Goodbye, Albert
The students of Saint Bernard's School put on a fine production last week. After starting a theatre program eleven years ago, the school is shutting down this year (like Folwell Middle School, where I played Cinderella) and I think the year's ending with a decent bang.
As with Carnival!, playing Bye Bye Birdie made for an intense week. Even more intense, in fact, since I had fewer rehearsals in which to learn the music. I joined the St. Bernard's pit at the last minute, following an eleventh-hour decision at Lion's Gate Christian Academy that cut out most of the pit orchestra for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat. I could have had four rehearsals before tech week, but I thought I was already booked this past weekend. Heh. Fortunately the Birdie score is a lot easier on the strings than Carnival!. 
So, the Tuesday tech was my first rehearsal. I had to share music with another player, as the school only rented three scores. (Their original plans included only three violins, but looking back the orchestra's conductor was glad to have added another.) To say that I muddled through would be pushing it. Frankly, I sucked on Tuesday; I couldn't read half the notes, but it did get me familiar with the music. I took home a score to use the next day; one player wouldn't be there on Wednesday.
Score Issues
At rehearsal time on Wednesday, I got set up with my borrowed score. I arranged to get a copy made for the next rehearsal. My playing was better, mostly because I had my own music and could actually see the notes. I was also more familiar with the cuts and so on.
Thursday, I had a photocopy waiting for me. It was excellent, save for about ten pages that had notes cut off the edge. Apparently the copying was done by a student… I made do and listed the pages that needed to be recopied after rehearsal.
Friday, I got replacement copies of the unusable pages. Oddly, two were blank save for a large black rectangle, but fortunately they were the two least critical replacements. I never asked to have them recopied properly; by that point in the process, it was easier to fill in the missing notes mentally.
Evolution
I would like to do an abbreviated version of what I normally do for shows I'm fully involved in. This being a high school production, there were a lot of happenings that I would like to record.
Unusually, this production placed the pit orchestra on the stage, behind the action. That decision made for some interesting events over the course of the week.
Tuesday
Not a whole lot to write. Some set pieces and props were still under construction, and the actors weren't yet used to doing all the technical bits; it was only the second time they'd had any of the extra material. The performances, however, were already quite good. The run-through had to be stopped part-way through the second act, so I didn't get to hear all of the music.
Importantly, the actress playing Mae broke her foot. The crew turned out the stage lights during the break and she fell off the front of the stage in the blackout. "Actor down!" That delayed the rehearsal a bit. It was not amusing that she got hurt. However, the cane she used for the rest of the week added to her character. Really too bad that it happened, though.
Scene change music hadn't yet been set, so a lot of experiments were conducted (in both applicable senses of the word).1
Wednesday
The scene changes were smoother, and the actors' performances improved markedly as they got used to working with the extra pieces. A typewriter was added to the opening office scene, but it was broken; the carriage didn't advance. Half a dozen people clustered around it trying to figure out what was wrong — myself included, since I used to use my parents' typewriters when I was younger. This model was too old for me to figure out, though.
More scene change music experiments.
The light fight, as I believe I will remember it, began on Wednesday. The tech crew wanted the orchestra stand lights covered with blue gels so they weren't shining into the audience so much. They also ruined a lot of the stage lighting with the excessive glow, mostly during scene changes. We got through the run; a sheet of gel sat nearby, waiting to be used.
Thursday
More improvements to all the actors' work.
On arriving for Thursday's rehearsal, we all found sheets of gel taped to our stand lights. The crew had used small pieces of black duct tape — a very bad decision, and a mistake that was never remedied — never mind that some of the stand lights were so dim that the gels made it impossible to read the score. By the end of the first act, most of the gels that hadn't been removed by musicians unable to read their music had all but fallen off; heat from the lights melted the adhesive on the duct tape.
The orchestra was promised gaff tape for opening night, the next day.2 One or two brass players joked that they would quit if they didn't get usable tape.
Friday
The show's opening night was great! Musically, at least — the only facet I was really qualified to judge. I know that the acting and dancing were both good as well, but I honestly can't say much about them because we were still making changes to the music between numbers. I can say that every number went about the best it had ever gone up to that point — it was a peak. Timings, coordination, and a hundred other factors all came together.
Somewhere between Wednesday and Friday, the typewriter was fixed. I never found out what was wrong with it.
No gaff tape arrived, however. Many of the stand lights had long strips of black duct tape wrapped around them to hold on the gels so heavily insisted upon by the crew. Of course, it cut down on the light emitted by each light — the desired effect so far as the crew cared — but it also made many of the lights useless. Many gels were ditched, at least partially.
Saturday
From my perspective in the orchestra, the show didn't go as well. There were a lot more timing and coordination issues — we played catch-up with the singers a lot when they jumped cues. Both nights, I had (different) guests in the audience; both nights, the guests were pleased with the show. I think there was some Second-Night Slump going on in both the cast and orchestra.
The violinist to my left brought her own gel and a bunch of clips to hold it on. The rest of us had even more tape added to our lights, and still no gaff tape. Ridiculous. Many resorted to removing the gels and just turning the lamps off when not playing, a solution embraced first by the conductor. (She removed her stand's gel not so she could see her music but so we could see her; the stand light was the only light by which she could be seen by the orchestra.)
Sunday
Both Sunday shows were back up to Friday's standards. Maybe one or two timing issues occurred, but a tiny fraction of what happened Saturday. The show really closed with a bang. So what if Gloria Rasputin lost her balance a bit at the end of her tap dance routine? It just made the moment even funnier. 
The light fight was pretty much resolved, too. Turning off the lights when we weren't playing became part of the routine, and the gels no longer fell off. Finally!
Favorite Memories
First and foremost, "We Love You, Conrad" is currently right up there with "Ten Minutes Ago", driving me nuts with its incessant playing in my head. Really, sometimes I wish musicals didn't always have one song that you can't get out of your head for a month. Ah, whatever. It's all Jack's fault.3 
I love how Albert's history as an English teacher lets Rosie needle him about his grammar: "You and me, English teacher." Then he's so worried that he'll mess up again, he second-guesses himself: "I'm so glad that you and I — you and me—could [make this trip together]." A classic grammatical mistake, and yet believable because of the joking around just a moment before.
Changes in language usage between the time of the show (1959) and the present (2010) led to a likely-unintentional joke between Albert and Mae. As Mae is exiting after her first appearance, in which she finally meets Rosie (after hearing about her in Albert's letters for years), she admonishes her son Albert to do several things. It's stereotypically motherly. Among the reminders: "Wear your rubbers!" Double entendre much?
His house taken over by Albert, Rosie, and Conrad Birdie, Harry MacAfee's morning is completely disrupted. Doris (his wife, Kim's mother) forgets to make his coffee and offers him a warm 7-Up instead; Randolf (his son, Kim's younger brother) clips out "a few" articles about Conrad Birdie before the morning paper makes it to Harry. Faced with the upset of his routine, Harry declares that "the democracy is over; Parliament is dissolved; Nero is back in town." He escapes the approach of a drowsy Conrad from upstairs by announcing that he is going to "go burn Rome."
The last scene before intermission is the television broadcast on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hugo, Kim's "steady", punches Conrad Birdie out in a slow-motion bit. Everyone on stage did a great job of coming up with something to do. For instance, Conrad's guitarist takes off his guitar and swings it at the oncoming Hugo, who ducks to avoid it. The guitar takes out a television crew girl instead; oops.
Everyone scatters after Conrad is knocked down, save for two people tending to Conrad. Rosie tells Albert that she let Hugo in. Best line of the scene: "Oh, Albert, you're not alone. You're on television." (She exits.)
In one scene, Kim flops down on her bed. A Conrad Birdie lunch box and a bobblehead, both sitting on top of her bed's headboard, fell off on different rehearsal nights. Since they were right over our conductor's head, we all held our breath when that scene arrived and wondered why the props weren't secured. The lamp and alarm clock on Kim's night stand were never in the same place twice, either, and the lamp came close to falling off a couple of times too. Once the set came out with the lamp leaning on the headboard.
Considering the cell phone announcement before every show — "there was no such thing as cell phones in 1959" — there were two very interesting props. In the opening scene, Albert takes "a severe overdose of Aspirin" from a plastic pill bottle with a child-proof cap. (A: "No, that's too much. Break it in half." R: "Albert, you're thirty-three years old. You can take a whole Aspirin." ) Later in the show, as the press men are covering Conrad Birdie's arrival in Sweet Apple, Ohio, at least one of them is pretending to write with a Bic mechanical pencil. I'm pretty sure that neither of those items had yet been invented in 1959…
Mae, Albert's mother, is a great character. Every time Albert does something, she thinks up some remark. When Albert tells her he's dissolving the Almaelou Music Co., she slumps over: "Mama, what's wrong?" "Nothing. You killed me." Later: "And don't worry about renting a limo for [my] funeral; I'll walk." Or: "When you get back, don't forget to come into the kitchen, turn off the gas, and pull my head out of the oven." Or, simply: "Goodbye, Albert." (She lies down between the rails of the train track.) "Don't worry about the coat. You'll have three mink stoles after the train passes over me."
Charles F. Maude, the bartender in Act Two, is also a great character. He has great exchanges with both Hugo (H: "I'll have a double rocks on the scotch, and put some rocks in it this time. [...]" M: "How old are you?" H: "Thirty-two." M: "Get out!") and Rosie (R: "Alvarez is the name, but I want you to call me Spanish Rose." M: "Spanish Rose?" R: "Si?" M: "Get out!").
Rosie rants on a bit about having a right to be in the bar after Maude tries to kick her out. Over her rant, Albert phones the bar. When he asks for Rosie, Maude yells over: "Hey, Fidel Castro, there's a fella by the name of Peterson wants to talk to youse." Rosie tells Maude to "Tell the weasely little rat I'm not here!" Albert shouts over the phone, "That proves she's there! Who else would know I'm a weasely little rat?"
Oh, and there was the one night (I think it was Saturday) that the bar sign moved after the scene had started. Like, the stage manager wanted it flown in further but the fly master didn't pull on the line until the scene had started. It was odd to see the sign jerk toward the deck in the middle of a scene.
All of these memories will be with me for a long time.
Future of St. Bernard's Theatre
St. Bernard's School is closing at the end of the school year, but that doesn't mean the theatre program is going to disappear. Parents are trying to create a community organization out of the current program, one that would welcome all present and past St. Bernard's students as well as anyone else wanting to get involved.4 I doubt, and hope, that we haven't heard the last of St. Bernard's Theatre.
More Small World
I seem to keep running into people I know. The actor who played Charles F. Maude (the bartender in Act Two, if you missed the note above) was a former choirmate. In fact, our mailboxes in the choir rehearsal room were next to each other on account of our adjacent surnames.
This is on top of running into choir parents in the cast and audience of The Sorcerer and another former choirmate at Concordia University's Carnival!. The world seems to be shrinking; I wonder who I'll run into next…
Upcoming
Last Monday, the day before starting Bye Bye Birdie, I auditioned for the Rosetown Playhouse summer production of Oliver!. I got my acceptance this past Monday, exactly a week later, via my mother. Apparently, someone at Rosetown misread the email address on my audition form and the message sent to me bounced; last time I checked the DNS, technobabble.es didn't exist… D'oh!
Anyway, I got into the chorus, which has the opportunity for solos and/or a small character role as well. Rehearsals start Monday. (Lots of significant Mondays with these Rosetown people, eh? Three in a row!)
It's worth noting that the title of this post is an homage to the character of Mae. She says those exact words to her son before lying down between the train tracks at the station in Sweet Apple, Ohio. (Don't worry, Albert pulls her back up. He doesn't "have time for that nonsense."
Notes:
- That is, 1) experiments were run and 2) they were conducted by a conductor. [↩]
- Duct tape and gaff (or gaffers' tape) use different types of adhesive. Since gaff is designed for use in all things theatrical — including lighting, with all the heat that comes with it — its adhesive has high tolerance for heat and doesn't come off the way duct tape's adhesive does. [↩]
- A running joke, one of my top memories from this show. Our flautist didn't come to half of the rehearsals, so we blamed him whenever anything went wrong. [↩]
- Well, I'm assuming about the "anyone else" part. In the past I have tried to get involved with supposedly open organizations that turned out to prefer that members of certain groups not join. Consider my assumption to be an optimistic hope. [↩]
That was fun! Let’s do more!
Three weekends of funny later, the Morris Park Players' production of Cinderella is over. Set strike for the show was Monday. Next on their agenda is packing up all their equipment; the school they've performed at for 25 years — Folwell Middle School — is closing at the end of the year, and so it's time to move everything to their new home, Edison High School.
Aside from having "Ten Minutes Ago" and "In My Own Little Corner" stuck in my head still, I have lots of good memories and a few annoyances. Why did the director (not the music director) want "The Search" to go on for so long that we had to play it about six times in each show — so much that we started calling it "El Searcho Unendo" and I wrote Da Capo ad nauseam in my score? Why is Cinderella (the character) such a wimp that she hides from the prince when he's looking for her to try the glass slipper on her foot?
Better than these annoyances are the jokes we constantly made at every show. "The Search" turned into the fun piece; several of us got into altering each repetition of the number so it wasn't so boring, and a couple musicians brought sound effects (like a "quacker" and a slide whistle) for the last two shows. We poked fun at practically all of the characters, especially Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters. It was awesome.
I even spent one show sightreading the first violin part. Both our viola players showed up that night, too, so one of them sightread my usual second-violin part. That was an awesome night. (The next day, one of my contacts from a few past shows this year covered my part when I couldn't make it.) Of course, we were viola-less for the next two shows; we could never get that balance right…
There are many more tidbits that I don't remember as of this writing. I'll quite likely remember them in a month or a decade, though, and I'll laugh.
Next: On Stage?!
My agenda has an important entry reminding me to replace all the Cinderella music stuck in my ears with Best Beware My Sting tunes, since I'll be performing that show as Hortensio on Saturday.
Best Beware My Sting is a musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.1 It's really cheesy, corny, and all the other wonderful adjectives we as a culture2 have come to expect from musical theatre. (It also made me have to skip a Cinderella performance in favor of a dress rehearsal, but fortunately someone could cover my part that afternoon.)
Honestly, I'd rather that another show had been chosen for this spring at StageCoach. This is likely to be my last term in the program — the one that ends in a week — and I had hoped to get a more fun show. But hey, I have to live with what I've been given. Hortensio is a lead, after all, and I have a couple good songs to sing.
That dialogue, though… Oy. It's not quite Shakespearian English, but it ain't American vernacular either and it's closer to Shakespearian. Memorization has been more trouble than usual for Best Beware; usually I know 95 – 98% of my lines by the week before performance (a number that leaves room for improvement), but I was hovering around 70% at the last rehearsal. It's no excuse that others were in worse shape; I've failed in my number one goal for this semester: Memorize early. So this week I'm reviewing dialogue every night, and I'm also hitting the CD to refresh my memory of the vocal harmonies.
As a cast, our lack of memorization likely stems from a lack of rehearsal time; we've gone through every scene exactly twice in four months. We'll have time for exactly one more run-through before the show on Saturday, and we haven't really added in much in the way of props or costumes. In the words of our principal, StageCoach is a learning lab first; education, not polished performance, is the goal. So we'll do our best and it will be fine; the shows always come together at the last minute.
I believe much of my own personal trouble with memorization comes — lack of rehearsal aside — from having a busy life outside of that production; I've had pretty much constant gigs since February, as can be seen from my posting activity these last few months.
The Grand Imperial Cirque de Paris
Most recently, music from Cinderella shared my head with tunes from Carnival!, Concordia University's musical for this year. Last Thursday I substituted for another violinist who couldn't make it. I can't get Paul Berthalet's "I've Got to Find a Reason" out of my head. ("Look, my friend, do what's best for you — do what's best for you! Look, my friend, I'm out of step with the rest of you. Is this the answer to your prayer? Not mine! Your prayer, not mine! Your prayer, not mine!")
Originally I planned to do all of Carnival!, but the violin section filled up3 and two of the four shows conflicted with my previous Cinderella commitments. I thought the music was rather more complicated than Cinderalla. My stand partner, twice my age and experienced on several different instruments, also had some difficulty, and the wind player who got me involved in both The Sorcerer and Carnival! called the score "unplayable". By that, I know that the music really was hard. (Hint: I spent a lot of time trying to fake fifth position — and higher — with varying success.)
Carnival! gave me the rare opportunity to see a show in which I'm involved as an audience member. The last time that happened was during The Sorcerer when I squeezed in one night to actually see the production. So far this year, I've only seen two shows from the house; for all the others I've been in either the pit or the booth.
I went to the Sunday matinée, the last show of the run. It was very worth it, even though I got a ball of confetti dumped in my lap (a prop malfunction; the confetti didn't spread out the way it should have) — I would not want to be on house clean-up for a show that throws confetti into the audience. Congratulations to the cast and crew, and the orchestra of course. You guys put on a great show!
It's a Small World, After All
After spending more time at Concordia in a week than I usually do in a month, I finished playing the Thursday show and grabbed a program. I looked for names of people I know (and noted the misspelling of my own name — sigh). Wait a minute, who ran the light board? Hey, I know him! We were in the Minnesota Boychoir together, back when it rehearsed in New Brighton. (The choir moved to Concordia shortly after he left.)
What's interesting is, when I hurried over after Cinderella to catch him exiting the booth on Friday night, I found out that he's a student at Concordia now, majoring in theatre and communications. We were both homeschooled Trekkers all those years ago; I guess our interests still overlap.
Thanks to Facebook, I plan to continue reconnecting. People I knew through the Boychoir just keep showing up, don't they?
Later: Bye Bye Birdie…Probably
I was one of three musicians to respond when a call went out for a pit orchestra to do a school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat. I've known the show since I was very young, and it would be really fun to play it.
However, a few days ago, the director sent out a message that he might rethink the pit. We three were the only commitments he was able to get. In light of his trouble finding musicians, he's considering scaling back. As soon as I got that message, I forwarded it to one of my new contacts; she knows a lot of people who might have been able to play Joseph, and I hoped that we three early responders wouldn't get cut out of the picture as was implied by the last email.
Unfortunately, the bomb shell dropped today. Strings have been cut out, to be replaced by synthesizers. Bah.
Fortunately, I have a lead on another show, Bye Bye Birdie, that runs the same weekend. My contact there still has to convince the director that more violins would be useful, but I'm reasonably confident that that show will happen.
PS: An apology is in order for my last post. I failed to check its appearance before scheduling its publication, and as a result most of the text was actually part of a very long footnote. I've corrected the problem on the site, but for those of you reading via email I'm afraid I can't fix it. I hope you'll forgive me!
Notes:
- Have I said this before? Whatever. If I have, I'll restate it for the people who never read the post in which I last mentioned it. [↩]
- "We" being Americans, of course. [↩]
- It had "six" violins, two to a part. As it turned out, there were only five, but there wasn't room for another in the pit anyway. [↩]
Orchestra, Tech, & Audition Opportunities Seized
As mentioned in Guys and Dolls Retrospective, my involvement in the pit orchestra at Temple of Aaron led to an offer from the Gilbert and Sullivan Very Light Opera Company. Well, last Sunday I attended my first GSVLOC orchestra rehearsal; there's another tomorrow. It followed a week of back-and-forth emails with my contact (from Arizona, where I went to celebrate my grandmother's 86th birthday). I also worked out dates for another potential gig in technical theatre at the Minneapolis JCC for their Jewish Humor Festival — about which I just happened to receive an email the day after the offer from GSVLOC.
After Sunday's GSVLOC rehearsal, I took home a practice score. Imagine my surprise when I opened it to find handwritten sheet music that was every bit as sloppy as what I had to deal with during Guys and Dolls. Here I thought that that was unique to my last show. How naïve.
Fortunately, the work of transcribing the handwritten manuscript-style scores to engraved sheet music was already long done at GSVLOC. In fact, the rehearsal copy I read off of on Sunday said it was last revised in 1999 (interesting, since this is the first GSVLOC performance of this show, The Sorcerer).
So, w00t, WIN, etc. etc. I don't have to put in hours and hours to get music I can read. My contact even emailed me a PDF copy of the engraved score in case I want to print my own copy for practice. (She's the organizer; the conductor is an immediately likable Brit — a man — named Courtney.)
I was honestly expecting the music to be way, way over my head, but the fun of having high expectations comes when they're not met. The music is quite within my playing abilities, enough that I sightread with around 90% accuracy the first time. I have some annoying sixteenth-note runs to practice (typical Gilbert & Sullivan), but for the most part I have it.
It's interesting to contrast GSVLOC with Temple of Aaron when it comes to amenities. Temple's rented scores were hard to read, and they paid the musicians not a dime (save for the pianist, who was hired for rehearsals too). GSVLOC pays $17 per performance or rehearsal and provides engraved, readable scores as part of the bargain. I could really get used to this, but it's going to spoil me.
Needless to say, I'm excited about the GSVLOC gig, because I get paid to play my violin. That's something I have never before been able to do, unless playing for quarters at the zoo as a child counts. I've also heard some interesting rumors regarding the production style, which lead me to believe that it will be a somewhat Guthrie-esque presentation. I thought the orchestra would be isolated from the stage, but my veteran stand partner says we'll have monitors and will be able to watch what's happening. Yes!
I also have confirmed all my commitments to the Jewish Humor Festival, which starts on February 24th. I'm also excited about the JHF because I will be getting paid to do technical theatre work for the first time, and it will be like getting paid to go to the theatre. My favorite part about doing tech — or at least booth work — is getting to watch the show.
Last summer, I worked backstage for one show and as a follow-spot operator on another. I never got to see the show for which I worked backstage; in fact, I have almost no idea what happened on-stage except for the lines I heard over the greenroom monitor. For the follow-spot show, however, I was able to see everything. (I was technically up on a scaffold tower to run the follow spot. I do have a nearly complete write-up of what I did last summer, to be posted as soon as I can get one last required image from my teacher. Soon, I promise.)
So I like working in (or around) the booth, and I'm very happy about this upcoming JHF event because I wasn't even expecting it to be paid. My previous communications with the JCC indicated to me that anything I did there would be on a volunteer basis, so it was at least a pleasant surprise.
Of course, it took a lot of time to work out my schedule, since the JHF and GSVLOC's The Sorcerer tech week coincide. I put both sets of events on my calendar and made some tough decisions. Then I got emails back from both sides with changes. Then I agonized some more. Then I was released from some of the Sorcerer tech rehearsals (and performances) because of space constraints in the space, which made my life a lot easier.
Just as I thought the schedule was resolved, things changed again. Such is the nature of freelance theatre work, I guess. Fortunately the changes weren't too major — just a date change for a JHF event that freed me one evening. Of course, I would have rather had that evening filled with something, but I suppose I can't be too greedy as a newbie.
After all the scheduling work, I have a busy schedule of technical work from February 24th through March 7th, and violin performances throughout the month of March.
Now I really should find out the minimum income for filing income tax; ain't it great getting paid? I also have to figure out what to do about Social Security — like I'm ever going to get anything back out of it.
Oh, and as for the audition opportunity mentioned in the title, that's for StageCoach's Easy Stages production of My Fair Lady next summer, in London. I applied — and was accepted — to a program in London last summer, but didn't go because of timing and logistics. This summer will probably work better, if I'm cast in the show. Of course, what place is there for someone like me in early-20th-century London... (My summer post is coming; only one more image I need, and I can publish.)
“Guys and Dolls” Retrospective
This was meant to be published last Wednesday, but WordPress missed the scheduled post. I'm looking into how to solve that problem in the future.
I told myself I'd blog about anything significant before I started it. That didn't happen, so I'm doing my normal post-project wrap-up. Combining the first time I've ever assistant-directed a show with the first time I've ever played in a pit orchestra (despite plenty of "regular" orchestra experience) was a job. Here are the highlights — or at least the important bits — and my usual summary of tech week.
Becoming Involved
I got involved in my two different roles by two very different methods. I was asked to be assistant director, but I got myself into the pit musician job by, well, you'll see.
Assistant Director
This particular production of Guys and Dolls took place at Temple of Aaron as a youth group play. I'd been involved in their productions before, playing the March Hare and Tweedledee in their 2006 production of Alice In Wonderland, but this time — because only high-schoolers can be actors in the USY play — I was on the other side of the fence. I was basically in the "staff" category.
Pit Musician
Becoming a pit musician resulted from me being a blabber mouth. The director was fretting over who would play in the orchestra at one rehearsal in early January, and I just had to come out and say that I was a violinist. That was dumb. Never volunteer for anything, because you will be stuck with it.
I should never have agreed to do it without first seeing the scores. Thank goodness for the free software movement. It was only with MuseScore's help that I managed to even have semi-readable music for the show. I invested quite a lot of hours in transcribing the worst of the practically unreadable handwritten manuscript I got into pretty, readable, engraved sheet music. Despite bugs already fixed in the unreleased next version (which hasn't yet gone stable), I managed to bang out some decent music in time for opening night — with many hours spent staring at the notes debating whether I was seeing a D or a C and whether that marking was a "div", a "pizz", a dynamic, or just a scribble. I would have eventually transcribed the entire Violin B-D part, but ran out of time; transcribing sheet music is a slow, tedious process. What I did get done, though, really helped. Focusing on the awkward page turns and the truly unreadable pieces kept the value per transcription hour high.
Rehearsals
I began my duties as assistant director in late December, just before the holiday break. When I was assistant-directing, I did a lot of getting paper, writing notes, and generally assisting. I did, of course, get to block a few scenes, though one of them ended up being blocked by the director during one of the early pit orchestra rehearsals.
Focus issues ran rampant through the entire process, up to and including tech week. That comes with the territory of working with middle- and high-school students, but it was still mildly frustrating until I learned to accept it. I'm used to working with kids (for lack of a better term) that really want to create theatre. For Guys and Dolls, most of the actors and dancers were there because they wanted to do something "fun" with their friends. Theatre can be fun, but it's also hard work, and a lot of them didn't want to deal with the work part.
Fortunately, most of the lead actors and a few chorus members were serious enough to help keep their peers in line. Working with them made up for the difficulties of managing their peers; it was a true pleasure to work with the kids who really wanted to put on a great show.
My rehearsal duties waned a bit as I took on the role of second violin in the pit orchestra, but with pit rehearsals being only about half of the weekly rehearsal time I still was involved in assistant directing.
Tech Week
Tech week started the day after Temple of Aaron celebrated its 100th year as a congregation. That weekend was also the Winter Shabbaton for a lot of the cast members. (The Shabbaton events are basically weekend retreats for members of the youth group.) The first rehearsal was rescheduled to be an hour earlier to allow returning Shabbaton attendees to jump right in without waiting around for an hour and a half or going home and coming back to the temple.
It was a long week, but it was productive and ultimately fulfilling.
Day One: Sunday
Sunday was the first day of tech week, and the longest day of them all. Rehearsal was scheduled from 13:00 to 19:00, and we in the orchestra spent five of those six hours actually playing. (The actors and tech crew spent five of those six hours running the show cue-to-cue — one of the most grueling processes involved in creating theatre and probably even worse than what we in the pit band had to endure.)
It was the first day we had an orchestra larger than four, and it was a rather significant size increase; the final size, including people who couldn't be there for at least one performance, was 20 musicians, most of them pros. I felt much excitement when I saw the size of the growing orchestra. Before, we had mostly holes in the music; Sunday, we really filled in the holes and began sounding like an Orchestra (with a capital O).
Sunday was also the only day the cast and crew had dinner provided. The actors got to eat and get their notes from the partial run-through — they only made it through Act I (of two) in five hours — while the orchestra got to have some time to unwind and chat. Who got the better deal? I've been on the acting side for most of the shows I've done. It's not a simple or easy job. The musicians really have it easy, at least at Temple of Aaron.
There was also a bug in my ear on Sunday. That is, after rehearsal one of the other musicians came over to me and offered me a short-term job as a second violin with the Gilbert & Sullivan Very Light Opera Company. Turns out their orchestra is short on second violins in March.
Day Two: Monday
Monday, the second day of tech week, might as well have been an entire week all its own. The four-hour evening rehearsal stretched nearly 45 minutes over time and still not a single complete run-through in sight. Several music cues were changed — it was the first time we in the orchestra had ever actually played along with the actors, so a lot of timing issues had to be worked out. Rehearsing with the actors was a very good thing, too, considering the amount of scene change music that had to be added, deleted, and shuffled around. Of course, most of us couldn't see what we were doing because we didn't have stand lights ready that night and half the orchestra was absent. (The temple is closed on Mondays, so there was no staff around to locate lights for us.) But we still muddled through all right.
However, several actors (including a lead or two) seemed to get some instant memory loss Monday night. Songs and scenes that had gone fine even four days before — the last "regular" rehearsal before the start of tech week — went completely out the window, especially in the second act. The long hours made some screw-ups in the later part of the evening understandable, but they seemed a bit over the top and excessive. The kids also got rather goofy, so when they did make a mistake they kept going on and on, running with it instead of just fixing it and moving on. Ah, well.
As kind of a serendipitous follow-up to Sunday's offer of a musical gig in March, I also got an email from a local theatre company at which I'd inquired last fall about volunteering or interning. It didn't work out then, but apparently they kept me on their list. I got a list of dates and times when they could use my help. Of course the woman from GSVLOC was absent from rehearsal tonight so I couldn't get a tentative schedule for that. :-/ But I did respond the next day to the other theatre to let them know I would be interested and schedule a tour to get familiar with their space.
Day Three: Tuesday
Tuesday was the third day of tech week and parent photo night. We also managed the first complete run-through with all music, costumes, props, sets, sound, and lighting. It even finished 30 minutes early! (Rehearsals almost never finish early during tech week — just see Monday...) As usual, there were some glitches — including some orchestral screw-ups and a few actors rushing through their songs — but overall the run was much better than the previous day, and actually finishing the show was but one reason.
Following rehearsal, as the actors got out of costume and waited for rides home (finishing early doesn't always work out perfectly), much of the orchestra left. Those of us who stuck around worked on the arrangement of the chairs, stands, and barriers with the music director. The saxophone section, and even more so the trumpets, drowned out most of the rest of the orchestra. In fact, the three of us violins could barely be heard over all the wind players and the piano was nearly inaudible. Hence the barriers: tall soft-covered movable wall sections that we set up between the trumpets and the audience. The first violinist also had the idea of using solid reflectors under the strings' chairs, to hopefully boost their (our) sound. I found dance floor sections left out from the temple's centennial celebration three days earlier that we could use for that purpose. After messing with the setup for about an hour, we finally called it a night.
The biggest issue, aside from singers rushing their songs, was microphone reception. There were a lot of clicks and pops in the sound and lots of plain old drop-outs. Much of the problems were fixed after an extended break (~20 minutes) between acts; however, the results still weren't perfect. The sound technician did more work on the mics with the director and choreographer while we musicians were in the pit messing with the barriers and reflectors; we all hoped the sound would be better for the final dress rehearsal the next day, on Wednesday.
Day Four: Wednesday
During the dress-rehearsal on Wednesday the show went extremely well. One or two additional tweaks were made to music and blocking; but, with the exception of adding the rabbi in on opening night, Wednesday's run was exactly what the audience saw on Thursday. A few lines that had been troublesome for the actors in the past few days also went off without any hitches, which made all of us very happy.
Day Five: Thursday
Enough playing to an empty room. Thursday, we got our first audience! The show went off so well, I was amazed. Adding in the rabbi's two cameos as the Master of Ceremonies at the Hot Box nightclub really enhanced the show. His improvisational skills are really quite good, and he gave two of the main characters some good-natured ribbing before moving on with the scenes.
There were the usual opening-night glitches, like nervousness, flubbed lines, skipped comic bits, and near – train wrecks. Some frequent mistakes that we thought had been fixed on Wednesday returned as well, but there were also some great additions. Nathan and Adelaide in particular delivered what I thought was the best version of their first big scene ever. (The scene in question is the one in which Adelaide reveals that her mother thinks the two of them are already married.) It wasn't that the delivery was script-perfect (it wasn't) so much as the fact that their few small flubs were amusing both in what was missed and how it was covered. I'm not sure that the audience got any of it, but the crew — having watched the show several times already — got a kick out of it all.
The opening night audience was a good crowd. They laughed, groaned, and generally made the right noises in the right places, with a decent amount of enthusiasm. Nobody complained about any volume imbalances in the orchestra, so the additions I helped make on Tuesday must have helped. Following the performance, we kibitzed a bit (as though we hadn't been the rest of the week?) and headed home to enjoy our day off on Friday.
Day Five-and-a-Half: Friday
Friday was a day off for everyone, but I used it to tour the local theatre that emailed me on Monday. During the hour-or-so-long tour, I discovered that what I thought was going to be a volunteer position was actually paid. Amazing that a theatre would be willing to pay me, someone with no formal experience whatsoever, to tech shows open to the public. But am I complaining? Nope!
I liked tech week, both because of seeing the wonderful production of Guys and Dolls shape up and come together and because of the two separate job offers I got. Only one was a direct result of being involved in this particular show, but the timing of the other offer couldn't have been better. Now if only I could have gotten a rehearsal schedule for the Gilbert & Sullivan company so I could alert the other theatre to potential conflicts instead of keeping them waiting... I took care of that on Saturday, though... sort of.
Day Six: Saturday
After taking a day off, everyone was raring to go on Saturday night. Saturdays are always USY night, which is an excuse for the cast to goof off. Saturdays always involve a lot of ad-libs and near – train wrecks — that is, more than usual. There were a few very close calls on this particular Saturday, and one or two veritable disasters, but there were also a lot of very funny ad-libs that more than made up for the mistakes.
For example, Sarah did "Pants on the Ground" to Sky in one of the Mission scenes — an unexpected turn from which he recovered only after being subtly prompted. Sky shot Big Jew (I know, not Big Jule, ha ha ) before leaving the Mission in the midnight prayer meeting scene, saying, "Sorry we couldn't clean them up. Except Big Jew. I don't like you." He then proceeded to behave like a burglar, "holding up" the meeting as if it was a convenience store. (Big Jew made a miraculous recovery in time to testify that he'd gone straight ever since his youth. "Thirty-three arrests and no convictions." Benny also fell asleep and had to be awakened by Nathan in order to give his testimony.
Benny and Nicely, playing catch in the sewer scene, dropped Big Jew's gun. Thankfully, Harry-the-Horse pretended to get hit by the bullet that would likely have been released. (Guns do tend to go off if they're dropped, don't they?) And of course, nobody who's seen this particular production will forget Harry and another unnamed gambler running off at the end of the show after Lieutenant Brannigan asks, "Anyone else planning to get married?" (Yes, the ending was rewritten. I don't know why, but I suspect it was mostly to get more out of the fact that Nicely was played by a girl.)
The usual minor line glitches persisted, mostly the same as had plagued the show all week like Big Jew saying he "came here to shoot craps" instead of "crap", Harry saying that Sky was "the fella I was tellin' you about" (his written line omits the word "about"), and so on. I realized on Saturday that the director was not really concerned with word-perfect delivery. Nor should he be; I'm just obsessive about things like that.
The orchestra was cello-less, but on Sunday would be minus a violin and tenor saxophone. All three musicians are important, but it's a bigger deal to lose two parts than one, especially when one of those two parts is a violin. We violins are already outnumbered 3:1 by the brass and winds, and losing one of our number means the ratio jumps to 7:1. Oy... If anyone in the audience would be able to hear us on Sunday, it would be amazing.
Day Seven: Sunday
If Saturday was joke night, Sunday was sloppy day. Much of the show ran better on Thursday, when the kids were nervous and relatively unpracticed, than on Sunday, after they'd gotten two shows down and were confident. I suspect that overconfidence on the part of a lot of the actors was a major factor in most of the sloppiness. Cues were missed, song timing got quite far off, and the sewer scene got completely butchered when Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson jumped ahead about 20 lines and then tried to fix it by going back and picking up missed bits.
The energy was also lower, collectively, than either of the two previous shows. Nervous energy is still energy, even if it results in mistakes. Dead scenes are no fun for anyone, on stage or off. Fortunately some of the leads stayed strong and carried their own parts well, decreasing the effect that the lack of energy had on the overall performance. I think the cast were tired after the poorly timed cast party the night before, which by rights should have been after Sunday's show, in the temple's youth lounge with the Super Bowl on the television.
Musically, the pit orchestra was better than I expected. Losing one violin didn't affect us as much as I thought it would; the audience could still hear the string part. It helped that our cellist, absent for Saturday's show, returned. We all got some exercise in following the singers when they rushed through songs and took entrances several beats early.
Even given all the little troubles, most of the audience was unaware that anything had gone wrong, and the show ended on a very positive note.
Closing
Closing a show is always bittersweet for me. Feelings of accomplishment and of loss commingle. But, "All good things must come to an end." And really, if shows never ended, all of us in the theatre would get mighty tired of playing the same songs, running the same scenes, hitting the same cues, and so on. Closing gives everyone a chance to move on and do something new; it's an opportunity to insert some variety — that wonderful spice of life — into our work.
Too bad that the closing of Guys and Dolls was really just everyone scattering after the final performance. It was an abrupt and very anticlimactic ending to a very intense week.
Conclusion
I learned some good lessons during Guys and Dolls. I learned a lot of little things, but these are the big ones.
First of all, in order to keep your authority, you have to assert it. Letting your charges do whatever they want won't do anyone any good, and it makes getting things done take forever.
Second, working with professional musicians is a wonderful thing. Amateurs just let the director do whatever he will, whether or not he really knows what he's doing. Professionals — and I like to think I share this quality — tell the director if he needs to be doing something differently, when he has forgotten something necessary, or is doing too much. A week before tech week, our accompanist started coming to rehearsals and became kind of an assistant music director. Since she'd played the show before, she had a lot of good ideas. When the full ensemble joined us on the first day of tech week, there were even more great ideas to be had, and the ensemble was able to do things — like stay together more often — that wouldn't have happened without concerted feedback from everyone.
Third, and finally, having experience in multiple areas of theatre is extremely useful. I was able to block scenes, help with sound, contribute to the arrangement of the pit, and assist the creation of the set, in addition to being an assistant director and pit musician. Had there been fewer people around, I probably would have been called upon even more — not that I would have had the time to take care of all the requests.
The experience gained and the lessons learned during this show would have been enough for me, but I also made some contacts with other musicians that I think will be useful in the future. At the very least, it will be good to know others in the community, and some of them have connections with other performance opportunities. Since theatre is more about whom you know than what you know (though it still helps to be versatile and good at one or more things), having contacts will be very useful in the future.
Finally, I'd like to thank the director for crediting me and all the other volunteer artistic staff in his piece of the program. I got a musician credit in the listing section, but the listings did not include either of the two assistant directors or any of the other guest and assistant choreographers. I assume that was a decision made by a Temple higher-up and I'm sure I'm not alone in appreciating the acknowledgment. On behalf of Erika, Sammy, Kara, myself, and everyone else who volunteered but didn't get listed: Thank you, Aaron!
Now all that's left is to see about getting a T-shirt. In true Temple of Aaron fashion (sorry), nobody thought to see what size I needed, so I couldn't take one home. Maybe this bit of bad luck had something to do with the front of the shirts. Someone decided to have the dice in the shirt logo show "snake eyes" — a losing craps roll — unlike the program cover dice, which display a seven.
Musical in the Food Court!
This post digresses from my usual technobabble, but it's just too funny and creative (not to mention awesome!) to pass up.
Improv Everywhere is a New York City-based group of people started in 2001. What they do is usually totally off-the-wall and almost always funny. Their blog's tagline: "We Cause Scenes". The mission I'm featuring today, though, was done in Los Angeles, CA. (There is now a global Improv Everywhere site on Ning as well, but this mission was performed before that was launched.)
I like the idea of Improv Everywhere because I am also into improvisational performance. I don't usually get into the complexity they do, nor do I pull off stunts in public places -- in fact my improv is usually part of some exercise in theater classes. I do like to do things like randomly start singing in the middle of a mall, and that's what their latest mission was.
Posted to ImprovEverywhere.com late last night, "Food Court Musical" has already drawn a ton of comments. The story is, well... Watch the video first.
I don't know who came up with the idea to sing a song about needing some napkins, but this is just too funny. The way it starts with one person and escalates into an entire group is really great.
One of the best parts, I think, is the security guard. He comes in and everyone thinks he's about to break up the performance, when suddenly he starts to sing as well.
The title sounds to me like a cross between the two Disney films High School Musical and Full Court Miracle. It really works, I think. The choreography even reminds me of some stuff from HSM.
As described further on the mission's page, Improv Everywhere actually got permission from the mall to pull off this show. That's something they don't usually do, but in this case it made for a better performance. Having people dressed in the same uniforms as mall personnel and putting one behind the counter of Hot Dog on a Stick definitely made it seem more real. (The other food court businesses had no idea what was going to happen.)
Anyway, I won't lift all the notes from Improv Everywhere's mission page, even if I am rewording it. They deserve traffic for this one, so head on over there for more commentary and the photos.
Before you go, however, I would appreciate a comment here if you like this sort of post, or if you don't. I need feedback so I know what to write more about.
Update (13:28): Reduced embed size; it was too big for the content column. It should no longer overflow into the sidebar.
Application Storage Architectures Are Important
This quarter and next quarter, I'll be taking music theory classes at school. We're using a program called Musition, distributed by an Australian company by the name Rising Software. Initially when I set it up, it was using a local database of course material with a local data store of audio files and all the other accompanying stuff. A couple days ago, though, my teacher sent out instructions for connecting the program to the network, and it's now 100 times slower.
Previous load time was around five seconds. That was tolerable, especially considering what the program was loading. It also logged me in automatically to a local account. Now, however, it takes around ten minutes to load, most of it spent on "Loading Melody Data". And it requires a username and password. Admittedly, the two together are only nine characters, but it's still an inconvenience. Also, commands that took milliseconds in the locally-stored version take five or ten seconds to execute and return results. The load time and latency are the problems that really get me.
So, what does this teach us? It teaches us that carefully considered storage architectures are important for the usability of any program. Loading all the melody data across the Internet is a really bad idea, especially since only a fraction of the data will be used in any one session. Loading everything over a local network is only marginally better, because it still wastes a lot of time and bandwidth for no good reason.
A better way to do it would be to load the server's data once and then cache it locally, requesting only a last-modified timestamp at each sign-on. That would drastically reduce load time and bandwidth use. I'm sure my school is paying for the bandwidth their server uses; they could definitely prevent drastic cost increases.
I'm not sure how to address the latency problem, because one of the foremost principles of application security is to never trust the user. All possible processing should be done server-side to prevent tampering by the client. Yet, this is most of what's responsible for the delays. If anyone has any ideas, this is your opportunity to leave a shout out in the comments.
I sincerely hope that someone who can do something about this egregious usability problem reads this. It's really an inconvenience to have to wait five, ten, or even fifteen minutes before being able to use the program, and to have five- or ten-second delays after issuing commands. Someone please do something about this architecture!
PS: If you're interested in a fictionalized, in-universe interpretation of this problem, I wrote a companion post on another blog I write for, The Queiba Wars. I also wrote a generalized "Best Practices"-type post on this subject for CodingExperiments.com.
Deezer On-Demand Music (Formerly Blogmusik)
There is something to be said about the digital age we live in. Up until a few weeks ago, I had only seen a couple good music sites, not the least of which was Pandora, and never saw one that played exactly what you wanted, when you wanted it. Now that's changed. I saw a posting on Lifehacker last month that showed me the newly upgraded Deezer.com (formerly called Blogmusik) and how it could help me find on-demand music. So far it's had most of what I've searched for, though I have had to tweak the search terms more than a few times. What can you say; it's not Google. But it does play music pretty well, and some of the comments on the original Lifehacker post suggest you can save music from it. And you can upload your own MP3s (sadly, not WMAs, which is what I've got) to share with the world. Meanwhile, I'll read through the comments on Lifehacker to look at some of the alternatives people have mentioned.
Study Day?!
I walked to orchestra rehearsal as usual today. I carried my violin the whole way, like always. Only to find that I didn't need it. That's right, the conductor declared a study day, because of some test going on. I didn't know what test, wasn't told, and certainly wasn't involved. And I didn't have anything to study, of course, so why was I there? Because I always am. What a waste of time! I did get to clean cellos and sort band uniforms, though. That was interesting, but I'd rather have worked on Beethoven's Fifth...
Music to My Ears
After having a nice Thanksgiving dinner with my nephew, it was (of course) up to me to keep him occupied while the rest of the family talked. We ended up in my room for a while, trying to destroy a model of a train crossing built out of Legos with the train, then went back downstairs. We were then led (in my case, by the little finger) by my younger nephew (1 1/2 y.o.) into our library, where there were Duplos scattered everywhere. There was also a Suzuki Omnichord (electronic instrument that plays rhythms and auto-chords) and a children's xylophone (one octave only). This had possibilities.
I picked up the Omnichord and started playing the chords to "Those Magic Changes" from Grease, and managed to get my older nephew (7 y.o.) to play along on the xylo. Since it was more fun than just making random notes, he agreed, and began to focus more and more intently on learning the notes I gave him. I explained a little basic music theory, telling him why, vaguely, I was giving him those notes instead of any of the others. He became even more engrossed.
To cut a long story down to size (the whole process took about an hour), we were soon in the dining room, with my nephew proudly serenading the rest of the guests with his newly-acquired xylophone skills. Then we went back to the library to practice some more.
After a little more practice, it was time to go. As his mother walked in, he and I had finally gotten to play together, as a duet, with me singing/humming the words I knew/didn't know. I think he's got some musical talent, as does his younger brother (you know, the 1 1/2 year old). I wonder if his mother will sign them up for Suzuki?
Pandora Internet Radio
I recently started using a service called Pandora on the Internet. It is a music-discovery and streaming service. Start with a favorite song or artist (creates smaller and larger stations depending on type of input) and Pandora searches the Music Genome Project for similar music. What's cool about it is the fact that it crosses genre, artist, and popularity lines; each song is its own little thing, listed by its own specific attribute set.
There are some things, like no rewind and a song-skip limit, but these are due to the company's music licenses. There are two versions: Free and Paid. The free version is supported by banner ads and (sometime in the future) audio ads in the music. The paid version is modestly priced, starting at $12 for 3 months and $36 for a year. All subscribing does is remove the ads; the same skip-limiting and no-rewind limitations are present.
That said, I have found a work-around to the skip limitation. If you're listening to a song you don't like, you click the Thumbs-Down button and Pandora skips to the next one. Unless you've made six skips on that station in the last hour. Then the song keeps playing. To skip the song, click another station in your list (if you don't have another station, just pause the music and create a dummy station for this purpose) and click back to the station you're listening to. The bad song will be skipped. Just make sure to do it as quickly as possible, to make sure that a song doesn't start in the "switch-hack" station. Keep in mind that this also works any time you want to skip a song without using any of your allocated skips, Thumbs-Downed or just because you're tired of it. Try to keep your clicks less than one or two seconds apart. Hope this helps any frustrated users!
The service is supported by nearly every browser and operating system the world over. All that is required is a reasonably recent version of Adobe Flash; the player is cross-browser and cross-platform.
It has helped me discover lots of new music, in addition to having a lot of my favorites. Try it out at http://www.pandora.com/ and see what you think.
Update 09/11/2007: The above workaround for song-skip limiting no longer works in the new version of the Pandora player.
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