I Heart NYC

So, my first day at work.

Met my Wardrobe Head, Mike, and I think we'll be great together. He told me entertaining stories about the weird dressers he's met on the road like the mother/daughter duo who couldn't read, and that we'll actually be set up outside in a tent (in a TENT) in Delaware because the theatre is too small for us. Things to look forward to... But it appears he and I have similar working styles and about the time we started making several simultaneous lists of things we needed to do, things we needed to buy and places we wanted to visit while in NYC, I knew we were going to get along.

We met up this morning and went to Pearl Studios, a huge building full of rehearsal rooms for auditions. NETworks, our production company, has rented multiple rooms in this building for the next several weeks to prep their touring shows. So we - The Producers - were there, across the hall was The Wedding Singer, the other direction was My Fair Lady, around the corner is administration and in between are several other shows holding auditions. So at any given time you have producers in suits dodging stagehands with boxes stepping around actors reading lines and singers warming up and wardrobe crew running hither and yon holding huge hats with feathers and wigs covered in sequins. BTW Chris, the swastikas have sequins on them. As is only right, right??

And this was load-in day for all the NETworks shows, which means sweaty exhausted stagehands were rolling huge wooden boxes - called gondolas - full of costumes and wigs up and down the hall and trying to find the proper rooms for everything. And since these rooms are not intended for gondolas and have drywall on 3 walls and one wall that's fully mirrored with beautiful hardwood floors, I kept flinching and looking away as we dug grooves into the walls and slammed the boxes up against the mirrors. Good thing NETworks is probably paying thousands of dollars to rent these rooms...

The fun part? Meeting the crews of the other touring shows and getting to see their costumes and wardrobe set-ups. You hear a lot of "What do you do when...?" and "Oh that's a genius idea for storing..." Everyone's nice, a lot of people have worked together before, some of them have had people jump ship on their show and join our show and vice versa so it was also a little gossip fest to get the low down on the new people to each crew. Very small world this touring business...

The crazy "you must be joking!" part was when we were told that we had to cram 16 gondolas into our tiny room only able to hold about 10 and then we also had to be able to walk around in said room AND hold fittings AND do alterations. Um, not so much. And meanwhile this nice man came in to cover the rehearsal piano, that lives in that space, with plastic, as if that was going to protect it from a huge wooden gondola gone careening across the room...

So we weeded things out of gondolas and sent the unused gondolas away and finally had a nice little space to work in and then My Fair Lady overflowed their space. We visited their wardrobe room and it's essentially a very small walking trail bounded on each side by HUGE tall gondolas crowded with costumes. They had maybe 12-14 gondolas in their room (no working space at all) and then had 3 more they didn't have room for. So now we're the "My Fair Producers" room containing costumes for both shows. Tomorrow we have hold our fittings in another room entirely because there's now no working space in our room.

But we got out around 4:30 and went to dinner. Ate at the Broadway Diner around Times Square and then walked around the city.

Rockefeller Plaza

Central Park

And completely inadequate pictures of Times Square. I can't seem to get a decent shot there. Too much going on. I might try to get a panorama sometime tomorrow.

There's also a rumor that this is fashion week in Bryant park, which would be SO great. But I think it's just a rumor...

Until tomorrow...