stairs or the like. I also suspect with any serious use they would start to break.

The bag has a standard pull-out locking luggage handle for wheeling it. It's very sturdy, the only complaint I have about it is that it's short. This works fine given the height of the bag, but if you have any carry-on bags that have a slot intended to be passed over the luggage handle of another bag, you will probably find this handle too short to come out the other end of your carry-on.

On the back side of the bag is a little window for your name and address, with a cover that velcros down over it.

The handles are nicely designed. There are duffel-style handles with a velcro strap to keep them together. The top of the bag has a soft handle, and the bottom has a hard rubberish one, which I think is also intended to help the bag stand on end. This doesn't always work, but it's a start. No matter how you want to carry the bag, or if you want to carry it with another person, you'll find a handle for it. I find that especially useful when yanking the bag around in the luggage bays under our bus.

The wheels, as I said, match the color of the bag and are similar to the narrow variety used in Razer Scooters and inline skates. I'm sure you could find a suitcase with more rugged wheels, but I found these satisfactory even through the snow and ice in Minneapolis.

Finally, here's an action shot of my bag in the Minneapolis airport. This gives some indication that the colors are a little darker and more subtle than the Smurftacular blue that the manufacturer's photos make it seem to be.

One final observation: when I was shopping for this bag I read some reviews saying that it started to fall apart quickly. I was a little concerned, but I must say so far I don't see any signs of wear at all. If that changes over the tour I will update this, but we are traveling every day or two now, so it should be going through a lot of use.

Pros:
Separate pocket for dirty laundry, collapses when not needed.
Hidden backpack straps
Handles every place you could think to carry it from.
Wheels roll nicely

Cons:
No small closable pockets or compartments.
Doesn't stand up on end all that well, depending on how it's packed.
Handle is too short to attach a carry-on around it.

TEASER: Just this morning, while acting a fool underneath our truck trailer, I got copious amounts of grease on my main backpack, which I fear will be coming off on my hands and anything else it touches from now until the end of time. So I am now in the market to replace my beloved Victorinox bag ASAP. This is one of the most essential objects in my life, so I will be sure to do a thorough review of whatever I get.

My Inner Monologue in Weather Widgets

2009-02-14T11:56:00.000-05:00

Our wardrobe supervisor has nicknamed this tour "The Big Thaw" as we are (theoretically) moving from one of the coldest places national tours go, in the middle of winter, to the warmer climates of the US as we get towards summer. After two months in Minneapolis, we are all a little bit obsessed with the weather. It's a constant topic of discussion among both cast and crew. What is the weather like tomorrow? Will it rain on load-out day? What's the forecast in our next city for the day we arrive? What did your mom/brother/spouse/roommate tell you on the phone this morning about the weather in New York?

I currently keep four weather widgets running on my dashboard at all times, which usually have to be updated every day or two as we travel. Below is an example of a current screenshot, and the purpose that each of them serves. Bear in mind when looking at these that a week ago the crew was in Nashville on our day off, wearing tee shirts and eating outdoors at a restaurant when it was 73 degrees.

St. Louis Day Off

2009-02-11T14:07:00.008-05:00

Bus. And truck.

We left Poplar Bluff last night around 1:30AM. Load out was a little rough due to the fact that the theatre doesn't have a loading dock, and getting heavy carts up a ramp to the truck (in the rain) is a lot harder than getting them down (in the not-rain). We also broke a castor on our plywood cart, which holds all the pieces of our floor. So after the cart was all packed and strapped down, we had to take it all off and load it by hand. Our pipe cart, which is the heaviest, scariest piece to move even on a level surface, was never even attempted to be loaded in one piece. The cart, and the metal box built into it that holds our cheeseboroughs, was loaded first, and then every piece of pipe loaded by hand. It was quite comical when a backlog was reached, and we had a line of about 12 people stretching from the truck to the door of the theatre with these pipes. I was about halfway back in the line and took this picture.

After load out we went to a Huddle House nearby for dinner. Some of us didn't get anything to eat before the show because we were rushing to get ready. I know Daniel and I didn't. He had to adapt the lighting design for a venue with less than half of the instruments the plot requires. In each city, once everything is focused, the two of us sit down and flip through all the cues on stage and make sure they look like what they're supposed to, and reprogram them as necessary. We were doing that right up through fight call, and then continued to make changes during fight call. There's one bit of fight choreography which involves almost the entire cast running around with swords and poles and jumping on things in near-darkness followed by strobe lights, and I wanted to make sure they had a chance to do it in the cues we had built, to make sure we had given them enough light -- of course we hadn't, so good to know. This was our first true one-nighter, and it was exhausting, but kind of freeing in the sense that there was no time to get tired of being someplace. If there's something not to like about the venue or the situation -- the stage right door is dragging on the floor, the dressing room paging system isn't great -- who cares, we'll be gone tomorrow! Two things basically made it hard in Poplar Bluff: the performance which had been contracted for 8pm ended up being at 7pm, which we found out the night before. If we'd had that extra hour it would have been perfectly relaxing. Also, if we'd had enough instruments (and interestingly, cable) to do the usual light plot, much less time would have been wasted redesigning the show as opposed to just putting it up like it always is.

One thing I want to share about our lighting situation for educational purposes: the lack of cable actually presented a greater obstacle than the lack of instruments. We don't travel with a full lighting package, but we do carry some strips and broad cycs. Unfortunately, due to the short cable supply at the venue, we couldn't use them. The Henry design depends a lot on powerful silhouette images of blue and red created on our RP screen/black scrim combo, and we needed a way to preserve that. When I saw the solution I couldn't believe what I was seeing: three par cans, hung side by side dead center upstage of the RP. One blue, one red, one no-color, or something similar. Behind the RP was hung the house's cyc, to use as a bounce. I thought, "we can't seriously expect this to work!" Well let me tell you, it worked! It wasn't beautiful. It would make a lighting designer cringe. But it told the story just as well as the full design does, and if you weren't a lighting designer, you'd never know or care that the coverage wasn't quite as even as it should be. For all the effort designers put into lighting cycs -- fighting for the right number of strips, and just the right angles, we lit the damn thing with one instrument! It may not be elegant, but when your plot requires 132 instruments and you've got 60-something (40 channels), it's nothing short of a miracle. Towards the end of the show I actually forgot I was calling something we had just thrown together a half hour before the house opened. It really did look close enough to the real thing, and Daniel set up a bunch of submasters so he could fill in gaps when our thrown-together design needed a little extra something. As he was right next to me, I knew he was using them a lot, but most of the time I couldn't even tell by looking at the stage. He said it was like running a 2-scene preset board. One of the interesting things about this tour is that there's an understanding that we will play venues that can't satisfy the technical needs of the production. It's part of the deal of bringing professional theatre to communities that don't normally get it. Our bosses back in New York understand that we will have to cut corners some places, and me, Joel, Ian and the supervisors are expected to make any changes needed to do the best show we can with what we've got in each venue. This was the first time we've really had to think on our feet, and I think we did a really good job.

This was our first audience that seemed to be made up of people who don't get much exposure to Shakespeare. They were a very quiet audience, but they livened up a bit in the second act, and were very appreciative at the end. A number of people seemed to have left at intermission, which we assumed meant they didn't like it, but one of the local guys believed they may not have known the show was over. It's really fun to perform for an audience that's familiar with the show and follows it easily, but really the mission of the Acting Company is to perform for audiences like those we had last night. If we're the most professional theatre performance that comes through that venue, then we've accomplished our goal, and hopefully they got something educational and enjoyable out of seeing Shakespeare performed live by professional actors.

Nick and the cast stayed behind and performed the 1-hour Henry this morning for about 500 students, which apparently went well according to his report, except that the door on their bus broke in the morning and they had to take cabs! It's fixed now, and they are currently en route to join us in St. Louis.

As for me and the crew, after eating at Huddle House in a downpour and tornado warning, we got back on the bus and hit the road for the 2-hour drive to St. Louis. I don't know how long it actually took because I was exhausted and malnourished and damp and disgusting and went immediately to bed. The drive was pretty scary. The rain was ridiculous, first of all, but I could feel the wind pushing the bus to and fro, drifting all over the place. It felt like we were going really fast, but I think that may have simply been the fact that we were driving into the wind so it felt like more resistance. Not being able to see anything from the bunk, it's sort of like a trust exercise. You lie down in the dark and close your eyes, and no matter what you feel or hear, just trust that Bart's not going to drive us into a tree or off a cliff, or get us sucked up into a tornado. I don't spend that much time in tornado country, and I've never seen one, but the idea of a tornado warning at night is very scary to me. I mean, seeing a tornado is bad. I figure not being able to see a tornado is worse!

Anyway, we apparently made it without tornado interference, as when I woke up we were in the parking lot of our hotel in St. Louis. We arrived sometime overnight and Bart went to his room to sleep and left the rest of us sleeping in the bus, to check in whenever we felt like waking up. I was desperate for a shower so I got up around 11AM, dressed and ran around in the rain trying to figure out which cargo bay my luggage wound up in. Then I checked in and took the best shower ever. Any shower would have been the best shower ever, but the water pressure was especially good, too. I unpacked a bit, gathered up my dirty laundry to do tonight, bought a Mountain Dew from the vending machine, but having not bothered to bring my computer bag from the bus, eventually ran out of things to do, so I have returned.

By the time I got back, Daniel was up and at the desk in the front lounge, no doubt working on a light plot for some venue in the future. That's basically all he does. I feel like at this point in the tour, there are many people whose jobs suck more than mine. I'm not really used to that. Anyway, I counted the number of closed curtains in the bunks (not counting Nick, who is traveling with the actors on this trip, and whose job also currently sucks more than mine), and determined that the back lounge would be unoccupied. I was very pleased to find that the case, so here I sit, feet up on the leather couch. The wind is still blowing the bus side to side. Now people are starting to wake up and come visit me. Our plan for the day is that when Bart has had enough sleep, he will come back to the bus and take us to see the St. Louis arch. I've never been here, so I'm excited about that, because it's pretty much the only thing I know about St. Louis. Our plan to go go-carting has been squashed by the fact that the track we planned to visit has apparently shut down! We were so excited, we even invited the cast to come with us tomorrow, and they were really looking forward to it, too.

Our schedule here is kind of nice. We have the day off today, then load in at 8AM tomorrow (for Henry), but then have no show or anything else at night. Friday Nick and the cast have a 1-hour Henry, which I suppose I'll drag myself out of bed for if there's no reason not to, and then we do Big Henry at night. Then Saturday at 8AM is the changeover to The Spy, and a performance that night, then we hit the road for Glenn Ellyn, IL.

TOUR STOP 3: Poplar Bluff, MO

2009-02-10T17:05:00.020-05:00

After several days of hanging out and slowly making our way west, we have arrived and loaded in in Poplar Bluff, MO. I have yet to figure out what there is here, except for a Holiday Inn that beats the pants off the one we stayed at in Lafayette (for the first time in months, I had a good enough internet connection for uninterrupted online gaming). Unfortunately we were only there for one night. We are playing Henry V tonight at Three Rivers Community College, which seems like a nice place. The theatre is a single-level proscenium, I'd guess maybe 600 seats, but then I suck at estimating capacity. Everything is clean and spacious, and close together (we didn't even bother putting up directional signage).

Nick and I made new laminated name signs for the dressing room mirrors, using some of the parchment paper used in the show (we have a colonial-era theme in our signage, utilizing still images from our favorite YouTube video). Now that we had the time to make them laminated and nice-looking, they will be reusable, which has been a goal of mine for a while. We set up our stuff in the dressing rooms -- signs on the doors indicating men and women and the names of the actors inside, valuables bags, and the names over the mirrors (sometimes assigned at random, sometimes located at the request of our wardrobe supervisor). When this was done I

Our crew breakfast, which is required in our rider for load-in day, was delicious, and everyone here has been very nice. We are in the last hours of load-in. The small electrics stock of the theatre has made it a difficult show to light, but I just went inside to check in with Dan and he thinks we'll be ok with only a tiny bit of restaging for one moment.

When I was in there it looked like the set was almost assembled, there were a bunch of ladders up on the gallery. Nick and I spend about the first hour of load-in working, and then sit around trying to be useful for about five hours, waiting for the set to be done and the ladders to get off the gallery so we can lay the sound-dampening carpet. Nick also replaces the pipe insulation that protects the actors from whacking their heads on low-hanging scaffolding supports. Some of it travels intact, but some can't, and then there are tiny pieces that cover the bolts once they are assembled, to keep the actors from snagging their costumes on protruding bolts.

Looks like it's time to go help with focusing lights. See ya later!

Slice of Life in Transit

2009-02-09T21:32:00.003-05:00

The crew bus rolls along a narrow deserted highway somewhere between Kentucky and Missouri. The drive has become so boring that many of us have gone to our bunks because there's nothing else to do.

I have the lights out and am lying down with my eyes closed but not really trying to sleep. After about 15 minutes I feel the bus start to slow, then make a sharp turn, then another, and finally we seem to have stopped (though the ride is so smooth, at low speeds it can actually be hard to tell). I suspect that our quest to find Mexican food for dinner has come to an end. At the very least, I have learned that these sensations generally indicate we are stopping.

I slide my bunk curtain partially open and stick my head out, just as Bart steps into the open doorway of the driver's compartment and exclaims, "El Bracero!" I flip my legs out of the bunk, and immediately Nick slides his curtain open across from me and asks, "Are we somewhere?" I say, "Yes." And so we all gather in the front lounge, getting shoes on and tidying ourselves, and together head out to dinner.

TOUR STOP 2: West Lafayette, IN

2009-02-08T00:56:00.003-05:00

Tonight we are leaving West Lafayette, home of Purdue University (where we performed both our shows, as well as conducted student performances and workshops ranging from 6th grade to college level.) West Lafayette is also the home, as we learned, of Triple XXX Family Restaurant, which despite sounding like a porn shop, is actually an historic drive-in diner, the first in Indiana (opened in 1929). The crew was HUGE fans of this place, mostly due to the fact that it's open 24 hours, and serves great diner food and their specialty root beer floats. In the six days we spent in West Lafayette, I think we ate there five times. I do believe on one day we ate there twice.

The crew at Purdue was great, and the support staff very friendly and helpful. We spent most of our time there teching The Spy, so we only did one invited dress and two performances (one each of Spy and Henry), but our audiences were large and responsive.

We have two days before we have to load in in Poplar Bluff, MO, so we are taking a slight detour to Nashville. Part of the reason for this is that it sounds like a more interesting place to spend a day than Poplar Bluff, but also because it's the home base of the bus company, and it will provide an opportunity for the bus to be serviced, as our water pump is broken. We will sleep on the bus for two straight nights, chipping in on a single hotel room so we can all shower in the morning and have a place to stash our stuff during the day. I think it will be a fun couple days to unwind after a very busy week.

Life on the Road

2009-02-06T13:42:00.002-05:00

I'm still new at this, but now that we've been really in touring mode for about 5 days, here's what's going on.

Our day often consists of waking up at 6:30AM to be ready for a 7:30 bus call. If I think my personal involvement in the insanity occurring at the theatre at 8AM will be minimal, I will bring my personal pillow from the hotel to the bus, in the hope of getting to sleep more hours on the bus than I do overnight.

Our schedule here in West Lafayette is kind of insane. We started out re-teching The Spy, then tearing it all down to do a single performance of Henry V, then tearing that down to put the Spy set back up for our last two days. This has been a kind of boot camp for our crew, getting to practice almost every method of changeover before we leave our first stop. They're getting very good at it. Nick, being an ASM, deals a lot with props, and actor-proofing the set, so that's basically what he helps with during load-in and changeover. I really have nothing to do once the signage is up and I've put the proper calling script in the booth, so I kind of float around helping with simple tasks. Today I packed a drum in a cardboard box and carried a few things to and from our prop road box, then I went on a cleaning spree of the stage management work box, which it desperately needed. Then when I ran out of things to do, I went back to the bus and took a nap for about 45 minutes, before returning to help Nick set up for our 1-hour Henry performance for a student audience.

Thankfully, that performance was in the same building as our main shows are, in a small proscenium theatre, so we didn't have to go too far with our trunk of props. I hung out for that one and helped to set up and get the cast settled in before the show. The 1-hour show is Nick's baby, as there will be times when he has to stay behind to put it up in a city after the crew has left. As far as that show goes, he functions as the PSM, and whenever I'm available I will make myself useful as his ASM. This was the first time it's been performed, and although it's been rather underrehearsed due to all the work needed to remount The Spy, the cast did well and the kids seemed to enjoy it.

Now that the show is over, we are back on the bus. Bart, our very awesome driver, needs to take the bus for an hour or so, so the call went out for anyone who intends to hang out and/or sleep on the bus to get on for the ride. I'm not sure where we're going. I'm not sure where we are. It doesn't really matter. I think we're going back to the hotel for a while (where I suspect we are now), and then to a place where he can service the bus.

Tomorrow we have five final hours of rehearsal, and then we play our first performance of The Spy to a paying audience (finally! We started rehearsals Nov. 3!), then the cast stays here for a true day off before traveling to Poplar Bluff, MO. For the crew, we will load out the show Saturday night and immediately begin driving to Poplar Bluff, where it will be loaded in.

I still don't know where we are right now, but I'm pretty damn sure that's our cast bus parked inches away ahead of us. Either that, or there's more than one black rockstar bus with gray swirly designs in Lafayette, IN. I haven't explored their bus that much. I've only taken one brief ride on it. They have 12 bunks instead of our 8, which means they stack 3-high, giving everyone less headroom. On the plus side, the bunks are there for convenience, they don't ever actually have to sleep overnight in them. I heard a rumor they have a shower on their bus. That sounds nice in theory, I guess, but I'm sure the reality is more cramped and awkward than it sounds. Their front lounge is also smaller, which I don't like. On short jaunts around town, including our favorite pastime here in Lafayette, having a late-night dinner at XXX, Indiana's oldest drive-in diner (founded in 1929), we generally all sit in the front lounge, which can comfortably hold all seven of us. It's a nice chance to unwind, check in about how the show went, and discuss anything we need to. I have taken to claiming the seat at the table on the post-show trips, so I can write the report and send it before we get to XXX.

As far as the show goes, things seem to be going well. Last night was our first performance of Henry outside of the Guthrie, where we teched it. The adjustment to a very different space, and to a new local crew who were unfamiliar with the show, went pretty smoothly. It felt good to try that once, to prove that we can do it. I'm really looking forward to this week being over, and finally being done with tech and major rehearsals. We have a couple 1- and 2-nighters next week, which will be a different experience as well. I enjoy the travel, so I welcome the change of scenery. If there's one thing we've gotten experience with on this tour, it's changing scenery!

On the Road, Finally!

2009-02-02T22:13:00.060-05:00

Well we finally did it! We finished our run at the Guthrie last night, and after about 5 hours, closed the door on our tightly packed truck and hopped on our bus, where a bunch of take-out bar food in styrofoam containers awaited us. Within a few minutes we started to roll, and finally hit the road!

We ate for a while, watched the highlights of the Super Bowl we missed during the show, and then got into our bunks exhausted. I for one slept really well. I'm a small person, so I don't feel as much like I'm in a coffin as some of my colleagues. That's my bunk in the foreground, the lower frontmost bunk. I found the motion of the bus was actually very soothing while trying to sleep. We all pretty much slept until about 12:30PM when I slowly got up and wandered into the front lounge where Nick already had his computer out. I also sat with my computer out, and had barely begun checking out Facebook when Nick pointed out the window over my shoulder and said, "Look! There's our truck!" Sure enough, the Acting Company truck was waiting at an intersection as we passed it. Moments later the front divider slid open and our driver, Bart, announced we had arrived. We were all taken a bit by surprise, and stumbled into our shoes and out the door to meet the local crew here on the campus of Purdue University, in snowy West Lafayette, IN.

Nick and I helped direct the unloading of the truck for a while, and brought some of the small items that travel under the bus into the theatre, until our work box was off the truck. Then we set it up in a corner and began hanging signs, assigning dressing room space, setting up the callboard, etc. There wasn't all that much for us to do, so a lot of our time has been spent on the bus updating paperwork, or just hanging out and watching TV. One of the main tasks we've taken on is to make coffee for the crew. We all carry walkie-talkies, and they can just radio ahead a few minutes in advance when they're going to be wanting a coffee break, and we get a pot going on the bus and begin making their orders. It's not our job, but I think considering they're in there doing heavy labor for 10 hours, and we hung some signs and printed some documents and sent some emails for a few hours, it's a fair trade. We also took on a project for our wardrobe supervisor, who didn't have enough of the little plastic things that divide each actor's clothes on the costume racks. We got some cardboard and made a bunch more for her.

Tomorrow we begin (or re-begin) teching The Spy. Tonight when the crew is done at 11PM Bart has offered to take us someplace to eat, and then we will go to our hotel, where everyone is going to appreciate a good shower (we were running late last night so we didn't get to stop at the hotel in the morning, we just got up and went straight to work). I'm having a lot of fun with this aspect of the job so far. I think the longer multi-day trips will be really cool. The unfortunate thing so far is that from the moment we got on the bus in the parking lot of the Guthrie, I didn't see the outside world until we got on campus at Purdue, so "seeing the country" isn't really happening yet. Also, the windows on the bus are so heavily tinted that you can't see anything at night. A couple times through the night I used the GPS on my iPhone to find out what state we were in!

Prepping for the Road

2009-02-01T00:00:00.055-05:00

It's Saturday night, and tomorrow we have two more shows at the Guthrie and then we're gone. Much of my attention in these last couple days has been focused more on packing and preparing to leave than on the shows we have remaining here.

I did most of my laundry last night, and will do the last bit tonight. I cleaned my apartment last night, and tonight is my last opportunity to pack. In the morning before the matinee call we have to bring our luggage to the parking lot of the Guthrie, where the crew bus is already parked. As soon as the show is loaded out tomorrow night we hop on board and are off to West Lafayette, IN. The cast will get picked up by their bus at the company housing on Monday morning, and will arrive at West Lafayette in the evening.

Our production manager and tech director, Joel, took all of the crew, as well as our staff rep director and company manager, out to dinner tonight between shows. This was our last opportunity to talk as a group about anything that might need to be said about how things will work on the road. It was a great opportunity for all of us to get on the same page and approach our next challenges as a team. By the time we walked back to the theatre, our bus had arrived, so a bunch of us ventured to the parking lot to take a tour of the bus, and meet our driver, Bart. He has been driving the crew bus for The Acting Company for many years, and by all accounts is incredibly awesome.

Here's Nick and one of our actors, Andy, who happened to tag along to see the bus, testing out the couches in the back lounge (pardon my flash -- there are a lot of mirrored surfaces).

In the morning I plan to come in early (which Nick thinks is hysterical because lately I'm never early, and barely on time for my own duties) to clean up all of the random stage management stuff strewn around the theatre. We have a cardboard box that lives under the seats in the theatre with a bunch of stuff that needs to get thrown out, and a bunch of stuff that needs to be packed in our road box before the whole place turns into a disaster area during load-out. So I hope to have a lot of time to make order out of all our belongings so there's as little as possible to keep track of after the shows.

We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but everyone is very excited to start the most adventurous part of this gig.

Why Yes, We ARE a Rep Company!

2009-01-27T19:11:00.023-05:00

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

2009-01-25T16:51:00.010-05:00

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

2009-01-25T13:47:00.007-05:00

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

2009-01-24T20:19:00.004-05:00

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

2009-01-07T18:58:00.008-05:00

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

2009-01-06T00:06:00.003-05:00

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!

Random Note of the Day 2

2008-12-22T22:03:00.002-05:00

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

New Feature: Random Note of the Day

2008-12-21T19:30:00.001-05:00

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.

2008-12-15T19:43:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-14T11:15:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-11T17:34:00.007-05:00

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

2008-12-11T13:40:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-07T13:20:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-05T01:31:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-01T17:18:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-24T20:39:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-19T20:56:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-08T16:34:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-08T00:47:00.001-05:00

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

2008-11-05T11:41:00.002-05:00

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.

Day 5 Preproduction

2008-11-02T03:32:00.002-05:00

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

2008-10-29T15:55:00.001-05:00

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...

2008-10-27T12:19:00.000-05:00

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

2008-09-18T15:20:00.007-05:00

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

2008-09-14T13:06:00.004-05:00

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

2008-09-11T19:32:00.000-05:00

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)

2008-09-03T10:07:00.009-05:00

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!

2008-09-03T09:56:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-08-02T17:03:00.001-05:00

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

Early photo call for Nanette

2008-07-31T20:17:00.001-05:00

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

Nanette ensemble in their snazzy costumes.

2008-07-31T20:12:00.001-05:00

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

No Pressure

2008-07-25T19:52:00.003-05:00

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

2008-07-14T18:42:00.003-05:00

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!!!!!!

2008-07-14T17:57:00.005-05:00

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

2008-06-17T08:10:00.003-05:00

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

2008-05-29T20:47:00.006-05:00

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

2008-04-28T22:25:00.005-05:00

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

2008-04-04T18:01:00.009-05:00

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:

It's 29 Hours. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

2008-03-07T18:57:00.003-05:00

My Views on Small Gigs
After several weeks of unemployment, I have a little job. Actually, even Equity admits that a stage reading does not constitute "employment." What they mean by that is, if you're doing a show that allows you to miss rehearsal due to other employment in the industry, this is not a good enough excuse. But also, a week of work for $100 isn't really a job. Still, I much prefer doing a reading to a showcase, as I recently turned down a 6-week showcase, even though it would have paid $600. My philosophy about jobs in theatre that don't pay actual money is that if I'm not doing anything, I can dedicate a week of my life to meeting some new collaborators, learning a new show that might have a future, working with well-known actors I admire, and putting my full effort into making a 1-page contact sheet, putting together 29 hours of schedule, and helping them to coordinate the moving of music stands and chairs around a bare stage. I might even take the house lights up and down for the actual readings.

Contrast that to a showcase, which despite its name and original intentions, is a full production with a full design team, essentially a full-time job for usually six weeks, culminating in an actual production which needs to be loaded in, teched, and loaded out. And it still usually pays only $100 a week (if you can get it -- that's seldom the original offer). Not to mention for someone like me who subs on Broadway and Off-, I could lose far more money in lost sub work than I make doing the entire run of the Showcase. It's happened to me several times. And lest that sound like it's all about the money, let's remember that if I'm taking a Showcase it means I don't have a job. So yes, at least until the rent is accounted for, it has to be at least partially about the money. Personally I feel I'm making more art in the 8,125th running of the Phantom Overture than in many showcases I've done, so I actually feel no guilt about the art either.

But back to the reading. I don't mean the title to sound like it's going badly. It's not at all. It's actually something I've said many times, in fact to the director of this one when we first met for coffee. It really is my philosophy about doing readings. When you take a show, you don't know if it's going to be a good experience or a bad one, if it will go somewhere or be forgotten about forever, or if the people you meet will lead you to bigger jobs, or never call you again. In my opinion, if the show turns out to be a bad experience, there are two ways to rationalize getting out of bed in the morning: either they're paying you a fair wage, or it will all be over soon. This is why showcases are bad -- they satisfy neither criteria, so if you're not having fun, you're screwed.

I truly believe the process of putting eleven actors standing at music stands for 29 hours can't possibly create the kind of unpleasantness that would make it not worth the risk. Thus, I took the job, no questions asked. We start rehearsal tomorrow, and so far I like the director, who I've met, I like the composer and musical director who I've gotten to know quite well via e-mail, and I like the cast -- one of whom I've worked with and am thrilled to be working with again, one of whom I've spoken to on the phone, and the rest through e-mail. I'm excited to start meeting people and get to work.

The other great thing about this job is, as I said in an earlier post, I've missed being a PSM for the last six months or so. A reading doesn't allow for the full use of PSM skills, but I'm hoping it will be enough to tide me over until summer, when I will have more responsibility than anyone could ever want, as PSM of a summer stock season.

I will share one other thing I've learned from being unemployed for the first time in about a year. Having a week or more to myself has reminded me how valuable my time is. I am an only child, I learned at an early age how to entertain myself. I am not bored at all. If I could be paid to do nothing forever, I would never leave my apartment. So I feel no desire to take a so-called "job" just for the sake of having one, if the money offered is not remotely worth the value of my time. I believe I provide Broadway-quality stage management to every show I do, big or small. That doesn't mean I expect every employer to be able to pay me $1,500 a week, or anywhere near that. I know how much money I need to live, which is not much by New York standards, and I need health insurance, and I will never turn down work that meets those two requirements. But for anything below that I realize now that the only reason to take such a job would be if I wanted to. For whatever reason -- believe in the show, want to work with one of the actors, like the director, trying to get in with the producer. There has to be a reason I want it, so badly that I'd rather do the show than sit comfortably at home doing something else. And in the last month I've learned that there's nothing wrong with saying no to working your ass off when there's little or nothing to be gained. In no other industry would anyone be made to feel guilty over such a decision. Should I call up an accountant and ask him to do my taxes for $5 in his spare time at night? If he tells me he's actually quite busy watching American Idol, do I have a right to question his devotion to developing his accounting skills?

Now that I'm spending some time back at the bottom of the industry, just wanted to share the view. It's easy to forget when you get used to a weekly paycheck.

Sometimes Apple Scares Me

2008-03-04T18:43:00.009-05:00

But in that way that you can't even worry about your privacy because it's just so damn cool.

Hey, two posts in one day! I have to tell you what just happened to me.

I'm doing this reading next week, so I'm in preproduction. I have some contact info for the cast and creative team, so I'm starting to enter it into Apple's Address Book app. I'm using the cool new feature that Mail has in Leopard where it detects phone numbers and e-mail addresses in your mail and offers to add them to your address book. Since the only contact info I have is in plain text in an e-mail from the director, this saves me a lot of retyping or cutting and pasting. The system is not perfect by any means, but it's still a time saver.

So I get to this one actor, who is a Broadway actor that I've vaguely heard of, but one I'm sure I've never met. I create a contact in my address book based on his e-mail address, and when I later go back to sort my contacts, I find that the guy's headshot has been added in the photo slot of his contact file! I then see that his e-mail is from a dot Mac account, which no doubt somehow explains this. I'm not sure if this is a feature you have to opt in for, but what I'm guessing is happening is that Address Book automatically matches @mac.com e-mail addresses to the person's account and their own address card. It hasn't filled in any other personal information though, as I'm still lacking his phone number (this is definitely a good thing, for privacy reasons). Maybe it just does the picture. I will post an update if I find out more about how this is done.

UPDATE: Found out how it's done. A quick search on MacNN solves all.
If you have a .Mac account you can go to the webmail page (webmail.mac.com) and click on preferences (upper right of your mailbox area). In the "Composing" tab, there is a place where you can add your photo. Presumably from there all Mac users will see this photo when they read your e-mails in Mail or they enter your e-mail address in their Address Book. I didn't have a photo set, but obviously I need to add one now. Will it look unprofessional if I use my default iChat icon?

My Manifesto as Emperor of New York

2008-03-04T15:28:00.010-05:00

Preamble
Whereas I have been called out (again!) for not updating this blog, I am going to make a slight departure from the usual topics to share with you my plans for the City of New York after I am declared Emperor.

And whereas these plans have been years in the making, and I have finally felt the need to write them down, and also to make a blog post, Behold!

I. Terraforming of Annoying Geography
For my first act as Emperor, I shall assemble a vast quantity of dynamite and bulldozers and other necessary equipment, and flatten the terrain of Washington Heights. This will no doubt require the destruction of many structures, probably including the one in which I currently reside, but in the end the benefits will outweigh the temporary displacement, and I will have long since moved into my palace above the Bed Bath and Beyond in Chelsea. It is unclear why this couldn't have been done a hundred years ago before there was all this stuff here, but it might as well be done sooner rather than later. In the interests of historical preservation, the Cloisters can be left where they are up on a cliff of some sort, and people can continue to use the A train elevator to get there.

When this important work is completed, some slight modification of the valley in the vicinity of 125th St. can also be looked at.

II. Provision of Necessary Amenities for the Populace

1. It shall be required by law that there be a 24-hour Duane Reade located within 10 blocks of every point in the City.

2. Likewise there shall be a Staples with copy center within 10 blocks of every space licensed for public performance within the City. At least one of these shall be open 24 hours.

3. There shall be a Starbucks within 3 blocks of every point in the City. It may surprise some citizens to know that this has not yet been achieved.

4. Every mobile phone operator who wishes to do business in New York shall ensure that the entire City is covered with adequate voice and high-speed data service down to the first basement level, as well as all subway stations and tunnels. For any area of the city found to be not so covered, the company shall incur a fine of 100 million dollars per week that the lack of coverage exists, or $600,000 per hour in the case of temporary outages, the time being rounded up to the next hour.

5. Time Warner or another provider shall offer internet at a bandwidth of no less than 7 Mbps to every business and residence in the City. Fines for outages shall be $1,000 per minute per customer.

III. Transportation
1. Subways. It was the intention of the designers of the original subway system in 1904 that trains would run every 90 seconds. My first goal for the transit system is to return all lines to this operating procedure. This will not apply only to weekdays or so-called "business hours," but to all hours, as the nighttime and weekend worker and the drunk returning home from the bar at 4AM are entitled to the same service as the businessman traveling to his office at 9AM.

The 2nd Avenue Subway shall be completed with all possible haste. As this will still leave the Upper East Side largely useless, a crosstown subway shall be constructed at 125th St.

2. Buses. The provision of bus lines and bus stops is deemed to be adequate, however the number of buses running on each line shall be greatly increased.

3. Vehicles neglecting to activate their turn signals may be physically damaged in any way deemed appropriate by passing pedestrians without fear of prosecution.

IV. The Bubble
Once the land has been sufficiently terraformed and the needs of the people provided for, we may begin construction on the true purpose of my Empire -- to construct a bubble over the City of New York so that the extreme inconvenience of precipitation may be avoided. Depending on its design it may also allow for some degree of temperature control.

This bubble does not need to completely enclose the city -- it may be open on the sides to allow fresh air and clear views. In effect it shall act as more of a "rain hat" over the City. Job placement assistance and educational opportunities shall be provided for the guys who stand on the street corner saying "Umbrellaumbrellaumbrella." Once the City is free from precipitation, my primary aims as Emperor will be complete.

Other Public Works
A bridge system shall be constructed above the Times Square district, consisting of glass walkways which may be accessed at street corners by means of a card system similar to a Metrocard. Such cards shall be provided without cost to all residents of New York and commuting workers so that they may travel through the Times Square area in a rapid manner while allowing visitors to stare at the tall buildings and have their portraits drawn by sidewalk artists.

In Conclusion
I hope I have made it clear why it is in the best interets of all New Yorkers that I be declared Emperor and that all citizens should cooperate fully with my regime.

I Have Left Verizon and Palm

2008-01-12T14:25:00.000-05:00

One thing I haven't mentioned because of all the time I spent working and blogging about Frankenstein, is that I have had a major shift in my telecommunications life.

To recap:
* I have been a Palm user since 2000 (my first Palm phone was the Treo 650 in 2005)
* I had AT&T from 1997-2003 and HATED it -- couldn't make calls indoors
* I switched to Verizon and despite hating their policy of crippling all the good features out of their phones, their reception is pretty much perfect in NYC.
* I am a Mac user and as such am opposed to Windows Mobile for both philosophical and logistical reasons.

Then this happened:
* As I excitedly blogged in May, Palm released the Treo 755p for Sprint. My Treo 650 at that time was dying.
* Verizon was rumored to be releasing it in July, then it failed testing
* I bought a 700p and extended my contract because I seriously needed a new phone
* I was one of the first people to get the maintenance release for the 700p that supposedly fixed it. This blog made PalmInfocenter, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world, despite being labled a "he."
* The Maintenance release turns out to have some horrible bugs, and a relatively minor one which causes the phone to randomly make audible DTMF tones even when silenced.
* After way too much time they release another fix which still doesn't fix the DTMF bug (which I was able to notice within 30 seconds of buying the phone). It turns out the 755p also has the bug.
* At this point I give up on Palm OS.
* Months go by, the 755p continues to not be released, and the 700p continues to be buggy.
* Palm announces that their next generation OS is at least 12-18 months away.
* Verizon is rumored to be soon releasing the HTC XV-6800, known as the Mogul on Sprint. This is a Windows Mobile 6 device. By now (September) I've decided to turn to the dark side for multitasking and a modern OS. Meanwhile AT&T is about to release the Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser), which is the next generation version of the 6800.
* The 6800 fails testing. AT&T announces the Tilt release October 5.
* October 5, I call all over town before I find an AT&T store with one in stock and jump in a cab on my lunch break.
* I try out the Tilt for a month and decide to keep it and cancel my Verizon account, with 20 months left in my contract.

So my AT&T experience has been quite good. Reception is definitely not as good as Verizon's, but it's the difference between being able to make a call from the basement of a basement behind a cinderblock wall or not. My usage has shifted a lot in the last few years, too. I use my phone far more for data than for voice, and I find AT&T's 3G and HSDPA networks to be very fast. Overall my Tilt accesses the internet much faster than my Treo, which is probably more to do with the phone's hardware and software than the network, but the important thing is that it's faster.

I'll be posting more details about this whole experience in the future, specifically from the perspective of someone moving from Palm OS to Windows Mobile.

I'm Not Dead

2008-01-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

I got called out by a friend of mine the other night -- "The Go Button, not updated so much, hmmm?"

Yeah. It's actually really embarrassing that it's January and I haven't updated since November. I've been busy, and to be honest, the Facebook epidemic swept through the Frankenstein company and took up most of my webpage-updating energy for a while.

Frankenstein has now been closed for a month, and I'm currently working on an adorable new musical called Wanda's World, which is billed as "a musical for the 'tween in all of us." The site appears to be down at the moment, but here's the tickets page. Anyway it's a very fun show, aimed at middle school kids, but with a great score and a very talented cast that I think will make it entertaining for all. We're currently in tech. I'm assisting (again!) so I'm sitting alone backstage while they work on a giant dance number. I really want to PSM something, but I'm going to be careful what I wish for because I could very well wind up doing a show in the spring right before going back to Reagle, and that means 4 PSM jobs with no time in between. I would probably be burnt out after the first show at Reagle. As it is, I've learned that it's best to leave a little cushion before the start of the summer. I had about 18 hours between my last show of the spring and when I left for Reagle last year, and I was worn out very early in the summer. A job is a job, but if I have a choice I'm going to consider the importance of my sanity for the rest of the summer. I had less than a week between Frankenstein and Wanda's World, so a week or two of intermittent sub work would be just fine whenever it comes along.

The best thing I can say about my career right now is that I have so many insurance weeks that it's a non-issue in considering job offers, and I have enough savings from Reagle and Frankenstein that I can afford to work at a loss for a while. This is very important, because every now and then the job that pays the most or gives you the pension & health points is actually not the most challenging or most helpful to one's career.

So that's what's been going on. Sorry to keep you waiting!

Post-Opening Update

2007-11-17T03:36:00.000-05:00

This is just one of those been-awhile posts. The show is open and still running, which in my history with "open" runs is nothing short of miraculous. The local reviews were rather unkind, but we got a couple raves from the AP and Gannett, which have run in papers across the country. Our audiences, even when small, have been enthusiastic, so everyone has been keeping in good spirits. We are also taking part in fundraising for Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS now. With the strike going on, our relatively small contribution is going to mean a lot more this year, with 27 Broadway shows shut down and unable to collect money. We may be a small show, but our audiences have been very generous.

Understudy Mania
This week was the first in which we didn't really have understudy rehearsal (well we're rehearsing on Sunday, but we have the majority of the week free of rehearsal). Last week we had our first scheduled understudy going on -- Christiane was out for three shows over the weekend, with Casey Clark covering the role of Elizabeth, and Leslie Henstock covering Casey, as well as her own ensemble stuff (we have no swings -- a bad thing waiting to happen if ever there was one).

We had a very interesting put-in the day before. All our understudies are basically ready to go on, so instead of a put-in with the regular cast opposite Casey and Leslie, we decided to lighten the load on the principals (who would have had to do the equivalent of a 5-show weekend) and let the understudies handle the bulk of the show, except in scenes were they played directly opposite Casey or Leslie. It was very interesting when the handoffs would happen. For instance, Jim Stanek played Victor for most of the show, but before scenes between Victor and Elizabeth, Jim would exit and at the next entrance Hunter would come in. It was really fun, if a bit confusing!

Anyway, all of that went surprisingly well (especially given that some people were understudying two roles at once!), but at the end of it, we found out that Casey might be going on that night as Mother. Despite the fact that her scheduled performances as Elizabeth had been the focus of understudy rehearsals from day one, she had also gotten enough time on stage as Mother, so it wasn't really scary, just a little surprising. With seven minutes left before the end of rehearsal, we ran the big chunk of Mother's part of the show and called it a day, and wardrobe sat around on the dinner break waiting for word to begin frantic altering of costumes. Casey did end up going on that night, and Leslie got to go on a day early for Casey, and both did a great job. By the time Casey was Elizabeth the next day, everyone was completely calm, like it was the most well-prepared-for thing in the world. I was really proud of us as a company for pulling off a great put-in, allowing all of our understudies the luxury of some time in real performance conditions (it was full tech, costumes only for Casey and Leslie), and then throwing in another put-in at the last minute for that night's show.

As much as rehearsal can make every day feel like a matinee day, I have never felt like it's wasting my time. I learn things about the show constantly. If there's truly nothing going on on the deck for a while, I can come out front and actually see stuff. There are tons of little moments that I never knew were there. Learning what the show looks like from the front is going to be very important as time goes on, for calling the show and times when I may need to run rehearsals by myself. The dance captain and understudies had requested an additional video monitor stage left next to the conductor monitor, that would show the same feed the stage manager gets of the front view of the stage. Then one day we had rehearsal. When we came back that night, suddenly there it was, thanks to our always-accommodating sound department. That night was quite comical -- it was like I imagine it to have been when the first television sets started to appear in homes. Everyone just gathered around under it, whether they were waiting for an entrance or not, watching the little figures move around inside the tiny glowing box, putting on a show that none of us had been able to see before. Once the novelty wore off, it's now mostly used by the understudies to look at specific moments they want to see (often involving them pointing at the screen trying to count the steps on the grand staircase to double-check which step their person is standing on).

Although I don't have a calling script yet, I have been doing everything I can to prepare to call the show. The new monitor, as well as the conductor monitors scattered about, have been very helpful that way. Even before we started previews, Josh has been saying, "Can you get near a conductor monitor for this cue?" and explaining what he's calling so that I start to learn what the cues look like.

My Rehearsal Process
In rehearsal, even though I'm basically just doing what I always do, it has added challenges. My stuff is the same, but the idea that none of the actors are doing their normal thing makes me have to pay attention to things I take for granted. As we go through the show, especially the first time giving them blocking, I had my own private backstage blocking rehearsal going on. It's often said on many shows that there's more choreography backstage than onstage. That is certainly true of our show at times, and I made it my task when people came offstage to talk them through anything interesting that they might encounter: "I'll be standing here, you hand me your props, you step over here where your dresser will do your change, then you have to watch out because a table will be coming off this way, and this person needs to get by. Before you go on again, don't forget to pick up your prop here..." Thinking about all those little things that just kind of happen automatically was good mental exercise for me, and it reduces the number of traffic accidents we'll have when an unfamiliar person steps into an otherwise well-oiled machine.

At the put-in we ran the show with full tech, but in regular rehearsals I'm alone on the deck, which is really cool because it forces me to think about all the deck cues, not just my own. It's already my job to make sure the other cues happen, but watching them happen is different from actually operating them myself, and knowing off the top of my head where every deck cue is called (we rehearse without cue lights, and often without headsets in more informal rehearsals). Throughout the tech and preview periods, a lot of cues were added and cut so I used to do some of the cues that are no longer mine. But rehearsing is a good way for me to keep up with actually doing them correctly in case I ever have to do them during performance in an emergency -- things like operating the trap and catching the lantern that Victor throws are not things I'd want to do without being confident.

The Routine
Overall I'm just happy to have a job. I really enjoy the routine of going to the same place every day, seeing the same people, doing basically the same thing, which is what I love to do. And every Thursday at midnight, more than enough money to live on magically appears in my bank account. I have no expectations of how long this will continue -- I've said the whole time it could be a huge hit or close in a week -- I don't really mind, I will appreciate it as long as it lasts.

I am anything but a morning person, but for some strange reason I look forward to matinee days. Maybe it's because I make such terrible use of my free time anyway (not that there's anything wrong with sleep), but I just feel so much more productive when I get up and go to work all day. Or maybe it's because I know how quickly I could find myself unemployed, and I'd rather do two shows a day than have no show to do.

It's starting to feel like a real show. We're up and running, and that's a big change for stage management, when the creative team is gone and the operation and maintenance of the show is up to us. We have some fans who are becoming organized -- I just heard tonight they're starting to refer to themselves as the Prometheans -- a reference to Mary Shelley's characterization of Victor Frankenstein as "the modern Prometheus." Your show really isn't anywhere until your fans have a clever name for themselves. There are a couple fan sites cropping up on MySpace and Facebook -- I actually finally joined Facebook tonight to check it out. It seems like that's where the majority of our company members have accounts, or at least which they like better. This is my first experience being on this kind of show since the era of social networking sites began, and it's really cool to have these pages where the fans and the cast and crew can post messages back and forth easily. I heard a girl the other day introducing herself to one of our actors after the show as "the one from MySpace," so it's fun to make the connection between the people on the internet and the real live people who watch our show each night, some of them coming back multiple times. This show, like many of the other dark/serious musicals, will need that kind of active fan support to thrive, so it's been very helpful to our morale to see people getting attached to the show and taking it upon themselves to spread the word.

Backstage Goings-On

2007-10-31T13:39:00.000-05:00

Our cast has said in a number of interviews that we may not be the funny Frankenstein, but we're funnier backstage. On this show I have been introduced to a Halloween tradition that I had never experienced before: the Boo.

It started maybe two weeks ago. One day we came to the theatre before rehearsal and found that Becky Barta's dressing table had been hit by an explosion of Halloween cheer: fake cobwebs, plastic spiders, pumpkin decorations, and even a bobble-head Frankenstein. Taped to the mirror was a note: "You've been Boo'd! Pass it on!" Apparently everyone in the cast drew dates for which they are supposed to boo another cast member. Nobody knows who has boo'd them, and people can choose at random who they boo, as long as that person has not yet been boo'd before the date they have drawn. Today we had a big surprise when the entire backstage hallway and both dressing rooms were boo'd, with signs proclaiming that we've all been boo'd by the original boo-er.

Some of them have been really inventive. One was in the form of a scavenger hunt, in which the boo-ee had to follow the clues to talk to various people backstage during the show, who would then present them with the next clue. I was incredibly honored to be one of the stops on the scavenger hunt. The clues were on white paper with a seal drawn on in pencil to evoke the clues used as props in the show (until they were cut a couple days ago), which were distinctive red letters with wax seals. The boo-er made some comment to me about trying to make them look like the clues, so I dug into my stack of used paper props and found the ones in best condition. The clues were rewritten on the actual show props before the boo was carried out. I was very happy to be able to participate in the boo, and later assisted in setting up another one.

Finally, today we came in to find that stage management has finally been boo'd. Josh's spot in the booth got a little cobweb treatment, and a gummy bloody handprint stuck to the outside of the window. My desk stage left was completely covered in candy, a rubber severed hand, cobwebs all over the desk and the nearby video racks, as well as the entire handrail of the escape stairs behind me. The final touch was the rubber snake on my chair. Pic:

The camera flash is way more light than stage left has ever seen. This picture is the only time I've ever seen what it actually looks like. We use a real flower in the show, and quickly learned we can't store them at the prop table because they die overnight. We have to keep them in the kitchen area downstairs where they get some florescent light.

Week 3 of Previews

2007-10-25T12:32:00.000-05:00

First of all, a new video about Frankenstein that I just found today, from Broadway Beat.

The most major changes have gone into the show. Some pretty big rewrites, and completely new orchestrations (which will continue to be added to and tweaked). The plan is for the show to be frozen tomorrow (Friday). The things we're working on now are some tweaks in the more tech-heavy sequences, putting music into the curtain call, that kind of thing. After today's rehearsal we have only one more 4-hr slot tomorrow afternoon to finish whatever is going to be done before the show is frozen.

We had another day off a couple days ago, and for the third time in a row, I did absolutely nothing. My body has been hurting in various places since tech, and I have been trying to get enough rest so as not to make it worse with each additional day's work.

Once we get to the point where we don't have rehearsals every day I think I may be able to rest and also accomplish something. Freezing the show and opening isn't exactly the end of all that, as we go full-force into understudy rehearsals right away because we have some planned absences coming up in the week after opening. But someday, eventually I think I may set foot someplace besides my apartment, 37 Arts, the Starbucks on 39th/8th, and the bar at the Zipper.

Week 2 of Previews

2007-10-17T09:29:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was our day off. Like our last one, October 3, I did absolutely nothing. Well I did get to make some progress setting up my new phone, which is a whole other category of blogging I need to catch up on. From this point on, I will get a day off every Tuesday, so hopefully once I get used to the concept I can make it more productive.

I'm realizing now why it is that sometimes shows don't seem to change very much during previews, or at least not as fast as an observer would think. While 18 hours of rehearsal in a week of 8 performances seems like a lot, it really isn't very luxurious. You really have to think in small chunks. "Today we work on this." There's not time to change everything that needs work in a 4-hour span, especially considering that when you change staging you also need to allow time to re-tech the scene. And then hope that you don't put it on stage that night and say, "Well that didn't work!"

Rehearsal is short-to-nonexistent on two-show days (either 2 hrs on one day, or one hour for each), so today we have no rehearsal, and it will be the same show we did on Monday night. We still have two weeks, but only a little over a week before the show should be frozen, so there's time, but not as much as it seems at first glance.

I'm not worried, I just find it interesting how even with a fairly long preview period, you have to be very careful about budgeting time to make sure the most needed work gets done.

First Preview and Some Links

2007-10-11T01:54:00.000-05:00

We had our first preview tonight. The whirlwind that has been this production is coming together and several hundred people happened to be watching it tonight. The performance was our second complete run of the show in real time, which is better than some shows get, and considering we only started rehearsal 22 days ago, it could
have been much worse.

Bill (our director) gave a funny little curtain speech before the show basically saying "welcome to our first preview, please bear with us if there are any train wrecks." He actually used the word train wrecks. Maybe more than once. Thankfully we had none.

I don't think we were really at a point where there was a big chance of a trainwreck, unless the huge sliding doors that are involved in a large percentage of the show had stopped working completely. They go through moods hourly where they are happy or unhappy, and we knew they were unhappy when we opened the house. I wasn't counting but I'd say they got stuck maybe five times in Act I, two of which required me to apply an inelegant amount of direct force to get them to close all the way. We've been dealing with the bothersome stage right slider since the beginning, so it's become routine for us, and aside from not closing or opening as smoothly as they're supposed to, it was nothing that really affected the show. In many cases it probably couldn't be noticed because we almost always had someone posted on the stage right side physically holding the slider as it moved, ready to apply extra force at the first sign of trouble. Unbeknownst to me, some adjustments were made at intermission, which explains why they were behaving during Act II, and more work with be done tomorrow morning.

Overall it was a very good show considering how little time we've had to get comfortable with it, and things will continue to be added and improved as we rehearse during previews. Afterwards, just about everybody involved with the production headed over to an informal gathering at the bar adjoining the Zipper Theatre to relax and celebrate.

Meanwhile, some press is showing up as the result of our open rehearsal from last week. We had a ton of press there, for an Off-Broadway show at least, and here are some of the links we've found:

Interviews:

NEW:Broadway.com - First Person with Hunter

NEW: TheatreMania video.
Christiane just tipped me off to this one, which we just watched during rehearsal. My computer at my desk stage left has become the nerve center for the cast and crew to check up on what the buzz is on the internet (and for the inexplicable number of Red Sox fans to check the playoff scores as they pass by during the show).

Photos:
Playbill
Broadway.com
Broadway World
...more Broadway World! (more set photos and stuff)

Video:

Stage Notes blog
Broadway.com

I have to share my personal favorite, though:
Being in charge of props, I was kind of mortified to see this picture featuring Struan Erlenborn, Mandy Bruno, Steve Blanchard, and Hunter Foster playing background while the photographer decides to take a nice juicy close-up of the bar code painted onto the ball. And yes, it's painted on -- there's no way to get it off. Of course that's not the actual ball used in the show. You should have seen the infamous Scooby Doo ball we used before we found a red one. Anyway, would ten seconds of Photoshop work have killed them?

Well I have to get to bed. We're all thrilled that we don't have rehearsal until 3:00. It's almost like a day off. Next Tuesday will be our first day off in 13 days, and it will be very welcome!

Glimpses of a Tech

2007-10-06T20:38:00.000-05:00

A few thoughts as we continue tech (scroll down for the latest updates):

"Watch your eyes, folks!"
Most common phrase of tech. There is a lot of light. Insane amounts of light. There's one place in the show where my track takes me down a set of escape stairs just as a bunch of giant strobes on the boom at the foot of the stairs go off in my face. That one always catches me by surprise. I also like our signage in the lobby which warns of "Theatrical Haze and Intense Strobe Effects." Not just your garden variety strobe effects. Epileptics in Jersey should be covering their eyes. I'm told it looks even brighter in the house.

10/08/2007 2:38PM
The word of the day.
We've developed a little thing among those of us on the deck channel on headset. Every day there's a word of the day, which we discover as events progress. Yesterday's word cannot be printed in a family-friendly blog. Today's word is "cut." Over the last couple days we've been weeding out props and scenic elements, and today it continues. Letters from school officials? Cut. Noose? Cut. While some of us have gotten very attached to certain props, notably the "implements of death," I much prefer a show that cuts props at the last minute rather than adding them.

10/09/2007 11:00AM
Just arrived at the theatre and plugged in my computer. I just realized how stupid it is that I've been bringing my power cord home with me every night. This week I have spent about 15 of my waking hours at the theatre, 2 hours on the train, and about 2-3 at home. My computer has a battery life of over 4 hours. Well I will be smarter tonight, and that will be the only chance I get to use it, as we start previews tomorrow. I don't like the sound of "tomorrow." We have 15 actor-hours to work before we have a paying audience. In some ways it's a lot of time, and in some ways it's really scary!

Frankenstein Photos and Press

2007-09-30T23:11:00.000-05:00

Probably half the e-mails I've received in the last two weeks have been from our publicist, notifying us of the various press commitments that our actors have. This is the first one that I've actually seen the results of: Playbill's The Leading Men column. The show should be getting a lot of coverage in the next three to four weeks. There was a great full-page ad in New York magazine this week.

The website also has put up some pictures from the photo call we did a few days ago. Here's one:
These are just the photos for early publicity, no sets, no wigs, and not necessarily finished costumes, but I think they won't look too out of place when compared with the finished product. The rest of them can be seen on this page.

Trusses! The Musical

2007-09-26T00:10:00.000-05:00

If you had walked into Theatre A at 37 Arts today, that's what you would have seen. We have trusses. Lots and lots of trusses. Some of which are not hung yet, and some of which are out of the frame of this horrible phone-camera photo (I'm putting my real camera in my bag right now). No sign yet of the 90 Par Cans in a 12-foot square. Later in the day tomorrow the set starts loading in, which should also be very exciting. Our crew is working 8AM-midnight every day this week to get everything in in time for tech on Monday. Suffice it to say there's a lot going on.

Meanwhile, in Theatre B, we didn't quite stage Act II today, but we should be done sometime tomorrow morning.

A Run of Act I

2007-09-23T21:41:00.000-05:00

OK, I swear I'm going to post, and I have some pictures. As you might imagine, things have been busy since we started rehearsals on Frankenstein. We started on Tuesday, and finished our first week today. Towards the end of the day, we were able to run Act I. Well, OK, it was sort of a stumble-through, but definitely more running than stumbling. Considering we just started staging yesterday, it was pretty incredible to see so much of the show take shape.

The rehearsal period is very short, and there is a ton of music in the show. This made the first few rehearsals kind of scary because the cast had to learn the music before we could even do an effective read-through, so at first it was hard to see the bigger picture. Three days of running three simultaneous rehearsals (two rooms of music and one of table work) got us to the point where we could do a read-through (we had already done the meet & greet and design presentations in the preceeding days). Then we did more cleaning up of music before starting staging yesterday. From that point things took off rapidly. Yesterday we staged the first half of Act I and ran it, and today we staged the rest and ran chunks, and then the whole act. It's amazing how quickly it went from something that happens in chairs around a piano, to a real show with props and some people at least partially off-book. Being on the deck, I see the whole thing backwards, so I don't really have the same sense of how it plays out front, but I think it moves really well.

Being on the stage has been really helpful for me, as a deck stage manager I like to run things as early as possible like a performance, so I can start visualizing what my track will be like.

Here's our finished floor:
The basic color scheme I went with is:
yellow = platforms
pink = walls
green = doors or traps
blue = stairs

The pink walls make it very clear how much offstage space there is going to be, which is very helpful for all of us to think about backstage traffic. One thing I'm being a stickler about is getting everyone to use their props, or any kind of substitute. Miming props is bad. It's way too easy to forget the fact that you're carrying something when it's not convenient, or to imagine the item will be smaller or easier to carry. And most invisible props are assumed to have been taken offstage by the Prop Fairy when they are no longer needed -- the reality of how something finds its way off gracefully is often something much different, and the sooner those questions can be answered, the better. I can make pretty much anything out of paper and gaff tape if I have to, just to have something that requires the actor to interact with it with specificity similar to the actual object. I also think it helps to get them used to picking up their props as early as possible, so it's a regular part of their routine in the show, and not an afterthought that can easily be forgotten.

We have been lucky to be rehearsing on our actual stage, but not for long, as load-in begins tomorrow and we move to the smaller theatre upstairs, where I had to concoct a way-too-complicated method of scaling the important parts of our set into the space, varying the scale from 1/2 to 5/6 depending on the importance of the area, and considering vertical and horizontal scale separately. If someone asked "so what size is this relative to the real thing?" the answer would make their head spin, but the overall result looks surprisingly like our set. I'll try to get a picture of it next week.

And in other news, our company is off to a great start fundraising for Broadway Cares. Today was the annual Broadway Flea Market, which is one of my favorite events, and unfortunately we were in rehearsal all day, so for the first time in about 10 years, I was not able to take my place at the Phantom table, except to help them set up from 8:30AM to 8:45. Things being so busy, there wasn't much we as the Frankenstein company could do, having only been in rehearsal for a few days. But one thing we did have was a handful of posters that had been given to us by the producers, and some names in our cast whose autographs alone would have value, even though our show has not had a chance to establish a fan base. So yesterday afternoon I went out and bought some silver pens and got one of the posters signed by the cast and director Bill Fennelly.
While we would only have one item to sell, I saw that as an advantage -- our angle was that this is the very first autographed Frankenstein poster, and currently the only one in existence. It was numbered "#1" with the date in the corner, and bore a sign advertising it as such. In the capable hands of the Phantom table, the poster sold within a couple hours for two hundred dollars!! I dropped by the table on our lunch break to see how things were going, and was told the good news. On top of that, the money was turned in to the BC/EFA powers that be on behalf of our company, not lumped in with Phantom's money. Word had obviously traveled quickly around the market, because by the time I got back to the theatre, Josh and Hunter had both heard from separate sources about the sale. The result was announced to the company on the first break after lunch, and of course everyone was very impressed with how much we've raised before even completing a week of rehearsal.

When I announced that we were doing a signed poster, I also mentioned that interested parties should start long-term thinking about a Gypsy of the Year skit. We have a long way to go before December 3-4, and thankfully about a month after we open for planning and rehearsals, but I just wanted to get people open-minded to it so that when a good idea arises it's recognized for what it is. I was thrilled to discover that within our small cast of 13 we have many people showing great enthusiasm for participating. To my surprise, within a few hours we had a solid outline for the premise. That could all change as things develop and new jokes can be made, but right now we have a solid idea to work on.

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End of Tour

My Week "Off"

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