Apr. 15th, 2013

howeird: (Danvers Sings)
Finished up Brigadoon with a night show Saturday and a Sunday Matinée, and then struck the set. The show still felt like a dress rehearsal, and chatting with other cast members who felt the same way we narrowed it down to a director who was all about the dancing, who did not pay attention to the acting.

When I directed Yeomen of the Guard at Stanford** many years ago, the first thing I did was direct traffic. Read more... )

This director did not give clear traffic signals. He blocked things in vague ways which made no sense, and in fact did away with the market fair with booths for each vendor and townspeople walking around the booths. Instead he gave each vendor a tray or a basket, and we were supposed to randomly walk around vending to each other.

And then there were the trees. four of them, 12' tall, 5' wide, on sliders, with person inside each of them to move them around onstage. The original blocking was for 8 much smaller trees which would be on carts that cast members would pull on and off stage. At no point did he count on having a stage crew, even though the theater group always has 4 to 6 people show up as stage hands. BTW, the trees were painted battleship grey. They were supposed to have been brown, which would have been easy because they were made from gluing brown cardboard and wrapping paper onto solid wood frames.

Long story short, the directing was incomplete, the set was incomplete, so the show felt incomplete.

The best part of the show was the orchestra. They were great. They got a huge applause every night at the start of Act II.
Striking the set was pretty easy, lots of people helped. The last two platforms were in the process of being taken apart when I left, my knee was killing me. And the director plus the two leading men were sitting in the audience not doing anything helpful by that time.

Decided not to go to the cast party for three reasons:

1. $20 for a BBQ buffet worth half that, back at the rehearsal hall/warehouse. With all the work the cast put into the show, I expect the organization to do better than that by us.

2. The ever annoying Stage Mangler would be there, being stupid and loud.

3. I would have said rude things.
Instead, I dumped my things in the car, grabbed the cell phone and wallet, walked a couple of blocks to my favorite bakery/café and had a napoleon and coffee while watching major eye candy traffic glide by - there was some sort of cosmetics convention in town.

Home, decided not to go shopping (I need bananas and ice cream and limes). Stripped the yellow microfiber sheets off the bed and put them in the wash, and made the bed with the blue ones. Kaan did not help, but Domino inspected the work later. My sister's quilt is back, but I really need to find someone to re-hem it. The hem is all frayed.

Dinner was a turkey pot pie and a Klondike bar.

And now I am going to trim my beard.

**The fellow who played one of the leading men in this show I gave his first major role to in Yeomen.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work. Tease boss for not showing up for the show (he said he had tickets, but this weekend was Songkran, so I knew Saturday night was iffy and Sunday was impossible)
BASFA. Show off my Boskone program

Brigadone

Apr. 15th, 2013 11:08 pm
howeird: (Default)
Last night I chopped my beard down to just a we bit more than stubble, and this afternoon I got a haircut. No more Scottish villager.

She also trimmed my eyebrows.

Work today started with a little WTF. 9 am team meeting so the guys in Belgium can conference call at the end of their day. Boss completely forgot to dial in. He realized it 20 minutes later.

The Big News is the sale of the company to Arris will be final on Wednesday.Click here for details.  Arris CEO will be doing a town hall meeting from Horsham, PA, which is one of four HQs for Motorola home, and is showing how much he cares about the CA groups by holding it at 11 am EDT. :-(

A lot of the team meeting was discussion of this, and boss' boss has done a 180 and is now certain we will be moving. Where and when is not clear.

They sent us 401k enrollment links, but I probably will ignore that, since 401k investments are restricted to funds which make megabucks for the fund managers and major losses for the employees. It may be time for me to look into a Roth IRA. I have a regular IRA which I am old enough to withdraw from, but I have to play about 37% tax on that. Boo. Hiss.

Pretty light day at work since we are almost ready to release the two products I am involved with.

Yesterday I boxed up and printed a USPS label to send a wonky in-dash GPS/entertainment unit for repair. It had been sitting on the floor of the computer room for months, originally the plan was to sell it on eBay, but when I started to compose the listing I remembered that it wasn't just that the Garmin map update locked up the unit, which most people would not care about because they plug in their own POIs, but it also would intermittently reboot and set itself back to factory defaults. It's a killer unit, better to have it repaired first. I miss the Garmin GPS part, but not the soft keys which are too small to read. Anyhow, I forgot today was Tax Day and drove to the PO to drop that off, but the traffic jam was so bad I just turned around and went to Great Clips. I'll mail the package tomorrow.

Knowing I was going to miss lunch, I had packed a bologna and swiss sandwich.

Had some chats with Automation Guy about Stuff™. It was also "knee-jerk reaction" day for the engineering manager, who replied to two bugs I filed last week with questions which were already answered in the bug reports.

Home, did some Facebooking, played with the cats, then headed for BASFA. It was a fun meeting, I almost met my pun quota. Got major laughs for my review of being in Brigadoon, and the auction brought in a good price for the tin of Scottish whiskey fudge I'd brought.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
TheatreWorks' musical version of The Importance of Being Ernest. Janice has season tickets with her neighbor, neighbor couldn't make it.

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howard stateman

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