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."
- 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. [↩]
Best Beware My Wrap-Up
So, all that studying of lines and mental review of songs and dances actually came to something. In our intense 80-minute performance, we also conclusively proved that more rehearsal makes for a better show. The three hours we spent before the show working through and fixing stuff was probably the most useful rehearsal of the last month.
Best Beware My Sting went off without a— Well, I can't say "without a hitch" because there were hitches, of two types (mistakes and marriages). Actually, three couples got hitched, and uncountable tiny errors crept into, well, everything. We had some bigger problems, too, and I had to cover the biggest one. (Don't worry about it, Nathan. It was fun. 
)
There were some people who had all their lines down pat — the ones who always do, the ones whose names I expect to see in lights someday — and the rest of us, well, didn't. But we covered each other and made the best of it.
I stick by the "learning lab" description of this particular production. We learned a lot of lessons, most importantly that it's very, very hard to pull off a very polished show with as little rehearsal time as we had. Best Beware My Sting was a longer script than usual, and it definitely showed in the frayed edges between scenes where the stitching couldn't be finished in time. But according to informal audience polling (a statistically insignificant sample, considering that it was only two people) it went all right.1
My major blunder was skipping about half a dozen lines, most of which outlined a major part of the plot. Really, though, in every show I've done in my 11 years with the program, there's always one person who does it. I was long overdue for my turn. It'd been years since I last made a big mistake, and it had to happen again sometime.
Line-skipping is nothing, of course, compared to dropping a musical number, which is what almost happened. The focal character of that number, Baptista, left the stage just before the music was supposed to start, which left me (Hortensio), Lucentio, and our two servants struggling to cover. Oh, and the four backup dancers came in and huddled up stage right. Awkward… But I just started the next scene, and Lucentio followed. When Baptista came back, I tried to play it as if he was supposed to wander across the stage. Finally the music started and we got back on track. Whew!
"Live theatre is special and exciting. […] Even I don't know what's going to happen!"
— Minrod Mier, director of the Morris Park Players' 2010 Cinderella production
Minrod, I've got a case illustration for you right here…
Anyway, once those two epic flubs were out of the way, the rest of the show progressed pretty well. Call it a rough start, I guess.
The show did have some short pauses — it wasn't quite tight yet — but that can be traced right back to a lack of rehearsal. With no time to really do a whole lot of work on just running the show and getting the transitions down, it was bound to be really loose. The only way to really tighten up a show is to do it over and over, to figure out how the timing, the beats, and all the other million-and-one details can be tailored to fit together perfectly.
So I'm not unhappy with the show. The show would have been ten times better if we'd had rehearsal time for more than three run-throughs over the last four months (that number includes the performance, sadly) and/or more time to do the sort of polishing we did at the eleventh hour over the whole process instead of just at the end. As far as I'm concerned, though, that doesn't matter. We pulled it off.
My feet have mostly recovered from spending seven hours in jazz shoes (no support, at all), and I can now spend the next month with lines and songs from Best Beware My Sting going through my head. That'll be fun while I'm trying to learn the music for Bye Bye Birdie this week. (If I can't play Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, I'll play a different show, thank you. Too bad if I missed the pre – tech week rehearsals; nobody got me involved in time.)
As long as these words are going through my head anyway, maybe I can write some (bad) paraphrases. Keep an eye out.
"Well, it's one part of a happy day: You have tamed a 404 error."
— Best Beware My WordPress by Voyagerfan5761
The Extraordinary
As I've described, much about this show was no different from any other I've done: songs, dances, scenes, all performed with varying degrees of polish. I'll not spend any more time describing all that, but there was one very special piece that deserves to have its own section.
One of our cast had to miss last week's rehearsal because of a serious illness that landed her in the hospital. We kept her in our thoughts during rehearsal and through the weekend, and received news that she'd recovered on day. This past weekend she expected to come and perform, but her illness reasserted itself and brought her back to the hospital. While we rehearsed, she was waiting for tests and hoping that the doctors would allow her to come and perform.
We made adjustments to the show in case she couldn't get out in time, and prepared to have her on stage in a wheelchair if she did make it. Showtime came and she hadn't arrived yet, so we put our contingency arrangements into action: three different people (two cast and our director) prepared to stand in for her role in different scenes; dance numbers had already been adjusted to use one less body.
Right as we were all about to go on for the final scene, she made it! Everyone pitched in to clear the way and help get her on stage; I rolled her on just in time to start. That last scene was, in my mind, the best part of the show, because we had our whole cast together again.
In her four years with StageCoach, Breanna never missed a rehearsal. Up until her hospital visit last week, her attendance had been perfect. To hear of her attitude at the hospital reminds me of the Alex Killian story in Colorado Springs last summer. Breanna was chosen as Student of the Year for her hard work and commitment in the past, but I think her commitment to this show made the award twice as appropriate.
Theatre people are tenacious when it comes to making commitments; both Alex and Breanna are terrific examples of just how far we'll go to stay in a show. I can only hope that, should I ever be in a similar situation, I will demonstrate a force of will even half as strong as they have.
- Perhaps it helped that I panicked as much as possible over the last two weeks, to project the image of a show that quite possibly wouldn't come together at the last minute, as is the norm. [↩]
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!
- 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. [↩]
A Summery Summary: Cherubs
I started writing this on August 22, 2008. I should have started about twenty days earlier and finished at least by the end of the year, but I'm really not good with publishing these things on time, am I? Oh well. unfortunately. This one's for you, Margaret. I've preserved as much of what I initially wrote as possible. Inevitably, there are gaps; I can't do much about that, but hopefully the incompleteness will motivate me to be better at getting these things done in the future.
A lot can happen in five weeks... And I mean a lot! Let's see, what did I really do during my summer at Northwestern University?
(Begin text 100% from 2008; footnotes excluded)
Overview
Lots of things happened at the same time at Cherubs:
- I put on a fully-mounted 50-minute show with four weeks of rehearsal time1
- I had a good two-and-a-half hour workout every weekday morning (core classes)
- I learned about sketch comedy, how to simplify stories into the most basic possible beats, and about solo performance
- I learned about theatrical lighting
- I got to help change over the lights for two shows, and ran the light board for a dress rehearsal
- I got to watch the other 14 performances completely unencumbered by any cast/crew duties whatsoever, and got to watch the four performances I crewed, as well, because lighting people were basically jobless during a performance unless they were working the board
There's lots of stuff that should be in that list, but there's just so much... I'll leave it at that. Some things are too subtle to list, anyway.
Opening Days: Elective Preferences and Monologues
After arriving on Sunday, we all checked into the dorm and had the first of many meetings, during which we were acquainted with the basic rules of the program and the general layout of the next five weeks' schedule.
Monday morning, beginning bright and early (08:30), we began the tedious and nerve-wracking process of performing 168 90-second monologues in one day. We also turned in our preferences for electives, which we decided on Sunday night using the handy elective catalog provided in the introductory materials. With only a forty-five – minute break for lunch, the process of reciting monologues took until about 15:30, when we had a tour of the campus. Once the tour was over, we were free until the meeting that evening.
At the evening meeting, we received our elective schedule sheets back, along with assignments to core classes and production companies. After the meeting, it was time to go back to the dorm and go to sleep.
The First Day of Classes
Core on Tuesday morning was pretty much the first thing we did after monologues, since it was pretty much time for bed after the meeting Monday night. It was a reasonably gentle class, since it was the first day. (And the rooms were still pretty close together; details later in the post.)
It was then time for the first of many 11:00 meetings, at which we discussed many things. I can't remember any of them; however, I do know that most of the meeting related to the afternoon and evening coming up after lunch. Then it was time for lunch, and then "A" day electives. I had lighting crew for my very first elective period — and crews are double the length of other electives! — of the summer! That day was just a tour of the theatre.
Free time came after crew for me, and I went to the library to check my email and such. Then it was time for Everyday Theatre, which I really enjoyed (this class was also moved; details later in the post).
Dinner was after that, and it was followed by the first rehearsal of Company G, which was putting on a production of Tristan & Yseult. We did some weird team-building stuff and called it a night.
All in all, the first day was pretty chill compared to what was to come... It didn't take long for things to get intense.
The Loss of Fisk B1
Well, it wasn't that dramatic, but it did cause quite a shift in my schedule. After about the first week, it turned out that one of the classrooms we'd been using wasn't actually assigned to our program. It made sense in a way, since it was the only room we used in that building (normally reserved for the journalism program). But it wasn't simple to move to another place.
For a few days, my first core section was shifted to the stage of the theatre, and Everyday Theatre (which had also met in Fisk B1) was pushed to different rooms depending on the day. (Fortunately this happened right before the weekend, so there was time to resolve the room changes without worrying about temporary locations — most classes are suspended on weekends.) I actually liked being in the theatre for core; the space was wonderful, and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump from the second half, just in the other wing of the Theatre/Interpretation building.
It didn't last.
It was announced the following week that the worst was happening: my Voice & Movement core (the affected section) was to be moved to Tech Auditorium. On North Campus. Just under a mile away. So that was fun. Not. But it allowed for a little improvement in my running, so perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Too bad I didn't appreciate it.
Game Night
You know a program is different when it makes a game night mandatory. Game Night at Cherubs was mandatory, meaning one couldn't go and relax in one's room for a few hours. I wanted to at first, resenting the required attendance, but soon relented after getting into one of the activity choices — one I hadn't played in a long time: Four Square.
Astonishingly enough, I began to enjoy myself. Despite being given the chance to switch games in the middle of the event, I stuck with it. And I got to know a few other people.
Field Trips
There were several field trips during the summer. Two of them were to go see other shows (we first saw Lookingglass Alice at the Lookingglass Theatre, and then Funk It Up About Nothin' (an "ad-rap-tation" of Much Ado About Nothing) at Chicago Shakespeare), and there was an all-day trip to Chicago in the second half of the program.
Lookingglass Alice was actually so good, I went back to see it again after Cherubs was over, and brought my mom. I wasn't quite as impressed with Funk It Up About Nothin'; while it was entertaining in its own way, and cleverly rewritten in rap style, it wasn't my favorite show of the summer.
The Chicago field trip was basically just knocking around the Navy Pier area (for my group), since we opted to go see Chicago Shakespeare's production of Willy Wonka (and Chicago Shakes is on Navy Pier). Then we just killed time exploring, and convinced one particularly reticent companion to go on the Ferris Wheel. (I have pictures of us up there, somewhere, but I haven't uploaded them yet.) Oh, did I mention that we got caught in the on-again, off-again, rain? Yeah, the clouds really couldn't decide whether or not to dump dihydrogen monoxide on us.
(This isn't supposed to be a collection of show reviews, but I should say that I wasn't super impressed with Willy Wonka either. Both CST shows were technically good, and the actors were obviously talented; it was the scripts that I didn't really like.)
Electives (My Afternoons)
I enjoyed my elective classes, for the most part (and I'll include crew in here just for simplicity, since it was during the elective portion of the day). The classes I had were (with their periods; A3 was my free hour):
- Sketch Comedy (B2)
- Everyday Theatre (A4)
- Solo Performance (B4)
- Lighting Crew (A1&2)
- Core Text Classes
- Text Analysis (B1)
- Performance Theory (B3)
The first three classes were the true electives, which had the opportunity to present at the elective recital in the last week before performance.
Anyway, here goes...
Sketch Comedy
Sketch Comedy consisted of about nine of us trying to come up with ideas for sketches (skits a la Monty Python and Saturday Night Live) that would be funny. I didn't do particularly well at coming up with ideas; my strengths were more in the realization phase, improvising a scene once a premise already existed. We had a bunch of ideas for the elective recital, and ended up picking "Preppy Gangs", which involved a verbal duel between the Ivy League and the J. Crew. (Polo shirts were a must for this presentation.)
Everyday Theatre
Everyday Theatre was a good place to explore the little scenes that happened to all of us every day. Once again, there were nine of us; each class period, we brought in one or two (usually funny) anecdotes. Nine stories were cut down to the three most interesting ones and we then split into groups of three and developed short skits.
For the elective recital, we did a few stories that we had particularly liked.
Solo Performance
Solo Performance wasn't exactly my first choice. It had been #4 on my list for that period, but I got it over Speech and Dialect. I found some of the exercises to be somewhat esoteric, but I at least got a rough poem out of it that I may eventually finish and publish here.
Text Analysis
Text Analysis was just that... usually. We were instructed to read three books before attending Cherubs (this year they were The Play About The Baby (Edward Albee), Offending The Audience (Peter Handke), and Shakespeare's Henry VI. Following the field trips to see shows (only Alice and Funk It Up), we discussed them instead of the books. Occasionally the discussions were interesting, but I usually had very little to say; this was the most English class-like period of my entire two-day cycle, and I'm not fond of English class discussions.
Performance Theory
Performance Theory was more interesting than Text Analysis, if only because we discussed Improv Everywhere for two days and staged a 'freeze' in the cafeteria during lunch one day (using all four of my teacher's sections). We got into much more interesting discussions in this class, and I decided it was definitely a high point of my 'B' days. As in Text Analysis, both shows we went to found themselves used as material.
Lighting Crew
I liked my 'A' days better than my 'B' days, and much of that is due to the fact that I had lighting crew on 'A' days. For a full two hours (well, 1:50, but who's counting?) we all got to mess with lights, cables, fly rail, weights, and R-FU (ARE-foo), among other things. All four lighting crews worked on the same lighting plot, and we used the same lighting plot for all ten shows. So there were a lot of lights to hang. I felt most at home on lighting crew, and I enjoyed it more than any other elective period. (Except, maybe, for my free hour, which was right after crew, during which I usually went to the library.)
(End text 100% from 2008; the rest was written this month.)
Lighting crew was also great fun at the performances. Eight of us were chosen from each pair of shows (AB, CD, EF, GH, & JK) to be on electrics crew for the following pair. Since mine was show G, I got to be on crew for shows J and K. My duties mostly included changing the gobos2 and color gels3 after each performance to prepare for the next one, and getting a shot at actually running the light board. (Each of us on the crew got one run, to give everyone a chance.) During the shows, we could watch or hang out, and we all did a little of both since we crewed the shows twice.
Reflections
Looking back on the experience from nearly two years in the future is possibly a good perspective for the writing of some posts. The details above were fresh from my memory in 2008, when I wrote them, but now most of them are new again. Now, when I think of the summer I spent at Northwestern, I think of Tristan & Yseult, David Chapman, and lighting crew. I think of the fire alarm test they did at 22:30, after rehearsals, while some of the kids were showering and getting ready for bed. I think of a lot of things — things that have changed, that I've lost, that I've gained.
Most importantly, I think of how that summer shaped the last two years of my life. Thanks to Cherubs, I discovered a passion for technical theatre that has guided my decisions ever since. I would never have gone to Colorado Springs or to Emerson if I hadn't made the discoveries I did at Northwestern University.
Sure, the show was fun. Yes, it was awesome how the faculty set up the last day of classes so we all ended up together and did something involving twine and a balloon that I still don't understand. Of course it was fun both to hang and to strike the lights for the shows, and to run the light board for a dress rehearsal. And it was fun how the director of show K included the voices of the crews in the ending of his show.
But on top of it all, there's the influence that summer had on me, as a person. It's really stuck, and it was totally worth it.
- OK, OK, the hours spent rehearsing were equivalent to several months of the usual theatre I would do at home. We had three to four hours of rehearsal, five days a week at Cherubs. [↩]
- A gobo is basically a metal template that allows the lighting instrument to project a pattern onto the stage, instead of a flat wash. [↩]
- So named because they used to be made from gelatin. A favorite trick back in those days was to send a newbie to "wash the gels" — they'd disintegrate and the newbie would panic. [↩]
The Sorcerer & Jack and Rochelle Wrap-up
So, my month-long commitment to two shows is over. Both The Sorcerer and Jack and Rochelle closed Sunday afternoon, March 28. Obviously I wasn't at both shows that day; I did my last run of J&R the night before, and played pit for The Sorcerer on Sunday while my replacement did projection at the JCC.
I hate to say it, but there's no way I'll miss running J&R as much as I'll miss playing pit for The Sorcerer. Normally I really hate to close a show, but Jack and Rochelle is quite honestly rather depressing, despite its overtones of romance and destiny. It's great to see a real-life love story blossom with the Holocaust as a backdrop, but the show kind of pulled me down every time even though the director tried to use as little Holocaust material as possible. To use the words of one man lured to the show by his companion with promises of hilarity, it was not a comedy.1
By contrast, The Sorcerer is a comic operetta written in standard Gilbert & Sullivan style. Not a moment went by during those runs when I wasn't chortling at a line of dialogue or a physical gag (thanks to the video monitors in the pit). The show is so over-the-top with word play, physical humor, and pop culture references that every performance seemed to end just as we were getting warmed up. The directors took more than a few liberties with the script. I wrote up a summary including some of the better gags from this particular staging below. (It was originally going to be part of the normal flow of this post, but then it got to be really long.)
However, I don't mean to be unfair to Jack and Rochelle. That script has only been around for about five years (the show was originally workshopped at Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins, MN in 2005), and the director readily admitted that there were problems with it. (Some parts of the show were downright confusing because the dialogue and stage directions given in the script were grossly inadequate to describe what was happening.) The Sorcerer has had the benefit of over a hundred years to age and improve, and every production over the years has added new enhancements to the show's "vernacular".2 J&R will probably evolve in much the same way.
My Duties
Jack and Rochelle
In Jack and Rochelle, I spent the show in front of a computer. No, really. It was a full MacBook with all the amenities. The director brought his laptop for me to use before every show because he decided that the projections should be run from PowerPoint. His original idea was to create a DVD version of the projections that could be run from the existing equipment in the booth, but timing it out would have been problematical for the actors — no two shows went exactly the same, and a couple of the sound cues were already stretching the limits of timing sensitivity — and my equipment was switched from DVD player to laptop before any discs were even created.
Conveniently, using PowerPoint allowed me to add notes directly in the presentation interface. During tech week I used them to remind myself where things would happen as well as to give feedback and suggestions to the director, who was still revising the projections. Once the run started, he'd given detailed status information and cue lines in the slide notes, and I used my own sense of timing to revise a few of them. I also added some extra details for when I wasn't there. That was the thing: I had to have good notes in place because previous commitments to play in The Sorcerer pit orchestra meant someone would have to do my job for four of the twelve shows. (The canceled matinée is included in that total.) So I added as many details as I could to the notes.
Despite having 70 slides, I still spent a good chunk of the show (about 40 pages straight, out of 66) doing nothing. (From page 22 through page 65, there were no projection cues at all, and so I had nothing better to do than watch the show. Again. I think the long stretch of having nothing to do was responsible for most of my boredom with the show. It was a great show for the first few runs, during tech week, but once I knew what was happening it got pretty uninteresting — not that I ever got bored of running the projection cues; a couple slide transitions had some rather challenging timing, and I came up with new ideas and notes during every run.
The Sorcerer
In The Sorcerer, my only responsibility was to provide as solid a rendition of the second violin part as I could. Yeah, "only" responsibility. Right. Arthur Sullivan certainly knew how to write intricate music. The rhythms in some of those pieces were, shall we say, demanding, and I must admit I fudged some of the higher notes — those above fifth position. (Who in their right mind would write a second violin part with notes in seventh position or above? That happened in Guys and Dolls too. Bah.) But hey, when you're playing in an ensemble led by Courtney Lewis, assistant conductor to the Minnesota Orchestra, you're on your very best fudging.
Unexpected Meetings
The Twin Cities area makes for a very small world. Before my first performance of The Sorcerer, I ran into Mather Dolph, who played the sorcerer himself. Mather and I go back a long way; I sang in the Minnesota Boychoir with his son for about six years.
Given that I played only seven performances of The Sorcerer, it was still ridiculously difficult to find a night to actually go and see the show as an audience member. The night that I did, the last Friday, only happened because I begged off of a pit rehearsal for Cinderella (I just said I had "a conflict" and couldn't go). That Friday was a good night, though. After the show, I ran into my former orchestra conductor from the local high school, as well as three more Boychoir parents. (One of the moms in the latter group sported an Android phone. Win.)
Bloopers
What's live theatre without bloopers, right? There weren't really that many compared with what usually comes up in productions involving my age group. (Actually, I shouldn't imply that these were all-adult shows. Jack and Rochelle actually did have a couple high-school students in the cast, and The Sorcerer did have a fifth-grade cast member.)
In its last weekend, The Sorcerer did start to lose it a bit. First Mather's voice started to go. The Friday that I saw the show was actually Mather's last performance as his role; the final two shows had his character played by an understudy. Then the cast had to be shuffled around to cover the loss of a principal on Sunday. Dr. Daly couldn't perform on account of a prior commitment. There was even some thought given to me stepping in for his understudy in the chorus, but the directors and I both agreed that that would have been a bad idea.
Jack and Rochelle provided a better blooper. There was one show, also the last Friday, when it seemed like a lot of things went wrong all in one performance. The audience that morning consisted of—as predicted—seniors. One of them wasn't exactly present, mentally, and she once shouted "What?" at the stage by way of requesting a repetition of a hard-to-hear line. Also, a cell phone rang during the show, and the lantern that the actors used for the last 20 or so pages of the script was knocked off stage in its first scene; it remained on the floor of the house, visible to most of the seats on far house left, for the rest of the performance.
Moving On
So, after a brief hiatus, I'll be back to it in just a few days. (Nothing got scheduled during Easter week? Really?) Friday I have another Cinderella pit rehearsal — actually a sit-sing, so the actors will be rehearsing with us. Saturday is back to StageCoach and our cheesy musical adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew—codename Best Beware My Sting, and I have a booking at the JCC a week from Sunday for the Jewish Film Festival.
Not that I have next week free; it's tech week for Cinderella, and the show opens on Friday. If they have a Sunday matinée that they haven't told me about by now, well, too bad, 'cause they're going to lose their second violin.
Below, my overly footnoted, longer-than-the-rest-of-this-post summary of The Sorcerer, if anyone cares to read it.
Appendix: W.S. Glibert(ies)
No, I didn't make a typo (and it's not a reference to GLib). The Sorcerer's directors really did take a lot of liberties with the script, to great effect, and I thought I might include some of the better gags along with a summary of the show. For instance, in this production, Dr. Daly (the village priest, "dear old tutor" and "valued pastor" to Alexis, the male lead) comes out after the conductor takes his bow at the start of the show and sings what we called the "Cell Phone Song":
Now that you're at the the-a-ter,
You can call your mother later.
Please don't try to text your mate
Or anyone else; just turn it off.Please turn your cell phones off.
Turn them off and please don't cough.
Please turn your cell phones off.
Dr. Daly, from the 2010 GSVLOC production of The Sorcerer
The song really sets the mood for the rest of the show. It should be quite plain which bits came from the text and which were rewritten, but I'll note the less obvious ones. Larger quotes are footnoted to their sources, but indeed all quotes large and small from the show are either from the same online source or transcribed from a video recording I have of the sixth performance. Square brackets note alterations in the name of either truth to this performance or clarity.
Act One
The overture underscores stage action: Several couples move about the stage, courting, chatting, some failing in their attempts. Cupid perches on top of a large, nondescript set piece just in time to see a girl "hide" on the far side of her perch while a frustrated young man3 moves to loiter on the other side (everything he has tried to gain her affection has had some ill effect on her). Somewhat forcibly, Cupid brings the two together behind the set piece to kiss. The two emerge briefly to reveal their newfound affection, and then duck back behind it; clothing is then thrown about above the set piece while Cupid hides her eyes to avoid the sight.4 After a beat, the couple emerge slightly rumpled, with veil and top hat, all ready for a wedding.
After more amusing but less remarkable comic action, a heart-opening recitative from Constance to her sister5 Ms. Partlet more or less confessing her love for Dr. Daly, and an elaborate betrothal ceremony — in which Alexis tries to surprise Aline (the female lead) but is foiled when she turns away from him every time he tries to reveal himself — lies the first real scene of the show.6 Alexis describes to Aline (but more for the audience's benefit) his belief that pure and lasting happiness comes only from true love. He expounds upon his vision of a world where people can love and be loved without discrimination by (among others) wealth, education, age, rank, gender, religion, credit score, or investment portfolio — a subject on which he has campaigned from New Hampshire to Iowa, and "the citizens have all agreed that love should be for love alone."7 Aline mentions that some people think Midwesterners are not open to argument; both agree, on that and that the farm hand is the highest intelligence (when he is quite sober). Based on his theories of happiness, he expresses his desire to distribute a love potion secretly among the villagers at an upcoming gathering, so that all may experience the happiness he feels at being in love.
To get a love potion, Alexis contacts a London sorcery firm and awaits the arrival of John Wellington Wells ("the sorcerer", or the show's title character). Reacting to Aline's fear of meeting a real sorcerer, Alexis soothes her: "I trust my Aline will not yield to fear while the strong right arm of Alexis is here to protect her."7 (He of course holds up his left arm, to great embarrassment a moment later.) When the sorcerer arrives, he introduces the various items carried by his firm's shop at Number 70, Simmery Axe (St. Mary's Axe, a London street). Among them are polyjuice potions, gillyweed, cloaks of invisibility, and all the latest broomsticks (including the all-new Nimbus 1800).
Mr. Wells agrees to sell the love potion to Alexis at a 25% discount in light of the latter's MPR membership, after alleviating Aline's concerns that many of the villagers are married people ("Madam, this [love potion] is compounded on the strictest principles. On married people it has no effect whatever."7), and a fearsome incantation ensues. Alexis puts the potion into the tea at the gathering, and the villagers unwittingly drink it. Everyone falls asleep just before intermission, many collapsing on stage and remaining until the start of Act Two.
Act Two
'Tis twelve hours since the villagers have unknowingly consumed the love potion, and at this mystic hour the magic drink will manifest its power.8 Before the action of Act Two begins, Cupid makes as if leading all the women in sleepwalking around the stage, mixing them all up.
As they awaken, the men wonder aloud: "Why, where be oi, and what be oi a doin', a sleepin' out, just when the dews du rise?" And of course, the women answer: "Why, that's the very way your health to ruin, and don't seem quite respectable likewise!"7 Then everything goes haywire; the mixed-up couples see each other and fall under the love potion's spell. Not that they care, of course, but there will be problems later.
The first sign of trouble arrives in the form of Constance, who has fallen madly in love with the Notary, a hard-of-hearing old9 man, but is fully aware that her love for him has replaced the love she formerly felt toward Dr. Daly. She bemoans her cup "not of nectar", flitting about the stage as before, with the Notary tottering along after her and asking that she repeat what she says in the faster sections of the song as he is "a very deaf old man"; the chorus oblige.
Behind them, Alexis and Aline have entered. As the others disperse, Alexis muses on the success of his plan. The world may consider the resulting matches ill-advised, but he and Aline are "far wiser than the world". He points out the benefits: "The miserly wife will check the reckless expenditure of her too frivolous consort, the wealthy husband will shower innumerable bonnets on his penniless bride, and the young and lively spouse will cheer the declining days of her aged partner with comic songs unceasing!"7 But his desire that he and Aline also drink the elixir elicits anger from Aline: "Oh, Alexis, do you doubt me? Is it necessary that such love as ours should be secured by artificial means? Oh, no, no, no! [...] If you cannot trust me, you have no right to love me — no right to be loved by me."7 Alexis interprets this as an indication that Aline's love for him is but fleeting, and concludes that "It is not love".10
Fortunately, Dr. Daly arrives to divert the couple's attention. Men and women darting across the stage intermittently punctuate his lines as he muses on the strange happenings. The whole village has, after all, just come to him in a body and asked to be married with the least possible delay. It has spurred in him a longing for companionship, but before he can spend too much time puling11 he is interrupted by the arrival of Alexis' father, Sir Marmaduke, accompanied by none other than Ms. Partlet (a pew opener12 and quite possibly the village's poorest resident). She unintentionally throws Alexis' philosophies of true love and happiness back in his face as she pledges to confer upon Sir Marmaduke "the great and priceless dowry of a true, tender, and loving heart".7 All the while, Dr. Daly sighs wistfully at Ms. Partlet's comeliness13 and finally he congratulates Sir Marmaduke on his newfound love. The quintet "rejoice that it's decided",14 briefly recognizing that Dr. Daly has "no one left to marry him", and the two couples exit; Dr. Daly follows them with a sigh.
Mr. Wells enters, reflecting on the results of his cooperation: "Oh, I have wrought much evil with my spells! An ill I can't undo! This is too bad of you, J. W. Wells — What wrong have they done you?"7 Lady Sangazure enters, her mood melancholy at being left with no companion.15 Still, she has been exposed to the potion, and so she falls in love with Mr. Wells. He is not amused. He tells her to hate him because he drops his H's, has a room full of Elvis souvenirs, drinks beer from a can, and is a NASCAR fan — but Lady Sangazure will have none of it. She offers to go ice fishing with him ("No, you'll catch a cold") and shop at Wal-Mart, also to no avail. Finally, Mr. Wells lies that he is engaged "to a maiden fair, with bright brown hair, and a sweet and simple smile"7 who awaits him on a South Pacific isle. Lady Sangazure is so distraught at this that she pulls out a knife16 and threatens to commit suicide in her family vault. Mr. Wells follows her, hoping to avoid tragedy.
Following Mr. Wells' trouble, Aline reaffirms her love to Alexis: "Doubt me not, my loved one! See, thine uttered will is sovereign law to me! All fear — all thought of ill I cast away! It is my darling’s will, and I obey!"7 She drinks the love potion and tries to go and find Alexis, but her exit is blocked by Dr. Daly, who is lamenting that all the villagers are "Engaged to So-and-so".10 He plays a tune using a synthesizer app on his iPhone (which displays a small keyboard when he shows it to the audience).17 Aline throws it off stage at the end of the song;18 she is madly in love with him because of the love potion,19 and has been making every effort to get him to notice her during his song. Finally, after he finishes, Dr. Daly sees Aline and falls in love with her as well, also under the influence of the potion.
Alexis soon discovers the two of them together. At first he is happy that Aline has tasted the potion, as he wished, but his joy turns to anger when he learns that she has fallen in love with Dr. Daly instead. He calls the villagers, and when they have gathered he begins to publicly denounce Aline. Dr. Daly will not stand for it, and explains what has happened: "Hold! Be just. This poor child drank the philtre at your instance. She hurried off to meet you — but, most unhappily, she met me instead. As you had administered the potion to both of us, the result was inevitable. But fear
nothing from me — I will be no man's rival. I shall quit the country at once — and bury
my sorrow in the congenial gloom of a Colonial Bishopric."7 Alexis gratefully accepts his old friend's sacrifice, but Aline will have none of it. Dr. Daly repeatedly pushes her toward Alexis, but she returns to him several times before giving up. (He finally resorts to placing a hand on her head to hold her off as she swings her arms wildly, reaching for him.) She moves off, upset; Alexis sees Mr. Wells and asks him what is to be done.
Mr. Wells thinks for a moment, and can think of only one possible solution: "Or you or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were you. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare yours, but we take stock next week, and it wouldn't be fair on the shareholders."20 Alexis stands ready to give up his life to set everything straight, but Aline won't let him. "Mr. Wells, if he must die that all may be restored to their former loves then what is to become of me? I should be left out in the cold, with no love to be restored to!"20 Not having thought of that, Mr. Wells appeals to the others to decide which man shall die.
The villagers choose Mr. Wells. He hands his wand to Alexis, who attempts to kill Mr. Wells. When it doesn't work, Mr. Wells takes his wand, whacks it a few times, and passes it back. Alexis tries again, and fails; Mr. Wells gives up on that wand and goes to his carriage to fetch another. While he is off stage, Alexis shrugs, with the wand, and finally succeeds. The spell is broken, and as Mr. Wells' spirit rises up stage left, the villagers return to their former loves. Sir Marmaduke invites them all to another feast, and the opera ends with a joyful dance.
- Thanks to my mother for picking up that gem while I was shutting down my equipment that night; apparently it was a good time for her to see the show. [↩]
- The score from which this production worked included many such enhancements, such as dialogue traditionally added but never put in writing and original versions of songs that were rewritten after the score's original publication. [↩]
- The youth is played by a man who appears to be in his thirties, but none of the actors are really that young, except for Cupid. [↩]
- It would have been funny in just about any circumstance, but this Cupid was played by a fifth-grade girl. [↩]
- In the original score, Ms. Partlet is Constance's mother. However, for the purposes of this production, the two actors were deemed too close in age to believably portray mother and daughter; thus, the relationship was altered and the associated lines rewritten. [↩]
- It should be noted that, for all intents and purposes, the overture and the first three numbers of the show are played practically back to back. Constant music means constant playing, which kept me from seeing most of the opening until I got a DVD and managed to actually see a live performance on the one evening I could do so. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Shamelessly adapted from the first four lines of "'Tis twelve I think", the opening number of Act Two. [↩]
- Relatively speaking. Constance is "nearly eighteen" and the libretto pegs the Notary at "sixty-seven nearly". He is not terribly old by modern standards, but this is the 19th century, after all. [↩]
- The number's title. [↩] [↩]
- Of which he accuses himself; basically, whining. [↩]
- In short, an usher in a church. [↩]
- The script uses the word "comely" quite liberally for "attractive"; my usage follows from that. [↩]
- The musical number, "I rejoice that it's decided" [↩]
- So perhaps there is someone left to marry Dr. Daly after all! This must have been intentionally overlooked when the show was written, to facilitate this scene and the next. This sort of plot device would most likely be categorized as a "plot oversight" by the venerable Phil Farrand, author of The Nitpicker's Guide for Next Generation Trekkers
. [↩]
- From the foam cut-out shrubs downstage, no less. What awkward blocking that was. [↩]
- The score calls for him to play a flageolet, but historically, most actors playing the part have not done so (according to the score's preface). In this case the instrumentation was played by another actor on an electronic keyboard backstage, but Dr. Daly could just as easily have played another instrument had the actor been so inclined. [↩]
- Unfortunately, while I know for a fact that the prop table held two mock iPhones, I never did find out when the second one (displaying the home screen) was used. [↩]
- Due to careless rewriting done for the 1884 revival, Aline falls in love with Dr. Daly almost immediately after drinking the potion. The original 1877 version has the potion take effect in half an hour, but the duration was lengthened to twelve hours for the revival — a change that was not reflected in the Act I finale or in this scene. [↩]
- This line was slightly modified from the libretto. [↩] [↩]
On Morning Matinées
- Image by Micah Taylor via Flickr
This morning, I had the dubious pleasure of waking myself at 08:00 to work a morning matinee of Jack and Rochelle. Not falling asleep until around 04:00 didn't help things, but even getting just four hours of sleep would have been worth it if everything had gone as planned.
But as it happened, this morning's show was canceled for insufficient audience.
OK, so Friday morning at 10:00 is kind of a strange time to have a show. The target audience is school groups, since most people are at either work or school; the only possible walk-up audience comes from seniors and other retirees. So these Friday shows are mainly targeted at groups of students.
Last Friday, there was a group scheduled from Project Success. They didn't even see the full show; since opening night was last Saturday, there were some technical bits that hadn't yet been worked out (like most of my projection slides). But there was an audience. There's another group scheduled for next Friday.
However, this Friday was open; no group was scheduled. A few people walked up to the box office, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the management. Unfortunately, there's a good chance that most of the dozen or so people that tried to see the show this morning will not come back at another time.
Now, losing ten customers to avoid dragging down cast morale with a nearly empty house isn't really that big of a deal, I suppose. But all 21 of us in the cast and crew went out of our ways to be at the theatre for a morning show. I deprived myself of sleep (as it happened) and had to drag my mother along to drive me; others had to beg off of their jobs for the morning. Still others likely had to beg off of classes. I know that that's "show biz" as they say, and such irritations are part of any job, but maybe there's a better way.
It would save aggravation for everyone — cast, crew, and audience — if a few changes were made to the handling of these Friday morning matinées. Having nothing else to do this morning after the show was canceled, I brainstormed some ideas.
Changing policy to cancel Friday morning shows without confirmed group reservations would be the first step. The published performance schedule might indicate that Friday shows are subject to cancellation, with cancellation announcements going out by the preceding Thursday (at the latest, but ideally by Monday or Tuesday).
For notifications, it would be pretty trivial to set up a status page on the theatre website and a call-in status line with existing resources.1 The website could be handled with a free CMS, and a free PBX like Asterisk could handle the status line.
In the event that a show is canceled, a system of notifications to cast and crew would then go into action (as simple as telling everyone not to bother coming the next morning, if there's a Thursday evening show, or as complex as automated calls — which Asterisk could handle). The status page and line would be updated with messages for audience members to check, and any patrons holding reserved tickets would also be notified by phone from the box office — either manually or automatically.2
Another way to handle it would be to take the opportunity for another run-through with the available walk-ups,3 or to offer those who were there (cast, crew, and walk-ups) a brief reception and social time for their trouble — maybe even a meet-the-director and discussion about the show.4 That would in turn inspire interest and maybe even boost future attendance by word of mouth. In the long run, it would certainly be better PR than simply saying, "Thanks for coming, but we've canceled the show; come back next week."
There is always room for improvement, of course, and I haven't tried any of these ideas (since I haven't had the reason to do so). But I believe the theories are sound, and it would certainly be better even to let cast and crew know the previous evening not to trouble themselves with showing up in the morning than to have everyone come for a show that ends up canceled.
- It might be necessary to acquire an additional phone line for dedicated status use, but it could also be added to the existing box office number via an extension. [↩]
- The system would of course work better if cancellations occur with a few days' advance warning, especially for the audience side. [↩]
- Probably not the best solution for a show that's already been running for a weekend or two [↩]
- Refreshments would have to be kept available in the wings (so to speak) as a backup just in case the show is canceled, but the reception idea could be combined with the cancellation policy somehow to still offer audience members something in return for showing up, even if the show doesn't run. [↩]
Summer 2009: Theatre, Theatre, Theatre
This post took a long time because 1) I was moving the site, 2) I was doing lots of college applications all at the same time, and 3) I spent too long waiting for media from other people that never came.1 Once I bought my domain and started setting up WordPress in late October, I didn't really want to publish any new posts at the old site. I didn't want to publish anything at the new site either until everything was set up properly, and I only finalized the move in mid-February because I wasn't through with college apps until mid-January. So sue me for wanting everything to work cleanly. Stupid Blogger and its spam-fighting hoops.
Anyway, I took a total-recall approach to this post, which was a bad idea now that I look back on it. I should have done what I did with my Guys and Dolls retrospective and taken a few notes every day to document what I was doing as I was doing it. This way, I'm sure a lot got left out, even if I did do a major brain dump right after getting back home in September. But the important stuff is there. And so, on with it.
When people asked me what I did last summer, I didn't know where to start at first. Fortunately, I've had practice describing my activities, so I can start with a very concise summary: Theatre.
Less concise, but more precise: Technical theatre and stage design.
I spent two months doing a couple different so-called "Design/Tech" programs, both of which were halfway across the country from Minnesota (one was in Colorado Springs, CO, and the other was in Boston, MA). Each program had a different focus, which was nice. One focused on the technical side of things, and the other focused more on design; but they each covered aspects of both, and — more importantly, I think — they each taught me a great deal.
Options
Before I did anything, I had to find and apply to programs that sounded interesting. I have to thank my mother for doing a lot of research for me. She found five programs to which I ended up applying, four of which I was very interested in.
Stanford was the most academic of the bunch. They offered what basically amounted to college-level summer classes for high school students. I wasn't terribly interested in it, but figured applying couldn't hurt. As it turned out, it was all right that I wasn't excited about Stanford's program. They turned me down. Oh well. No skin off my nose, except for the fact that Stanford's application had taken the most time. Whatever. Next…
Alfred University offered a summer theatre program to which I applied and was accepted. It was a design/tech program, probably similar to what Emerson's program was like. Speaking of which…
Emerson College had a great-sounding Stage Design program in their Summer Arts & Communications Academy. It got into everything: Set design, costume design, and lighting design. (Almost nobody has sound, unfortunately.) I got in there, too.
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center offers a program called Youth Repertory Theatre every summer. I'll describe it more in detail later, but it was highly technical with the promise of instruction in the basics of design.
For something different, LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts) offered summer courses in various fields of acting. In London. In England. I applied for two of the courses — involving Shakespeare and physical theatre — and got in.
And those are the choices I had for this summer: Alfred University, Colorado Springs, Emerson College, and LAMDA.
Choosing which program(s) I'd do, though, wasn't trivial.
Deciding
Summer really isn't that long. Three months sounds like a long time, but most programs don't start immediately, and those that do don't generally go through the end of the summer. Between the two extremes, there's a lot of overlap. Doing more than two or three different programs is difficult, if not impossible. So I had to choose which programs to turn down.
Since Stanford was out, I really didn't have to decide between academics or theatre. (Not that there would have been a contest; academic courses usually bore me, and I like to be interested in what I do during the summer.) However, I did have to choose between the acting side and the technical side. Because I've done years and years of acting (I'm currently in my 11th year at my extracurricular theatre school), I elected to explore the technical side of things this summer.
(Last summer at Northwestern University, tech was a requirement for all the actors. Since that program did ten shows in five weeks, we needed everyone in the shops getting things set up. That gave me my first experience with theatrical lighting. And yes, I do plan to finish my post about Northwestern. Eventually. It's just complicated — more so than this summer. As demonstrated by the fact that I wrote this one faster and more easily.)
That meant that LAMDA was pretty much out. Not only was it yet more performance, but the information packet I got in the mail indicated that housing was not guaranteed, and food was not provided. Neither was transportation. Sure, Colorado Springs was even less certain, but it was a lot closer to home. I really liked the idea of traveling to London, but I didn't like the idea of having to navigate a foreign country on my own for over a month. Also, the timing didn't exactly work out with my front-runner, Colorado Springs. I regretfully sent an email declining LAMDA's acceptance. I will go to London in the future — definitely.
With London out of the way, and Colorado Springs becoming the one that I really wanted to do, Alfred and Emerson had to duke it out. Well, I had to duke it out.
In the end, it came down to timing. Emerson overlapped Youth Rep, but Alfred's conflict was much worse.
So, in mid-June, I packed my bags and set course for Colorado.
Colorado Springs
The idea of the Youth Repertory Theatre program is to take a group of students ages 15 – 18, in both performance and design/tech, and provide them with the experience of a fully mounted show. Er, two fully mounted shows. (That's what the "Repertory" part means. The program always does two shows — one musical, one straight play — on a rotating performance schedule.)
It just so happened that I was the only out-of-state student. Why? Well, Youth Rep (as we affectionately call it) is a local, day program. It's not like the program I did at Emerson College (I'll get to that next) where students come from all over the country. The Fine Arts Center is just a local theatre, and they don't provide housing, food, or any of the necessities. It's not designed for what I did. But it still worked.
After I sent in my application, I got a voice mail from Chris, the FAC's technical director. Traditionally, all applicants come in for an interview or audition (depending on whether they apply for design/tech or performance). In my case, that was obviously not an option. But he was happy with a telephone interview, and so I was accepted.
Fast-forward to after the afore-mentioned decision process. Once going to Colorado Springs was definite, I needed to find a place to stay. It just so happened that Margaret was again the key to part of my life. She has family in Colorado Springs (she has family and/or friends just about everywhere), and she asked them if they knew of people willing to rent out a room for the summer. She got back a lead pretty fast, which ended up being where I stayed. A little Facebook and telephone magic, and it was all set.
Beginnings
Upon arrival in Colorado Springs the day before Youth Rep began, I got settled in my home for the next five weeks. The accommodations were modest but comfortable, and only a few blocks from the FAC.
That first Monday morning, after trying (and, as it turned out, failing) to set myself a routine, I arrived fifteen minutes early to the Fine Arts Center, to find the lobby nearly empty. Not surprising, considering that the FAC is closed on Mondays; but wasn't a program involving about 80 high-school students about to start? I didn't have to wait long. People started arriving, first in a trickle, then in bursts, then in a steady stream. Within ten minutes, the lobby was echoing with chatter, squeals of delight at seeing friends from the previous summer, shuffling, and all the attendant commotion that comes with a gathering of teenagers. The front desk staff made futile efforts to shush the group while I edged toward the few other quiet types taking refuge along the sides of the space.
Promptly at 09:00, the doors to the theatre opened. Over who should sit where, there was some confusion. No directions had been given to anyone, but it was all straightened out. The staff appeared on stage. Faculty were introduced, speeches were delivered, etc. etc. etc. After about half an hour, the program officially started, amidst more uncertainty due to lack of instruction — this time, over the sign-in sheet that had appeared at the front of the house right aisle. (It moved to the green room bulletin board for the rest of the five weeks and became routine for all of us.)
Our design/tech group was a few students short; one had apparently decided to do something else with her summer, and another couldn't make it for the first day. We made our introductions without the absentees; there wouldn't be that much to catch up on. Once introductions (including one interruption, a full-company meeting in the rehearsal space that nobody had thought to tell our mentors about) were through and our "textbooks" — large red three-ring binders — distributed, we began to learn.
Classes
In the first few weeks, mornings were devoted to a classroom-like study of our textbook material: An entirely FAC-staff – written Design/Tech Handbook. I learned a lot of the basics from that text. We also did some design exercises: Listening to music and drawing it, getting a word or concept and expressing it through various art works, and creating basic, quick design sketches from two-page clippings of plays.
For most of the text, we simply read the material as a class, with Chris (TD/SD) and Holly (ME/LD) leading with expansions, examples, questions, and answers. A few subjects (such as stage management, production, and costume design) warranted bringing in other staff members, which was always enjoyable.
I would like to say that, while my classmates and I were occasionally reticent to have discussions, at least one of us had something to say 95% of the time (not always me, I freely admit). The number of silences after questions may have been a little high, but it was more often due to thought than a desire to not speak.
Beyond the Youth Rep program, my instructor at Emerson appreciated having examples of my style a month later. I grew rather attached to those exercise pieces. They're all keepers.
Shop
With classes in the morning, shop training was left for the afternoon. For the first few days, the two were tied closely together, because we learned about the different tools in class and then learned how to use them in shop; but from there, they split.
I found shop to be very satisfying, especially once we started the build. Everyone had a hand in just about everything on stage; pairs or trios of us ended up having pet projects of a sort, in that we did most of the work for some particular design element.
For example, I and a pal (Calum, with whom I worked and chatted frequently; our banter quickly earned us the nickname "the married couple") had a heavy hand in building Grizabella's staircase on the main wagon (now that was one big rolling platform!). Calum, a second classmate (Steven, also a frequent work partner), and I all erected the piping on both house platforms. I and a third classmate assembled most of the scenic flats that would hang on those pipes.
Everything was interrelated. Nobody's project was really isolated. Each of us probably had some part in 75% to 95% of the set. That kind of interdependency is really awesome when you look back on it, and it was all Chris and Holly planning the whole dance.
Aside from the scenic elements I was involved in, I am also rather proud of two other small projects in which I participated on which I was the only student. The first was hanging the three moving light units (the FAC uses ETC Revolutions) at the back of the house, setting their DMX addresses, and running their power cables; the second, running the headset (intercom) cables to the two scaffold tower follow spot positions at the back of house (one of which I ended up in) and interconnecting them to those in the booth.
No, I did not hang three $7,000 lighting units by myself. That job came after I requested some involvement in lighting. (I'd been doing nothing but scenic work for three weeks while people with no real interest in lighting hung everything else.) Most of the lights were already hung, but the back of house hadn't been finished yet. So Chris, Holly, and I (feeling smug, of course, to be on special assignment ) trooped up to the booth and did a little put-the-Revs-on-the-pipe-without-letting-them-fall-30-feet dance. That entailed Chris and me sitting in the glassless windows, using the pipe for balance and our feet to support the Revs. Oh, boy, was I glad when each unit was seated on the pipe…
Running headset and power cables took advantage of my existing knowledge of circuits. The challenge was finding the correct lengths of cable. Since most of the cabling had already been done on stage, the supply of available cable was limited for both types. I had to do some creative things to get cables that weren't too short or too long. But I had fun doing it.
And by the way, the connections between projects were strongest when you were doing something on your own. Sometimes the smallest things — like headset cables — were very important. What would have happened if I'd messed up a connection and the follow spot operators (a group that included me, as it turned out) couldn't hear each other, or the staff? (It couldn't happen, because I checked the circuit myself when the cabling was complete. But it makes a good "what if" scenario.)
What I built
I lost track of all the scenic elements I was involved in. However, several of them stick out in my memory as pieces that I invested a significant amount of time in.
As a particularly remarkable example, I had significant roles in two of the three steps (I know, ouch) involved in making the staircase. With one partner, I glued and stapled about half the steps together. Then, a week or two later, Calum and I spent the better part of two working days stacking and securing and arranging those steps into a staircase bigger than either of us. We each drove dozens and dozens of screws into that thing. Neither of us knew you could break a sweat while sitting still, but we did with all that pushing on screws.
More screwing (a running joke) was involved in constructing the railing pieces for Midsummer. Those also got carriage bolts, which were great fun.
Before putting the steps on the main — huge — wagon, Calum and I (with help from Steven) put still more screws into the smaller flats on the back of the wagon, turning them into one big flat. That involved some ladder work and a few awkward positions. But it was all fun.
As I mentioned, Calum, Steven, and I single-handedly (triple-handedly?) put up the pipe frames on the house platforms that were later used for both hanging scenic flats and lighting instruments. If putting the flats on the back of the main wagon involved "some" ladder work and "a few" awkward positions, building the pipe frames involved awkward positions on ladders, ladders in awkward positions, and combinations of both. Plus those pipes were heavy: Ten or sixteen feet of steel pipe is no laughing matter when you're surrounded by polished wood paneling and painted seat backs; you mustn't hit anything or drop the pipe. But again, mostly fun, and we could all laugh at ourselves afterward.
Finally, those scenic flats I mentioned got three different stages of input from me. First there was that whole putting them together thing (staple gun and wood glue). Then there was attaching the flat goods (fake wood paneling, in my case) to a couple of them. Then I got involved in putting foliage on the trellis-type flats (with an upholstery tacker, a staple gun's runt child). I was especially proud of putting those things together, at the time, since they were my first project.
Tech and Performance
The last two weeks of the program — and especially the final nine days — were devoted to finishing the last few details of the set, tweaking lighting instruments, learning run crew duties, and showcasing the fruits of our labors. I ended up not having a thing to do for most of Midsummer's first half, but my assignment as follow spot operator on Cats—as well as the backstage hang-out time I gained by my lack of duty during Midsummer—made up for that.
Tech
I won't go into detail about the tech rehearsals themselves. If you've had them, you know what they're like; if you haven't, just ask Wikipedia. (I'll give those of you without experience in things theatrical a hint: Tech week is often referred to as "hell week" or "torture week", and for good reason. The rehearsals are very tedious for everyone, cast and crew alike.)
However, while Midsummer rehearsals were especially tedious for those of us with very few duties, Cats was a never-ending source of change, frustration, and entertainment for those of us manning the follow spots. Cues changed every day, and I (for one) never figured out all of the characters I was supposed to hit until the second performance. (Quaxo, if your positioning had been any less obvious…) Our entertainment, we got from headset chatter. Even on performance days, we cracked jokes, somehow managing to not irritate our SM.
Performance
All told, the performances were all enjoyable. With the exception of our last day (I'll address that shortly), everything happened almost exactly as it was supposed to. Set pieces moved, props traveled around, light and sound cues ran, and the audiences loved it all. Predictably, Cats was a sensational hit, selling out all four performances. Many of us on the crew, including me, were hoping to arrange tickets for others — in my case, the guy who provided my housing and my mother — but didn't move quickly enough, and had to deliver bad news. My mother got in to see the dress rehearsal by invitation, but she only saw the final performance by volunteering to be an usher; as it turns out, she wasn't the only parent to do so.
The Last Day
Many differences cropped up in just the four or five days between the dress rehearsals on Tuesday and Wednesday and the final performances on Sunday of the same week. One difference in particular, however, wasn't a conscious change by the creative staff. One of the leads got too daring during intermission of the Midsummer matinee on the last day and managed to injure himself severely enough to hold the show. He finished with a gauze bandage on the back of his head, close monitoring from the wings, and minimized appearances in the latter half of the show. He was taken to the hospital following the performance, but we still had one show left.
Cast and crew alike were worried about him. Never mind what would happen if he couldn't perform in the evening run of Cats; he was one of us, and nobody wanted him to be hurt badly. So everyone was relieved when he appeared, fully treated and ready to perform one more time, in time to wow one more audience.
Alex Killian is one tough guy. He took a head injury, finished the show, went to the hospital, and came back to finish. Not many people can say that, and I deeply respect him for it. I am proud to say that I know him.
The End
Of course, that final performance was bittersweet. It wasn't just Alex; five weeks with this group of people had gotten me rather attached. I suppose my position was unique; as the only out-of-towner, I alone was possibly seeing these people for the last time. Many of the others could count on working together again next summer; a lot of them attended the same schools. I couldn't count on anything. I was only eligible for the program this year; barring some sort of special arrangement (which I might have to look into, now that I'm thinking about this once more), I can't participate again.
But regardless of whether my future holds involvement with the FAC, my past always will. Who knows, I might decide to go to Colorado College. They have a rather novel class schedule, under which students take one class at a time for three weeks. I like the sound of that.
Boston
After a couple of days getting organized, repacking, eliminating unnecessary stuff (which went back to Minnesota — thanks, Mom! ), and booking last-minute travel changes, I arrived in Boston, MA around midnight and got to Emerson College at 02:00. Getting checked in was pretty simple — a couple staff members and both of my suitemates stayed up waiting for me — and I went quickly to bed after unpacking enough to get me through the night (read: pajamas). Tori, the program supervisor, told me when classes started (09:00) and said to come to her in the morning for directions to my classroom. I tumbled into bed, setting my alarm for 07:30.
I slept through it.
Tori woke me up at 10:00 via proxy; I was roused by Ben, one of my suitemates, knocking on my door. I rushed through the process of getting dressed and went out to knock on Tori's door, which was next to mine — interesting coincidence. (It was also interesting that the reason Ben was around to rouse me was that he'd also slept through his alarm, because he'd stayed up late to greet me.) That first morning wasn't the last time I had to rush to get dressed, but it was the first and last time I did so during class hours.
So, Tori led me to the classroom, by then nearly two hours late. It was not a good start to my first day that was actually already a week and change into the program. But the students and teacher were welcoming, and I learned of the reputation I'd earned in my absence.
There were many conflicting stories going around regarding me, the mysterious tardy student. One of the most popular was that I was up in the mountains building houses; another, less credible, said I'd been eaten by a mountain lion and wasn't coming. Most of the rumors did get one thing right: I was in the mountains. After all, Colorado Springs is up at about 6,800 feet.
All those rumors earned me the nickname "Mountain Man". Heh. Well at that point, I felt like one. Coming from 6,800 feet to just above sea level… Just imagine.
First Project: Drafting
Anyway, I got right into the thick of things. I already had a partner for a project they'd started two days before; she'd come up with a set design for a short play called Film Noir by Bathsheba Doran. My first assignment was drafting elevations of my partner's scenic elements.
Now, I'd never done any drafting before. Well, not formally. (I had a tendency to doodle geometric shapes in class when I was younger.) But before lunch I'd gotten a crash course and was well on the way to producing what Brynna — our teacher — would later call "pretty drafting."
I spent as much time as necessary on every elevation. If I thought something didn't look right, I rechecked it. I couldn't be rushed. I knew the project wouldn't stop with my work, and I wanted the next step — whatever it was — to go off without any hitches due to negligence on my part. As it turned out, the drafting was made into a white model. Julia, my partner, worked long and very hard on her model, and I think it turned out very well. Unfortunately, I couldn't get pictures of the finished model in a timely enough manner, and even one sheet of drafting is far too large to scan.
Costume Design
Individually, we each also started a second project in tandem with the individual/pair design work, called our "refrigerator character." This was a character to be designed from scratch, using only a photo of a refrigerator taken by someone else in the class. The design would, ideally, include as much detail as possible, including name, occupation, age, home, familial relationships (if any), personality, and whatever else we could come up with, though the character's costume was the most important component.
My photo2 prompted my imagination of my somewhat wacky character, a 47-year-old divorced fraud analyst at U.S. Bank named Alan Kluesner residing in a rather messy mansion in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa (my full notes). The kicker was actually finding a Plaxo profile picture of a forty-something U.S. Bank fraud analyst in my research. Of course I spent far too long researching Alan's life, from where he might live and work to what his home and office might look like, but I think it was worthwhile. (I won't deal with adding any of my research photos to this post; suffice it to say I have pictures of possible offices, houses, clothing, and so forth.)
This project allowed me to exercise my Google-fu and my skills in watercolor and GIMP. Taking a few pieces of costume research and a sheet of tracing paper, I got my character's shape down. I then photocopied the tracing and watercolored it. Finally, I scanned the finished watercolor into the computer and cleaned up some of the rough watercolor edges. Below, the final cleaned version:
Alan Kluesner, my 47-year-old bank fraud analyst character design project
Lighting
Another project was a group lighting design, created to go with a song. As a group, we chose the song and collaborated on colors, angles, and timing. Our guest instructor, Scott Pinkney, taught the basics of lighting and helped us with our choices. The song ended up being "Helter Skelter" as heard in the movie Across The Universe. Our efforts are documented in the video below (until such time as it may be removed from YouTube for copyright infringement ).
Grunt Work
Because our lighting instructor (not Brynna) was the lighting designer for Shakespeare on the Common's production of The Comedy of Errors, we all spent two days helping to assemble the set for the show before we began the lighting curriculum in earnest. It was fun, even though the weather was a little hot and I'd already spent the better part of five weeks building sets. We got our names added to a program insert for our trouble.
Makeup
We had a week of three-hour makeup classes, too, where we learned the basics of stage makeup and experimented with color, fantasy characters, old age, and some trauma (bruises, cuts, and so on). Funny how I tried to include a Bajoran as a fantasy character; too human. But one of my classmates turned herself into a panda. (We jokingly called her "pissed-off panda" for the rest of the session, because she got annoyed whenever anyone said she made a cute panda.)
Final Project: Solo Set Design
The concept sketch I drew for my set design before beginning the research and compositing process
Each of us also took on one final project. Mine was a solo set design, which I created based on the short play The Message by Hilary Bell. I began with a mental concept, which I then sketched. I did dozens of image searches for the various components of my design, saving them all (and embedding the sources in the file comments) and adding them to a GIMP file, and then composited the entire scene together. Making everything fit and look reasonably natural took a little effort, a lot of patience, and far too much time, but the end result, below, was totally worth it.
The wall portraits are all separate layers. I imported the headshots one at a time, added a border, and then used the perspective transform tool to "place" them on the walls. Conveniently, the walls in the greenroom photo I ended up using were built from concrete blocks, and thus had lines on them for me to follow. I laid in the couple, cart, and baby separately, erasing away the empty parts of each picture (standard practice). Much of my time went to tuning pixel-level detail around the more complex shapes and arranging the portraits. While preparing the image for posting here, I actually noticed a detail or two (like the shadow at upper left that isn't cast on the actress' headshot) that I didn't catch, but I think it still looks pretty awesome.
Since I had time to spare in class, Brynna suggested that I print the composite, trace it, and create my own watercolor version of the scene. So I did. It, like the refrigerator photo character, was good exercise for my neglected watercolor skills.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
Looking back on the work I did at Emerson, I spent most of my design lab time either behind a drafting table or behind a keyboard. I suppose that indicates what I enjoy and/or what I'm good at. (Like I didn't know I enjoy working digitally. ) The drafting was surprisingly satisfying, and I'll have to look for more opportunities to do it.
Traveling the Northeast: Family and Colleges
When the Emerson program ended, my mother picked me up in Boston and we drove to meet up with my father, who turned 60 last June. My parents celebrated his actual birth date with local friends in Minneapolis; however, since the main corpus of my dad's family lives in Pennsylvania, my mother set up a second celebration in the East.
We spent a week at a rather nice campground in southwestern Pennsylvania, the five of us (Mom, Dad, my brother, me, and my four-year-old nephew), sightseeing and visiting family and friends in the area. I took far too many pictures of my nephew (as I always do — he's too damned cute) and the new 16GB SD card I bought in Colorado Springs when my 4GB card got full came in very handy. Not that I came close to filling it; I've barely managed to use half of it — including copious video clips — and I haven't yet emptied it.
After my dad went home (with my nephew) and my brother returned to school, my mother and I began a wandering tour of colleges in the northeast. We visited (listed in no particular order): Muhlenberg College, Alfred University, Brandeis University, Hampshire College, Amherst College, Brown University, Cornell University, Ithaca College (where my cousin is currently a freshman), and Carnegie Mellon University. At most schools we took the admissions tour, though some got less attention and some got more. (For instance: My cousin took us around Ithaca herself, but Amherst got a mere drive-by — the timing didn't work out for a tour, and we'd just spent most of the day touring Hampshire College.)
I found some good options through those tours, and eliminated a few choices. The experience got a little tedious at times, but I ended up applying to Brandeis and Brown (from this list only; I sent out nine applications total). Brandeis even looks like my current front-runner, so I'm really hoping I get accepted.
Home at last
After returning home, I added up how long I'd been away. The total was three months. Three months! That was a long time to be living out of one duffel bag and a backpack. Not that I haven't done that before; I last did it in 2007, when I went on two three-week canoe trips in Temagami, Ontario followed by a month of exploration on the roundabout (via New York) drive back. (I definitely suck at blogging about my summers. Two pretty major summers — 2007 and 2008 — never got blogged about. That's fine, I know that I fail. )
I got involved in the youth group play at our synagogue as an assistant director, and got myself roped into being part of the pit orchestra too (I just had to open my mouth...). That's been giving me some useful experience in directing and leadership; it performed the first week of February.
Guys and Dolls led to another pit orchestra opportunity that I couldn't resist, and I simultaneously got another, unrelated offer to run tech at the Jewish Humor Festival (which I keep typing with an extra 'e' after "Humor" for some reason). My last two summers of learning about tech came in handy, and I picked up a bunch of new skills as well.
The day after the end of the Humor Fest, I got another job at the same theatre running projection for their next show, Jack and Rochelle, which I'm doing alongside continuing pit orchestra performances with the Gilbert and Sullivan Very Light Opera Company. Both productions run through March 28.
I'm also waiting to hear from colleges. (The first letter, an offer to be put on Colorado College's waiting list, came March 15. 'Twas but an advance scout for the coming — I'm sure — onslaught.)
Final Thoughts
No matter where I end up in the fall, no matter what I do with my time (write! photograph! sing! play violin! edit Wikipedia!) — I know that I learned a lot this summer. Hey, the carpentry skills I picked up in Colorado Springs already came in handy when we got home. A board on the steps of our back porch came off about a month after we got back, and I was able to go down to the basement, scrounge a power drill and some wood screws, and fix the step — once I stopped at the hardware store for a pilot bit and a Phillips driver bit. Set-building skills translate directly to the home – maintenance world, and vice versa.
I truly believe that everyone should do theatre sometime. It teaches useful skills, it's good for stimulating creativity, and you get a real sense of accomplishment as you watch the audience enjoying each performance. Art may imitate life, and life may imitate art; but the art of theatre is life.
And that is what I learned this summer.
- Never again! From now on, I'm setting target dates for important posts and publishing them no matter what pictures or videos I would still like to add. The amount of time I delayed this post's publishing to wait for pictures that never materialized was utterly ridiculous. [↩]
- Unfortunately, I never got a digital copy of my photo during the session. Whoever took it didn't keep a copy (I asked all my classmates) and Brynna didn't keep them either. I have a print-out, but it's hard to take to the library and scan because it's mounted on a foam board for presentation. I'll keep working to get a copy somehow... [↩]
The Jewish Humor Festival Ends
The Jewish Humor Festival is over, and what an event it was! Comedians from all over the Twin Cities and beyond came to perform, and I was in the booth for most of their shows, running the lights or sound. My senses of accomplishment and satisfaction right now are, I think, greater than they've ever been before. I mean, really. (Except for the closing cabaret. I mean really, that was the least technically interesting event of the whole week. But I got a lot of laughs out of it.)
I've been working the festival for 12 days — though I shouldn't include last Saturday because I wasn't involved in that event. In that time, I logged many, many hours in the booth. Time in front of both boards — light and sound — was part of it, but much of my time was spent in front of the JCC's ETC Express 24/48 DMX control board, writing lighting cues for the shows from scratch. I didn't design the pre-hung general plot (set up to provide flexibility for all the different types of performance), but even working within the limits of what was available I still felt like I was designing the look of every show. Really, it's amazing what one can do with just combinations of warm front light and blue down light.
With some of my free time during sparsely-cued shows, I availed myself of the Express' "Help" button, which helped me to learn new abilities as well as remember forgotten knowledge. Most significantly, I learned how to use the "Sneak" softkey to bring channels in and out slowly enough that the audience (hopefully) wouldn't notice, and I practiced writing effect cues.
The last two things I learned about were cue "Wait" attributes and dimmer profiles. I knew there had to be a way to tailor the upfades and downfades to the behavior of a particular instrument, and I found it by poking around in the setup menu. So if I ever need that feature, I know where it is. I also added a very useful "Wait" to the downfade of a cue in the short play Toast1 by Monica Raymond, just in time for the final performance, which worked perfectly.
For one of the shows — arguably the most frustrating, on account of its 7th- and 8th-grade cast — I was responsible for flat-out designing the whole look with no input from the director other than approval when it looked good. The show — called A Purim Spiel—used Star Wars characters to tell the story of Purim, and included a couple lightsaber fights (because how could it not?). Despite being only 25 minutes long on a good day (20 on a bad one), I wrote more cues for that show than I did for any other. It included the only effect cue of the festival (flashing lights are always good for party scenes ) and had me glued to the board so I didn't miss a cue. Some of them were literally ten seconds apart, and I wasn't ever allowed more than a minute to "rest".2
I spent a good hour or two outside of the three 90-minute tech rehearsals for A Purim Spiel cleaning up and improving upon the cues I'd written, including a session between the two daytime performances last Friday. The last show would have been the best run technically if the two narrators hadn't decided to switch sides without making sure I knew. Because they failed to tell me, my cues lit Narrator #1 when Narrator #2 was speaking and vice versa. Fortunately I overshadowed their faux pas by running an "immediate" (0-second fade) cue from bright to dim lighting by accident. Thank goodness for the Express' "Back" button! That was a good-sized FAIL.
Beyond A Purim Spiel, my most significant lighting work was on So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz, a one-woman show by Amy Salloway. Her script included descriptions of the five general "looks" that her show required, and we spent the better part of an hour at the start of her tech rehearsal working out what those would look like. I ended up running sound for her show because Amy was uncomfortable (and I don't blame her) with the idea of having one sound op tech the show and another run it. The sound cue timing was pretty sensitive, and I do agree that someone who hadn't teched the show would have been lost. So I taught my fellow technician for that rehearsal to work the light board and copy the looks I'd programmed into subsequent cues. I hope Troy won't be as intimidated by the light board in the future. He did good work.
While Troy was intimidated by the light board, I am intimidated by the sound board. Sound operation continues to be something of a mystery to me. I don't know what to do with all the different knobs, nor do I know how to eliminate feedback or keep a mic from popping. However, I'm hoping to get some advice from Breton Parks, the sound designer who worked on the shows I teched last summer. (Yes, that post is still coming. I might give up on getting that last photo...) Learning to adjust more than the fader levels will probably come in handy if I continue working as a generic technician, since I never know what I'll have to do. So I kind of took too long to begin the process of getting advice, but it's not like I had much time online to do it before last Saturday.
I hope I do get some advice from Bret soon, since I'm moving on to be a sound board operator for the upcoming Theatre Or production of Jack and Rochelle (which starts teching tonight, opens on Friday, and runs Thursday – Sunday through March 28). Tonight I'll find out exactly how much I'll need to do. Hopefully it won't be anything with which I haven't had previous experience...
In addition to running sound for Jack and Rochelle, I will continue playing violin in the GSVLOC pit orchestra until the end of March. Next month, I'm working on joining the pit orchestras for Carnival at Concordia University and Cinderella with the Morris Park Players.
- For Hijab and Toast I was responsible for designing the lighting cues, with input from the director. [↩]
- A lot of this was due to the scriptwriting, which gave only a few lines to each of most of the scenes. The rest resulted from the young actors rushing through and dropping lines. [↩]
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.
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- Anna Coffee on “No Evil”: My NET10 Wireless Experiences
- kim gifford on “No Evil”: My NET10 Wireless Experiences
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Badges
Mobile URL
Promotions, Causes, Etc.
- Yes, it's a shameless plug for money. A strange thing coming from me, but it supports one of the Web's greatest sites.
- I'm sure you saw this one coming. You know what I want.
- Set yourself up with OpenDNS, the fastest DNS service around! You can also set up shortcuts for frequently visited sites and filter content.
- Download the best multi-protocol IM client I've ever seen! So it crashes once in a while, but it's in active development, so they're definitely working on it. (And really, what program doesn't crash once in a while?)
- Don't let Microsoft push through a redundant, broken standard for office files! Chaos and confusion could ensue!
- This is just in case spam-bots visit this site. Click it to find out more (it only does bad things to email harvesters, don't worry).
Blogged.com says I have to leave its badge here to claim ownership of this site. I can't take it off, apparently. Whatever. What would be nice is linking to my own site's page rather than generic "technology news" listings...
blogarama and Blog Flux (now removed due to always being down) have similar, but implied, issues. And why does everyone link me to a generic listing page?!
