Well, dear readers, we have survived our cue-to-cue, which took a long time, but we got the show written. It’s not the way I like doing tech, but they have their way of doing it and that’s part of the deal. What I like to do is have my lighting designer write his cues – then I come in and we go through all of them and if I have any notes he addresses them and we move on – it takes all of about three hours to do it, if that. Then the cast comes in and we run the show without stopping. He takes his notes, makes adjustments, and only THEN do we do a cue-to-cue, basically for the stage manager to get their stuff in order – and that usually takes a couple of hours and then all that’s done and you haven’t had the cast standing around for ten hours, doing nothing but doing the beginning, middle and end of a song or sketch or whatever. But this other way is how a lot of folks do it, i.e. the cues are written as we go, which is very time consuming and not a good use of the actor’s time. And so it was – we began at eleven-thirty and didn’t finish until eight. There’s still stuff they have to do – two moving lights went out, a couple of things have to be refocused and a couple of lights have to be added. So, for me personally, it wasn’t that enjoyable a day other than it was great to see the projections and the lighting is lovely when it’s all working properly. That’s the other thing – it wasn’t just writing the light cues, it was getting the projection cues in order, too. The projections and how they work can be tricky in terms of not having them be distracting, but we’ve come up with a pretty good way to never have them switching on lyrics, but always on a vamp or interlude – that works really well. Here’s a little sneak preview of the projections on our fun set.
I only got about four hours of sleep and so I had a headache and my throat began to feel a little sore, which is what always happens when I lack sleep – but I was popping Sambucol and Airborne consistently and hopefully I’ll be fine. I didn’t have time to do much of anything before moseying on over to LACC. When we took lunch I went to a place across the street called Big Mama’s and Big Papa’s pizza. I ordered two slices and it was like an entire damn pizza. I took it back to the theater building and gave some away – I was famished so I ate it, but it was pretty disgusting. After we finished, I stopped at Jerry’s Deli and got a bowl of chicken soup to take home. I ate it all up whilst watching a bad thriller called Echelon Conspiracy, which, it turns out, I’d seen about five years ago – I know that because I searched the title in our notes archive and I’d written about it.
Today, I’ll hopefully arise after a good night’s beauty sleep. Our call is noon for a one o’clock start, and I informed everyone that I wanted the run-through done with no stops, no matter how many cues aren’t called correctly or what goes wrong. I intended to do a second run-through but was informed by a cast member he had to leave by four. Not sure I understand how that can be, but I may just run it and have someone walk his track – we simply don’t have the time to spare and have very few runs left before we’re in front of an audience. I’ll talk about the other drama that’s going on when the dust has settled from it, but I can tell you we were either going to have to cut Doug Haverty’s act two monologue (he actually has two in that act) or have someone JUST do that monologue and nothing else in the show – to that end, our ASM, who’s really good, said he could learn it and do it, so we’re giving him that opportunity and we’ll see how it goes. He was all over the script while we were doing our cue to cue and he says he already knows the first page or so.
Tomorrow we have a day of rest and, baby, I will rest. Monday we have our first dress rehearsal, Tuesday our second, Wednesday our final dress with some invited folks, Thursday our preview, and Friday we open and begin our run.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, have a run-through, clean up stuff, and hopefully do a second run-through. I’ll eat something at some point, I’m sure. And do send some excellent vibes and xylophones for my throat to not be sore when I arise. It’s really minor right now and I just need it to go away. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite paranoid thrillers in books and film? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have the cue to cue out of the way out of the way so that we can now run the show run the show without stops without stops.