Today is June 21st. It is the official start of the summer season this year. The thermometer is expected to gauge at least 100 degrees. I expect this to be in the shade, given the all too frequent inaccuracy of meteorologists.
After exhausting my options I have decided on a stage manager for my show. This is possibly the most important position on a show, and the selection of one should not be taken lightly. For the past several weeks, I have been on the hunt for anyone to work on the show at all, which has in itself been an uphill battle.
The stage manager role takes an extra level of importance in my mind. Given the variety of duties and expectations demanded by a production, the stage manager needs to be someone with whom the director can trust. I am scheduled to meet with her today to grab some coffee and talk over some more specific details about the show. With the first fully committed member of the team on-board, I realize the show is now underway, inching toward opening night. Given the way I have found my life flowing with the currents of life as it passes, it doesn't surprise me in the least that production begins on the first day of summer and will cease when our show opens on the first day of autumn.
It has become customary for a number of the shows at my theater to film one or two performances to keep for prosperity's sake, as well as the cast and crew. Unfortunately one of the longest running jokes seems to be the unlikely event that the tapes would ever become DVD due to some creative flakiness of one or two folks who will go unmentioned. When I directed my first show there I vowed to break that cycle, however, against my better ability I have still been unable to find a way to get those DVDs knocked out by those with proper equipment. I am sure there's a curse over the process.
I have gotten close on my most recent show. I was scheduled to meet today with the production guy who was helping me out with one edit. Through details too boring to share I know that this will be an incomplete copy, but it's a version none the less. I figured we would add the missing footage and call it a day. It would appear that as I rev up the new show, there will be very little looking back, since I have just learned that his hard drive crashed YESTERDAY. It's what it is.
Harnessing live theater is like that. Those shaky VHS copies of silly school performances friend's parents used to film never really captured it. Live performance is special. It has its moment and then it's gone. It echoes life in that way. I look back (briefly - shut up Don Henley) on the productions I have been involved in over the years and each one drifts off in its own bubble, never duplicated, never really returned to.
Life is full of forward momentum. Glaring cliché or not, life that has passed has passed. I see it pass on Facebook as friends I once had show up in friends of friends pictures, or as I share the room or dine at opposite ends of a friend-filled table with people who once had significance in my life and now have none. There's no controlling it. There's no mastering it. There's only allowing yourself the chance to flow with the current, through the seasons as they progress, and hoping that each will improve on the past.
21 June 2011
12 June 2011
miracle marketing
Recently I decided to undertake another play at the theater I have been involved with for the past five years. I had briefly considered submitting a show to direct last season, but I thought better of it given all of the myriad transitional crap that was going on in my life. In many ways a production becomes a short-lived marriage. To pull it off properly you briefly assemble a creative family with whom you live and breathe the piece, and the presentation - whether play, film, or exhibit - becomes an intensely vulnerable housewarming.
Putting together the creative team on my first show was comparatively easy to how my last one ultimately came together. Much like the life that surrounded it, the production was fraught with challenge and precarious dramas.
For all intents and purposes I had to fire two of my friends who were in notable positions but never lifted a finger. My original stage manager broke up with my lead actor and promptly quit the show, leaving us without a co-captain. The assistant stage manager left due to distress and unsettled personal matters between herself and the actor whose baby she was carrying. My lighting designer completely dropped the ball during the last few weeks of production, leaving a scramble to find a replacement that ultimately may have done a better job. For a show with so much demand for it, our effects make-up artist was indeed a late find. To say little of certain key props and set pieces which were still being mimed until the last week of rehearsal.
Yet the show came together for the audience with such overwhelming aplomb that we received unsolicited reviews as far out as Jacksonville and were told it was the best show done in Gainesville in a long time. It was intensely demanding on cast, crew, and in many cases the audience.
So here I am again - back at the bottom of the hill. Anything worth doing has its share of challenge. With the current climate that has followed such a drastic change of social orbit and the ensuing circumstantial dissolution of many a friendship, I have found myself with the thankless task of attempting to cull together a team for my new show from fragments of the ones that came before and plenty of individuals I barely know and ones who I am hoping will emerge from the woodwork.
The process is slow going, but steady. The auditions are in one month. The show opens in fourteen weeks.
Putting together the creative team on my first show was comparatively easy to how my last one ultimately came together. Much like the life that surrounded it, the production was fraught with challenge and precarious dramas.
For all intents and purposes I had to fire two of my friends who were in notable positions but never lifted a finger. My original stage manager broke up with my lead actor and promptly quit the show, leaving us without a co-captain. The assistant stage manager left due to distress and unsettled personal matters between herself and the actor whose baby she was carrying. My lighting designer completely dropped the ball during the last few weeks of production, leaving a scramble to find a replacement that ultimately may have done a better job. For a show with so much demand for it, our effects make-up artist was indeed a late find. To say little of certain key props and set pieces which were still being mimed until the last week of rehearsal.
Yet the show came together for the audience with such overwhelming aplomb that we received unsolicited reviews as far out as Jacksonville and were told it was the best show done in Gainesville in a long time. It was intensely demanding on cast, crew, and in many cases the audience.
So here I am again - back at the bottom of the hill. Anything worth doing has its share of challenge. With the current climate that has followed such a drastic change of social orbit and the ensuing circumstantial dissolution of many a friendship, I have found myself with the thankless task of attempting to cull together a team for my new show from fragments of the ones that came before and plenty of individuals I barely know and ones who I am hoping will emerge from the woodwork.
The process is slow going, but steady. The auditions are in one month. The show opens in fourteen weeks.
invisible man.
Twenty days have passed since my last post. This is an especially long time, given the frequency of my writing over the past six months. It has been an exhaustive stretch of time, over the course of which I have been doing my damnedest to keep ahead of the proverbial eight ball.
The demands of working at a corporate business that is open seven days a week and continues to add obtuse requirements to every customer interaction and is quick to put jobs on the line can put its strain upon anyone's shoulders. Add in the desperately under-staffed aspect that has become the condition of the last five weeks at my location and it's no wonder one day is hard to distinguish from the next.
Toss in zero recognition for all of the ways I have helped to keep things together during this Lord of the Flies period while our figurehead and accidental pseudo-manager (think President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica) has stumbled through operational bits and bauble with his usual blinders on. I have seen the numbers. I know that I have been doing far more than my share of the work with no notice.
It's enough to wear a guy down.
The demands of working at a corporate business that is open seven days a week and continues to add obtuse requirements to every customer interaction and is quick to put jobs on the line can put its strain upon anyone's shoulders. Add in the desperately under-staffed aspect that has become the condition of the last five weeks at my location and it's no wonder one day is hard to distinguish from the next.
Toss in zero recognition for all of the ways I have helped to keep things together during this Lord of the Flies period while our figurehead and accidental pseudo-manager (think President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica) has stumbled through operational bits and bauble with his usual blinders on. I have seen the numbers. I know that I have been doing far more than my share of the work with no notice.
It's enough to wear a guy down.
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