End of Tour

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).

Baruch Revisited

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.

Foooooood

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

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.

We Have a New Bus!

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

The Acting Company Crew, Circa 1940

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

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.

The Ongoing Adventures of a Geek Without a Computer

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.

Tour Stop: Telluride, CO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.