The Theatre Question Amnesty Thread

Apologies if this has been asked but what happens if a member of the tech crew (I hope thats the right term!) is off unexpectedly? Are they all trained to cover different roles?

It depends on the size of the show.

Some crews have a Swing Showman, who will learn and cover all crew plots to cover emergencies or holiday.

Stage Management usually have a swing.

It's rare to have a swing on the lx team these days.

Holiday is usually covered by Deps, who will also be called to cover illness. They will come in and learn one or two plots and cover when needed.

If someone is taken ill during a show and there is no swing, it's all hands on deck to cover cues.
On Followspot, it will mean losing some cues and concentrating on lighting the more important people in the scene.

Most shows will have contingency cue sheets to use as a basis.

I was thinking of doing this as a thread but I think it's better here but what it is like to run a theatre like the National or the Lyric Hammersmith but also why do some theatres have CEOs plus an artistic director or have the AD be a chief executive as well?

I always thought it was the former.

Well, she must have heard lots of people pronounce like that while she was there so she’s just being bloody minded. Typical Patti!

Most locals use Al-mee-da but Rupert Goold definitely prefers Al-may-da.

Adele-Fey

Several people in the Warriors thread said the album (26 songs) isn’t long enough for a stage musical.

This surprised me because I thought 26 songs with dialogue interspersed between the songs would be more than enough “music” for a musical.

I think I remember hearing of musicals with only 9 or 10 songs.

Are there different types of musicals and is there some reason why Warriors is classified as the type where it’s all singing?

The two types of musicals (in terms of how songs are used) are 'through-sung' and 'book musicals'.

'Through-sung' e.g 'Jesus Christ Superstar' 'Evita' 'Les Miserables' has everything sung.  Eva Peron does speak in 'Evita'; she has 3 words, and two of those are the same: she says "Yes, Oh Yes"!

Others are 'largely through sung'.  Something like 'Sunset Boulevard' has dialogue moments, but it's underscored with music, so the atmosphere is still driven by the composer, and the transition from speech to song is quite smooth.

The 'Book musical' is dialogue scenes (called the Book) that build up to songs. Often the orchestrations start to trail in a few words or sentences before the singing starts to make the transition from one form to the other sweeter.  'Oklahoma!' and 'The Sound Of Music' would be examples. This form can suffer from a clunky 'here comes a song' feeling. The upside is that many like that characters only sing when ordinary speech is no longer enough for them to express the power or intensity of what they feel. ['Through Sung' musicals can get criticised for the fact that if a character is asking for something as banal as a packet of crisps, they'd still be singing it]

There could just be 9 or 10 songs, which means (for a full length show) that the 'Book' is going to dominate - at which point there will be lots of debate about whether it's a Musical at all, or should be termed instead a 'Play with Songs'. Nobody will ever get to the bottom of it, but come awards season people may get annoyed at which category it gets put into.

'Warriors' I would call 'largely Through Sung' - it's very music driven, and even where there's dialogue it's underscored either by music, or urban atmosphere of trains etc.  Personally I think that if they plump it out to a full length show with dialogue the intensity will be lost.  So they could either write further songs, or keep it at the current length and perform it without an interval.

It’s a bit of a puzzle pieced together by any level of director who may or may not happen to be around and the dance captain. (This is a big part of how the dance captain role gets misunderstood - it often sounds like they are just in charge is dance warm ups and practising the dance numbers, but essentially they are the middle management between production and the performers, so they tend to be super people who know their shows inside out and back to front.) You’ll usually have a starting plan because inevitably some people will be booked off in advance, but then illness and injury can be ongoing. (There’s usually a cut off to call in sick but sometimes you wake up feeling great and feel like death by 5pm and that’s life.)

Listed covers will know their own part and any names cover role, and that’s all they are ready to go on for, as even if they had soaked up the other part by being on stage all the time, they wouldn’t have a costume and wig, etc.
Swings know way more parts and have all the costuming required ready to go. Female swings often know every female track in a show. The men sometime require being split to cover bass and tenor tracks, but basically having a tremendous vocal range as well as a tremendously adaptable brain makes for a brilliant swing.

If you have heaps of roles you need to cover, you now have the puzzle of just piecing all that together in the best way possible. Your general rules is you start with named covers first and in order and then work your way down until you’re at swings filling in the roles with fewer lines or less stage time. The named covers have priority over swings. Looking at the list for the particular set of shows you mention, you might have to shift a little away from the usual hierarchy to just find a magical way to make the show go on.

As for the practicality of it happening, I think it’s largely up to the thinking process of the person making the calls. I’ve worked under someone who would just close their eyes and visualise it, then shout it out to all the cast and it always worked. I would never trust myself with that! Slightly more sane are sheets that have the roles written down and then drop the names in post-it note style until it all works. Thinking about it now, I would love to know the specific method used at Starlight last weekend - that’s the sort of thing that would make an amazing documentary but if it’s happening, there’s no way anyone has time to start filming it! But I hope that helps as a basic understanding.

I have a question about actor/musician performances.

How are they auditioned for? Is it strictly that they want an alto who also plays the trumpet, and a bass-baritone who plays the clarinet for example?

Or can do they give a pool of instruments for each character and then tweak who is on when to play?

I suppose you have multi-instrumentalists, and in the chorus it won't matter as much as long as all the parts are covered by somebody, but I was thinking in particular of CRH's Fiddler on the Roof where all the main characters play a specific instrument.

The production hires a lighting designer who works with the director and the designer to create an overall visual look for the production, then the lighting designer goes through each scene one by one to create a lighting plan for each scene, which could involve anything from the very simple which would be a single lighting state (like a neutral warm wash) throughout, to hugely complex plans including a dozen different lighting states, spotlights, different coloured gels, use of lights to evoke specific effects (like lighting outside, the shadow of a door closing, or the flickering of a TV screen), blackouts, anything.

Part of creating a lighting plan involves working with the director and the cast to ensure the lighting plan matches the blocking of the scene, which is where the actors physically are on the stage, and when and where they move throughout each scene.

Then after all the regular rehearsals are over you do a very long day called a tech day, where you go through the production scene by scene to test all the technical aspects, including lighting. So this involves 'marking' each scene (meaning the actors don't properly act out all their dialogue, they just do the technical cues, and speak any lines that act as a cue for a technician), to ensure that the lights are in the right place for wherever the actor is supposed to be standing on the stage at any given moment.

The lighting designer writes the lighting plan then programmes it into the lighting desk, usually with an assistant lighting designer, then lighting operators or tech operators actually run the lighting desk during the run, using the lighting plan to follow along to the play. On a smaller productions there might be just one person writing and programming the lighting plan and running the lighting desk.