Sometimes I Feel Like A Fatherless Color

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I don’t know how it found its way to my backstage, but I came across a booklet from Apollo Design that really show the company has a sense of their customer’s needs and seek to add value to their products. They have what they term Playbooks which provide a scene by scene break down with gel and pattern suggestions of some of the most popular plays high schools and community theatres perform.

They admit that the options they offer are among the safest choices a lighting designer can make. They also can’t offer guidance about placement of instruments and intensity of light since they can’t know the needs of every theatre. But for the high school teacher who has volunteered to direct the fall play and knows nothing about choosing gel colors, the booklets can remove quite a bit of anxiety. Even if you aren’t directing any of the plays they cover, you can get a sense of how the design theory you might read in a text book has been put into practice in specific instances.

You can download pdf versions of specific Playbook sections here. As an example of the general guidance they offer, for The Glass Menagerie, the notes state:

“Smoky, red glow” – mentioned in the Amanda and Tom argument scene. The colors should not be malevolent or suggest violence. It should be a subtle indication of frustration and tension”

Another example is in scene 3 the booklet provides guidance for different colors on the fire escape, living room, bedrooms and dance hall.

Although their skills far outstrip those of the people who would use these booklets, my technical crew thought the booklets were a great idea and have been thumbing through them for the last week.

We did get a little chuckle though from their political correct renaming of Bastard Amber, one of the most often used gel colors around. It was created by mistake when a guy was trying to create a batch of regular amber. Bastard Amber ended up being generally a better color choice and more widely used than regular Amber. The two leading gel manufacturers, Rosco and Lee both have the color in their swatch books.

Apollo on the other hand calls the color Fatherless Amber. Given that they have a Dominant and Submissive Lavender, we can’t imagine they are complete prudes.

If you want to have a bit of fun, ask your tech director if you can see their gel swatch books. You can find some amusing names for colors in there. Given that Rosco and Lee have created proprietary colors that the other hasn’t been able to reproduce, you can have fun looking through both. Like some famous painters who have created their own paint shades, lighting designers have asked that unique colors be created for them and so you will find some colors named after notable theatrical folks. Be warned that there are also a lot of mundane boring colors in there as well though you will probably wonder at the contradiction of shades like No Color Blue.

Brother May I?

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Okay another cautionary tale. I swear that I am not trying to emulate Jason Heath’s wild gig stories. This stuff is just falling into my lap. The drama director, tech director and motley band of collaborators have been meeting recently and having exciting discussions about our Fall drama production. It has gotten easy to get caught up in the energy so I keep forgetting a crucial point. We don’t have the rights to do the show yet.

The show isn’t currently in print but the playwright has said we can perform it. It will be something of a coup for us–but only if this permission is communicated to the playwright’s literary agent. I have asked my assistant theatre manager to keep an eye on me to make sure I don’t forget this crucial fact and list the show in our brochure or something. He then related this great story on that topic to me.

It seems he was in rehearsals for an off-Broadway play and the producer invited the playwright’s brother to view the final dress. As the playwright was deceased, the brother administered all of the rights. After the show the brother was very critical of the directing and the casting decisions. He may have been within his rights to complain about the issues if the performance license stipulated details about how the show should be presented. But we will never know because the brother finished by pointing out that the producer never requested the rights for the show.

The producer essentially told the brother that she assumed since the brother and she were of the same race and the play dealt with issues facing their shared race, the rights would naturally have been granted. The brother refused to grant the rights and the results of many weeks of rehearsal was never seen by an outside audience.

Even with the concepts of intellectual property blurring, there were a lot of mistakes made here. Not the least of which was that you shouldn’t try performing anything in the heart of Manhattan without securing the rights even if you are smart enough not to invite the executor of said rights to your show. This is not to say you are safer flaunting licenses the further you are from NYC. There are plenty of stories of vacationing playwrights and agents gasping in horror at the liberties taken with scripts in both sanctioned and unsanctioned productions.

The assumption that blood is thicker than money or least permission was also probably ill-advised.

It is likely that the playwright wasn’t terribly specific about how his play was to be directed and cast. The brother’s problem most likely started with the fact the rights hadn’t be granted and every other little dislike became enlarged as fuel for the complaint. The guy who taught me about the presenting business talked about the same thing in reference to horror stories we heard about performers who were absolutely sweet to us. The bizarre comments we heard about probably wasn’t the root complaint but merely one of many expressions of dissatisfaction about the absence of things their riders specified should be present.

Hopefully we will be granted the rights to perform the show we want to do in the Fall so I can relate the interesting way the script fell into our hands. Not to mention how our excited, creative madmen and women manage to execute the show.

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

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During a meeting I had today I was reminded of a series of problems I had with a group of traveling artists some time ago. I think enough time has passed that I can talk about it without revealing the identity of the group to any but the most ingenious of researchers.

One of the things I am often most anxious about when a performing group arrives is that they won’t find the arrangements we have made suitable to their needs. Following the advice of the man who trained me in the business, I am pretty meticulous about advancing a show with a road manager. I double check the details of a rider just in case personnel changes result in different dietary or technical needs. It isn’t foolproof but generally the worst that happens is the group arrives and says, “Oh, you must have the old rider,” and accommodates what is usually the lack of something minor.

I am also upfront about anything we can’t provide as soon as the topic comes up. If I suspect there might be a problem brewing with something, I send off an email confirming conversations so that I have it in writing and time stamped. In one case, I reiterated a fact in three different emails because it didn’t seem to be sinking in to the guy’s brain. Fortunately, it did before he arrived.

There was an instance where despite a lengthy conversation with the road manager the group had issues with the food, hotel and transportation after they arrived. The only thing that didn’t emerge as a problem was the technical equipment we provided. What contributed to the problem was that the agent and the road manager apparently did not communicate the information to the artists. The artists did not communicate their needs with the road manager or have them written into the contract. What seemed strangest to me was that they had been touring for years upon years and hadn’t ironed these details out. There were plenty of “you must haves” listed in the contract but a lot of basic details omitted, too.

The night before the group arrived the road manager called and said that the group would like to exercise the option I had mentioned (and expected them to exercise) a month earlier and have their rooms upgraded to suites. They would pick up the cost difference. So I scramble and as luck would have it, there are enough suites available. I am also asked to make a dentist appointment for the first business day after the concert for a group member who is having a problem with a tooth. Even more amazingly, I find someone at a dentist office near the hotel that late at night and make the arrangements during the specific time frame the performer requested.

When the group arrives, we go to the venue and I am asked to go grab food for the group because they hadn’t gotten to eat before their flight and their technical director doesn’t want them leaving the theatre. (Come to find out, they went swimming instead of eating earlier that day.) Later when dinner arrives, we discover the caterer has decided to embellish a little and stuffed the entree with crab. One of the group won’t eat it because of the crab.

Now my mother is deathly allergic to shellfish and has almost died on a number of occasions. The two questions about food I specifically address is seafood allergies because of her and vegetarian requirements because the term means different things to different people. There were no allergies of any sort mentioned. So off I go for two more meals because one of the other people decides that since I am going anyway they would rather have something else.

An hour before curtain the road manager comes and asks if I can move them to another hotel. Now note that at this point, they haven’t checked in to the rooms I upgraded for them the day before. The reason is due to a minor feature, the lack of which I revealed to the road manager a month prior. Since I had made the reservations month earlier to secure good rates during high season and a purchase order had been issued to cover the estimated cost at that hotel, there was nothing I could do.

I think they secretly wanted to stay at a specific hotel because they ended up staying there on their own dime which equaled four times the amount they would have paid for the upgraded rooms I arranged. Unfortunately, due to the fact I had canceled the rooms hours before they were to be occupied, I ended up paying for them. Fortunately, the hotel took pity on me and only charged me the regular room rate rather than the suite rate.

After the show, I discovered that instead of one trip to the airport, they had changed their plans and would now be leaving at four different times. The next day was a non-travel day for the company and all seemed well. No messages at all from the group. Still, after I went home I checked my voice mail and email regularlly for problems. Then at 11 pm I got a call at home (a number I didn’t give them) from the road manager saying the group wanted to alter their pick up times.

That was about the end of the troubles, fortunately. If I recall, the performance was great. The audience loved it and had no clue what was happening behind the scenes. The one thing I appreciated was that they let the road manager do all the talking. Maybe it was because they didn’t like confrontational situations. But I was glad that as I drove them to the hotel I didn’t book, they didn’t try to explain themselves. They kept thanking me and my staff for all we did and talked about how grateful they were. I grinned and bore it while looking forward to their departure thinking all the while that if they were really grateful, they would stop making my life a living hell. Revisiting a frustrating topic while driving would probably not have been a good idea so I was just as happy to have them ignore that elephant in the room.

Were I to offer any advice to people starting out and those who have been lucky enough not to have a couple days like these. This was one of those fluke occurrences that transpire despite your diligent efforts to address issues well in advance. In fact, good advance planning allowed the situation not to get worse. The night of the performance everything that I would usually wander around checking on was completed by staff and volunteers doing their jobs. That left me the time to address these problems without overtly freaking out. Following this incident, I am sure I annoyed the next few road managers coming through on tour to no end double and triple checking their requirements. But I guarantee you that everyone has been happier that I have wanted to be better safe than sorry.

Not As Bad As Reported

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For those who have been eagerly awaiting a post on the implications of the chicken dance at weddings on the greater culture as a whole, I am sorry to disappoint you, I didn’t gain any insights while at my sister’s wedding. I don’t even think they played the chicken dance, much to my relief.

I did have a brief conversation with my other sister’s mother-in-law who founded a social service non-profit and is approaching retirement in the next 18 months. I asked her about the succession planning she was doing since that has been on my mind of late. Pretty much every element mentioned in the reports from the Myer Foundation and Building Movement held true. It was interesting to actually speak to someone about these trends having read so much about them.

In her organization, the budget was about $200,000 too small to necessitate having the type of person on staff who would be groomed to take over. None of the other people in senior management positions want to take over so her board will have to look outside to replace her. She also commented that since most people only stay with an organization 5-7 years, there hadn’t been a lot of opportunity to cultivate someone to succeed her. I was grateful to learn that in general, she didn’t really question the commitment of emerging leaders in her field to the work.

She had taken a seminar on Founders Syndrome which she had found quite valuable. She talked about having that problem with her board when many of the original members left. (The organization is going on 25 years old now.) She admits that her agency will probably have to deal with at least an off-shoot of this problem when she leaves. Some of the staff have said they are too old to get used to working with a new boss and will leave when she retires. While this will leave one less person who will resist the inevitable change a new executive director will bring, it also removes some of the institutional memory from the agency.

As with many of those in the aforementioned reports, she wonders if she can afford to retire as planned on what she has saved given the recent changes in the economy.

I don’t often get the opportunity to speak with people in the non-profit field outside of the arts at any length so it was interesting to hear so much of what I had read verified. When I read reports, I often forget that the trends being reported are cumulative of many respondents and that every element doesn’t apply to every organization out there. While my sister’s mother-in-law faced many of the challenges outlined in the reports I have read, her agency hasn’t experienced them all. Those they have encountered haven’t been as big a cause of concern.