Daily Goal: Prepare the theater for the opening of the Tempest and attend Assassins choreography rehearsal. Today, we focused more on the appearance of the theater, rather than doing much business work. Over the past couple weeks, there has been a lot of work being done in the Studio. Because of this, there has been a cart full of tools upstairs and the floor very dirty. We went through an emptied all of the trashes, restocked the paper towel in the bathroom, and finally vacuumed the lobby. Then, Madison and I looked through the press photos taken for the Tempest last night. There were 12 total and we chose 7 to compile into a video to show in both lobbies. They usually only use 6 photos from the studio play, mixed in with whatever show show photos from the Mainstage. But since there is not show on the Mainstage right now, Madison said that we could choose up to 8 photos from the Studio. After they were choses, Madison burned the video of them onto a dvd and we switched out the disc in all three dvd players. After that, I was asked by another staff member to help with putting up a decorative element in the Studio lobby. The other day, he had asked Madison if a long time volunteer could pull out some old studio brochures because he wanted to hang them up. He gave me brochures from 2011-2017 and I taped them up on the wall above the concessions stand. After a bit of troubleshooting while up on a ladder, I was able to fit four brochures across and there will be room for four rows of them. Some of the other staff members were discussing what to do when they run out of room. The main idea being just take down 2011 and put up the new one and so forth. But they don’t have to decide for another 9 years. Today was pretty much all choreography. However, there is not a lot of actual “dancing” in the show, maybe a step here and there, so it was the director and choreography working on it together. They were choreographing the opening number which is a 10 minute long song and each 10-15 seconds is a new story. The director walked over and told me that “blocking this many things with this many people is always hard.” However, it was less stressful because they could be on the Mainstage so they were not squished together, they actually had a pretty accurate amount of space. The biggest difficulty was that it’s practically one person singing the entire time, so this one guy has to lead all of the action and remember all of the sequencing in order for the number to run smoothly. That leaves the rest of the cast to be standing around while they are blocking/choreographing steps for this one person. Despite this, they got the entire number roughly blocked. They need to go through and polish many moments but they have a base which is important. So they ran through the number about 3 times, and then filmed it so the cast can watch and practice. Then they moved on and polished and already choreographed number. For this number, they sang through with the cast recording and the music director playing on piano. It took a minute to get it right because the original cast recording and the revival are in different keys. The cast is using the revival books so they are used to that, but in the beginning they started to use the original cast recording. They said they choreographed this on Monday and I don’t know the last time they ran through the music. It took a couple of runs but they settled in nicely. That just proves that practice really does help. The second song was a lot of polishing rather than making up choreography, but at the end they still filmed it. However, they didn’t have anyone else to film it, so I used my phone. One of my next tasks will be to get that uploaded to drive and shared with their stage manager. Reflection: Today was mainly focused on the appearance of everything. With Tempest having an audience tonight, the theater had to look good. It’s something audience members expect, but I never knew how much the staff did it as compared to a cleaning lady. Choreography is also somewhat about appearance. It’s what you see if you don’t pay attention to the words, and sometimes it tells the story better.
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AuthorSince 2010, my family and I have been very involved with the Long Beach Playhouse. ArchivesCategories |