Passive Aggressive Happiness

There are no perfect productions. No matter how much you love a show, it's going to have hiccups here and there. Conversely, every show, no matter how hated, has some redeeming quality about it.

Rather than dwell on the past or the negative, I want to blog about what is going well with my current show.

• There's no intermission. It runs under 1 1/2 hours.
• All of the cast is over the age of 18. Hell, they're over the age of 21.
• The script makes no attempt to replicate a film.
• The director has a very clear vision of what she wants and is able to communicate it with the actors and the production team.
• The director and the scenic designer do not hate each other.
• Production meetings consist of collaborative discussion and problem-solving. No one yells. No one dominates the conversation. No one dismisses suggestions off-hand.
• While the show mainly focuses on the arc of 2 characters, the fate of the production does not rest in the hands of one actor.

There are more reasons why I like this show, but I'm tired.

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.