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!

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.

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.

Silly rumors!

So Winny's ex worked at Weathervane a few summers ago, and when he found out I was working here he was like "Oh no, I wish you'd told me before you accepted the job there- their SM quit halfway through the summer because the company was so awful!" which of course freaked me the hell out. I finally got the skinny on what actually happened- two years ago (my SM's first summer here), the current SM was hired as the ASM, and this girl got hired as the SM. She quit after the first week, on her day off, and didn't even tell anyone. So they bumped the ASM up to PSM, which is the job she's had for 2 years now. According to her, the original girl was a terrible SM to start with. Anyway, that makes me feel a LOT better. I mean, nothing that I have experienced so far would make me think that conditions here would drive someone to quit- most of the backbone of the staff is the same as it was 2 years ago, and they're all pretty great.
We "ran" the whole show today, sort of. It's rough not having a stage crew yet to handle the scene changes. What's worse is that a lot of the furniture will be on wheels, so it can be moved on by one person, but our rehearsal furniture isn't, so it takes 2 people to move it. I can't wait until I'm not the one having to carry this furniture around!

Also, I found out an interesting tidbit today- Weathervane's tech rehearsals are from 5PM-midnight, which SUCKS, and is NOT the norm. Turns out that the reason they're so late at night is because the theatre wasn't fully enclosed (hence the current incomplete renovation) and they couldn't start tech rehearsal until it got dark, because they couldn't set any light cues while there was still daylight. My SM was hoping that since we have a roof now, we could move the rehearsals earlier in the day, but the answer to that request was a resounding no- they've scheduled focus and scenic painting to be on stage during the day, so it's a no-go on us moving earlier. That was such a foreign concept for me- having to start tech at night because of the daylight. Also, we're concerned about actors not being used to actual blackouts now. We'll see what happens on Monday!

Scrumbles

We stumbled-through Act I today! Sort of... we didn't make it all the way through. I'm just amazed that we have Act I blocked in 6 days of rehearsal. That is so insane to me, it is SUCH a short period of time.

It was SOOO hot in the gym today, we opened all the doors to the outside to get a breeze in, and from where I was sitting (hidden in the corner so I could plug my computer into the one outlet with a ground so I could do paperwork) I could see these little boys playing in the yard of the house by the back door of the gym, and they climbed up on a picnic table by the fence and watched our stumble-through. It was absolutely precious.

Talking to Meg last night, and talking to Corey today, I realized I've been pretty lucky to work with legit companies and legit programs. I mean, as much as we bitched about our department, Auburn has a pretty good theatre program (definitely better than Belmont's!). And then talking to Corey today, the theatre she's working at right now? Geeze. Her SM is apparently a Nazi about where people sit in rehearsals. And also called 3 ASMs for table work. I'm just sayin, I've worked for some legit companies.