Pennsyl-tucky

Left Hershey in a blaze of glory by loading out about an hour faster than we had loaded out in Delaware. And it was our first night on the bus, so woo hoo! The bus the bus. I'll get to that later.

It requires pictures.

So we drive overnight and sleep in our bunks and I wake up to my TD – Pizzi – in my face saying “Kaitlyn wake up! You're 20 minutes late to your call...”

Lovely start.

Got up, dressed and wandered out to find the theatre and the wardrobe room. Load in was delayed because we had absolutely no space on deck. Our gondolas would have to live in the hallway but they couldn't be there right now because everything else was in the hallway. So wigs and wardrobe lived in one room for most of the day...

And then there was laundry. You know, I've always said that if I had the money I would hire a chauffeur and a maid. I'm adding laundry to my future maid's list of responsibilities because I'm getting to the point where I don't want to even hear the word again.

We had one washing machine and one dryer and they were practically on the loading dock, behind all this electrical madness.

And the dryer was old and tired and didn't really want to work so well... And we had about 5 loads to do. AND we couldn't get started until the afternoon because it was all on the third truck that hadn't been unloaded. So yay.

Mid afternoon I decide to take a shower. When we're traveling on the bus for one nighters we don't get hotel rooms so we have to shower at the theatre...somehow...somewhere...at some point in our day. I get a free minute and go upstairs, turn on the water to let it get hot, lay all my stuff out, get in the shower and the whole shower head decides to bust loose. The inside of the shower head flies across the shower and out through the flimsy inadequate curtain. But the water doesn't cut off, which leaves a powerful rushing stream of water flying straight at me and also out of the shower stall onto the floor and my stuff. So I'm trying to find the shower head, fight the water stream, put the shower head back on (it flies right off again) and move my stuff out of the waterfall, all sort of simultaneously. By then I'm soaking wet so I didn't want to really consider getting dressed and going out to find another shower. So I end up turning the water on and manually holding the shower head together with one hand while shampooing my hair with the other. Turning the water off, putting the shower head down, finding the soap, soaping up, picking the shower head back up and putting it back on, holding it there while I rinse off... etc. Oy. And when I get back our wig girl, Jen, says “Where have you been? What took you so long??”

So by 5:30 we just start shoving things into the hallway because we have 2 hours til show time. And the stage space is SO small that we have no wing space, no back stage space and half our deck couldn't be laid.

Note how I can capture the back wall and the orchestra pit in one picture...

Check out our ghetto-fabulous dressing space! And yes, those are full length mirrors laid sideways on music stands...

Then our dressers start showing up. And it's Bloomsburg at the University so our dressers are...wait for it... college students! Hip! With no experience! Hip! Who ask questions like “what's a preset??” Hooray!

So we have about 2 hours to teach them how to be dressers and then teach them how to run their tracks and then work a show consisting largely of running our own tracks and then double checking all their tracks and doing all the cues they keep missing. A couple of them were really good and a couple of them didn't do anything all night. Ingrid did most of her show by herself. Ryan crawled on stage to push a set piece that couldn't be pushed any other way. Corey and his flymen spent most of their night standing inside our quick change baskets. Jen, the wig girl, did a little stage hand work and then turned around and helped out wardrobe in between working her own track. Just another show... And then we packed everything up again!

Load out? We won't speak about load out except to say that the truck was parked on a hill so everything in the truck shifted down and we lost space. And this is a game of Tetris where we can't lose any space or we won't get everything on the truck so... well, so we won't talk about it!

Let's just finish by saying that we have 400 miles to go tonight and we have a 7:30 show tomorrow and it's already 3AM. That means we have to load in this entire show in about 5 hours. And it also means I'm going to bed where I don't have to think about unloading all these trucks!

Goodbye to Chocolate Town!

Goodbye to Hershey!How cute are those street lamps shaped like Hershey kisses??

The fall colors are also lovely. It rained for several days this week and I loved it! I'm still in rain withdrawal from living in the desert. However, it rained so much that the light fixture above our stage door filled up with water.

And it's still leaking.
2 days later.
And it also still turns on.
I'm going to classify that as disturbing...

There wasn't much to do in town, but we did visit Chocolate World.

And rode the little carts through the tour to learn how chocolate is made.

It was free.

That's how we feel about that!

Corey apparently got struck with lightning while we were riding through the chocolate roasting cave.

He seems fine though...

Cows sang to us and narrated the journey.

There's hardly anything better than a singing cow.

Except free chocolate at the end.

And tonight? We load out the show and get on our bus - pictures to follow, for certain! - and travel to Bloomsberry (Bloomsberg?) Pennsylvania over night.

We load in on Monday AM, we train our dressers in the afternoon and have a show Monday night. Then we load out the show Monday night, get back on the bus and drive over night to Morgantown, North Carolina.

We load the show in to NC on Tuesday morning, train our new dressers in the afternoon and have a show Tuesday night. Then we load the show out and get back on the bus and wake up in Blacksburg Virginia on Wednesday.

And Hooray! It's Halloween and we have a day off. To sleep for more than 3 consecutive hours.

We then get back on the bus and repeat the process in Nashville on Thursday and have 2 days off and then a Sunday show... somewhere else.

Needless to say, I'll keep you posted as I can.

xox

k

Chocolate town

We drove into Hershey and it does indeed smell like chocolate here. Mostly in the downtown area where the chocolate factory resides. It's also a lot more rural than I expected. One of our locals in Delaware called it "Pennsyl-tucky." There's also a lot of rivalry between Delaware and Pennslyvania, which is a little David and Goliath-ish I think. And amusing... :)

First order of business, the chocolate martini. Need a better view of that?

And yes, it's as delicious as it looks. Vodka and Creme de Cacao with a kiss at the bottom. Yum!

And as usual, load in to the Hershey theatre was interesting. Picture several hundred pound boxes being maneuvered down that ramp and you have for an exciting morning...

Some things were flown in. Apparently they store the orchestra pit decking in an area 8 floors up by the midrail, only accessible by winch and in front of the one door to the outside. Cuz that's where it makes the most sense, right?

The Hershey theatre is gorgeous though. All gothic with quatrefoil designs...

Could these pictures be any worse??? Turns out that 8AM in a dark theatre with natural light pouring in from one small load in door and what amounts to a point and click digital camera without lots of ability to manipulate settings is not the ideal situation for clear stunning photography.

Who knew??

Chocolate factory today. More later.

Dela-where??

So we get to the lovely historic DuPont theatre (the longest continuously running theatre in North America) in Wilmington, DE at 6PM last Monday. And the first rude awakening was the size of the theatre space. Ridiculously, tiny small for our set/deck/gondolas/dressing area, etc. And we had our wardrobe room downstairs with only a tiny circular staircase to get there. Ergo, we had to lower our gondolas downstairs via the trap door in the stage.




If you look at the guy in red, from where he's standing to the back wall on the left was our dressing area. With gondolas. And the cross through. We literally had about 5 feet of space for people to dress in, dressers to pass through and actors to somehow plow through to make their cues on the opposite side of the theatre. Good times!

Straight ahead there is the loading door with a ramp, leading to an alley way that leads to another alleyway that leads to the street with another ramp and our truck. Good thing we had good strong locals to push all those boxes about a block each way!


And what does the alley way look like?


Ah! Here we are in Producers land with our props all over the alley way. Remember the part about the venue being super small? This was the scene every day. Half our props and big set pieces lived outdoors in the alley during the show.


Near the dumpster. Need a better view of that?

Well, alright then! And what oh what were we to do when it rained, as it was projected to do on Friday??

KB: Ingrid, what are they going to do about the Nazi puppets?



Ingrid: Buy them ponchos...And maybe a sombrero... It's The Producers do Mexico!



Yep, amused! Cuz nothing says The Producers are in town like an alley full of Mexican Nazis in the pouring rain! :)

Despite the extreme tightness of the space, our local crews were pretty great. I did have a girl on my crew who thinks she's a pirate. Apparently she's building an 18' pirate ship so she can sail around the Delaware Bay... pillaging. When someone pointed out that perhaps an 18' boat is a bit small for pillaging, she said, in all seriousness, "It's not the size of the boat..."

How do you even follow that up??

We think this picture of Moon our Head Electrician should be on all the new NETworks promotional material for recruitment! Join NETworks and you too can put ponchos on Nazis!

Today we have our first day off in 2 weeks (hooray!) and we're headed to Hershey, PA. We're in a hotel on Chocolate Ave... of course!

more later

xox
k



,

My birthday

On my birthday I had to work a rehearsal all afternoon and then the show at night. Sigh.

But I got a Frog pinata! And it was definitely the best moment all day...

We strung it up backstage between shows and did our best to break it open. I got the first several shots blindfolded by one of Max's extra ties :)

The blindfold didn't work so well so Dirk tried it with just his eyes closed.

But you kind of need the blindfold, it's part of the experience. This was the secondary solution for Ryan... or maybe it's Corey??

And whoever it was, they busted the connector so we couldn't hang the pinata any more and I had to finish it off on the floor.

Candy for everyone!

And a birthday hug from Jesse.

And another long show and a beer at the bar and then bedtime. Happy 36 to me!

Addendum:

This is Josh, my best friend on tour who left at the end of Atlantic City. I miss him horribly but he needed to be home in NYC and not on tour. We dressed up and went to mur.mur, the "hottest" club in Atlantic City. It was fun and don't we look cute? :)

Pumpkins!

We carved pumpkins most years when I was a kid. Strangely, my memories of that and my memories of Easter egg dyeing run along similar lines: Gooey insides and my dad always came up with the coolest designs :)

Jen brought back pumpkin carving for me as an adult and since we carved pumpkins in Tucson in 1996, I've carved a pumpkin just about every year since. This year Ingrid spear-headed the carving party and we held it outside on the patio of our hotel.


Jesse, KeLeen and Corey, all concentrating with varying degrees of intensity.

Lauren and Chris taking their design work very seriously.

Lauren: Is this a competition?
Chris: Cuz we're gonna win!"

I finished mine first so I got to sit back and watch all the genius around me.

Dustyn, also enjoying the festivities.

Ryan and his finished pirate ship.

Ingrid and Dracula. It took awhile to see it and she kept saying "look at the positive space, not the negative space!"

Lauren and Chris and their panorama pumpkin inclusive of a graveyard (with a tiny RIP on the gravestone and a ghost rising up above it), a haunted tree, clouds and bats. They did indeed win the non-competition :)

Some post-carving hijinks.

And clean up that didn't go so well...

And the finished product in the gazebo.

I think this is phase one of operation pumpkin carving. We discovered that several people in the cast have never carved a pumpkin before (poor deprived kids!) so we'll probably do it again in Delaware or Pennsylvania.

Have a good day everyone!