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.

I do not envy her this job- the child wrangler backstage at the Washington Ballet's Nutcracker. Good Lord, what a task. I also know one of the SM's on this show- she's a former OTC intern. She just posted this video on her facebook, which is also really interesting-

you can see her curly hair in front of the monitor in one of the backstage shots.

I would love to work on a show this big, I think it would be so much fun! The bank of cue lights at that console is intimidating. I also really want to call a show from the deck some time... The closest I ever came to that was Pops! and I didn't really call anything but rail cues for that because Joel took his own cues. I'm still bitter about that...

No really, never work with children.

This morning we had a school matinee performance of A Christmas Story. My 7-year-old actor playing Randy, the little brother of the main character, was late for an entrance. It went something like this:

Scene change where several things happen at once in a blue-out.

My realization- I didn't see Randy get behind the couch, but it's possible that I missed it in the scene change.

Mother's line "Randy, are you back there?"

Randy is not back there. Randy is entering the stage, from the wings. Sweatervest half on, suspenders dangling.

Mother has no idea that Randy is not back there, as she cannot see where he is supposed to be hiding, until he walks in the front door of the house like he's coming home.

Before Mother can attempt to cover this situation, he looks out at the sold-out audience of school children, says "I'm late," gives an apologetic shrug, and dives behind the couch.

Mother continues the scene, talking to the now-unseen Randy behind the couch.

I am thinking, at this point, "For the love of God, kid, just put your vest on before you come out from behind that couch."

Randy comes out from behind the couch. Randy has put on his vest. Backwards. Suspenders still dangling.

This kid is a hot mess, but he is so freaking adorable that it almost doesn't matter. Almost.

What is my life?

Today I spent 10 minutes with my arm shoved all the way inside a box covered with glitter, attempting to dislodge a wad of tissue paper with a wooden spoon. Then I swept fake snow, went on an Easter egg hunt for prop food scattered about backstage, and threatened to fire a 7-year-old.

Tape.

Today I taped out 2 sets- first, I helped our mainstage ASM tape out the Darling Nursery for Peter Pan in our main rehearsal room, then I ventured alone to the wilds of the 5th floor to attempt to tape out the set of A Christmas Story.

I was excited to tape out the Peter Pan set because it meant I could use my nifty little drafting of the rehearsal room that I made for the first time! I was without a task for a little while one day at work, and decided to get a transparency and draft our main rehearsal room onto it in 1/4" scale, so that we can lay it down on a groundplan and know exactly how much of the set will fit in the room and also where that damn pole will end up before we start taping it out and realize that it's smack in the middle of something important, which is what seemed to always happen. Anyway, I did that, and this is the first time we've used it. It was actually pretty helpful, we smooshed some stuff around to make the pole land in the middle of the bunkbed where it would be out of the way.

And then I went upstairs. To the 5th floor. Let me explain about the 5th floor- it is empty. It is a desolate wasteland of empty office space, not even used for storage. Mostly it's just empty- a few of the rooms have scary things in them, like the kitchen with the breaker panel facing on the floor, and the bathroom with no ceiling tiles because the roof leaks- but it's primarily a maze of empty offices. Well, A Christmas Story is rehearsing in this empty maze due to an utter lack of space elsewhere on POTS property, and while it is not an ideal rehearsal space (none of the rooms are really big enough to get the whole set taped out) it's actually starting to grow on me. I've spent the last few days vacuuming, changing light bulbs (which caused a breaker to blow and all of the lights to cease working for a few hours) and Clorox-wiping every surface I can imagine these children touching in preparation for rehearsals to begin upstairs. I've also put up signs with arrows leading from the elevator to the rehearsal room and from the rehearsal room to the bathrooms, and signs that say Homework Area, Props Go Here, etc. I'm enjoying the fact that this space is 100% ours- we won't have to share it with anyone, and while it is not ideal, it's not half bad, either.

My real adventure today was taping the set out... I fit the house in the bigger of our 2 rooms, and the school and Christmas tree lot are going in the smaller room next door tomorrow. I was taping by myself, which is always an adventure, doing the whole "pull a few feet of tape and then step on the end and stretch" thing. The biggest challenge is the fact that this room has brown shag carpeting covering every inch of the floor. I'm not sure yet how well the tape is going to hold up on the carpet, but I do know that none of my lines are straight- pushing the tape down makes the carpet move underneath it, which makes the lines all wiggly.

I think that taping on shag carpet might actually be worse than taping out The Producers this summer when we ran out of colors of spike tape and had to make more by coloring dots and stripes with Sharpies. At least then the lines were straight...

Anyway, the moral of my story today is this: USE SCISSORS. Or a box cutter. Or a knife. Or a sharp stick. Something other than your fingers to tear copious amounts of spike tape, cause my fingernails are jacked up, y'all.

Hairspray, wow!

We opened Hairspray last week- the last show of the season! It's weird not being in rehearsal at the same time as performance...

Hairspray is a challenge- it's the biggest (also youngest...) cast of the season- 30 actors, 9 of whom are either in high school or just graduated- we have less backstage space than we did for The Producers, and the tent out back that we used for furniture/prop storage is now the dressing room for the male ensemble. The problem was also compounded by the fact that we didn't have a lot of the scenic pieces until final dress and/or opening night, in some cases. Opening night was the first time we had the giant (9 feet tall, 4 foot diameter) hairspray can backstage for Act I, which caused all kinds of traffic problems that actually resulted in the actor playing Edna Turnblad falling backstage during the quick change in Welcome to the 60's. We had to hold the show for about 5 minutes while we bandaged him up, his legs were scraped up pretty badly. His giant beehive wig probably saved him from a concussion, too. We (my SM and I) were complimented by a few people on how well we handled the situation, nobody panicked or anything and it only took us a few minutes to get him ready to go.

We've had a lot of problems with the set, actually. Casters coming off of rolling units, and most importantly- the turntables not working. We have two small turntables that rotate A LOT through the course of the show (the Turnblad house, Penny's house, Detention, etc). Apparently it was someone's bright idea that they didn't want to see people turning them, so the shop staff rigged up a pulley & caster system. Unfortunately, one of them has the casters done up poorly, which makes it extremely difficult to turn and really susceptible to malfunctions.

I'm also starting to get rehearsal reports for Superior Donuts, which is my first show at Playhouse! I start work there in 2 weeks! My first day of rehearsal is one of the final run-throughs before we go into tech. The current SM sent me a copy of the cast list and the rehearsal schedule, but I don't have a copy of the script yet, which unfortunately makes the rehearsal reports pretty useless. They're supposed to be mailing me a copy of it, so here's hoping I'll have a chance to read it before the first day of work!

Kansas! Also, blind kids!

So tech at Weathervane is NUTS. We have 3 days of tech- one day of spacing, scene changes, etc. (it's the first rehearsal on the actual stage) and then 2 days of dress rehearsal.

The thing about My Fair Lady that made this whole process even more intense is that because of the renovation, our second dress rehearsal was also the grand-opening-ribbon-cutting-gala-ceremony-extravaganza with like 250 donors, season ticket holders, etc. Too bad we didn't make it all the way through the end of the show in the first dress! Wahoo!

So for the gala, they got everything ready and all fancy and made a bunch of speeches that we didn't hear because we were rehearsing, and we start the show, and halfway through the Overture we hear a siren outside, and then the Artistic Director yelling "HOLD! HOLD! HOLD!" There was a tornado warning (watch? warning? whichever one is the one where there's actually a tornado). So the actors are all in the dressing rooms, and the audience is chillin in the seats for about 10 minutes. One of our donors is the county fire marshall, so he had his radio and was getting all of the updates on the situation, which quickly progressed to a tornado moving in our general direction, so we evacuated everyone into the Children's Theatre, which is the safer building- no windows, lower ceiling, etc. So then we had about 300 people in the Children's Theatre, which isn't completely finished being constructed yet, so the crew was frantically carrying in chairs for the old people (most of the audience was old) and flashlights in case we lost power and it was a MADHOUSE. At one point the Artistic Director started serving cake from the gala, and then the cast was singing to try and keep people from panicking. All of the crew and the theatre staff were remarkably calm and composed during the whole ordeal, thank God.

My SM & I decided that if the theatre is actually hit by a tornado, at any point in the summer, really, we will be getting matching tornado tattoos. We thought we were all going to get blown away, the weather was absolutely terrifying outside! Also, wouldn't it just be beautiful irony for the brand-new building to get blown away by a tornado during the ribbon-cutting ceremony?

Anyway, we finally got to resume the show, we got started around 9:15. A lot of the audience left, understandably, but we had a fairly large number who stayed all the way through. And when I say all the way through, I mean we skipped large sections of the show that we had run in the first dress so that we could make it through the end of the show before midnight, which we barely achieved. The result of all of this was that we opened the show without ever running it from start to finish on the stage in one sitting.

We opened last night, and it actually went very well, considering. The other crazy thing is that the first day of performance for one show is simultaneously the first day of rehearsal for the next one, so we rehearsed Miracle Worker from 10:00-5:00 and then went to open My Fair Lady.

Miracle Worker is one of my favorite plays, I really like it. I wish I could see it performed in Tuscumbia, they do it every summer in Helen Keller's actual house. The character of James is such a great part, the actor who's playing it is doing a fantastic job. I really just think James is so funny, poor guy.

We have two girls playing Helen- the main Helen and then her understudy. Her understudy is one of those obnoxious Broadway babies. Also a very bossy child. Helen is fantastic, though. We played a lot of blindfolded games with the kids and the girl playing Annie, which of course resulted in us being groped by blindfolded 10-year-old girls, because they put their arms straight out and up, which is right at boob height. Classy.

We're rehearsing at a Lutheran church in downtown Newark right now- no more rehearsal in the abandoned elementary school/architectural firm gym! The irony of this situation is that the church also houses the Licking County Center for the Visually Impaired. We share a wall with them, and can hear them on the phone all the time. It's a little uncomfortable, actually.

You know that old phrase...

So you know that old saying about theatre, "Never work with children or animals"? Well, we have decided that it should be changed to "Never work with old people." It is seriously ROUGH. You have to explain things to them over and over and over and then they just forget it again by the next rehearsal!
Speaking of never working with children or animals, we've cut the dog from Miracle Worker thank the lord, and we also requested (and were given) a child-wrangler for rehearsal. She's the associate choreographer/dance captain, so she doesn't technically have a job during Miracle Worker.