An introspective look at my career choices, or, Why I'm Not a Lighting Designer

I had a discussion today with a couple of lighting designers about my color blindness, and it got me to thinking about my career path.

I wanted to be a lighting designer for a while. The fact that I'm red-green color deficient really didn't factor into that decision, it was mainly based on the fact that I "designed" the lights for every show at my high school my junior & senior year. This is due to the fact that I was the only person who knew how to use the light board, I did some research to learn the difference between a par & an ERS, and I knew how to pronounce the word "fresnel." Basically I was a glorified master electrician. I made sure that all of our 75 lighting instruments were plugged in and we had some vague sort of wash onstage, achieved via bounce focusing on our 4 motorized electrics (everything else was dead hung to the ceiling). Occasionally I'd go really crazy and convince Pruitt to order a gobo.

Anyway, the point of my high school reminiscing is to say that I was much happier as an electrician than as a designer. I like following the plot, I like reading the paperwork and putting gel and templates and all the accoutrement in order. I don't like having to make actual artistic decisions.

I'm the same way with scenic painting- show me what you want it to look like, give me the paint (mixing paint is not my strong suit, you know, with the color deficiency), and I'm your girl. Stage makeup, too- I loved stage makeup, loved the class, loved everything about it except the designing. I liked following instructions and making it look like the chart. Designing my own? Not so much.

That's why stage management is so perfect for me- the director and the designers decide what it looks like, and then I make it happen in every performance. Give me a cue sheet, some spot charts, a whole bunch of spike marks, and I'm golden. I am the facilitator of the art, but I do not make the actual artistic decisions, and that is just the way I like it.

Opera a Capella

I ran the light board this morning for a school matinee performance of the world premiere production of A Midsummer Night's Dream: Opera A Capella. The show is a joint venture of POTS & Opera Memphis, & has just been an absolute extravaganza of... stuff. Basically it's an opera version of Midsummer, using Shakespeare's text (no supertitles), and with all the accompaniment performed by a "voicestra" of a capella groups, with no orchestra.

It got an EXCELLENT review in The Wall Street Journal. Yeah, the actual Wall Street Journal.

Here are my thoughts:

I really enjoyed it. Like, I legitimately enjoyed watching the show, and I had fully expected to hate it.

Visually, it was gorgeous, the lights especially. I mean really, some of the best lighting design I've seen ever. The set was great, the costumes were great, the lights were fabulous.

I thought that it was blatantly obvious which cast members were used to standing still & singing without having the expectation the audience would actually understand what they were saying. By that I mean singing in German or Italian with English supertitles is very different from singing in Shakespearean verse. People have to understand what you're saying, or they won't be able to follow the plot. Not to say that any of it sounded bad, because it didn't- gorgeous sounds coming from all of them, just hard to make out what they're saying.

I found the voicestra to be very distracting for the first five minutes or so of the show, especially since the first few minutes was Theseus & Hippolyta, who were two of the most opera-y (read: difficult to understand) of the cast. I knew that I needed to pay attention to the actors onstage so that I could follow the plot, but all I wanted to listen to was the CRAZY AWESOME A CAPELLA MUSIC EXPLOSION coming from the pit. After a few minutes, the newness of the voicestra (I hate that word, but I feel like typing 'a capella singers' or 'vocal instrumentalists' or something is just lame) wore off, and I made a conscious decision to stop paying attention to them as more than just accompaniment. After that it was a lot easier to focus on the action and to follow what was happening.

Apparently the voicestra couldn't be there for the matinee, because this morning's performance was instead accompanied by a piano & the beatboxer. So, not so much a capella as... opera with weird accompaniment.

Watching the opera's SM call the show was fascinating. I've been reading a lot on SMNet about the differences between SMing for opera & theatre, but watching it was something else. The paging was... intense. I can't imagine paging actors for every entrance. Overwhelming.

Is this real life?

Surreal. That is the only word to describe the first run-through of A Christmas Story. At one point the actor playing Grown Ralph looked at the director and said "Is this for real? Is this really happening?" The director and I looked at each other and she said "We just did not think this through, did we?"

We were rehearsing in two different rooms- one for the Parker house, and one for the other scenes. Not ideal, but we were making do. Then came time to run Act I. If you've ever seen or done A Christmas Story, you'll know why this was a problem- the play is, essentially, the movie onstage. It relies heavily on cinematic-style montages of scenes- 2 pages in the house, 1 page at school, 1 page outside, 3 pages in the house, and so on. For 77 pages. The run-through took about 2 hours, for 1:09 of actual stage time (I'm pretty pleased with myself that I even managed to salvage an accurate run time from that fiasco).

Yesterday was The Great Rehearsal Migration of 2010- the Ballet moved out, which meant that Peter Pan moved their rehearsals from the small rehearsal room to the big rehearsal room, and so A Christmas Story moved downstairs to the small rehearsal room. This meant moving 2 sets of rehearsal furniture and props and all of the ensuing detritus that accumulates in rehearsal spaces, as well as taping out 2 groundplans.

Frantic taping ensued- the floor of the big rehearsal room is unsealed (whose bright idea was that?) so spike tape pulls the paint off the floor. Which means the sets had to be taped in painter's tape, and then spike tape got laid on top of that to color-code the various sets.

In other news, I worked the overnight electrics load-in for Peter Pan, which got me out of the Monday all-call for the scenic load-in. It was fun, and even though I worked from 1:00pm on Sunday-7:00am Monday with an hour break for dinner, it didn't feel like that much. I'm not going to say I was full of energy at the end of it, but I definitely wasn't as exhausted as I expected to be. We started with a bunch of set-backs- couldn't start hanging until midnight for various reasons, spilled coffee on the plot, and had to frankenstein the gel cuts for the cyc fixtures (you can get 4 cuts with the grain going vertically, but only 2 if it goes horizontally. Guess which one we needed? Guess what the ME didn't know when he ordered the gel?) but we prevailed! The hang went really well and we got everything done!

I say I started work at 1:00 on Sunday, but really I just watched the ballet. Ballet Memphis was in residency at POTS for the last 3 weeks, performing A Midsummer Night's Dream. I watched the show from the booth- our lighting designer ran their board for them, so I sat with him and listened to their PSM call the show. I wanted to shadow her, but she called the show from the deck and there wasn't really room for me to stand with her during the show. I really enjoyed the show, it was pretty gorgeous and surprisingly funny. I wish that there were more of the Mechanicals- it's just Bottom and Quince. I guess that's standard for the ballet version? I don't have anything to compare it to, so that's pure speculation.

Right now I'm sitting at the light board- I'm running the board for our lighting designer/master elec while they focus the show.