My Fair Lady is taking over the world...
I wake up this morning (incidentally, I have my own room in this hotel and the bed is super comfy and really huge and the room is really tiny and the wallpaper looks like a china pattern. I'll post pics later. But we are also 2 blocks from Times square so we're in the middle of everything...) Anyway...
I wake up this morning, hit my snooze, doze off for another 10 minutes and then wake again to realize my alarm was set for an hour later than I intended. I now have 45 minutes to get ready and find something for breakfast before meeting Mike and getting downtown to Chelsea for our fitting at 10AM. So at 8:45 I'm standing in a long slowly moving line at Starbucks and finally I'm 2 people away from the front when the lights go out. There's no discernable reason as some things - like the registers - are still working but they can't run the espresso machines. So the guy in front of me gets served and I put in my order but as I'm talking another guy behind the counter tells the register guy that he's to stop taking orders. This is so clearly not good as I do not have time to run up two blocks to the other starbucks and stand in another long line. Nor can I face a 2 hour fitting without coffee. The register guy must have seen the panic in my face because he poured my venti coffee despite the orders not to. So I run out the door and make it back to the hotel to meet Mike just in time, thinking maybe I'll grab a bagel or something on the way.
We decide to take the subway. So we walk up a block to the station, get on the train and then realize it's going uptown not downtown. So we get off at the next stop - and by the way, the subway stations are underground, of course, and HOTTER than the fires of Hades, and humid with no moving air. You can literally watch people melt around you. So we get off the uptown train and run across the platform to catch what we think is the downtown train - some trains share a platform, running in opposite directions on either side of it, some trains run opposite directions down the middle with platforms on either side and apparently some run in the same direction on either side of a platform. It requires some attention being paid. And of course we got the latter with another train going uptown only this one was an express, which means it skips a bunch of stops. So there we are trying to get to 34th street and instead watching signs for 125th street fly by us. Sigh.
Finally we catch the right train and get to Chelsea and screech into our "shop" - the Fair Producers rehearsal room - with 10 minutes to spare before our fitting. Now remember all those extra My Fair Lady gondolas from yesterday? Well, despite all assurances to the contrary they are still with us. So now we have to move our fitting up the hall to the room reserved for Annie - a show that doesn't move in for another couple of days, and which is also crowded with My Fair lady shoe boxes, hat boxes and extra gondolas. That show is massive.
So I think we're all prepared and then Jim, the costume coordinator - the guy who takes over a touring show after it's already been designed, who doesn't seem to remember my name or care very much - comes in with his two assistants and the actor shows up. the next couple of hours went something like this:
Jim: Where are the hats? Mike, there should be hats.
Mike: Kaitlyn, can you go get some "First Night" hats in the extras gondola?
Kaitlyn (interior): What is "First Night" and which gondola is the "Extras gondola?"
Kaitlyn (exterior): a hat like that one *pointing*? Ok.
Kaitlyn runs off down the hall, paws through the gondola, finds a singular hat and runs it back to the room.
Jim: That's too small. Mike, we need to buy a hat.
Jim: Are these our only tie options? How come we don't have any shoes for this actor?
Mike and Kaitlyn: we'll go get them.
We run down the hall Kaitlyn looking for shoes and Mike searching for ties. Kaitlyn realizes, as she looks, that the boots are tiny little and the labels are written in some Asian characters. Mike informs her that those boots came from the Korean show (!) last year where the median shoe size for a man is a 6. Well, clearly that won't work when the median size for Americans is a 9 or so. So we have no shoes or boots that will fit this guy and the tie selection is rumpled, stained, stretched out or otherwise inadequate.
Jim begins to pull costume pieces off the rack and throw them directly into the garbage. Mike looks resigned, Kaitlyn slightly horrified.
Then the gondola discussion comes up. Somewhere along the line a producer decided that 17 gondolas for Producers costumes was too many. So the word comes down that we are to weed down the costumes until they fit into 8 gondolas. Well, this is absurd and laughable. The only way to weed out that many costumes is to cut whole characters from the show and then cut big scenes with huge costume pieces. Only this hasn't been done, nor has any official pronouncement come down from "the top" but now we're doing fittings for costumes that may end up getting cut anyway. only we don't know that. So we are all getting paid to show up, do fittings, make alterations and then maybe retire the costumes. THIS is why theatre can be so expensive... And during this fitting, Jim and his assistants are arguing about what could potentially get cut, which sweater they like better if they only get one, if it's possible to put the actor in one pair of pants for the whole show, etc. etc. while Mike and I run up and down the hall pulling out costume options only to get back to the room and discover that Jim's moved on to something totally different.
And I never got breakfast.
So you can only imagine my state of mind by noon.
Finally the fitting is over and we get to run out for lunch and Mike says "That went so much better than I imagined!!"
To say that jim is one of my least favorite people right now is a massive understatement.
The afternoon was mostly .uneventful. We had to move our fittings back into our rooms because the star of My Fair Lady - some British stage star - was showing up for her VIP fitting and needed a "closed set" situation and Jim's full attention. So we created space for our fittings by wheeling a Lady gondola into the hallway. One of the Pearl Studio execs sees us do this and says "you can't just leave that there! How long will it be there?" and Mike says "Oh, only 5-10 minutes" and then mutters under his breath "or a day or a month..." So we continued to try to reorganize our room and when we came back the gondola had been taken care of by the My Fair Lady people. So, success! Maybe we'll get rid of another one tomorrow... All the Lady wardrobe people are great but their stuff is like a hydra. I can't even imagine the situation when Annie comes into town.
We left late afternoon and headed out to the rehearsal studios and met some more people - accountants, stage managers etc. and then did some sight-seeing. We saw:
Ground Zero. Very underwhelming actually. The whole area is fenced off and then covered with green cloth so you can't see anything except through little holes that people have torn to be able to see. The pictures above are taken through those holes. There's no memorial either. Just signs talking about the new buildings under construction there. If you didn't know the history, it just looks like another construction site. I think it would have made me really sad and angry had I known someone who died on 9/11. As it was, it just felt anticlimactic and weird, like it was supposed to be a moving emotional experience and wasn't.
Night all :)
I wake up this morning, hit my snooze, doze off for another 10 minutes and then wake again to realize my alarm was set for an hour later than I intended. I now have 45 minutes to get ready and find something for breakfast before meeting Mike and getting downtown to Chelsea for our fitting at 10AM. So at 8:45 I'm standing in a long slowly moving line at Starbucks and finally I'm 2 people away from the front when the lights go out. There's no discernable reason as some things - like the registers - are still working but they can't run the espresso machines. So the guy in front of me gets served and I put in my order but as I'm talking another guy behind the counter tells the register guy that he's to stop taking orders. This is so clearly not good as I do not have time to run up two blocks to the other starbucks and stand in another long line. Nor can I face a 2 hour fitting without coffee. The register guy must have seen the panic in my face because he poured my venti coffee despite the orders not to. So I run out the door and make it back to the hotel to meet Mike just in time, thinking maybe I'll grab a bagel or something on the way.
We decide to take the subway. So we walk up a block to the station, get on the train and then realize it's going uptown not downtown. So we get off at the next stop - and by the way, the subway stations are underground, of course, and HOTTER than the fires of Hades, and humid with no moving air. You can literally watch people melt around you. So we get off the uptown train and run across the platform to catch what we think is the downtown train - some trains share a platform, running in opposite directions on either side of it, some trains run opposite directions down the middle with platforms on either side and apparently some run in the same direction on either side of a platform. It requires some attention being paid. And of course we got the latter with another train going uptown only this one was an express, which means it skips a bunch of stops. So there we are trying to get to 34th street and instead watching signs for 125th street fly by us. Sigh.
Finally we catch the right train and get to Chelsea and screech into our "shop" - the Fair Producers rehearsal room - with 10 minutes to spare before our fitting. Now remember all those extra My Fair Lady gondolas from yesterday? Well, despite all assurances to the contrary they are still with us. So now we have to move our fitting up the hall to the room reserved for Annie - a show that doesn't move in for another couple of days, and which is also crowded with My Fair lady shoe boxes, hat boxes and extra gondolas. That show is massive.
So I think we're all prepared and then Jim, the costume coordinator - the guy who takes over a touring show after it's already been designed, who doesn't seem to remember my name or care very much - comes in with his two assistants and the actor shows up. the next couple of hours went something like this:
Jim: Where are the hats? Mike, there should be hats.
Mike: Kaitlyn, can you go get some "First Night" hats in the extras gondola?
Kaitlyn (interior): What is "First Night" and which gondola is the "Extras gondola?"
Kaitlyn (exterior): a hat like that one *pointing*? Ok.
Kaitlyn runs off down the hall, paws through the gondola, finds a singular hat and runs it back to the room.
Jim: That's too small. Mike, we need to buy a hat.
Jim: Are these our only tie options? How come we don't have any shoes for this actor?
Mike and Kaitlyn: we'll go get them.
We run down the hall Kaitlyn looking for shoes and Mike searching for ties. Kaitlyn realizes, as she looks, that the boots are tiny little and the labels are written in some Asian characters. Mike informs her that those boots came from the Korean show (!) last year where the median shoe size for a man is a 6. Well, clearly that won't work when the median size for Americans is a 9 or so. So we have no shoes or boots that will fit this guy and the tie selection is rumpled, stained, stretched out or otherwise inadequate.
Jim begins to pull costume pieces off the rack and throw them directly into the garbage. Mike looks resigned, Kaitlyn slightly horrified.
Then the gondola discussion comes up. Somewhere along the line a producer decided that 17 gondolas for Producers costumes was too many. So the word comes down that we are to weed down the costumes until they fit into 8 gondolas. Well, this is absurd and laughable. The only way to weed out that many costumes is to cut whole characters from the show and then cut big scenes with huge costume pieces. Only this hasn't been done, nor has any official pronouncement come down from "the top" but now we're doing fittings for costumes that may end up getting cut anyway. only we don't know that. So we are all getting paid to show up, do fittings, make alterations and then maybe retire the costumes. THIS is why theatre can be so expensive... And during this fitting, Jim and his assistants are arguing about what could potentially get cut, which sweater they like better if they only get one, if it's possible to put the actor in one pair of pants for the whole show, etc. etc. while Mike and I run up and down the hall pulling out costume options only to get back to the room and discover that Jim's moved on to something totally different.
And I never got breakfast.
So you can only imagine my state of mind by noon.
Finally the fitting is over and we get to run out for lunch and Mike says "That went so much better than I imagined!!"
To say that jim is one of my least favorite people right now is a massive understatement.
The afternoon was mostly .uneventful. We had to move our fittings back into our rooms because the star of My Fair Lady - some British stage star - was showing up for her VIP fitting and needed a "closed set" situation and Jim's full attention. So we created space for our fittings by wheeling a Lady gondola into the hallway. One of the Pearl Studio execs sees us do this and says "you can't just leave that there! How long will it be there?" and Mike says "Oh, only 5-10 minutes" and then mutters under his breath "or a day or a month..." So we continued to try to reorganize our room and when we came back the gondola had been taken care of by the My Fair Lady people. So, success! Maybe we'll get rid of another one tomorrow... All the Lady wardrobe people are great but their stuff is like a hydra. I can't even imagine the situation when Annie comes into town.
We left late afternoon and headed out to the rehearsal studios and met some more people - accountants, stage managers etc. and then did some sight-seeing. We saw:
Ground Zero. Very underwhelming actually. The whole area is fenced off and then covered with green cloth so you can't see anything except through little holes that people have torn to be able to see. The pictures above are taken through those holes. There's no memorial either. Just signs talking about the new buildings under construction there. If you didn't know the history, it just looks like another construction site. I think it would have made me really sad and angry had I known someone who died on 9/11. As it was, it just felt anticlimactic and weird, like it was supposed to be a moving emotional experience and wasn't.
Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island Ferry.
I walked past the Hershey's store yesterday and saw this advertised. It's an Elvis commemoration Reese's cup (my favorite candy, fyi). And this one has a layer of banana creme. Well, it sounded so weird that I had to try it. So as we walked through Times Square going home we stopped so I could get one. I'm eating it now. It is more of less as you'd imagine: weird but not bad... And then since we had done the Hershey's thing, Mike wanted to visit the M&M store across the street.
Night all :)
posted by KBARRETT at 7:15 PM
2 Comments:
I'm hooked on your blog! Can't wait to read it everyday. Love the pictures too and am sympathizing with your every trial:)
Laughing too hard to type, really. Hydra. Nice.
Post a Comment
<< Home