Messages

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Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: Preshow (turn off your cellphone) announcements

« on: Feb 04, 2008, 07:10 pm »

We currently have one of our actors go up and give the safety/cell phone speech to the audience. I absolutely love the part about cameras. It goes something like this:
"There is no flash photography or video recording of any kind during the performance. After the show the actors will be in front of the stage and you can come by and flash us all you want then." It always gets a laugh. 

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Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: Stop The Show!

« on: Nov 13, 2007, 11:37 pm »

This past summer I came close to stopping a show but was able to cover it. At this particular theatre the cast also served drinks and popcorn during preshow and at intermission. Well, we had called "bar closed" which was to signal the cast to finish up serving people and get backstage to start the show in 10 minutes. I made sure i had all my cast, called places, and off we went without a problem, as usual. Well, about 3 minutes before the 3rd scene in act 1, my "hero" came running through the backstage door and into the dressing room! I didn't even know he had left! Well apparently he had gotten sick and ran to the closest bathroom which was in the hotel that the theatre was attatched to, but he didn't have time to tell anyone. Well, needless to say, there was a costume change needed and by now we were going into his scene and he was nowhere near ready. So after quickly discussing it with the other actors, we decided to flip flop scenes 3 and 4 to give the sick actor more time to get ready. It was perfect and no one even knew what we had done except that there was a slightly longer blackout between scenes. The actor finished the show and was feeling better by the end of the night. I had a couple of actors get sick during that summer.

The other one happened when one of my actors ran full speed to the backstage bathroom to throw up at intermission. We came to the conclusion that he was pretty dehydrated as he told me he hadn't drank any water on that 90 degree day. He insisted on continueing and he made it through the rest of the show very pale and sweating a lot. Lots of things can go wrong during a performance, but hey, thats live theatre for ya!

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Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: Executing both light and sound cues?

« on: Nov 10, 2007, 03:19 pm »

I have had to do this on a few shows.  Although I think it is easier to have a board op for both, it is a luxury that we don't always enjoy.  My suggestion is just put warnings before each cue in your script show you know when a cue is coming before hand.  This has always helped me a lot.

I agree with trevor7 on this one. I had to run lights and sound for my last show and as long as you have a warning before your sound cue(and i've found it helps to hilight it), you should be able to have it ready to go by the time the actual cue comes around. As long as you stay on top of it you should be fine

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Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: thoughts on hanging out with the cast after shows

« on: Nov 10, 2007, 03:08 pm »

I guess i am just repeating a lot of the other posts, but you definatly need to learn where to draw the line. I recently worked a summer SM for a small melodrama with a small cast. All the cast lived together in 2 apartments as well as had to work together, so you can imagine there we times they wouldn't be getting along. Some of the cast decided that they should tell me everything about why a certain person was pissing them off, or what they did on stage that bugged them. I just had to keep my mouth shut and let them vent it. Not once did i offer my opinion, and when they would ask me, i would just say  "sorry, but i don't want to get involved".  They were all very nice people and we would hang out, but you should never accept or add to gossip, or talk about work when you are out.

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Stage Management: Other / Re: Running lights from front of house?

« on: Nov 10, 2007, 02:24 pm »

So I just finished setting up my little makeshift booth (read as table) in the audience and it seems like it will work just fine. I've ran all the light cues and i can see everything as it happens. Should be a good show! Thanks for all the responses!

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Stage Management: Other / Running lights from front of house?

« on: Nov 09, 2007, 04:00 pm »

Hi. So this weekend I am running lights and sound for a magic show in a theatre that seats about 240. Since we don't want to reveal any tricks, we have decided to only use the center front of house for seating in the area, and the director wants the light board moved to one of the corners and run from there. I've always run lights and sound from backstage, but the way the theatre is set up, it's hard to see anything from the SM console. This makes sense to have me out front, but is this ever typical? I've heard of booths in the back of the house, or backstage, but ever IN the audience? Just a general question, and I'm interested to see your responses. Thanks!