Kim’s Domain

Okay, I am way overdue for a posting, and now I have to remember what I did last week.

Well, last week was final dress and 3 performances of The Barber of Seville.  Not much to report there, the horse didn’t do anything bad onstage (we love you, Buster!) and everything went smoothly.  I never screwed up the house curtain, so that was good (it runs on a mechanical winch, so the SM runs the curtain instead of the fly op…if you take your finger off the button, it stops wherever it is, which happened during final dress but none of the performances).  I’ve decided I really like calling shows from backstage.  Did I already mention that in week 3?

Anyway, the major thing I dealt with last week was a little personnel dispute.  It wasn’t anything huge, just the SM for the other show and my fabulous ASM were not getting along very well.  So I acted as a mediary for a couple days until they managed to speak to each other, and now everything is fine.  I’ve never actually had to deal with a situation like that before, so that was a new one for me.  I’m actually pretty proud of how I handled it.  The SM came to me with some concerns about the ASM, so I went to her (who I have a good relationship with, so that was easy) and asked for her side of the story.  Then I reminded her that she has to treat the other SM with as much respect as she treats me and do as good work for him as she does for me.  She agreed and said she had already planned to try and talk to the other SM once tech was over.  And the next day she asked for a meeting with the SM, who then called me because he wanted to make sure she wasn’t disputing what he had talked to me about, and I assured him that she was aware her behaviour hadn’t been completely correct and wanted to talk to him about how they could work together better.  So they talked and everything seems to be fine now.  This was easy because I get along well with both parties already.  But it was still good experience because I have something in my bag of tricks to pull out should the situation ever arise again.

And that was really the only major thing I dealt with last week, other than having some time off to spend with my boy who came to visit me (yay!)

Tired, so I’ll make this short.

Things have been going very well.  This past week we mainly did work throughs and run throughs of each and the show.  Friday we moved into the theater.  Tech has been going very smoothly.  The one hiccup is that, due to union break rules and overtime rules (for various unions) we have not done a complete run through of the show in the theater once.  I’m not blaming the union rules, I’m a member of two, I think they’re a good thing.  We just don’t have much tech time.  Usually, other places I’ve worked, we get an entire evening for act 1 and then another evening for act 2 before we try to run the whole thing.  Here we have 2 days of tech with piano and then 2 orchestra dresses.  And the two days of tech are 3 hours, period.  Not a lot of time.  So basically I get one shot at calling the whole show before we have an audience.  A little nerve wracking, but I think it will be okay.

The big event for me was moving backstage yesterday to call the show.  I’ve never called a show from backstage before.  But it was a very smooth transition; I didn’t really have any problems.  I’m still getting used to which visual cues I can watch the stage to call and which cues I have to take watching the monitor, but it’s coming along. 

Everyone’s been telling me that I’ve been doing a great job.  Apparently the PSM they had last year wasn’t very organized, and I’m not sure how much opera experience this person had had before.  So I want to take this moment to thank all the great SM’s I’ve ever worked with since it is their example and their training I have had to follow (and you know who you are, although I doubt many of you are actually reading this blog).  So I’m feeling good.  My assistant has really come into her own now that we’ve moved into the theater.  I really haven’t had to worry about much of the stuff that she controls.

Tomorrow I’m going to start prepping for the next show, Fall of the House of Usher.  Wednesday is opening, the big test.  And then on Thursday David comes to visit for the weekend, yay!

When we first started staging rehearsals, Lisa, my assistant, turned to me with this wonder in her voice and amazement in her eyes.  She’d never heard people sing "like that" so up close before.  It reminded me of the way I felt the first time I was in a rehearsal for an opera.  The whole first day of rehearsal she couldn’t get over it and kept commenting on it.  She thought I found it annoying, but actually I got a big kick out of it.  She really has a lot of potential as a stage manager and I guess I’m secretly hoping I’ll recruit another one into the world of opera.  And her wonder reminded me what an awesome job I have, even though at times it seems hard and stressful and thankless.

Funny side note: the set designer, who is originally from France but now lives in Los Angeles, came to rehearsal today.  He was the entire topic of discussion for the first 20 minutes of dinner when I went out with my assistants tonight because he is VERY attractive and has a cute accent.  He actually asked me, possibly as a joke but I’m not entirely sure, if I would take his resume with me back to Chicago Opera Theater.  I think he would actually fit in great there so I’ll probably give him COT’s information.  That’s another reason I love this business: it’s so small!  As long as you’re good at what you do, that’s a good thing.

Okay, let’s see if I can recreate my brilliant insights from last night were lost in a system error.

This first week of rehearsals has been very interesting.  It all started with one of the singers showing up not completely prepared to music rehearsal.  As a result, I ended up scheduling coaching sessions outside of rehearsal hours in an attempt both to appease the upset conductor and help bring the singer up to speed.  This nearly led to a revolt by the accompanists who felt like they were being abused  The situation has more or less resolved itself at this point…except that now there are new issues.  The conductor is still upset, now because there’s some problem with instrumental scores that we were or were not sent (and were or were not ordered).  In addition, the publishing company of Show #2, which the second accompanist is music directing, sent two different versions of the score.  So the second accompanist for Barber is basically out of the picture since he’s working on making sure the company has the publishing company send us one version of the score for all singers and instruments, as well as the correct version of the score for all singers and instruments.  And he now has to learn the correct version of the score since the score he has been working off of to learn the show was the wrong version.  Therefore our ability to schedule coaching sessions is cut down because we only have one accompanist to coach in addition to playing all the staging rehearsals. 

This didn’t seem to be a problem…until a few days ago the conductor pulled the director into the hallway during a rehearsal to yell about how some of the singers don’t know the words.  We were staging the big finale of Act I, which as anyone who has done Barber knows is difficult and wordy in Italian let alone translated into English.  As a pre-emptive response, the accompanist handed me a list of names of people who we should schedule coachings for in the coming week.  Oy vey.

On top of all this, the conductor is, I feel, being a bit difficult in rehearsals.  I don’t know if he’s overly paranoid because of some of the unpreparedness, which is understandable (and apparently not actually a word, according to the Microsoft Word dictionary) but I think he goes too far.  He’s taking a lot of time out of our staging rehearsals to give notes and correct people, even when singers are marking because they’ve done a lot of singing in the past week.  He is an extremely talented musician and will be able to lift the musical performance of the opera to a higher standard, but there are times when I wish he would let us get through the staging before he interjects his notes.  But the dynamic between the director and conductor and the balance between staging time and musical notes time is getting better as we go on.  I think I have been doing a pretty good job of keeping rehearsals moving and keeping us all on track, at least in terms of actor herding and keeping the director going.  It’s been harder to keep things moving with the conductor except in instances where I need call a break, in which case I just call the break.

So getting back to my role in all of this, I’m feeling pretty confident after the first week.  I’m very lucky that I have such a competent and organized ASM.  I really have not been able to give my attention to props preset because of everything else that is on my plate, and Lisa has really stepped up to the plate in a way that allowed me to put props on a back burner.  However, I do need to be better about checking her work.  For the most part she’s been flawless, but there have been a few hiccups that remind that me that I can’t totally check out in this area.

Speaking of props, I was starting to get frustrated with the props designer because I hadn’t gotten any responses to my rehearsal reports.  But he called me today (it’s my day off, but whatcha gonna do) and gave me his schedule for the week and let me know that he has been busy but will get on my notes ASAP. So we’ll see how that goes.

And that’s the week’s news. 

Okay, I just spent half an hour writing a great blog entry about week two, and when I went to post it the page wouldn’t load, I couldn’t go back and I lost my entire entry. 

Too pissed to try again right now, maybe tomorrow.