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Oh hey a theatre thread, this is exactly what I needed today  Right now my life basically centers around involvement with my local civic theatre. I'm from a sorta small town and a few months ago I decided that my project for the next few years is going to be trying to grow the arts scene around here a little by expanding the talent base and audience at the theatre. Right now I'm working on three projects, one of which is the first I've worked production on, and it's making me the teensiest bit crazy, but I'm having a blast.I'm in a weird situation with one of the plays I'm working on and I'm not sure how to handle it. The short version is that we're doing a play about women who served in Vietnam and in the script, one of the women is black. It is clearly stated in several places throughout the script, including her first monologue -- quote:Afterwards she calls me aside and says, "Oh, sorry about this Steele, but we can't have any Negroes in the band because you just don't blend in!" 1950! My first touch with the American Armed Services. I think they didn't have many people audition or something because they cast a white lady for it and removed all references to racism from the script. I pretty much think that's bullshit and they should just keep looking until they find someone. However, it's not really my call to make. I'm having difficulty deciding whether I should approach the director about this or not. He and I have a good working relationship and offstage he basically treats me like I'm his adopted child, but at the same time I realize that going to a director and saying "hey I'm pretty sure you brutally miscast this role and may want to rethink that" is rude. Everyone working on the show takes it really seriously and I know the production staff all want it to be as accurate and sensitive as possible. I think it's just a matter of only having done small-town theatre where like everyone's a WASP and not really knowing that whitewashing is a thing. I guess my specific question here is, how would you handle this situation? Keep quiet and just do the show, or go to the director and talk to him about it, and if that option, how would you approach that conversation so as not to hurt anyone's feelings or call their judgment into question?
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Jul 11, 2013 22:37
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 22:08 |
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r0ff13c0p73r posted:It depends on the type of people you're working with. Theatre has a very specific hierarchy, but that tends to break down the less professional the theatre is. What is your job? Does it include giving the director creative feedback (Actor, Stage Manager, Assistant Director, Artistic Director, Designer could all be such a job) If it does not, it might not be a good idea to approach the director unless he asked for your feedback before. I'm an actress in this show, but this particular director and I are pretty close. The last show I did with him, he was attempting to cut another actor's line and I felt pretty strongly that it was an important line. I spoke up during the rehearsal and argued to keep the line, he ended up keeping it and thanked me later. He is a pretty collaborative director and respects me. My concern is that this is a casting decision, not just "do we cut or keep this line" and the casting decisions have already been made. If I sat down with him and said look, this is maybe a bad idea, think about calling so-and-so and asking her to do the part instead, I think he would take me seriously and at least strongly consider it. The problem is that the woman who is playing Steele is on the board of directors for the theatre and is basically off book at this point (she did the role as a staged reading earlier this year). I don't want to piss anyone off. I had my second rehearsal for this show tonight and after having heard that character's opening monologue for a second time I'm even more convinced that we would be doing the play a disservice by having Steele played by a white woman. Colorblind casting, sure, but considering the themes of this play, I feel really uncomfortable that any discussion of racism has been completely removed from the script. It's also kind of uncomfortable to hear White Lady read the "southern black woman" pronunciations of words as written in the script ("new yawk" etc). uggggh I just can't decide what to do.
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Jul 12, 2013 04:09
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We have a couple understudies stepping in for two performances this weekend. One has no experience. The other has a zillion lines. We had a pickup rehearsal last night and it was horrifying. So, we have enlisted one of the makeup guys as a prompter. None of the shows I've worked on have used a prompter, so I don't really know what the procedure should be. We won't have a chance to rehearse with the prompter. It's on me to inform them of their duties. What should I tell them? Any way to make it easier on cast members who have never used a prompter? Edit: someone added acetone to our spirit gum. Is there a way to save it? Every person in the cast wears some sort of prosthetic. Uggggggh... Look Under The Rock fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 00:39
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Princess Nebula posted:This is probably too late, but your spirit gum is screwed. Acetone can take off spirit gum- adding it to the stuff will kill it, or has in my experience. I would go ahead and buy a new bottle or two. Also, what show are you doing where everyone wears a prosthetic? Curious. We were doing The Hobbit. All the dwarves had beards, trolls had fake foreheads, goblins had noses, elves and hobbits had pointed ears. I'm using an app to read forums but I will try to figure out how to post an image.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:02
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http://imgur.com/a/CrOQL There's an album with a few pictures.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:10
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I get to direct my first show (I've been an actor, stage manager, assistant director, and now a producer) and I think my biggest weakness is going to be timing everything. It's a two-person cast with a short-ish script featuring three-page monologues. I'm really excited, the script is insanely cool, and I'm being allowed to basically run things however I want as long as I've got a show ready by the end of May. But there's my problem -- I have no idea how much rehearsal time is needed. I'm not doing typical auditions at this point; I'm more interested in finding people who connect to the script and who won't get discouraged if the audience is kinda meh about it (small town, experimental theatre, blah blah). Generally our theatre does 6-8 weeks of rehearsing, I'm concerned that with the giant monologues I may want to budget more time for it. At the same time I don't want the material to get stale for the actors. Rehearsal space isn't an issue at this point, minimal set, props are mostly things I have in my apartment right at this moment. Any advice on rehearsal schedules would be super helpful. I generally don't even know what day of the week it is.
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Oct 3, 2013 06:03
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Max22 posted:How long is short-ish? 6-8 weeks sounds like it might be verging on too much time as it is, unless there are other factors at play like the skill level of the performers, the number of hours available per day to rehearse, etc. etc. The script is 48 pages. Maybe 6-8 weeks is too much, I guess they normally use that schedule for plays with larger casts. The performers will be skilled for sure, and I'm thinking two-hour rehearsals 3-4 times per week. Whoever recommended coming up with a schedule, that's what I'll do, I just don't really have any concept of how long it should take to get everything nailed down. I'm pretty quick with memorization but that's partly because I have no life and just sit around and run lines with nothing distracting me.
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Oct 16, 2013 18:52
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Last week's production meeting: "Okay so it sounds like we're right on task, nope, there's nothing else we need for now, everything looks pretty great!" Last night's rehearsal: "Oh poo poo we need a stage manager RIGHT NOW and it has to be someone who can handle wrangling 30+ children under the age of 12! Also could you be the one to call the person we want for set painting crew chief because she won't work with most of the people at this theatre? It'd be best if she could be at the production meeting in two days. Oh and please help work on costumes on Sunday and props Saturday kthxbye!!!!" I really love crunch time but I have no idea how I'm going to find a stage manager for this show...
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Nov 14, 2013 02:22
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rantmo posted:There wasn't a stage manager lined up during preproduction? Traditionally the assistant director continues on as stage manager at this theatre. The AD for this show is in the cast though. I've been so busy during rehearsals that I somehow didn't catch onto that and nobody brought it up until the other day. I love this theatre so much and part of the charm is the disorganization. Also this particular show has been fraught with weird road blocks. Our props guy was admitted to a psych facility last week and hadn't brought anything in yet so we all had to band together to bring in various props. Also we have someone learning the guitar specifically for one scene, and I'm learning the accordion. Tonight's drama was trying to get the pianist to send me the list of demands she insists she sent me already (and definitely didn't). This is my first time as producer and I'm learning as I go, but we also have a newbie director and a newbie tech chief so there's been a bunch of stuff that should have been there from the start and really wasn't. Either way I'm having a blast. Lots of work outside the theatre itself and basically no down time during rehearsals. Just the way I like it :-)
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Nov 15, 2013 05:39
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r0ff13c0p73r posted:When you find a theatre that is relatively organized and still has no down time during rehearsals, that's when the fun truly begins. That would be awfully nice. The theatre I work with is a civic theatre in a small city. The next city over has a wonderful civic theatre and I'm hoping to get involved with their shows at some point. This place is a five minute bus ride away though, so I've kind of made it my goal to work really hard there, get the calibre of the shows up, and pull in new talent to grow the program. My hope is to learn everything I can there and maybe go on to do something professional, once I figure out what I do best (I'm hella good at stage management. Not so great as a producer although it's fun).
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Nov 16, 2013 02:26
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SatansBestBuddy posted:We have lost an actor. We lost an actress who had two roles. Neither of the roles had more than a couple lines, but we found out about it on the day of our first dress. The part of this that's amusing to me is that she was in her 40s and a 12-year-old girl from the chorus asked if she could take over one of the roles. I was impressed by the ballsiness of asking so I told her yes, and she's done an awesome job. She learned Jingle Bells on the guitar overnight and is always the first person in costume. I hope she sticks with acting, she's clearly talented and guts will take you far, right?
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Nov 30, 2013 05:21
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OSheaman posted:Yeah, I'd say she has the bug. This theatre is really cool because most of the veterans there are intensely supportive. They recognize that everyone has something bigger in their lives that they're working on and most will try to help you do your part when working on a show (example -- I don't have a driver's license and the bus stops near my house shut down during this production, so I had people picking me up and dropping me off every night). The problem is that they are really bad at getting new talent in there; there's kind of a big focus on PAY YOUR DUES. Even as a talented actor it's hard to break into and can be really discouraging, if you want to design sets or be a stage manager or director or producer it's even harder -- they want to have seen you work on several shows before you're trusted with any large responsibilities. I get why they do this, but they're burning out the talented veterans and never bringing anyone new in. One of the producers there shares my philosophy about what the theatre needs (skew some shows to a different audience than our normal middle-aged WASP crowd, bring in new talent with a mentor system, focus on growing the program instead of allowing it to comfortably stagnate) and being kind of loud about how I think things could change has begun to pay off. I've been empowered to start shaking things up around there, sometimes with success (I brought a couple high schoolers in as stage managers on this show and they've been great) and sometimes not (the tech guy I picked had no idea what he was doing and actually SKIPPED the tech rehearsal). I get to direct a show that will run next spring and I'm hoping to do it in such a way that it'll show the artistic committee that there's an audience in our town for stuff that's on the weird side and that lack of experience sometimes just means that you need decent mentors to grow latent abilities. But to me, if something means enough to someone that they'll approach you and ask for it, why not give them a chance to be successful? I have been really excited to see the girl who asked for that role step into things. She'll leave this show having had a great experience rather than just being one of the older kids in the choir with no lines, she got to challenge herself a bit and be more involved with the production. If you can sleep through your role but it's still sucking up all your time and it's kind of thankless, of course you're not going to come back. I think part of a supportive program should be finding the people who REALLY REALLY want it, and helping them to find achievable goals within each production. Blah blah I could probably go on about this stuff for hours because it takes up so much of my thought processes. Has anyone ever done the show Trap for a Lonely Man? It's the next one we're doing and I'm auditioning tonight, but I don't know much about it besides the synopses I can find online. Trying to decide if I want a part or if I'd rather ask to be on a crew.
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Dec 2, 2013 21:00
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I'm directing a play right now. It's a script I fell madly in love with about a year ago, obtained permission to stage, and have basically been working my rear end off for it ever since. I'm in a really bad place with it right now, though. Put bluntly, my producer is a slacker. I approached pretty much everyone I could think of to help me get this play on our stage and nobody wanted to touch it (it's on the experimental side and the theatre I work at is very, very traditional/conservative). There was only one person who was interested and had enough pull to get a budget behind the idea, so I ended up working with him and it's been disappointing ever since. Nothing is getting done on time. We've been in rehearsals since February and it's only been in the last couple weeks that I've started to get tech people on the project (which is bad as this is a fairly complex show on the tech side). We still don't have a light designer and the other day when I bugged producer guy about it, he said that he was planning to do it himself. That idea is giving me an ulcer. Aside from things not getting done, the budget I was promised isn't there. We have no props and it's looking like I'll have to pay for promotional materials out of pocket. He informed me that we'd be able to rehearse on the stage after a certain date and yesterday I found out that the person directing the next show to go up has been planning to use that space right up until tech week. I'm pulling out my hair at this point. I've talked to this guy several times about how I'm worried about how far behind we are. I know this is kind of the nature of theatre but I spent so much time planning out every detail I could and it feels like everything's falling apart because this one guy can't get his poo poo together. I don't know how to handle it -- setting deadlines hasn't worked, repeated reminders haven't worked (in fact, he's started ignoring my calls and messages). I feel like it might be too late in the game to try to find someone else as a producer. If I had the budget I was promised I could probably pull double duty as producer and director. I might lose half my mind in the process but something's gotta give. Any advice would be awesome. I don't want to pull the show, this is the first time I've been lead director on a play here, but I want to do this beautiful script justice and if something doesn't give it's going to be shoddy as gently caress. The elements just aren't there. I'm frustrated as hell.
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Apr 26, 2014 02:05
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True Tales of Incompetence: I now have 1000 promo cards that are misprinted and give the date of the show as 2004. The show involves time travel and I could conceivably come up with something tongue in cheek to write on the backs, but it's a glossy print and Sharpie pens don't work on them. oh my god.
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Apr 26, 2014 17:09
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 22:08 |
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Opening night of the play I'm directing and I'm hella nervous. I've been mentally working on this show (What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us) for a year now and we've been in production since February. Certain tech elements have only been in place for a week and I had to drag my boyfriend into running projections on it. (here's an album with photos from a dress rehearsal -- http://imgur.com/a/oJd9r) I know the actors are ready (although we had a situation last night where one of them almost passed out because he was dehydrated) but so much has gone wrong with the production that at this point I need to just keep telling myself it's gonna be okay. I've been working on this show 6-10 hours a day for the last few weeks and that's pretty insane for a civic theatre show that isn't even a main stage production. The whole "not main stage" thing has been pretty frustrating. The four of us who have been working on this faithfully (me, my two actors and my assistant director/stage manager) have done almost every thing that needed to be done -- people who are known for being skilled at tech didn't want to be involved with a technically complex show that was only going to run for one weekend. AD/SM did props and had to redo the projections almost from scratch because so many slides were wrong. One of my actors did the majority of hanging the lighting setup, I got a ten minute lesson on how to program a light board and created the cues myself (no experience in lighting, but nobody else was stepping up). I'm running sound on the show and there's no light up in the sound booth so for the last two weeks I haven't been able to take notes. Our production hasn't been promoted much through the theatre, which I knew would happen, so I came up with a really ambitious promotional campaign that fell flat. We didn't have enough people working on it. If I'd realized I was gonna be doing the jobs of four different people I would have done things differently. Either way it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays with an audience. This play is dynamic and cuts through the fourth wall in some really lovely ways (like making toast onstage and talking about memories evoked by the smell, and teaching audience members to time travel). I have no idea how many people are going to be there tonight, but this is a show unlike anything that's been done in our area and I'm excited to be part of breaking new ground in this town's art scene (which mostly consists of galleries filled with photorealistic paintings of Lake Michigan). If you live in West Michigan you should send me a PM and I'll give you details . I'm pretty sure I've got a couple comp tickets left if you want to come see the show.
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Jun 12, 2014 19:16
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