geeking out!

My SM and I are geeking out in choreography rehearsal right now. We are super stage management nerds.

First of all, Kels found this:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/objects_theatre_performance/doyly_carte/index.html

It's a collection of pdfs of prompt books from a stage manager at the Savoy Theatre from the late 1800s. They are amazing. I cannot handle how cool this is. Or how much our jobs haven't changed in 150 years. They take blocking the same way we do, they just write in calligraphy. CRAZY. Absolutely crazy.

Also, I just found this website, www.smnetwork.org that is SUPER cool- it's just a bunch of forums for stage managers, and it's actually pretty active. I've been reading stuff on their message boards all morning, and got super excited about making a virtual call-board/website thing. I think I want to try that for Memphis- I'm the PSM for the theatre, and my boss said she wanted me to "make it my own," whatever that means. I'm messing around on googlesites right now, and it's looking pretty promising!

when it rains...

I am perpetually amazed at the things we have to deal with in theatre...

Yesterday I missed most of the day of Hairspray rehearsals (yeah, we're halfway through rehearsal for that already!) to go rebuild the sound cues for Alice with our resident sound designer. Our sound intern has left the company, and we were running the show from his personal computer. That worked out fine, it just took forever and a day. So that was fun.

Our resident sound designer has this thing where he doesn't like to take cues from stage managers. At all. I don't know why, but when he is running a show that he has designed, he takes his own cues, so having to run Alice now is going to make him INSANE. Well, he did not design this show, the intern did. There are 45 sound cues, many of which go off of light cues. He is not familiar with this show at all. Also, we don't have headset communication between the booth and the board (we lost 2 packs in tech, so I'm also talking to my ASM via walkie), so we had cue lights set up for me to call the cues for the intern. He kept bitching about having to take cues from me, and all I wanted to do was say TOUGH SHIT. SUCK IT UP. The show went fine, we didn't have any problems, but I had to listen to that all afternoon. Sound designers are a strange bunch.

Our Mad Tea Party scene is insane- the audience loves it, but it's a stage management nightmare. Last night our March Hare spat a piece of half-chewed bread onto on of the tables. I told my ASM that he had to clean it up himself- it's not in his blocking to spit chewed food on the table! That is disgusting! I was going to give him stage management dollars for picking up a tea cup that got kicked halfway across the stage, but he got sassy with me about cleaning it up himself, so NO SOUP FOR YOU, CRAZY RABBIT! Not that stage management dollars actually amount to anything, it's like Who's Line- the score's made up and the points don't matter! But that's disgusting. He can spit whatever he wants wherever he wants as long as he cleans it up himself.

Alice in Wonderland is a trip and a half.

meanwhile, back at the ranch...

SO it's been almost a month since my last post... I'm going to recap some stuff in bullet points.

-We survived The Miracle Worker. It was an excellent run of an excellent show. The set turned out gorgeous, and although I never actually saw them, I've been told that the lights were gorgeous too.

-We survived The Producers too! The actor who stepped in to play Max did a fantastic job, and the reviews of the show were fantastic. We struck that show last night...

-So about The Producers... the set for that show was so intense/had so many moving parts that we ended up getting the lighting designer, the ATD, the sound intern, and the carpentry intern to be our run crew, in addition to the 3 run crew members we already had. We tried at first to get by with crew and actors moving the set, but the scene changes took forever and were just dangerous, so we ended up with shop staff doing it. It worked out so well, though- it took 2 of the guys to move each wagon, where it took 4 actors to do it, and they did it in half the time.

-Another fun thing about The Producers is that there was not enough room backstage to store all of the set pieces, furniture, and props, so we set up a big pavilion tent outside and at intermission, we rolled up the elephant door and switched out stuff that was only used in Act I for stuff that was only used in Act II. It was ridiculous. There were also times (like the Accountant scene in Act I that required 5 rolling desks with chairs attached) that furniture came offstage and literally just kept going straight out the back door. We were scared about what would happen if it rained, but we got super lucky- there was only one night that it rained, and it held off till right after Intermission. We knew it was coming and did the shift in 7 minutes, literally running back and forth between the backstage and the scene shop, where we were keeping all of the props that could be damaged in the rain. It was really windy and the clouds were just black, and almost as soon as the Entr'acte was done, the bottom fell out. We group-hugged and said a prayer of thanks to Thespis and Dionysus for holding off the rain for us.

-A perk of having half of the tech staff on the run crew instead of high school apprentices was that things got fixed really fast, sometimes within minutes of it breaking onstage. That was super helpful when it came to things like the gun that kept misfiring or facing coming off of platforms as we move them on and off stage.

-Also, while all of this Producers craziness was happening, I was in rehearsal for Alice in Wonderland. I have neither the time nor the inclination to open the can of worms that is the recap of the rehearsal process for Alice at this moment, so that will wait for another time.