Messages

286

The Green Room / Re: Your ideal kit bag/box/portable hole

« on: Feb 02, 2011, 02:45 pm »

My ideal kit is an office with a functioning lock and alarm system. 

I'd settle for that nice piece of work, though! (Although perhaps in a maniler fabric. )

287

The Green Room / Re: Supply Versus Demand

« on: Jan 29, 2011, 02:54 am »

Something I've observed is that one of the best ways to get government funding is to already be successful.

If you always sell out your entire season and have corporate sponsors up the wazoo (in the program, in the building, on the seats, in the bar, in the toilet stalls, by the payphones, on the backs of the tickets, in the advertising, in the name of the company itself...), you seem to get much bigger grants than you do if you're a comparatively small company, even if the small company's financial picture is substantially better than the large one's. (At least, insofar as a small company which is juuuuuuust breaking even is in a much better financial position than a large company which depends upon annual multi-million dollar grants just to keep the lights on.)

On some level, I think there's a credible argument to be made here, insofar as government should be focusing its funding on those arts which their populations find most interesting, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that a company which routinely sells out 2000-seat houses is more popular than one which struggles to hit 60% in an 80-seat studio space.

But at the same time... eh.
- Artists in general, and playwrights in particular, do not always spring fully-formed from BFA programs and young companies. Smaller theatres which are less beholden to the immediate success of every single show that travels through them provide an important proving ground and a source of experience (and baseline employment) for the artists who eventually move onto bigger and "better" things.
- There's a lot of snobbery about the commercial sector ("They do commercial work. We do real theatre."), but I think it's absolutely undeniable that genuinely risky theatre (particularly dance theatre), while it can be artistically interesting and commercially viable, simply doesn't have a place in the commercial mainstream. Every now and then a quirky new show makes it big, yes, but even then this generally involves moving up through the ranks [Cleveland -> Off-Off-Off-Off-Off Broadway -> Toronto -> Off-Off-Broadway -> Chicago -> you get the picture] rather than debuting at the top.
- I think we eat our own lunch when we focus on a smaller number of already-successful companies at the expense of the rest. If we are to attract large numbers of new theatregoers--something we need to do for the sake of the entire industry--we need to focus on an audience who are not already theatregoers. I'm not sure what form this takes--educational theatre, identity-driven theatre, young theatre in general, whatever--but I'm pretty sure it doesn't take the form of a company which caters almost entirely to retirees. (Well. Retirees, and the corporate sponsors who want to sell things to retirees, I suppose.)

288

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: REHEARSAL: Sign-in Sheet for Rehearsals

« on: Jan 29, 2011, 02:32 am »

I just don't get the sign in sheet on the table next to you.  I mean, so you are in the middle of a scene, with the director right next to you, and an actor comes up to you and signs in . . .  I am just trying to picture when this is a good idea.

My whole goal of the sign in sheet is to get them

1) In the habit of signing in.
2) In the habit of checking the call upon signing in to see if there are any changes.
3) In the habit of checking the call board for changes.

I would argue that putting the sign in sheet closer to you is reinforcing a physical need of them needing to be coming to you all the time, which may not always be the best habit for them to get into.  Especially when I am sitting with a director working on a difficult show, to have an actor, bring in different/new/odd energy to sign in and ask questions - just may not always be a good thing - may not be a bad thing, but may not be a good thing.

I'd like to add another number to the list.

4) In the habit of sticking to a pre-show routine.

I want my actors to get used to things happening in a certain order and sequence, with roughly the same amount of time spent on each element every night. (Especially if it's a big cast!) I don't necessarily want them to feel rushed or hurried, but I want them to get into the practice of starting in one location, and shifting to the next, and the next, and being aware of the sequence and the rhythm and the importance of keeping it all predictable.

I've found that on shows where the callboard is taken seriously by the acting company, the sequence and rhythm is taken seriously as well. On shows where the callboard is taken less seriously, it's a struggle to get people to keep moving backstage. I'm not sure if it's a symptom or a cause (does taking the callboard seriously lead to backstage professionalism, or does backstage professionalism imply taking the callboard seriously?), but it's so reliable that I choose not to question it.

289

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: REHEARSAL: Sign-in Sheet for Rehearsals

« on: Jan 21, 2011, 04:47 am »

I've found that the utility of sign-in sheets goes something like this:



These numbers are approximate and depend on your specific cast. (More professional actors who are used to your systems will usually be more mature about these things. Less professional actors, actors who are used to different systems, and children in particular will create more problems.)

I: Cast has so few people that you already see everyone anyway. With this few people, you can probably do attendance in your own head, or at the very least you'll quickly notice who is and isn't present as you go about your normal preshow routine. Sign-in sheets are really only useful for formal record-keeping. (1-4 bodies.)
II: Cast is still small enough that you can more or less do it in your own head, but there's a chance you might overlook or miss someone, so sign-in sheets begin to become useful. (5-10 bodies.)
III: Cast has enough people that you can no longer do it all in your own head, and you absolutely need an external method of keeping track. (10-20 bodies.)
IV: Cast is so large that sign-in sheets are not only useful for your own purposes, but add an (extremely useful) element of rigid routine and predictability to calls. If you're really lucky, cast members will even take it upon themselves to remind one another to sign in, saving you a lot of nagging. (15-40 bodies.)
V: Best of all worlds: sign-in sheets are still easy to use and understand, they add predictability to calls, they provide useful information to you as a stage manager, people take them seriously, and so on. (30-50 bodies.)

And then there's VI. Usually two things happen:
- Cast members stop taking them seriously. They start signing in for each other. They start doodling and drawing jokes which impede the usefulness of the board. They begin to realize that the "consequences" for failing to sign in are so minor that it's not worth the effort on their part to do so. (Bigger cast = more difficult to have these conversations, to reach all the perpetrators, etc.) You acquire one or two bad apples who get haughty and self-important about it. ("Have you signed in?" "Why? You're talking to me, so you know I'm here. Is there anything else?") If things get really bad, the entire callboard can be defaced or vandalized, and then what? There's 80 people in the cast, you really want to interrogate everybody?
- The sign-in sheets themselves become so large and byzantine as to become unwieldy. There are very few ways to arrange 60+ names on a few sheets of paper in any sort of useful sequence which will still make sense to everyone involved and provide useful at-a-glance information to the stage management team. (If you sort alphabetically, then you get almost no useful at-a-glance information if you have staggered calls, or if you want to be able to quickly pick out lead roles so you can fuss your understudies, etc. If you sort by any other criteria [call time, role, etc.], actors will spend hours gawping at the sheets trying to find their own names, even if it's in the exact same place it's been at all previous calls, and this tends to incline them to stop taking it seriously.)

It's a tricky situation to deal with. I've heard some creative solutions, but they're very much tied to specific companies or venues. (Have people sign in with the stage door guard, attach sign-in sheets to dressing room doors, that sort of thing.) The best solution seems to be praying it doesn't happen to you to begin with.

290

The Green Room / Re: Tax Season!

« on: Jan 15, 2011, 04:29 pm »

To answer them in order:

1) I hire an accountant. I live in a major urban centre with a large theatre/dance community, and there are several firms who deal exclusively or primarily with arts expenses. (And all of these accountants are former dancers.)
2) I keep a pencil case in my messenger bag into which I stuff any receipt I plan on deducting. 2-3 times a week, I empty the pencil case and enter it all into a spreadsheet, then I put the receipts into monthly shoeboxes. When tax season comes around, I give the spreadsheet and the receipts to my accountant. It only takes 5-10 minutes a week in total, and it saves me a few hundred dollars.
3) I'm pretty good with paperwork and bureaucracy and accounting, but I've honestly found that hiring an accountant pays for itself. They find all sorts of deductions and credits and loopholes that I would never have found on my own, and so far, having used the same one for three years, these extra bonuses have more than paid for the cost of hiring the accountant in the first place.
4) I live in a jurisdiction where freelance and contract SMs can deduct almost anything which is even tangentially related to the arts, broadly stated, as a business expense. Subscribe to Stratford? Not only can you claim the subscription (it's industrial research, after all!), but you can often claim the transportation as well. Buy a book or rent a movie? More research! Go clothes-shopping? If it's stuff you'll wear to work, then it's equipment necessary to perform your job, so claim it. Have lunch with a friend? Well, if your friend so much as ASM'd a fringe show, that's now a business meeting--claim it! Your union dues and certification courses and professional memberships are almost all claimable...

Sometimes people overreach and get audited ("Now, I'd like to talk about your clothes budget." "Ah. Well, as a stage manager, I need to maintain a large assortment of all-black clothing in order to perform my job, and I consider it a professional expense." "You wear a $300 backless sequinned cocktail dress to your job as a stagehand?") but in general it's pretty much open season. The saving grace of this entire system is that so few SMs make enough money to pay income taxes in the first place that all of these credits and deductions rarely add up to very much.

Of course, a few years ago, the courts found that resident SMs (which includes SMs who are technically freelancers, but work primarily for one company) should be counted as employees rather than as contractors, which turned their world upside-down. (It is expected that employers will provide their employees with all necessary equipment and expenses, while freelancers are responsible for it themselves, so employees are allowed to make significantly fewer deductions.)

291

The Green Room / Re: Dracula in NYC

« on: Jan 13, 2011, 04:09 pm »

7:15 p.m.: Willa Kim informed [producer] Michael Alden that those costumes that have not been paid for have been removed from the building.

I informed Joe Tantalo [theater manager] that some of our actors would be performing in street clothes this evening.

I'd always assumed this was hyperbole. ("If you don't pay your designers, they'll take their stuff and walk!") It actually happens? Jeez!

292

The Green Room / Re: Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark

« on: Jan 08, 2011, 12:40 pm »

Wasn't there a Forbidden Broadway tune about the horrors of working on Lion King? To the tune of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight":

I hate Julie Taymor. She doesn't have a clue.
My neck is breaking wearing her designs, and subluxating too!
The puppetry is stunning, but now I must confide:
although it looks great from the audience, it's torture here inside!

I think I understand what Matthew's driving at, though. (A show this size can keep hundreds of people employed, after all. We all want that, yes?)

What really bothers me is that number: $65m. Producers have a hard enough time keeping things together when the budget is much lower and the egos involved are much smaller. At $65m, not only do you have all sorts of parties trying to set terms in order to protect their investments and involvement in the production (backers have all sorts of fantastic ideas that they want incorporated into the production, directors want to defend their artistic visions, writers want fundamental control, actors have egos...), but inevitably a budget gets overextended and has to be cut, or a timetable needs to be rolled forward, or a vital person leaves the show, or an effect simply isn't coming together, and the whole things needs to be recalibrated. And recalibrated. And recalibrated. If your producer isn't extremely, extremely good, the whole thing can get killed by committee: the backers panic and start making more and more demands, the director has less and less time to fix more and more problems, DC Comics doesn't approve of the latest changes and demands a rollback, the production back-end increasingly becomes a Frankenstein's Monster of assembled bits and pieces that hardly resemble the original plan, more rounds of budget reductions as things slip further and further behind schedule, things slip through the cracks, someone gets seriously injured, bad buzz spreads, the backers start to panic a little louder...

It's a vicious cycle and I like to think that, rather than this all being down to a malevolent director or uncaring/incompetent people in general, this is a problem of the sheer size of the production, the sheer number of people involved, and a back-office team who simply can't keep on top of it all.

293

The Green Room / Re: set design extending into the house -

« on: Jan 05, 2011, 12:25 pm »

I was trained working entirely in blackbox spaces, so dealing with pros conventions (Stage is HERE! Audience is HERE!) is still something of a novelty. That being said, I do admit I get a little twitchy I enter a pros theatre and find that my view is obstructed by the gigantic stuffed plot device sitting just above aisle four.

For Someone To Watch Over Me, they turned the bar into a prison cell, so you had to order drinks from a poor bartender behind bars. For Metamorpheses the whole place resembled a Roman temple. Sometimes it works, but I'll admit it gets old real fast.

Especially for the poor bartenders! 

294

The Green Room / Re: "An Actor Postpones"

« on: Dec 28, 2010, 07:33 pm »

John Gieldgud already has a sloppy story[url], though.

295

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: Stage Manager IN the report

« on: Dec 26, 2010, 04:12 pm »

I use initials for everyone on the production team, myself included. ("JC will check with RR in order to ensure that FP or JP will get the costume shop unlocked early on Tuesday.")

It was a great system until I worked a show involving Mark Micklethwaite and Mike Mansfield and Mona McCullough.

296

The Green Room / Re: Life (As Seen Through Performance Reports)

« on: Dec 26, 2010, 01:04 pm »

My Weekly Shopping was interrupted--again--by the unexpected introduction of snow, blocking all exits and entrances and creating chaos on the stage for everyone involved while audience members were left to fend for themselves. Will speak to the producer again re: moving to an indoor venue, but I keep getting fobbed off on his hippy longhaired son, so I'm not hopeful.

297

The Green Room / Re: Video / photos during performance

« on: Dec 24, 2010, 12:05 am »

Honestly, I've never found the ownership argument to be very compelling. On some level I do understand and appreciate the value of it--but I tend to think that a bootleg recording, even a well-made bootleg, will never be in any way comparable to actually being in the theatre to watch the show. I mean, yes, they're free--but they're scratchy and poorly-focused and the sound quality is terrible and it cuts out randomly when the ushers got too close and it picks up the guy coughing two rows back and the actors might as well be cows for all you can see, and that's for the GOOD ones!

I don't mind telling you that I've been inspired to see shows entirely because a friend showed me a bootleg of it. (I realize this might get me lynched in a community like this one, but hey.) Other times, the bootleg is the only watchable version. (If I really enjoy, say, Mack and Mabel, I *could* buy plane tickets and travel across the continent to watch the Bummer, Nebraska Community Theatre And Light Opera Company run their way through the score, or I could watch a bootleg. In neither case am I costing the actors or designers of that performance anything, because there are no current productions of the show.)

I do understand that, if and when bootlegs begin supplanting live theatre outright, that's a major enormous horrible problem. But I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet, and--if anything--because of situations like mine where people are made aware of shows they might not otherwise see, they might even represent a net revenue gain for everyone involved.

298

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: PROFESSIONALISM: Managers in rehearsal?

« on: Dec 20, 2010, 11:48 pm »

It sounds as though his presence in rehearsals (or, rather, the presence of "a bodyguard" of her own choosing, in this case her father) was written into her contract. If she refused to have anyone else in that position, and refused to renegotiate her contract, then getting rid of him means getting rid of her.

299

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: PROFESSIONALISM: Managers in rehearsal?

« on: Dec 16, 2010, 11:29 pm »

(does no one else find the nepotism frustratingly amusing - in other words, don't bother auditioning if your parents aren't somebody...)

Not only that--don't bother auditioning for the understudy of the understudy of the lead unless your parents are somebody.

(Doesn't matter if they're "somebody" because they used to do porn! That counts!)

300

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: PROFESSIONALISM: Managers in rehearsal?

« on: Dec 16, 2010, 06:09 am »

If an adult actor asked you if their parent could be in rehearsals, what would your response be?

"Ask the producer". My preference would be for no guests at all: unless you're getting a paycheque from the company, you can wait until previews with everyone else, but it's not my decision nor is it a decision I should really have a say in until and unless their presence presents a problem. In this case, if there's any truth to the NYT story, not only was he being a colossal jerk, but he was presenting a safety hazard by taking it upon himself not only to lurk around backstage, but to personally examine pieces of the set which he believed to be broken--something he has no business doing, and if something should happen to him (or the set!) in the course of this impromptu safety inspection, something the company may not be insured against. (He isn't an employee, he hasn't been trained...) That alone, in my mind, is a sound reason for forcing him out.

Ms. Birch has been replaced by her understudy, Emily Bridges, whose father is the actor Beau Bridges; Ms. Bridges’s role will be played by Katharine Luckinbill, whose parents are the actors Laurence Luckinbill and Lucie Arnaz.

Oh great googlie mooglie.