Vaudeville Rehearsal Day 22 - "Heads down..."

The morning is spent continuing yesterday's lighting plot, which is followed by the sound plot. There is still more work to be done on the lighting plot, but it will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

The actors arrive at around 1.30pm and go to get into costume for tech-ing. Chris and Lally are photographed by the newspaper on stage. They stand next to the infamous 'Machine of Unhappy;' (yes, it's as crazy as it sounds, and I imagine you'll get to see it in the paper).

The moment the actors arrive on stage in costume is exciting for everybody. Mark steps out first. What a great moment; everybody feels it. Wow.

Two hours later Chris says he's already numb to it and now he's just focused on the work needed to get the show into shape. The first audience will be in on Friday night.

Tech-ing a show can be really time consuming because every lighting cue, sound cue, action with a new prop, action associated with a new piece of set, every 'trick'; virtually everything that is not 'acting' is tested and worked through to be sure that everybody has it covered.

This tech time has a classic calm before the storm feel about it. The performers are generally the ones with the higher stress levels through the rehearsal period, but in tech time the pressure is transferred to everybody else, and the actors roll through the show at a medium energy while all the technical details are worked out.

As we expected there are some tricky technical challenges, which take considerable time to sort out. As each of these technical moments take shape it fills in some of the detail that Chris has been talking about in rehearsal. He might say, “At this point the something will do this thing we're planning,” but until you actually see it and feel it in the theatre it can be hard to comprehend the full power of it.

There are other things that unfortunately don't quite work in the tech run and need to be put off until a part of it is fixed or adjusted so it can work. There aren't many of those moments in the tech run, but the trouble sometimes is in knowing when to keep trying to get something to work and when to leave it and move on.

This concern is magnified because at this stage in the process, if something is left to later, later might never arrive and the element might end up being cut all together. Providing, of course, that the technical detail doesn't define a moment so important that it can't possibly be cut. But that can actually be worse; it's annoying to cut something because it technically doesn't work, it's a nightmare when that something can't be cut because it's vital, but it somehow doesn't quite work either.

As I said, fortunately, there are only a couple of problems that were put off for the sake of 'fixing.' Probably less than might have been expected for the level of technical detail in the show. Nevertheless, everybody would prefer there were none at all.

The day ends at 10.30pm and they've got about a third of the way into the second act. There's plenty left to do, but everybody agrees that it's been going well. The actors are super keen to get through it. Every minute spent working through technical details is a minute they can't run the scenes in the show, which is what they really want right now.

Tomorrow is the clincher, because after tomorrow, anything that's not working is just not going to have time to get fixed by the first preview. Of course, the Opening isn't until next Wednesday. But the public is still the public.

COMPETITION FOR TICKETS!!

Just a reminder. I've got two tickets to the best comment of today and tomorrow. They are to Sunday afternoon's preview at 5pm. Get on it now!! Click where it says 'Comments' below. (And send it to goodbyevaudeville(at)gmail.com too, so I can email you back.)

Vaudeville Rehearsal Day 21

Vaudeville Rehearsal Day 21. (Tuesday)

Yesterday the actors had the day off. With the performance schedule beginning this week the actors will be working nights, so Monday was a rest day. That doesn't mean that no work is happening on the show. The time away from the rehearsal room gives the rest of the team time to concentrate on the technical elements.

Tuesday begins with a run of the show in the morning and then another run of the second and third acts in the afternoon. Both of these rehearsals take place in the rehearsal room; I was a little premature in calling the end of the rehearsals in the Bagging Room in the most recent post.

There's going to be a lighting plot tonight and tomorrow morning. Chris tells the cast before the afternoon session that it's going to be predominately tech time after this, so they really need to hit their performances today.

As has already been mentioned, there is a lot of technical detail in this show, so we're going to need all of the tech time available to get the technical scenes into shape.

Creating a lighting design is an interesting process for anybody who's never seen it done. The lighting designer in collaboration with the director creates a lighting plan and supervises the rigging and the focussing of the lights. (The 'rig' is where the lights are hung. The 'focus' is where the light is pointed, and the quality of the light as it can be manipulated within the lantern.)

Then there is the 'plot.' In the 'plot' the lighting designer brings up each lighting 'state' that has been designed for each scene and transition. Then the director asks for lights to be higher or lower, or lights to be added or subtracted from the state. 'Walkers' mimic the movement of the actors on stage so everybody can tell what the scene will look like.

A good relationship between the lighting designer and the director is really important through this process. In many ways it's pain-staking, detailed work. A common conversation sounds like this;

Lighting Designer - “Scene 12. Lamp number 20 at 50%, 21 at 60%, 33 at 45%, 40 at 50...”
(He says this to the lighting board operator who drives the board)
Director - “Can we have the downstage area a bit brighter?”
Lighting Designer - “Okay. Let's change 20 to 60% and 21 to 60%.”
Director - “Can we remove that shadow on the edge of that wall”
Lighting - “Yeah, can you bring up 43 to 20 and drop 21 to 35.”

This basic conversation gets repeated in a variety of ways as they massage the states into shape. On large shows cues and states can run into hundreds. (I'm not sure how many cues Richard has plotted for Vaudeville.) And there's not a great deal of time to 'test' anything. If a state feels wrong or doesn't light the area that the actors play the scene in, the time in which to change things is limited. It's not negligible, but it's limited. And with big changes that require extra lamps to be rigged and focused, sometimes a choice has to be made about which changes of this are most important because there might not be time for them all.

Chris has worked with most of the design and technical team numerous times before, and it really shows when they're doing the plot. The communication is clear, the mood is relaxed and the they move through things with a great deal of efficiency. More important than that, the atmosphere and dialogue is more creative than it is functional.

Although there's a clear order of states that the team work through, and a lot of “Lamp 20 at 60, 30 at 40” etc, the work they do in this time is not nearly as linear as it sounds. There are lots of minor changes and tweaks across many elements of the show; the set, the physical patterns, the action of the actors, the props, as well as the lights themselves. This is all happening simultaneously at the same time as they work through each of the lighting states. Ideas come across many different aspects of the show that are 'banked' to keep working on if they have the time.

It's a tremendously exciting time. As lights are brought up for each state in the show, the stage begins to live and everybody gets their first glimpses of what the show is going to look like once it hits the stage. It's absolutely tremendous. The Beckett is looking incredible.