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.

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.