I'm SMing a new work - rehearsals began tonight. In the months leading up to rehearsals I think I received four different versions of the script, but now that we're in rehearsals the director has put her foot down and the playwright will no longer be distributing new versions of the script. All changes will be noted by me, which you know... is great, on MY end and for the actors. But I'm not really sure what the best way is to keep the designers in the loop.
The playwright/producer handed out shiny new hard copies of the script at rehearsal tonight. Excellent - except for the fact that this is a different version than the most recent edition I got via email. So I suspect that the designers also only have the previous edition as well.
I've got a handful of changes that were made today after the readthrough, but I also have another handful of changes that were made between the last version and this one. The hard copies he gave out today have the changes tracked (...so there are strikeouts and red and blue text). I checked with my director and she asked me to just type all of these changes up as well, so the designers can be on the same page. So that's what I'm going to do, and for right now I'm just including a "Line Changes" section in my Rehearsal Report, because I don't know of any better way to do this.
I've really only done one show in the past that involved significant changes, but it wasn't a new work, it was a Shakespeare adaptation. I was ASM on that and my SM did everything on Google Docs, so her idea was to not change anything in the actual script document, but keep a running list of changes in a separate spreadsheet, and it was nicely color coded and whatnot but the changes were not monitored in the script... and then all of a sudden we're about to go into tech and I'm copying & pasting a bajillion line changes all night so she can have an updated version of the script which could then be distributed to designers, who had no clue about any of the changes because she never mentioned them in reports. Which ... hardly seems like the most efficient way to do things.
Personally I'm much more of a pencil & paper kind of gal, and also I don't have an ASM on this show, so I'll be keeping a list on Excel and it looks like I'll just be including the changes each day in the Rehearsal Report. I think this will work just fine... but I was just wondering if anybody out there has any tips and tricks for streamlining this, if it's possible to even do so. Many thanks!