Messages

46

The Hardline / Re: Actors/Directors: Taking Photos in Rehearsal-A Disturbing Trend...or Not...?

« on: Jul 06, 2013, 04:02 pm »

If you were born before 1980, you grew up in a world where photography was something pretty special: either you're getting dressed up and going to the photographer's studio, or you're commemorating an unusual event. Fix your hair, check your lipstick, get into a nice, attractive pose, look your best. Now smile!

If you were born after 1990, you grew up in a world where photography is ubiquitous. Every minute of every day ends up on instagram (lipstick or otherwise), and that's totally totally normal. (Even if you yourself don't take these constant snaps, you definitely know people who do.)

I think that, as the acting community shifts from the earlier model to the later one, attitudes towards social-media photography are going to change very rapidly. (And this is triply true as we come to depend more and more upon crowdsourcing to fund our productions and social media to promote them.) Until then, things are going to be bumpy, but I don't think this is a shift that can be prevented.

Even in more traditional companies, donors seem to like feeling involved in the process as more than just passive recipients of art. They don't just want to sit in the audience, they want their finger in the pie. And things like throwing a few rehearsal photos on Facebook actually do seem to make a difference. They're trivial to produce, they don't really injure the actors (okay, okay, they may feel weird, but it's not like anyone's losing revenues or royalties here), and, they work.

--

All this being said, you have my full agreement that they can be damned distracting in rehearsal halls, especially if the person behind the camera is being a nuisance. Mute the shutter sound, turn off that @&$#ing flashbulb, and try not to be a prick about it.

But I think they're here to stay, and any push to eliminate them is only going to find temporary success.

Maybe the solution is to have "casual photo days"? During this hour-long block of rehearsal, our publicity intern will be hanging around with a camera, discreetly taking some shots for our donation campaign. Pay her no mind, she knows what she's doing, and she'll do everything she can to be unobtrusive.

47

The Green Room / Re: ARTICLE: Performer dies during Cirque's KA

« on: Jun 30, 2013, 08:44 pm »

Oh dear. :-/

48

Employment / Re: Leaving a difficult situation just before Opening...

« on: Jun 27, 2013, 05:38 pm »

Almost everything you've described is essentially salvageable.

But singlehandedly saving the show is not your job, nor are they paying you nearly enough to do it. And most importantly of all, I said "almost."

"[...] though the Director would not speak to me the rest of the night."

That's not salvageable. That's not something you can fix. If you've lost the confidence of the director and the producer, even if you've lost that confidence for the most stupid and infantile and unprofessional and self-indulgent reasons imaginable, your position is untenable. Get out. Talk to Equity, but get out.

49

The Green Room / Re: Book Club?

« on: Jun 27, 2013, 01:04 pm »

Good lord. You could not pay me to crack that book open. 

50

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: Communication with the House Manager?

« on: Jun 24, 2013, 12:54 pm »

I paid my way through my first years at university as a house manager, and one thing I learned is that house managers have radically different styles from one another, in much the same way and to much the same extent as SMs.

F'risntance, my second year, I shared my job (HM for the university's 7-8 performance venues, with rotating shifts between them) with two other people.

I ran my houses like I was Swiss. You'd hear from me at 30, 15, 5, and at house turnover, and you could set your watch to each of these check-ins.

One of my coworkers was more laid-back. She'd wander by the coms and check in periodically, but not regularly; usually only if she'd been summoned or had something desperately urgent to communicate. (Everything else can wait for the show report.) You'd hear from her somewhere in the window of 40-20 before curtain, and once more at house turnover, but if she didn't contact the SM between the two, you could safely assume that everything was right with the world.

And the other coworker was a bit of a stresspuppy, checking in constantly (often every 2-3 minutes) even if he had nothing to report. "Hi, has anything changed?" "Hi, just checking in, is everything OK?" "Just wanted to check in. Things are fine down here." "Everything good? Great." "I just want to synchronize our watches again..."

51

Employment / Re: Making the transition to PSM

« on: Jun 20, 2013, 04:52 pm »

On_Headset - where would one find jobs for PSM and SM in general? And how difficult would it be to transfer from SM to PSM in a building?

It depends very much on the city, state of the industry, your experience, the extent of your network, and what interests you most.

It's actually tremendously easy to score a stage management gig on a cruise ship or at a performing arts summer camp, etc.

Conversely, a gig like a full SM contract at one of these summerstock festivals is the sort of thing where, if you have to ask how to get the job, you are probably not qualified for the job.

52

The Green Room / Re: Forwarding previous information in emails

« on: Jun 19, 2013, 05:43 pm »

Don't forget that, while most of us have fantastic modern email clients which know how to parse those massive forward-trees, there are still people who find information in that format to be essentially unusable because their software or backend simply can't parse it properly.


Viz:
>>>>>>>>>> So what I'm saying is
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> How readable is this
>>>>>>>>> RE: OBNOXIOUSLY LONG FORWARDING TREES
>>>>>>>>>>>>> When the line breaks are all
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Supposed to simply
>>>>>>>>> Love, Amanda Dee
>>>>>>>>>>> And somehow you're
>>>>>>>>> FWD: PURPLE MONKEY DISHWASTER
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>know which lines belong to
>>>>>>>>> ~*Reach for the Moon and you'll Always Land Among the Starzzzz *~
>>>> which messages.

53

The Green Room / Re: ARTICLE:Fox Searchlight should have paid interns, judge rules

« on: Jun 12, 2013, 07:17 pm »

I don't want to downplay your experience, but this is an area where I don't especially mind throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For everyone who gets a Super Great Awesome internship, there (anecdotally) seem to be several dozen who spend months doing menial, useless busywork which neither advances their career nor educates them in any way. (This FOX thing is a classic example: we're taking someone who has an MBA and making them assemble furniture? Are you serious?)

54

The Green Room / Re: ARTICLE: Low Pay/No Pay (UK article, interesting read)

« on: Jun 12, 2013, 01:10 pm »

If it's any comfort at all, the rules which apply to actors don't apply to stage managers, technicians, designers or arts administrators. We're allowed to screw up: in fact, when we do screw up, it's usually the actors who have to wear the damage.

I'd go so far as to say that, short of criminal negligence or deliberate sabotage, there's almost nothing someone in this category (SMs, technicians, etc.) could do to end their career in a single bound. Even in the worst-case scenarios (you screw up and someone dies as a direct result), you can recover. (In fact, you're way more likely to end your career by being rude to the wrong person than you are by making errors. Food for thought!)

Conversely, there are circumstances from which an actor, director or playwright simply will never recover. Some flops are just so floppy, some performances are just so bad, some divas are just so divaish...

55

The Green Room / Re: ARTICLE: Low Pay/No Pay (UK article, interesting read)

« on: Jun 12, 2013, 09:05 am »

Within my own city, there's a growing trend towards "converting" Fringe shows: during the last pure-Fringe festival, a good dozen or so productions were picked up by larger companies for polished remounts in larger venues. (With luxuries like designers, salaries, professional PR, etc.)

And on the one hand, this appeals to me. Theatre is one of the most meritocratic professions in the world: if you don't pull your weight, your phone will stop ringing. and this process of upgrading from Fringe to "real" theatre definitely appeals to that side of my personality. Put on a good show and the money will find you. I like that.

But I'm also thinking about some of the people I graduated with.

The summer we graduated, 4 of them got together and produced a Fringe show.

It wasn't very good.

And that's not surprising. On any other career path, we wouldn't bat an eyelid if someone took their first kick at the can and failed: of course you're going to make mistakes and need to learn and be trained by others and gradually master a skillset. That's why we have internships/apprenticeships/Junior and Assistant positions/etc. Even if you've got a specialized degree in the field, the assumption is that you're going to need time to master "real-world" skills and gradually get into a position of mastery.

But for actors, well. Some of them are going to land a small number of apprenticeships and artistic internships and be invited to join Junior Companies, and they'll earn their stripes that way.

Many of them don't. These 4 students had to go straight into the "workplace". And when the Fringe show tanked, their careers effectively ended. This was demoralizing and frustrating and life-shattering in many ways: your first "real" production, and you blew it. I'm led to understand that they lost about $2000 on the adventure, factoring in the Fringe fees, production expenses, the shifts they had to cancel at work to rehearse and perform, publicity, photography, and all the rest.

The good news is that one of them was able to recover. She's currently teaches improv classes while promising herself she'll break into theatre eventually.

The other three have left the industry.

They weren't untalented as such, and given time to mature as artists might have made worthwhile contributions. If we treated actors the same way we treat accountants and lawyers (take your time, master your skillset gradually, here's an apprenticeship, etc.), they might have been able to tough it out, and could have become useful, productive and interesting members of the artistic communities.

If they had had even just a trickle of income or profit while working on that Fringe show, it might not have ended as it did. But the business model doesn't support it: either your show is profitable, or you don't get paid. They tried, and all it got them was credit card debt equivalent to a month's rent apiece--making it much harder to try again, even if you can get over the demoralization and the failure and the discouragement.

Instead they're paying down their student loans with the low-skill service jobs which are the only positions they're qualified to land after a 4-year BFA.

I don't think that's good for the industry, for the economy, or for the artistic community.

56

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: Escripts=Do you HAVE to have them?

« on: Jun 06, 2013, 04:06 pm »

By the way, an important tip: unless you're working with a real dinosaur, your company's photocopier can almost certainly scan a document for you. The newest ones can also run OCR, but that's not too much of a chore to do yourself.

The problem I have with this approach is that I really really want it in a Word document so I can mess around with margins, and most scanners prefer to churn out PDFs.

57

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: REHEARSAL CONDITIONS: That summer smell

« on: May 31, 2013, 03:34 pm »

I'm wondering if you could make a field trip and do a rehearsal (or half a day? I suggest the latter half, when the heat would be worst) in a public park or something. Highly unusual and the company may just hate the idea, but if you've got a group who'd be into it (and in that kind of heat, a lot of people would be into it!), well.

You'd lose a significant amount of productivity (no props, no sets, no marks, etc.), but the stress level would fall through the floor, and there's something to be said for that.

58

The Green Room / Re: Introducing the Unicorn Rainbow Sparkly Theatre Company!

« on: May 28, 2013, 01:44 am »

Anyone who enters the building while wearing any kind of perfume or cologne will be stripped, showered, and dressed in a fauntleroy suit in an unflattering colour, at least two sizes too small. If they want to stand out, they get to do it on our terms.

59

The Green Room / Re: PATRON SMASH!

« on: May 16, 2013, 04:36 pm »

Presumably taking someone's cellphone and smashing it to the ground would constitute fighting words. (Provocation, incitement, I'm not sure what the term is for actions as opposed to verbiage.)

60

The Green Room / Re: Tony Awards

« on: May 16, 2013, 01:18 pm »

Not just a popularity contest, I think there's a very real possibility a SM category would get "polka-ized".

Until very recently, the Grammy awards actually had about 120 categories, including fairly esoteric ones like Hawaiian, Native American and Polka. And, in practice, these categories were pretty much cesspools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Polka_Album

Look at that list of nominees and winners. See any patterns?

So few people vote in these sorts of "down-ballot" categories that in some years you end up with 20-30 people picking the winner. Bad news all around.

A separate awards run by a SM organization would be interesting. But rolling it into the Tonys... well.