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Ask Playbill.com: Ushers

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Kathy Garland of Basking Ridge, NJ.

Question: I would like to know how to get a job as an usher for a Broadway show?

Answer: Mim Pollock, business representative for the theatrical division of Local 306 of IATSE — which represents ushers, head ushers, ticket-takers and backstage door people — says that the process is similar to that at any other job. Each of the three major companies that control Broadway theatres — Shubert, Nederlander and Jujamcyn — have certain people responsible for hiring ushers. Each company accepts applications — either a specific usher application or just a cover letter and resume, depending on the company — and if they like your application, they bring you in for an interview and can eventually decide to hire you.

Typically, if you're hired, you start off as a substitute usher, filling in at any of the company's theatres when other ushers can't make it. Some weeks you'll do eight shows, some weeks fewer than that, and some weeks zero. Usually, a sub finds out about his or her assignments at the beginning of every week. "Monday morning, very often, the phones are very busy," Pollock says. "That's where most of the filling in of all the work is done."

Eventually, when a full-time ushering spot becomes available, a sub will get offered the job. Full-time ushers can move up to become ticket-takers, who make more money and in some cases have had their jobs for decades.

Each night, half the ushers can leave after 20 minutes, and the other half stay late to clear the house at the end of the show (the next night, the two groups switch). And no matter what kind of usher you are — sub or full-time — after 30 performances, you have to join the union.

Jeff Hubbard, a management associate at Jujamcyn in charge of hiring ushers, says the company has about 65 full-time ushers for its five theatres, and the number of subs is much more than that. In the last four months, three full-time ushering spots have turned over. Hubbard notes that the three biggest groups in his ushering pool are students, actors and retirees.

When is a company hiring subs? It depends on the company's needs and the time of year. Hubbard says that he posted an ad on Playbill.com at the beginning of the summer, since many of his existing substitute ushers were students who went away for the summer. He ended up hiring about 15 to 20 ushers. So he's not in dire need at the moment — but he still accepts cover letters and resumes. "We're always hiring," he says.

Manhattan Theatre Club and Roundabout, two of the not-for-profit companies who control Broadway theatres, use some volunteer ushers (in addition to paid ushers), who do it to get to see a show for free (Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont has all paid ushers). Many Off-Broadway theatres use volunteers as well. The vetting process for volunteer ushers is more lax — pretty much anyone can sign up if there's space available and if they can abide by the theatre's requisite dress code.

To get more details on how to apply, you can contact the theatre companies for specific instructions.

Ask Playbill.com: Casting Leads

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: Several Broadway and West End musicals have been picking their lead performers through reality shows, allowing viewers at home to see the casting process up close. But on those shows, of course, the casting process is, in part, designed to create good television, and doesn't always mimic what happens in the real world. What is the normal process for casting the lead roles in a musical?

Answer: For this column, we spoke with Tara Rubin, one of Broadway's top casting directors, who has cast the current musicals Young Frankenstein, Spamalot, Jersey Boys, Mary Poppins, Mamma Mia! and The Little Mermaid.

Let's say a performer wants to play Bert in Mary Poppins. He could come to the Equity Principal Audition (EPA), where he would wait in line with lots of other performers, and eventually perform a song of his choosing, in front of Rubin or one of the associates at her casting agency. "He could sing any song, but if he's wise he'll sing something in the style that Bert sings," she says. (Non-Equity members can also show up to EPAs and sign up to audition, but there's no guarantee the casting directors will have time to see them.)

If the casting people in the room think the performer is good enough, they'll send him a song from the show and sides — bits of scenes from the show — which he has to prepare for another audition. Sometimes that's the ultimate audition, in front of the director and maybe the music director, choreographer, producers and writers.

Other times, it's just an intermediate step, in front of what Rubin calls the "associate team," which may include the associate director, associate choreographer and others. Then, if the performer passes that filter, he goes on to have his final audition. On occasion, before the final audition, the performer will have a work session with the director, associate director or a music director, where he can ask questions and get coaching. Also, if dancing is a big part of the role, a dance audition will be required at some point.

Does a role always get cast this way, where someone works his way up from the EPA? Not at all. But it does happen, Rubin says. She especially remembers it happening for Les Misérables.

There are all sorts of variations on this process. For instance, let's go to the top: Some of the top performers on Broadway, Rubin says, are purely offer only — they will only consider a role if offered it, and won't agree to audition. This is the case certainly with many movie stars, but also some purely Broadway stars as well. Some won't audition but will agree to take a meeting with the creative team so that the team can assess the performer's thoughts on the role, and decide whether to make the offer.

While this may sound high and mighty, note that stars of this stature have been seen onstage in lead roles multiple times by everyone in the theatre community, and so an audition would probably be unnecessary anyway. Plus, these performers might have past working relationships with the musical's director, producers or writers, who know the performer's abilities and process. Sometimes, the performer has even helped shape the role itself by appearing in a developmental reading or workshop of the musical.

In other cases, Rubin says, top Broadway performers will audition. "There would only be one meeting, and we would make it as private and low pressure as possible," Rubin says. "We might sit around the piano and sing through the music. The artist might prepare the music [ahead of time] but still present it in the room in a very casual way." The director will be there, and probably the music director and choreographer (even if there's no dancing to be done), and perhaps a producer and the writers. Since the performer's acting ability is well-known, Rubin says, "the purpose of the audition is to find out what the actor will be like in the world of the play."

Sometimes the process is a legendary, months-long, transcontinental affair, as was the case with the new revival of South Pacific. Sometimes an understudy to the lead gets offered the job when the lead leaves the show.

And, sometimes a particular role calls for a particular process. For instance, the performers who play Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys have to be able to dance, act in a convincing Jersey accent and sing in Valli's unique falsetto style. And, they have to look like the guy. It's tough to find someone with the whole package. After a series of auditions, the casting directors and the associate team narrow down the field to six to eight-or-so performers who get sent to what Rubin calls "Frankie Camp." For a week in New York, performers go through workshops where they can work on any aspect of the performance. After that they have a final audition in front of the director, choreographer, perhaps the writers and producers, and sometimes even the real-life Valli and fellow band member Bob Gaudio.

Since Rubin has been in the business for so long and knows the pool so well, doesn't she spend a lot of time seeing the same people over and over again? "Sometimes you see someone you've seen so many times, but that particular day, they do something that you've never imagined them doing," she says.

Ask Playbill.com: Crew Hiring

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Robert H. of New York, NY.

Question: We often hear about the typical audition process that actors go through when they want to join a Broadway production. However, what process do potential backstage crew members go through when they want to join a new/current show?

Answer: For this column we'll explain all the different types of stagehands, in addition to how they're hired. A show has two types of stagehands: First, there's the "pink contract" crew, which is hired by the show's producers, typically via a production manager that the producers hire to oversee everything that goes on backstage. The pink contracts start with a musical during its out-of-town tryout, and then travel with the show to Broadway.

Then there's the house crew, which is hired by the theatre owner. Typically, a big Broadway theatre will have a permanent house carpenter, house electrician, house propman and a flyman. When a show is in the theatre, those house heads will be working there; if there's no show, they don't have to be there. For a show, these house heads hire crew members who work under them.

As you might have guessed, this breakdown is a union-related distinction: The house crew is governed by Local One, the stagehands union in New York City. The pink contracts are governed by the national union. (The majority of pink contracts are also Local One members, who work in Local One contracts at other points in time, according to Bruce Cohen, a spokesperson for Local One.)

Hillary Blanken of Juniper Street Productions — the production management company for shows such as Cry-Baby, Xanadu, A Catered Affair and Gypsy —says that on the big musical Cry-Baby, for instance, the house heads and their crew consist of five carpenters, four electricians, three props people and one sound person. In addition, there are seven pink contract crew members: three carpenters, one electrician, one props, two sound. The pink contracts collaborate with the house heads in leading each department. To load in the sets, the show needed even more people: about 30 people, plus the pink contract crew.

The term "carpenters" doesn't mean that they're backstage sawing all the time. They put the sets together, hang parts of the set, raise and lower sets, and prepare the sets to be moved onstage and offstage via the automation system (these days, stagehands don't usually push sets on and off stage with their hands).

Typically, Blanken says, the house electrician runs house lights, while a pink contract electrician runs the light board. Other electricians run follow spots, or work backstage setting up lights that are embedded into set pieces and props.

The props people prepare props and hand off props — and props doesn't just mean things you hold in your hand. In Cry-Baby, for instance, when the prisoners escape from the prison, they jump onto a huge crash mat behind the set that gets carted on and taken off by props people.

Cry-Baby also has a wardrobe supervisor, wardrobe assistant, nine dressers, a hair supervisor and three hairstylists. They're hired by the show's producers (as opposed to the theatre), and are governed by their own union, separate from the stagehands.

Broadway stagehands have to first be members of the stagehands union, and membership has various requirements that we don't have time to get into here (it involves earning a certain amount of money over a certain length of time). Local One also runs an apprentice program, which aspiring stagehands can join by passing a written test. Apprentices get placed into various New York City theatres or scene shops (though typically not Broadway theatres, Cohen says). Eventually, after a certain number of years, they can join Local One and work their way up into Broadway shows.

The Broadway shows run by not-for-profit companies — where the producer and the theatre owner are usually one and the same — work similarly to the for-profit shows. Rebecca Habel, a general manager with the Roundabout Theatre Company, says that the company hires a production supervisor to oversee each show, on a per-show basis (though, by contrast, Manhattan Theatre Club, another not-for-profit with its own Broadway theatre, has a full-time production management team). In addition each of the Roundabout's Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres has a full-time head electrician, master technician and wardrobe supervisor, and occasionally a sound supervisor and a head of props. The house heads collaborate with the production supervisors to hire the other stagehands.

So how do they decide who gets the jobs? "A lot of times [we hire] people who work on our load-ins," Habel says. "Other times it's somebody that one of our heads knows and recommends. What we look for is obviously someone who is experienced, and has the right technical skills that we're looking for, and is in the union, and has — at the Roundabout — what is a significant time period available, often 11 weeks to 14 weeks depending on the theatre."

Ask Playbill.com: Tony Logistics, Part Two

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Mark Kari of Toronto, Canada.

Question: When shows are performed on the Tony Awards broadcast, do they bring their own sets/props/lighting or do they have an extra set of sets/props/lighting created just for the show?

Answer: Several readers have asked this question in various forms, so let's settle the question: No, sets are not brought from the Broadway theatres to Radio City Music Hall to be used for the songs on the Tony Awards. "It's physically not practical," says Glenn Weiss, the director-producer of the Tonys.

Weiss does say, however, that "all the shows will have a scenic representation of their own set." Typically, a show will build another set specifically for the Tonys — anything from a replica of the actual set to a bare bones version.

That may be costly, but here's why it's impractical to use the original set: Many of the shows have a Sunday matinee the same day as the awards. So dragging all the sets to Radio City in the late afternoon before the Tonys, loading them in, getting them assembled, finding a place for them on the stage — all in a few hours — would require a miracle.

Plus, there are rehearsals with the sets (but without costumes) on the Thursday and Friday before the Tonys, and a dress rehearsal (with costumes) Sunday morning. And the sets could never be transported back and forth for all those rehearsals, unless you simply canceled all those Broadway shows for the week.

Don't worry, those extra sets don't always go to waste. Weiss says that some are dismantled, but others are stored after the Tonys and then later used for the show's touring production.

One fact to note: The Radio City stage is about 100 feet wide — much wider than a Broadway stage. "You can get lost on the stage at Radio City, it's just so huge," Weiss says. So Weiss' team builds a false proscenium that's a more appropriate 44-feet wide. As a result, Weiss says, "The scale is correct, so the number looks like it looks in their own theatre." The 44-foot scale also allows for an appropriately sized set that can later be used in touring productions if need be.

As for the other technical elements, the actual props can sometimes be transported from the Broadway theatre to be used during the awards. The Tonys has its own lighting designer, who works in consultation with the lighting designers for the shows.

The actors use their actual costumes. Sunday morning, all the performers report to their own theatre to get into costume, and then are bused over to Radio City for the dress rehearsal. Then they go back to their theatre for the Sunday matinee, and then the busing process is repeated for the actual awards. If you're one of these performers who's also nominated for an award, you can have a place to change backstage so that you're not in your costume when you go up to receive your statue.

For actors, that Sunday is quite insane, especially if you're someone like, say, Idina Menzel, the year she won a Tony for Wicked. She was her Elphaba character during the dress rehearsal, then she performed in the matinee, then she walked the red carpet as herself, then she got back into Elphaba gear to sing at the awards, then she changed back into her own clothes to receive her award — all the while having to put on and take off a entire face full of green make-up. "She was moving every moment of the day," Weiss says. "It's a true testament to the whole logistical situation that we have going on backstage."

Ask Playbill.com: Tony Logistics, Part One

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Peter Mitchell of Chanhassen, MN.

Question: With the Tony Awards coming up, I was wondering how the nominees for Best Musical and Best Revival of a Musical choose which song (or medley of songs) they will perform? Once the songs have been selected, how do the organizers of the Tony Awards ceremony pick the order in which the casts will perform? Is there any kind of technical rehearsal and/or dress rehearsal to incorporate the design elements and work all of the songs and transitions before the ceremony?

Answer: Glenn Weiss, director and producer of the Tony Awards, says that every season, before the nominations even come out, he and his team sit down with the producers of each new musical on Broadway to discuss potential songs for the Tonys telecast.

"We're looking at the shows from the eye of what would make a great three-minute television performance, which is sometimes not what people would perceive as the best number of the show," he says. "It must be something that holds together out of context of the show."

While the Tony Awards producers (Weiss co-produces with Ricky Kirshner) and CBS have the final say, Weiss says, he wants all parties to agree.

"There's a lot of compromise that goes into it and give-and- take," he says. "It's a total collaboration. No one's going in bullying anybody else. We really talk through with their creative people and come to consensus on what we feel represents their show."

Adam Epstein, the producer of one of this year's Best Musical nominees, Cry-Baby, plus past nominees Hairspray (the 2003 Best Musical winner) and The Wedding Singer, says that in deciding what song to suggest, "usually we use two criteria: What is the most energetic and robust number that a TV audience could watch that would make them want to buy tickets? What is the largest number that could include the most people so that you're doing an ensemble number, to show people that you're doing an old-fashioned and heavily populated Broadway musical?" Cry-Baby will perform the song "A Little Upset," which, while not including everyone in the cast, is a group number that "we think is out best foot forward," Epstein says. As for his discussions with the Tony producers, he says, "I've never had a situation where we've disagreed. TV producers and theatre producers arrive at the same idea because clearly there's highlights of every show."

Rob Ahrens, a producer of Xanadu, says that the producers and creative team looked to similar out-of-context presentations for guidance in picking which song would work. They had presented a medley of four songs at a cocktail party during the Broadway League's recent conference for road presenters. "We felt one of the songs played very well there, so we decided to do that song again at the Tonys, and to expand it a little bit," he says.

As for the order of the songs, Weiss says, "Our objective is to keep it interesting, keep it exciting so that viewers have an interest in staying." Does that mean putting more recognizable shows later in the show? Not necessarily, he says, but "that is one of many calculations that could go into the formula."

Another part of it is making sure the songs flow from one to the other. Weiss says the process is "much like in the music business, what song plays first on an album what song plays second an album — trying to create a flow that you're happy with." He implied that that might involve making sure songs that are back to back aren't too similar in terms of tempo, perhaps, but was hesitant to spell out hard-and-fast rules. "There are no guidelines or rulebook," he adds. "It's more just creating something that feels like a natural flow. Like anything else in the art world, that's subjective."

Stage logistics is also a factor. Sometimes the order is determined by when sets have to be moved on an off. At other times, "these nominees are playing in that number so we can't put that award next to that number," he says. "It's an interesting jigsaw puzzle. For every concept on paper that might flow well, you have to look at nuts and bolts."

And yes, there are rehearsals, including a dress rehearsal on Sunday morning (June 15), the day of the Tonys. AskPlaybill.com will address more Tony logistics questions next week.

Ask Playbill.com: Merchandise

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from an anonymous reader.

Question: When did Broadway shows start selling merchandise? How is it decided what will be sold (for example, the designs of T-shirts)? Who receives the profits from the items sold?

Answer: For this question, we spoke with Randi Grossman, the owner of Max Merchandising, who began selling Broadway merchandise when she signed on with Rent shortly after it opened and is now overseeing merchandise for at least ten current shows, including Spamalot, Spring Awakening, Avenue Q, Legally Blonde, Mamma Mia! and A Chorus Line. As for the history of Broadway merchandise, Grossman says, "As we know it to today, it started with Cameron Mackintosh," she says. "With his productions of Cats, Phantom and Les Miz, it's at that point where it really took off. It really became a business, and there was more than a CD and a brochure being offered."

When Grossman and her team first start work on a show, they meet with the producers, the ad agency, the marketing team and sometimes the creative team and the authors to start thinking up their ideas. Grossman and her team read through the script and highlight certain lines that would make for good quotes to put on a T-shirt or other item.

Show to show, the scope of merchandise is similar. "There is a core line that is logo-specific," she says, meaning there have to be some items that simply have the show's logo. "And then it branches out from there," she adds, "depending on the direction the show takes. We'll start working with different graphics or we'll add lyrics that are in a song or text and we branch out. But it starts with the logo."

Another rule of thumb: You want some merchandise for each gender, but more for women. "Women buy more merchandise than men do," Grossman says.

Max Merchandising's in-house graphic artist will design some of the items and create print-outs, which are then presented to the producers to decide what they like. After that, the physical samples get made, and the producers and Grossman's team decide what goes on the shelf.

Then they see what people buy. "We'll put things out there," she says. "We had high hopes for a particular shirt, and it didn't do as well, and we'll pull that shirt and we'll put in another item and see how that goes."

It's a lot of trial and error. For example, Grossman's vice--president came up with the idea for a Legally Blonde T-shirt that read, "kiss a leprechaun for me" — a line from the show — for St. Patrick's Day. Max often does holiday-themed merchandise in December, such as Christmas ornaments, but had never done it for another holiday. "I just thought it wouldn't work at all, and, lo and behold, it was terrific," Grossman says. They now plan to do merchandise for other holidays mentioned in Legally Blonde. "Most shows wouldn't be able to do that," Grossman says. "Legally Blonde has the right audience. Legally Blonde has a lot of repeat business, it has the right fan base that is in the right demographic to like that idea. It's not something that would work at Curtains."

The lines that go on the T-shirts can change over time. For Rent, Grossman says, "We didn't put 'no day but today' on a T-shirt until probably the second year, and it was one of those 'a-ha!' moments. I was like, all of a sudden, 'That's what's supposed to be there, that's what will resonate.'" On the other hand, she adds, "When we did Legally Blonde we knew that 'Oh my God' was going on a shirt from day one."

At Spamalot, the top selling T-shirt slogan and top-selling button is "I'm not dead yet." The second highest-selling button is "I fart in your general direction." "We don't have the 'fart' T-shirt," Grossman says. "We decided that women wouldn't want their husbands to buy it. We do have holy grail boxer shorts." Overall, Spamalot sells around 1,400-2,000 T-shirts a week. But the show is unique in that the novelty items — such as killer rabbit puppets and the coconut shells — sell well. "Most shows have a few break-out items," Grossman noted in a follow-up email, "but Spamalot is unique in that the wide range of audience demographic leads to a wider assortment of top-selling items." Spamalot is known for having a higher percentage of male audience members as compared to other musicals, which generally tend to attract more females.

At A Chorus Line, of the many potential lines to put on T-shirts, Grossman's company chose "And now life really begins," a reference to adolescence, from the song "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love." That's because, "when this production opened, it was an attempt — and they succeeded — in bringing in a younger audience," Grossman says.

As creative as the merchandise can be, Grossman says, the top sellers at a musical tend to be the souvenir program and the CD. Those are followed by the T-shirt of the large logo across the chest. "As much as we want to create an opportunity for your fashion line, and the opportunity for people to buy many things, first and foremost it is still a souvenir to take home of their experience on Broadway," Grossman says.

For a children's show, things work a little differently: The top sellers are the toys, followed by the "plushes," Grossman calls them (the stuffed animals, or Grinches, or whatever), followed by the T-shirts — but the T-shirts can't just have the logo. For Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Grossman says, "We need to have the Grinch in a really cute characterization," some sort of pose, or else the kids won't want it.

So, how do you decide what merchandise to use for a play such as Thurgood? People aren't exactly going to buy miniature stuffed Supreme Court justices. Grossman says for that show, the producer, Bill Haber, came up with the idea to have a book on Thurgood Marshall's life, which is selling well. With a recognizable play like Macbeth, you can have more fun. For the recent revival, Grossman's company did a hat that said "The Scottish Play" and a T-shirt with the line, "by the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes." "It's a little sexy," Grossman says. "I don't think I could go through The Country Girl script and come up with something like that."

As for the financial arrangement, Grossman says, typically, her company runs like an independent store, taking case of all its costs and taking home the money it makes — except for a percentage of the gross sales that goes to the production, which can be anywhere from 15 to 35 percent. That means that when a show closes after three weeks and there are T-shirts left unsold, Max Merchandising takes the hit.

Ask Playbill.com: Tony Statuettes

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: A Tony Award statuette made news recently when a 1991 Tony for Best Musical Revival, which went to Fiddler on the Roof, was sold at a Dallas auction in April for $5,676.25.

How many statuettes are made each year? How are they constructed? How are they prevented from being sold? When are the winner's names engraved? And, is the statuette that the winner lifts into the air on television the same one he or she gets to take home?

Answer: Let's start with that last question: This year will be the fourth year in which the answer is yes, according to Jean Kroeper, manager for Tony Award administration at the Broadway League.

The statuettes on the winners' shelves at home have their names engraved in the medallion, the metal disc that spins around on top of the black base. But since no one but the accounting firm that counts the votes can know the winners before the ceremony, the statuettes can't be engraved until afterwards.

It takes about two weeks for the performers', designers' and directors' engravings. The producers take longer. For the Play, Musical, Play Revival and Musical Revival categories (and the Theatrical Event category when they have it), the producers in each category get two awards for free, but can order more if they pay the cost (which Kroeper wouldn't reveal). Every producer whose name is above the title is allowed to get one, and basically 99.99 percent of them choose to do so, Kroeper says. Organizations that are above the title get one for every principal in the organization, up to four — and the organization's name is what's engraved, not the person's name. Last year's Best Musical winner Spring Awakening has so many producers above the title, Kroeper says, that "last year's producer Tony orders basically took the entire summer to fill."

"When The Producers won, it was a good year," adds Frank DiBella, co-owner of Academy Engraving, who has been working on the construction and engraving of the Tony statuettes for about 15 years. "They were ordering some for everybody. We even laser-engraved brooms because they 'swept' the Tonys. Somebody brought in actual brooms, and we laser engraved all the names in the handles."

For many years, during the ceremony, about ten blank statuettes were used over and over again. But starting four years ago Kroeper decided to change the system, so that the winners could keep their Tonys for the rest of the evening and take them home. "It would be nice that they could walk it around and share it with their friends and family and cast and crew," Kroeper says.

So, this year (as in the three previous years), before the ceremony, Kroeper receives about 75 blank statuettes. She writes down the serial numbers of each statuette and which statuettes will be given out for which categories. In categories like Best Score where there are multiple winners, she sets aside the maximum possible number of statuettes, and after those winners walk offstage she taps each one on the shoulder and asks to check the serial number to write down who was given which one by the attractive women you see handing them out on television.

Over the next couple days, Kroeper rounds up all the awards, typically by sending a messenger service to the winner's home or to the theatre where the winner is performing. During the week of June 16, messengers will be biking around New York City with Tonys sticking out of their backpacks? "Usually someone's placed it in a bag or something," she says. "It's usually concealed." Tony statuettes began getting serial numbers in 1996 to keep track of them in case they get stolen or sold (the lower serial number is 101, on the statuette given to Peter Stone for the book of Titanic). After the ceremony, but before (or sometimes right when) the winners pick up their engraved awards, they have to sign what Kroeper calls "a medallion agreement." "The medallion agreement is basically stating that if they wish to not own their award any more, they would give Tony Awards Productions first rights to buy it back for them, so you don't have awards going up on auction," she says.

Now, about the construction of the statuette. It's made of three parts:

-The medallion, which is a mix of mostly brass and a little bronze, with a nickel plating on the outside. A company on West Broadway in Manhattan stamps the brass-bronze with the medallion's design, similar to how a coin gets minted. The medallion then goes to a plater in Rhode Island for the nickel plating, which gives it a polish, and is "a good surface for engraving" the winner's name, DiBella says. (For a video on how a medallion is made, check out one of the video features in the middle of the main page of the Tony Awards website).

-The base, which is black acrylic glass, a synthetic material used instead of regular glass. "Acrylic is good because it take a beating and yet it still looks elegant," DiBella says. The base is made by an acrylic caster in Quebec.

-The swivel, made of nickel-plated pewter, is the small piece that holds the medallion to the base and allows it to spin around. The swivel is made by a caster in California.

There's also the elegant, black, velvet-lined box that the winners receive that can hold the Tony. It's constructed in Massachusetts.

Before the ceremony, all the components are shipped to DiBella's company, Academy Engraving, at 271 Madison Avenue, at 40th Street, to be put together by DiBella's team of about five people. (All the materials used to be made in New York City, DiBella says, until EPA regulations forced chemical companies to move elsewhere).

Winners who have had their awards lost or stolen — such as Carol Channing and Patricia Neal — can get new ones. If your Tony falls off the shelf, you can bring it to Kroeper who will send it to DiBella, whose company has fixed Tonys for Dick Van Dyke and others.

DiBella says there's a squadron of about ten Tonys that are used for promotional purposes, such as department-store windows. They get banged up the most — he fixes about six or seven of them every year.

What makes a Tony harder to construct than an Oscar or Emmy? "It does something: it spins," says DiBella. "So many awards are just statues." It's tough to create a statuette with moving parts that is still "stable and durable enough so that the piece doesn't fall apart," he says.

So on June 15, if you win a Tony statuette, you can hoist it into the air, take it to the party, take photos with it, have everyone coo over it and spin the medallion over and over again as you ride the limo (or the N train) home. Just don't sell it.

Ask Playbill.com: Makeup

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Eric Lee of Dallas, TX.

Question: I know that a show has a make-up designer, but do the actors have any input into those decisions? Also, who actually applies the make-up? The actor? Make-up artists? Fellow performers?

Answer: AskPlaybill.com spoke with Thelma L. Pollard, production make-up supervisor for Phantom of the Opera, who started off in the hair department when the show opened in January 1988 and became make-up supervisor soon after Michael Crawford (along with his make-up supervisor) left the show in September of that year.

For Phantom, Pollard says, the make-up was originally designed by Maria Björnson (who designed the sets and costumes) and Christopher Tucker (whose official credit is "Phantom character make-up created and designed by") for the original London production. Pollard's task is "maintaining the show as it was when it opened" with the make-up scheme Björnson and Tucker designed (Björnson passed away in 2002).

Typically, when a show has a lot of complicated make-up —such as the make-up effect to create the ugly part of the Phantom's face, underneath his mask, which is eventually revealed — that show will have a specified make-up designer, Pollard says. The designer doesn't have to stay with the show — he or she can bring in a make-up supervisor to oversee it on a daily basis. When there's only minor make-up, a show might only have a make-up supervisor, or a make-up consultant (Pollard is a consultant on Passing Strange). A show's original actors do have a say in their make-up, just as they often talk with the costume designer about which costumes fit the character, and with the director about how to play the character.

The performers apply their own make-up. Other performers can't do it for them. "It's against union rules," Pollard says, referring to Local 798, the union for workers in hair and make-up. The exception is for effects make-up, such as the Phantom's ugly face — Pollard spends a little over an hour every night on that project, which mainly involves applying three prosthetics (a head piece, face piece and lips) and putting on make-up over it. (Pollard is also in charge of supplying the actors with make-up, which she orders from the company Alcone in Long Island City in Queens.)

When new performers join the cast, Pollard teaches them how to put on their make-up. Many use the basics: foundation, eyeliner, eye shadow, contours, blushes and mascara. Other performers have to get a bit fancier, such as the ones who have the Kabuki-style white faces. After teaching, Pollard watches the performer put on his or her own make-up to make sure he or she is doing it right.

Pollard mainly gives each performer the same instructions as all the performers who played the role previously. But she often has to adjust the instructions to accommodate the performer's particular face. For instance, if a person has smaller eyes, their eye shadow can't be as dark, or else audiences will have a harder time seeing their eyes, Pollard says.

Pollard later sits in the audience during a show to make sure the new performer put on the make-up correctly. She also has to watch for renegade actors who change their make-up routine on their own. "Sometimes actors, [when] they get bored, they may want to change the lipstick or something. Or they might put on too much blush or not enough blush. They might say, 'I saw this model, I saw her make-up,' and they might put on too much eye shadow." She adds, "They might not think they look glamorous enough" when the role requires an unglamorous look. Pollard also has to make sure their make-up fits with turn-of-the-century Paris. "The period was smoky eyes," she says. "People might think the darker eyes might make them look too old."

Ask Playbill.com: The Dance Arranger

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: Peter Howard, the long-time Broadway dance arranger, passed away on April 18. What does a dance arranger do?

Answer: For this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with David Chase, the dance arranger for the current Broadway shows Cry-Baby, Curtains and The Little Mermaid (not to be confused with the creator of "The Sopranos").

"The simplest answer is that my job is to be the liaison between the music department and the dance department," Chase says. He's "the person who takes both the melodic and the musical structure of the show, and what the choreographer wants to do physically, and tries to marry them."

Think of a classic cartoon, Chase explains: "Every time a character does something, it's [accompanied by] an appropriate sound. Every time someone takes a step, you hear the band go, 'bloomp bloomp bloomp.' Or every time they come down the steps, they go, 'de-de-de-de-de.'"

Similarly, the dance arranger has to make sure that the sound matches the dance movements. So when the dancers kick, for instance, the dance arranger wants to make sure that it's accompanied by a cymbals crash. Or perhaps he wants a softer accent, like a drum sound. Or perhaps the melody doesn't accommodate an accent on that kick, and you have to shift the melody around, or move the kick to somewhere else in the music. And, do you want the kick on the downbeat (the first beat in the measure, which is typically emphasized in classically derived music such as Rodgers and Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber) or the offbeat (the second beat in the measure, which is typically emphasized in rock-and-roll, Gershwin and other popular music forms).

Or perhaps, in some cases, you don't want the kick accented at all. "We sometimes refer to music becoming too Mickey Mouse," he says, when it's "too cartoony because you're hitting every accent." Think about scoring a movie, Chase says: Sometimes you want the music to enhance the scene emotionally, while other times the music should play against the scene. "If you have emotional music with an emotional scene, it can get sappy," he says.

Chase uses another useful metaphor (there are a lot of useful metaphors for his job): "It's like focusing a light on an actor's face — I'm using the music to tell the audience where to look at the dance." Sometimes you want an actor to be very well-lit; other times, you want him in a bit of darkness.

On a larger level a dance arranger has to look at the song as a whole. When should the dance breaks happen? When do the dancers need a short bit of background music to play as a transition, while they make their way up the stairs, for instance? What kind of music should that be? A dance arranger then has to write those dance breaks and those transitions, using music that the composer has written for that song, or for other songs in the show, or from other songs from that time period. While making these decisions, a dance arranger has to make sure that these decisions fit the style of music the composer is trying to evoke, and the story that the director wants the song to tell.

Chase says he starts his process by talking to the composer, the music director, the orchestrator, the arranger (if there is one), the director and the choreographer. He gets everyone's input and looks for a singularity of vision — typically coming from the director — that will guide his work.

After that, Chase spends a lot of his time with the choreographer. He explains: "Rob Ashford and Kathleen Marshall both like making ABC lists. The A numbers are the ones that really involve dance and specific dance movements. The B list is the one that involves essentially musical staging. The Cs are the numbers that they don't really need to think about except for shaping in a very general sense, like a ballad, something that isn't movement driven."

Starting with the "A" numbers and working their way down, Chase and the choreographer discuss their general thoughts on each song. For instance, in "A Little Upset," the prison number in Cry-Baby, Chase says that Ashford "knew it would have a chase sequence, he knew that within the number there would be moments when the guys break out of prison. Where can we expand the number?" Not only where it makes sense musically, but where it makes sense with what's going on physically.

They play through the song. "We say here's a place we can expand it. Then: how do we want to expand it? Is it just its own section, which means you're establishing something that has its own melody?" — like a dance break. "Or we're going to [only] add a couple of eights here" — that's dance language for eight counts. (When each measure has four counts, for instance, eight counts is two measures. If you've seen A Chorus line think of it as the eight in "five, six, seven, eight.")

Chase then has to write the music to fit what he and the choreographer decide. In "A Little Upset," he wrote the music and the words for the Latin chant that the prisoners sing as they go up the steps (approved by the songwriters). He created the music that's heard after the prisoners break out of prison and the police are chasing them around the stage. For that sequence, he drew from songs in the show, plus influences that fit the 1954 setting, such as Ray Charles' "Hit the Road Jack," Peggy Lee's version of "Fever," Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and the music of Neil Hefti, who in the '60s wrote the "Batman" theme.

Chase and the choreographer start out spending a week together, four or five hours per day, discussing their general thoughts. Then after a month, they come back together for another week or two to nail down the details, this time with more people in the room, such as an associate, an assistant and the dance captain. "He'll come back and say, 'I wish I had four more counts here,' and I'll say, 'Can you do that for one more bar?'"

Other details get added later. At some point, someone in the creative team said that the characters of Allison and Cry-Baby should sing during this chase sequence. David Javerbaum, one of the songwriters, wrote a lyric for that section. Lynne Shankel, the music director and arranger, arranged the vocals. And then Chase inserted it into the song — he and Ashford decided that she should sing while three of the dancers run in slow motion.

After Chase is done arranging the whole song, he hands his music to the orchestrator to orchestrate, with very detailed notes: "This is what I hear, this is what's important, here's where it's loud, here's where it's really supporting the dance, here's where you can go a slightly different way," Chase says.

During rehearsals, Chase starts off as the rehearsal pianist during dance rehearsals, paying close attention to the dancers. "I might say, 'Gosh, that's a bigger accent than I thought,' or 'That's a bigger gesture than I thought.'" During breaks he'll often make changes to his score, which is on his laptop in Finale, and can even have the stage management print out the score and make copies for the actors that day. During previews, he still makes changes — he can sit by the sound booth, make a change, and have a new score ready by the end of a performance.

Some numbers are harder to crack than others. One particularly difficult song was "Kansasland" in Curtains. "On the script it says 'Bambi does an incredible dance that wows everyone,'" Chase says. "That character has to prove that she's truly talented and not just there because of her mother." Chase and Ashford created a whole Wild West-like dance sequence to convey this idea. Ashford took advantage of the actress Megan Sikora's flexibility, and Chase created music that was "somewhere between 'American in Paris' and Aaron Copeland," he says.

Chase has a few favorite songs from his productions, in which he felt the dancing and the music melded particularly well: "Too Darn Hot" from the 1999 revival of Kiss Me, Kate, choreographed by Kathleen Marshall; the courtesan dance in "The House of Marcus Lycus" from the 1996 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, choreographed by Rob Marshall; the Havana sequence in Guys and Dolls in London, again with Ashford; and "Hernando's Hideaway" in The Pajama Game revival, with Kathleen Marshall, in which Harry Connick, Jr. had a piano solo in the middle of it. That song, Chase says, was "about how people interacted with him playing piano. How the song adjusted itself around the style of the playing." He adds, "That version of 'Hernando's' could only have existed with Harry Connick."

               

Ask Playbill.com: Lighting

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Robbie of Providence, RI.

Question: I often help out community theatre productions and local high schools with their lighting design, but often I'm brought in at the last minute, when all the sets, costumes and staging have been completed. I was wondering how lighting designers on Broadway handle their craft?

Answer: To answer this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with Brian MacDevitt and Kevin Adams, two prolific, Tony-winning lighting designers.

Like many designers, lighting designers often work with directors they've worked with before. It's "kind of 50-50 between people I've worked with and people who have [only] seen my work," Adams says.

Sometimes they pick shows based on scheduling. And while major lighting designers' diversity of credits makes it seem as if any of them could do any type of show, Adams says he'll often turn down shows he doesn't think he's right for. He says, "There are shows that are realistic types of lighting, like sunrises and sunsets and candlelight. That's not me. I just don't have the patience to re-create all that. I like abstracted space, and I like event type of shows — heavier on the event than the realistic storytelling."

Is the set designer typically hired first? "That's typical of a commercial production, because people will open the purse strings slowly," MacDevitt says. It takes longer to build sets than it does to create the lighting. So if a producer is planning to open a show on Broadway this fall, for instance, even if the production isn't a done deal, you need to hire a set designer as soon as possible. Since you can wait a bit on the lighting designer, you might as well do so. Then, in case the show falls through, you've been spared the cost of the lighting designer's initial payment. At non-profit theatres, where productions are slotted into a theatre ahead of time, everyone tends to be hired at once, MacDevitt says.

Adams has had a slightly different experience. "Often I'm hired after the set designer," he says, but "the last few years I've been hired before the set designer." That's perhaps because — or why — the lighting in his shows Passing Strange and Spring Awakening, with their walls of light, is so prominent.

The designer starts the process by reading the script many times. While reading, MacDevitt says, he's "trying to respond to the show emotionally, and, with that emotional response, think of how you can contribute to it personally," he says. "Is it a happy place? A sad place?" For instance, he says, for A Catered Affair, he felt that "lighting should be warm and inviting, and we should kind of want to be in the room with the performers. That really has as lot to do with the color — having a warmer color, a softness to it."

MacDevitt says this conceptualizing is not unlike trying to alter the lighting in your home. "People are all lighting designers when they turn off the fluorescent lights in the kitchen and put the candles on the table. They're designing the lighting in the room to make it feel a certain way."

After initial conceptual discussions with the director and other designers, the lighting designer has to create a light plot. This is a map of all the lights in the show — how they're arranged on each pipe above the stage and in the house, where they point and what colors they are. "I often work from background to foreground, laying in layers of light," Adams says.

The designers have to decide how to circuit the lights together — the equivalent of deciding which lighting fixtures will be on which switches and dimmers in your house. And they also decide on lights with special effects. In Adams' design for The 39 Steps, for instance, he has a light with a moving cloud loop, to create the effect of clouds moving along a blue background.

MacDevitt says A Catered Affair, a small musical, has around 400 stationary lights and 30 robotic lights that move around. A big musical could have 1,000 stationary and 100 moving.

During this process, in addition to underscoring the emotions, a designer also thinks about how to frame what's happening onstage. This proved especially difficult, for instance, when Adams did Peter and Jerry at Second Stage. The director wanted the lighting to stay exactly the same for the entire show, throughout both one-acts. "At times the staging was very tight, just on a bench, and at times it covered a 25-foot wide space, so to make a look that could cover both of those was hard," he says.

The lighting plot gets turned in right before rehearsals start, or very early on in rehearsals, Adams says, "which I found very difficult to do when I first stated this. You don't really know what the staging is. You put in room to wiggle around." Does the plot have to change? "Sometimes very little changes and sometimes a lot changes — and a lot is like 30 percent," he says. "It's rare that an entire plot is overhauled."

MacDevitt mentions that after the designer turns in his light plot, there's usually a back-and-forth with the producers over costs. You're mainly trying to keep rental costs down, which on a play could be about $3,000 a week, while on a musical could be $15,000 a week and upwards, he says.

After the light plot is set, you go into the theatre and "focus" the lights — meaning you hang them up and point them at the right place on stage. Then you create each light cue in the show by setting exactly how intense each light or set of lights will be in each cue, and recording them on a computer. A big part of this process, MacDevitt says, is the "transition from scene to scene: Do they black out quickly or do they cross fade from one part of the stage to another like in a musical segue, or is the curtain coming down and you're taking all the light off the stage?"

Is lighting supposed to be noticed? Or is it like a film score, where, as the cliché goes, it's better if you don't notice it? Adams says, "There are times when the lighting is part of the spectacle, and should be very 'muscular,' I call it, should be doing a lot of the work. But there are times that l should sit back and let other elements push the storytelling along. A show can be all of one or all of the other or be combinations of those things." For instance, in Spring Awakening, "in the book parts of the show, the lighting sits back, and when you go into the songs, the lighting gets a little more muscular." In general, the effect should never be too obvious. "Someone's murdered — red light! After you do that a bunch of times when you're 25, you don't do that any more," Adams says.

How do these designers design a half-dozen shows at once? Typically, they're all at different stages, though not always: "In January I was working on three different shows, and I was in three different theatres some days," Adams says. And they hire a staff. MacDevitt, for instance, employs an associate designer to help him with a play, and one associate and one or two assistants for every musical (each helper is only on one show at a time).

Adams employs a unique philosophy for handling the workload. He explains, "I was a waiter when I was younger, at Bennigan's, and they taught us to think of your tables not as five separate tables but as one table. And that's helped me so much in my work. It's like one big show that you have to move forward every day instead of lots of little shows."

Ask Playbill.com: Cast Albums

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Thom Sellwood.

Question: What goes into the process of recording and producing a cast album?

Answer: For this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with Kurt Deutsch, the president of Sh-K-Boom Records (full disclosure: I once wrote liner notes for Sh-K-Boom). First, Deutsch says, the record company executives see the show, agree to create the album and make a deal with the show's producers. A lot of times, record companies have established relationships with certain producers. Deutsch says his relationships with Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum, for instance, led to him creating cast albums for The Drowsy Chaperone and In the Heights.

The next step is to come up with an overall concept for the album. This task isn't always as straightforward as it seems. For The Drowsy Chaperone, for instance, Deutsch and the producers decided to record the show more or less live in the room — with performers and musicians performing at the same time, as opposed to the traditional method of everyone performing at different times and layering in various tracks later. Deutsch says, "We wanted it to sound like the way they would have recorded it in 1928," in keeping with the show's theme of nostalgia for old musicals. Sh-K-Boom's Passing Strange cast album was recorded live in the theatre, which is hardly ever done.

The main difference between recording a rock album and a Broadway cast album: time. While rock albums can take weeks to record, a typical Broadway cast album is recoded in two days. For a rock album, Deutsch says, "You could spend one day just recording one vocal track and putting down layers and layers of guitar overdubs. You could spend a whole day setting up drum sounds, getting the drums exactly how you want them."

One reason for this difference in recording studio time is that in rock music, recording is a big part of the artistic process, while in musical theatre, the music is pretty much set by the time everyone gets into the studio (the songs are, of course, being performed the same way every night). Plus, since Broadway is an extremely risky business, and cast albums hardly ever become hits, there's a big push to keep costs down. A smaller Off-Broadway show costs around $100,00-$150,000 while a big Broadway cast album costs around $500,000 — a significant chunk of change for a $10 million show. Union rules affect these costs. For instance, a performer gets a week's salary for every eight hours spent in the recording studio. The rule of thumb, Deutsch says, is to schedule the sessions so that the actors don't work more than those eight hours.

This recording studio time issue is one reason why the Passing Strange album was recoded live, Deutsch says. Stew and Heidi Rodewald, who composed the music and play instruments and sing in the show, are used to making rock records. "They're used to going in and laying the tracks down and spending a lot of time on the vocals, spending a lot of time on really making a record the way that you would make a rock record," Deutsch says. "It would be cost-prohibitive for us to make a record like that with Passing Strange." A live album is a concept that rock musicians are used to, and it doesn't take up studio time. But beyond these practical maters, Deutsch says, the live concept fit because for Passing Strange "half of the energy is the [audience] reaction and how Stew plays off of the audience, so the audience is almost like another character in the show."

To maximize the efficiency of the process, scheduling the studio time is very important. "It's like a jigsaw puzzle," Deutsch says. "It's usually scheduled very, very specifically, down to the minute."

For In the Heights, for instance, Deutsch scheduled a three-hour Sunday-night session, an all-day Monday session, and a Tuesday-morning session, all at Legacy Recording Studio on 38th Street. On Sunday night they recorded mainly the musicians. While the musicians played, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's songwriter and star, did some vocals. Then, Monday morning, Mandy Gonzalez, who plays Nina, the plucky Stanford University student, did her solos. A bit later they brought in Christopher Jackson, who plays Benny, Nina's love interest. Eventually, Karen Olivo came in to do her solo stuff. Towards the end of the day, the ensemble vocals were recorded. Tuesday morning, Carlos Gomez and Priscilla Lopez, who play Nina's parents, came in to focus on their solos, since they're not in a lot of the group numbers. Despite the cramped schedule, Deutsch likes to do at least two takes per song.

The leader during this process is the producer — the equivalent to the director in theatre. There's also a recording engineer, who oversees a lot of the technical aspects of the recording session: making sure the studio is set up properly, making sure all the microphones work, and making sure the sound is being captured in the right way. (Deutsch serves as the producer on his albums but will often co-produce with the recording engineer.) Another job is the ProTools engineer, who makes sure the sound is being fed into the ProTools software in the correct way.

Later, a mixing engineer (often the same as the recording engineer) leads the mixing process — when all the tracks are assembled together. After that comes the mastering process, which "puts the icing on the cake," Deutsch says. The producer and his team make sure all the songs on the album have a consistent feel. In areas where the show is sung-through, without any obvious endings to songs, they decide the point at which one track ends and the next one begins, so that the individual songs will sound okay when shuffled around on your iPod. And, for the songs that do have obvious endings, they decide how much blank space there should be between one song and the next. After the mastering process, an album takes about three weeks to manufacture and put into stores.

While mixing and mastering, you're also working on the album cover and the booklet with the lyrics and the liner notes, while also creating a marketing plan. Usually you make sure to check that the lyrics in the booklet fit with exactly what's sung on the album. But sometimes you run out of time. "For In the Heights, this was the first time I had to hand in the artwork before the finished product," Deutsch says. "It was more important to make the street date than to check every single 'and' or 'but.'"

Ask Playbill.com: The Quick Change

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Dit Lopez of Seattle, WA.

Question: How do actors and actresses change costumes so quickly during a show?

Answer: For this question, we decided to focus on one particular quick change: in Hairspray, the change that Tracy and Edna have to make during the song "Welcome to the 60s." During that song, Tracy (the lead, a teenage dance champion) and Edna (her mom, played by a man) visit Mr. Pinky's clothes shop and transform from their old clothes into matching turquoise, white and purple psychedelic dresses.

AskPlaybill.com spoke to Megan Bowers, Tracy's dresser throughout the show (who helps out with both the Edna and Tracy change during this song), and Marissa Perry, the actress who began playing Tracy April 15 after going on as the standby about 20 times over the last six months. (Perry also played Tracy in one of the first regional theatre productions of Hairspray — at the Weston Playhouse in Vermont.)

Edna's change happens first. Right behind the Mr. Pinky's set, Bowers and Joe Armon, who is Edna's dresser, "puddle" Edna's dress on the floor, meaning they splay it out so that the performer can step into it easily. Tracy's dress is puddled onto the floor a little further upstage.

The actor playing Edna — currently George Wendt — exits through the main doors of Mr. Pinky's in the middle of the stage, and the change occurs behind the set. Armon runs over and takes off Edna's housecoat. Edna gets out of her shoes and walks into the middle of the dress on the floor. Armon and Bowers pull the dress up and onto Edna's arms. Meanwhile, two other people swap out Edna's wig and pin on another. Armon zips up the back of the dress while Bowers puts on Edna's shoes. The process takes about 45 seconds or so, Bowers, estimates.

As Edna re-enters the song through those same middle doors, Bowers scoots along the floor (so as not to be seen), pulling Tracy's dress downstage so that it's in the same place Edna's dress was (if Tracy changes too far upstage, she won't be hidden behind the set, and people in the mezzanine will be able to see the change).

Tracy exits through the same middle doors, and a similar process occurs — except Bowers and Armon switch roles, more or less. We'll let Perry, the actress playing Tracy, explain: "As I go through the doors, I start to unsnap my shirt. Megan is in front of me, Joe behind me. Megan [reaches around and] unsnaps the back of my skirt. She pulls the skirt down. I take off my shoes. We switch places, so that I'm facing Joe and my back is to Megan. That moment is when I step into the dress. The dress is laid out very nicely and very organized. Joe pulls it up. I put my hands right through the sleeves. Megan zips me, and I put myself into the '60s heels, as Joe is holding the shoe open." Armon then closes the shoes, which are specially-rigged for quick changes: Each shoe is fastened by a small hook, similar to the hook on a bra.

Tracy's change is quicker than Edna's, taking only 25 to 30 seconds, Bowers estimates (she doesn't have to change her wig like Edna does). Bowers, who has been the dresser for Tracy since October, says she's had her close calls during the change, but nothing too horrible has happened. "I think the zipper is the scariest part," she says, referring to the zipper on the back of the dress. "You have to always make sure you're carefully doing it. With that fabric, it's like a chiffon; if it gets stuck, it's probably not going to go up in time."

When the zipper gets stuck, Bowers says, "I just say, 'Your zipper's stuck and we don't have enough time. Try not to turn around as much.'" But, she adds, "There are times when you can have coffee and tea afterwards. We're like, 'That was quick.'"

One general rule of thumb in quick changes, Bowers says, is, "the less the actor can do in a quick change, the better. If they're going through the sleeves or they're trying to button it, then you're fighting with them to get it done. The more relaxed they can be, the more still they can be, the better."

Perry says the one time this particular change tripped her up was during her final dress rehearsal, before her first time going on as a standby. "I tried to help," she says. "Joe put my sleeve on instead of just putting my arms out and letting him put the sleeve on. I tried to help, which is the number one thing you don't do, which I didn't know, because it was my first time on Broadway. The sleeve got stuck, it got twisted, we had to stop the rehearsal. Your instinct is to help, and you can't. It was a good lesson to learn. I'm glad I learned it during rehearsal."

How does Perry feel during the quick change? "It is tiring to know that you're coming offstage, but you don't get to relax," she says. But changing in front of people doesn't bother her. "I just luckily happen to be one of those people who really have no shame," she says. During the show, under her clothes, she's wearing a kind of fat suit — "it's like a dance leotard except it's got boob padding, and I am padded around my midsection, sides and my back." During the change described above, she acknowledges, "You can see a little of my butt, but I don't mind. It kind of creeps out a little bit. You can probably see the outer edges of it. But it's a good view."

Bowers serves as Perry's support system throughout the show. She'll ask Perry how she's doing, and she wears an apron with pockets to carry things Perry might need, such as a water bottle, towel, mints, tissues, lip balm and an extra pair of stockings, which tend to rip. She also maintains Perry's clothes and will tidy up her dressing room a bit during the show, especially if the actress is having guests afterwards. "A big part of it is to be supportive of them and make their job a little easier," Bowers says.

Ask Playbill.com: Closing a Show

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Patrick Varner of Santa Rosa, CA.

Question: What happens to the sets, lights, costumes, and sound supplies after a show closes?

Answer: This week, AskPlaybill.com is talking about strike — don't worry, it's not that kind of strike. Strike is the theatre term for taking down a show. For this column, AskPlaybill.com spoke with Philip Naudé, the associate production manager at Manhattan Theatre Club.

MTC, a not-for-profit company, operates the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, which presents three shows a season, and two Off-Broadway spaces at City Center, which present two shows each. So seven times a year, the company moves a show out of a theatre (disclosure: this reporter worked at MTC as an intern).

After a show ends its run, the crew takes two or three days to get everything off the stage. They break down the set using things like crowbars to pry out the nails, electric screwdrivers to undo the screws and hand-held electric saws to simply cut through things. "A lot of the sets are thrown away — they're literally thrown in a dumpster," says Naudé. They put the trash in a dumpster on the street nearby, or they hire a truck to take it to a landfill.

MTC takes special care to salvage everything it can, especially since it's an ongoing company that knows it'll need those elements for future shows, and since it's a cash-strapped not-for-profit. Hardware such as wheels and pulleys are saved, along with a lot of the pipe and steel work.

It would be hard to recycle the stuff that gets thrown out. "A lot of the things we have built are combinations of materials," Naudé explains. "You'll have wallpaper that is on top of mahogany panel board, [which] is screwed and glued onto a metal frame. Unless you're dealing with raw, basic materials, it's hard to recycle things." He notes that sets are rarely just basic wood, since all exposed wood is "back painted" — painted black in the back, to reduce the chance of fires.

But some elements of the set get recycled in more creative ways, by MTC employees themselves. "I personally used ten sheets of half-inch lexan" — similar to plexiglass —"and instead of throwing it out I moved it to my house to use in an indoor winter garden," Naudé says. "One of the carpenters took some of the steel elements because he does welding work. We have a little bit of a game going on where people [find] uses for these materials."

A lot of the props and costumes have been rented — they get restored to their original conditions and returned to rental houses. But if a costume has been purchased, actors can sometimes take it home. "Everything is so tailored to make the perfect look for the actor," Naudé says. "Sometimes there'll be a jacket that fits really nicely so they'll request that they take it with them."

Some of the light and sound equipment is rented, and some of it is in-house. For example, the theatre has a computer system for the sound, but rents an extra, in case one breaks down. After the stage is cleared, the rental vendors drop off big black "road boxes" to get loaded with sound and light equipment, and then come back to pick them up when they're filled.

The crew — which can number 12 to 15 during strike at the Biltmore — eventually puts the theatre back to normal. They take down the "soft goods" — the large black draperies that hang down at the back and on the sides of the stage — which get stored off-site. They take down motors that were used overhead, and store them. They often repaint the stage floor, and sometimes a new layer of Masonite board is constructed for it as well.

"It's an elegant process," Naudé says, though he believes it can be made more elegant — mainly by finding ways to save more materials so that other theatres in the city can use them. He says he's currently consulting for a new company (run by a production manager friend, Janet Clancy) that will help match theatres that could share resources, so that, say, the glass from the skylights in an Off-Broadway production of Barefoot in the Park can be taken downtown and put into the windows in someone else's Off-Off-Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "I think it would benefit the community as a whole to focus on whatever materials we can pass on to our younger brothers and sisters," he says.

Ask Playbill.com: Child Actors on Broadway

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Natalie Schirone of Pelham, NY.

Question: I baby-sit for a young girl in Sunday in the Park with George.  She shares the role with another young child. They each perform four times a week.

Why do some shows make the children share the part and others do not? For example, Kelsey didn't have to share a role when she was in Grey Gardens. What is the Equity rule on that?

Answer: Yes, that is true: In Sunday in the Park with George, two young actresses, Kelsey Fowler and Alison Horowitz, share the role of Louise. Each plays the role four times a week, and each serves as the standby for the other four. But in Grey Gardens, when Fowler played Lee Bouvier, she had the role all to herself, and played it eight times a week.

Other shows do it differently. Mary Poppins uses three sets of child actors for the boy role and three sets for the girl role. In Les Misérables, in both the original and the recent revival, three actresses rotated between two parts, Young Cosette and the much smaller role of Young Eponine. Each night, the third actress was a standby, and would show up to the theatre just in case. One lucky actress got to play Young Cosette three times a week, and the others played it twice each. At night shows, they could all leave after intermission, since their parts weren't in the second act. In the same show, two boys rotated in and out of the role of Gavroche.

A spokesperson for Actors' Equity says that there are no Equity rules mandating that child actors split roles. A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Labor says that the state does not limit the number of hours a child can perform in any way that would require a role split on Broadway. All the state requires is a special permit for a child performer and that the child maintain a satisfactory academic performance (as mandated by the Child Performer Education and Trust Act, which went into effect in March 2004).

So the decision as to whether a child splits the role or not is up to the individual show and its producers, management and creative team. On Grey Gardens the decision was made back when the show was Off-Broadway that the child actors were mature enough to play eight shows a week, according to a spokesperson for the show.

Mark Shacket, a Broadway general manager, says that in general, the decision is made by the creative team, and there are a number of factors that go into it. If the role is particularly demanding, "it may be determined that it's too much for a child to handle" to perform for the entire week, Shacket says. Shacket also notes that if one actor performs all week, there must be a standby child actor who takes time to show up every day but doesn't usually go onstage. Therefore, for fairness reasons, the creative team will choose to split the role, especially if both actors are almost equally qualified. Finally, the creative team also thinks about the needs, skills and personality of the particular actors they're working with.

There are other Equity rules regarding child actors. Everyone who is under 19 years old and has not graduated from high school has to have a tutor during rehearsals. They also get a tutor during out-of-town tryouts (or previews if there's no out-of-town tryout). And if you're on a Broadway tour, you get a tutor full time. And, even on Broadway, for a performer who's under 16, the show is required to hire a supervisor for the child to be at the theatre at every performance.

During rehearsals and previews for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for instance, Alana Serignese worked as the tutor for two of the young performers, a third grader and a fifth grader (the third performer is four years old, too young for a tutor). The tutoring generally took place for four hours every afternoon, Tuesday through Friday. The children would sometimes be tutored during the show when they weren't in the scene, in a large upstairs dressing room.

Serignese, who has worked as a tutor on theatre productions, films and television shows, says schedules can be unpredictable. "You definitely have to be flexible," she says. "You can't assume that everything's going to go smoothly because it never does." When the performers come offstage, she says, "They're still excited sometimes, and they have to sit down, and they're like 'Ugh, school.'" Plus, she says, "You're teaching a bunch of different kids at different ages, all at different grades, at the same time. That can be tricky." And, of course, she adds, "Child actors usually they have strong personalities. But I like that."

               

Ask Playbill.com: Moving a Broadway Show

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: This spring, August: Osage County and The 39 Steps are moving from one Broadway theatre to another, and Macbeth is moving from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the Lyceum. What is involved in such a move?

Answer:

To answer this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with Mary Miller, the company manager of August: Osage County, and Jeffrey Richards, one of the show's producers.

Richards and his fellow producers knew that August had to exit the Imperial Theatre in spring, since the backstage areas need to be refurbished a bit to accommodate Billy Elliot, which begins previews in September. The only problem: there wasn't a theatre available. The Seafarer was closing, but the Booth was booked with Thurgood. Rock 'n' Roll was closing, but the Jacobs was promised to The Country Girl.

'It's a very tight market," Richards says. "We went back to them" — Gerald Schoenfeld and Phil Smith, the heads of the Shubert Organization, which operates the Imperial — "in the beginning of the year, because we felt that August was exhibiting the kind of box office traction that would enable us to sustain a long run, and they were very supportive and they said they would put us at the top of the list" for when something became available. They were able to negotiate for a couple more weeks at the Imperial. "We hemmed and hawed and pushed and shoved," Miller says. Finally, when The Farnsworth Invention announced it was closing at the Music Box, Richards got the call.

The final performance at Imperial is April 20 and the show begins again at the Music Box on April 29. But the move starts on April 17, when, to get a head start, crew members will start installing a duplicate package of light and sound equipment into the Music Box. The show rents that equipment, so after April 20, the light and sound package from the Imperial can simply be returned.

Starting April 21, the set will be dismantled into different pieces, using a system of chains attached to motors, secured by the metal grid above the stage. The set has to be dismantled completely, starting with the top floors all the way down to the deck of the stage, before anything can be installed in the Music Box, since the deck has to be put down first. During the move, onlookers might even be able to see pieces of the set lying on the sidewalk.

The audience entrances for the two theatres are just down the block from each other, on 45th Street. But the Imperial's loading dock is on 46th Street, and the Music Box loading dock is on 45th Street. So the set parts will be put onto a truck, which will literally drive around the block to drop them off.

Both theatres are similar enough that the same set can be used. But the Music Box stage is a few feet narrower than the Imperial stage, which will affect the scenes that take place on the side edges, such as the dining room and the front porch. "Those scenes will be cheated closer to center stage, and maybe even put on a different angle, to maximize the viewing power of the audience," Miller says.

The Music Box is also not as deep as the Imperial, so the stage will lose the crossover space behind the set. To cross from one side of the stage to the other without being seen by the audience, actors will have to walk downstairs to the basement below the stage.

"There aren't too many quick entrances and exits, so people will have time to do it," Miller says. "It's just a little more of a nuisance."

The Music Box has fewer dressing rooms, so some performers who had their own room at the Imperial will now have to share.

Tech rehearsals will begin on Friday, April 25. The actors will get the week off, but they'll come back for rehearsals on Sunday, April 27 and Tuesday, April 29 — to get used to working in the new space before performances begin Tuesday night.

There are, of course, the little change-of-address tasks that have to be dealt with when moving anywhere, be it between theatres or apartments. "It's silly, but we have to call Verizon and get the DSL moved, get the mail moved," Miller says. The Deer Park water bottle delivery service had to be transferred. A meal is served during the play, so the sink and dishwasher have to be hooked up, along with the venting system for the stove, and the fire department has to approve all that.

Many of the stage crew members will be new, since on Broadway, each theatre has its own house crew. But the sound board operator, a props person and the wardrobe team will move with the show, since they're employed by the production, as will the management team.

The Music Box has 400 fewer seats, which changes the gross potential from $930,000 to $725,000. The show has to hire fewer ushers and cleaning staff members, and the cost of renting the theatre is decreased a bit. But overall, the weekly operating costs only decrease by a few thousand dollars, Miller says. The actors get paid the same, and the show isn't doing less advertising because they need to sell fewer tickets.

But the producers also have to get word of the move out to the public. They put up a second marquee on the Music Box and a second set of posters and promotional materials near the entrance. For a rare photo op, you can now go to 45th Street and take a photo of two different marquees, each advertising the same show. For many of the show's posters, they'll put what's called a "snipe" — a large sticker of sorts — across the bottom of the poster, to change the theatre that's listed.

The show is using the same ticketing service, Telecharge, but they had to create a second listing on Telecharge's website for the Music Box performances, accompanied by special warnings letting customers know what's going on. "It is in red and it is in bold," Miller says. "I hope it hasn't caused confusion but I'm sure it's caused a little bit."

Currently, theatergoers can go to the Imperial and buy tickets for the Music Box performances. But when the Music Box's box office opens on April 7, the Imperial has to stop selling those tickets, to comply with the rules of the treasurer's union, Miller says.

Despite all the logistics, Miller calls the move "exhilarating." She's especially excited to potentially be let in on a Shubert Organization secret. "I'm told that there's some secret little alleyway" underground, between the two theatres, Miller says, through which she's hoping to move the props and costumes. Still, she'll have to inspect it first. "Jack the Ripper's probably down there," she says.

Ask Playbill.com: Advertising

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Leazah Behrens of Marshall, MN.

Question: What is the process for publicity designers for Broadway shows? Do they work with a director to get their ideas?

Answer: To answer this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with Nancy Coyne, who helped found the Broadway advertising firm Serino Coyne and who has been working in the theatre business for over three decades.

First, when we talk about designs — and I assume the questioner is asking about designs of posters and logos and such — we're not talking about publicity; we're talking about advertising. What's the difference? Let's clarify some theatre business terms: Marketing is the overall term that means "putting your product out to the public to consider," Coyne says. It's an umbrella term that encompasses many sub-categories, including:

Advertising: mentions of your product in the media that you pay for, the specialty of the ad agencies such as Serino Coyne   Publicity: mentions of your product in the media that are free, like reviews and feature articles, which the press agent facilitates   Promotions: "associating your product with other products," Coyne says, such as corporate sponsorships, tie-ins, and using tickets for trade (Broadway shows will give tickets to television or radio stations for them to use to entertain clients, in exchange for ad time).

So, about the designs for the ads: Coyne says her firm — which specializes in Broadway musicals — starts working on a show a few months before its out-of-town tryout. Coyne, her creative director, and the account supervisor assigned to the particular account, will read the script (and listen to a CD if there is one) and talk with the firm's art department about what they want to communicate about the show. "We don't try to summarize a show," Coyne says of the ads. "We try to give a flavor, a taste: What makes it unique?"

The art department will help come up with a general concept, and will then either create the design itself or hire outside photographers or illustrators. For instance, for Serino Coyne's current campaign for A Catered Affair, the firm and the show's producers considered five or six outside illustrators and picked the one they felt could best create a Norman Rockwell-style look, circa 1954. For Cry-Baby, which is also set in the 1950s, the firm found an illustrator who could best capture the look of pulp fiction covers from that era. For help with the Passing Strange designs, the firm called in Dewynter's, the London-based firm with which producer Gerald Schoenfeld has a long relationship. After a designer is selected, the designer presents a few different options for the general look of the show, and the marketing team and the producers will select one of them.

The show's director and creative team are not usually involved in the ad design process, but they are consulted. And, the set and costume designs can be a major inspiration for the ads, Coyne says. That's one reason why Coyne is a big fan of waiting until the show goes up onstage for the first time — or at least until the set and costume sketches are completed — before unveiling the final ads.

For Legally Blonde, for instance, "We hired a photographer who is great at that kind of look — that pop look, that young, fresh, Cosmo Girl magazine cover" style, Coyne says, "but it's the set designer and costume designer [who are] all over that artwork, because it's lifted from the show. If the show wasn't pink, our artwork wouldn't be pink." For Hairspray, Coyne says, "in our artwork, she has blue hair — she doesn't have blue hair in the show, but the colors, that flavor, is dictated by the show itself."

While coming up with the designs (the creative strategy), the ad firm simultaneously decides where to place the ads (the media strategy). Both aspects have to mesh. "We usually create an array of materials, from things that work on a side of a bus, to things that work in a newspaper ad," Coyne says. But often a show will specialize in certain media. A Gershwin score might focus on radio, Coyne says, while for many years people closely identified Evita with its television ad. "Television is a little less important these days," she adds. "I've had a lot of focus groups tell me that the most important thing they see about a show is on the side of the bus." For the Metropolitan Opera's upcoming Philip Glass work Satyagraha, about Mohandas K. Gandhi, the firm initiated a "wild posting," as Coyne called it, putting posters that say things like "Could an opera make peaceful warriors of us all?" on construction sites, to reflect the work's political consciousness.

From the out-of-town tryout through opening, a Broadway musical will typically have weekly marketing meetings, which include all the marketing representatives and the producers. For an awards contender, those weekly meetings continue through the Tonys. Some shows still have weekly meetings five years into the run, Coyne says, but after the Tonys, many shows switch to every two weeks or every month.

Shows change their ad designs as their runs progress. For instance, they might use a logo-centric approach to start off and then switch to a photographic approach after opening. "That's a very common next step," Coyne says. "We've sold the show on that — now let's look at some of the people who are in it."

The main challenge of advertising, Coyne says, is the small budget. The general rule of thumb is that a show's weekly ad budget is no more than ten percent of the weekly gross potential — $100,000 for a show with a potential of $1 million. And, Coyne notes, you're introducing a new product that no one's ever heard of, in New York, which is oversaturated with media. Coyne says the process is not unlike introducing any other product, such as a McDonald's sandwich. But "you have to eat, and then the sandwich is 99 cents," Coyne says. "It's essential and affordable. Broadway is not essential nor affordable."

Ask Playbill.com: Music-Related Jobs

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Jeremy M. Boegel of Union City, CA.

Question: Can you talk a little bit about the music department of a musical? What happens to a musical score once it is written by the composer? How many people get involved (i.e. orchestrator, musical director, arranger, etc.) and how important is each position? Can you compare today's practices with the way they were done in the "Golden Age" of Broadway (50s and 60s)? Can you also talk about what happens when a show is revived and how that show's score is dealt with?

Answer: To answer these questions, AskPlaybill.com spoke with Seymour "Red" Press, the veteran musical coordinator whose latest Broadway projects are Passing Strange and the current revival of Gypsy, and who received a 2007 Tony Award Honor for Excellence in the Theatre.

Here are the various music-related department jobs on a Broadway musical:

Composer Writes the music. Lyricist Writes the lyrics. The lyricist may or may not be the same person as the composer. Conductor The conductor, typically the same person as the music director, not only conducts the orchestra every night but also helps teach the music to the performers and the orchestra during rehearsals. Arranger Occasionally a musical will have an arranger or music supervisor, who takes the melody from the composer and writes it down and fleshes it out by adding chords and other basic elements. Glen Kelly was the arranger for the Mel Brooks musicals and Spamalot, for instance. Dance arranger A musical will usually hire a dance arranger to work with the choreographer to create the sections of the songs in which the performers are dancing instead of singing. The dance arranger will typically fill the dance sections with "variations on the themes of the basic music of the show," Press says, and they work with the choreographer to make sure the dance music "represent[s] the dancing that’s happening." (Press notes that John Kander created the dance arrangements on the original Gypsy, and they're still being used in the current revival). Vocal arranger Sometimes a show will have a separate vocal arranger to decide which exact words and notes each performer will sing. But most of the time, the conductor does these arrangements. Orchestrator The orchestrator takes the arrangements that are set up by the composer, arranger or conductor and distributes them across the various instruments in the show. They create a huge document that details every note that every member of the orchestra will play at every moment. They even decide how one trumpet player's part will be different from another's. Copyist Typically, the copyist is suggested by the orchestrator, as many orchestrators like to work with certain copyists. The copyist takes the master score written by the orchestrator, and creates the many different individual scores given out to each musician. "You're not just transcribing," Press says. "They have to make sure that the music accommodates the problems of the different musicians." For instance, they try to arrange the pages so that the musicians can turn the page when they're not playing. The orchestrator and the copyist are sometimes called in to amend the music at various times throughout its run. For instance, when a new star comes in, the music will sometimes change keys to accommodate the star's voice. The orchestrator has to make sure that the key change doesn't screw up the orchestrations. For instance, if a saxophone is already playing its lowest possible note, and the orchestrations get moved down a key, the saxophone can no longer play that note, and the orchestrator has to figure out whether and how to make up for it. On a show like Chicago, where stars go in and out all the time, this can be a big job. Music coordinator Seymour "Red" Press is a music coordinator, though he uses the old-school title "contractor." Before a musical's rehearsals begin, he sits down with the orchestrator and conductor (the composer is there, too, on occasion) to discuss "the needs of the orchestra, the size of the orchestra, the style of the players who have to be hired," he says. He eventually hires the orchestra members, negotiates their contracts (usually it's a standard union contract but some will make demands), sets up the orchestra's rehearsal schedule, books the rehearsal studio and determines if instruments have to be bought or rented. Orchestra These are the people who play the instruments in the pit every night. The Gypsy orchestra, for instance, has 25 members. The orchestra starts rehearsing together about a week to ten days before the first preview. About five days before the first preview is the "sitzprobe," where the orchestra rehearses with the actors for the first time, and the various people listed above figure out how to make everything meld together. "I describe it as 'sitz' is sitting and 'probe' is analyzing," says Press. Associate conductor On almost all shows, Press says, the associate conductor is the keyboard player in the orchestra. He or she will often serve as a rehearsal pianist. Rehearsal pianist Usually, Press says, a musical will also hire a second rehearsal pianist, in addition to the associate conductor. One of them might play piano for the singing rehearsal while the other plays for a dancing rehearsal in another room. During a show's run, the rehearsal pianist could be a substitute for the regular keyboard player. Librarian The librarian collects the music, transports it and hands it out to the various orchestra members. He or she is typically a member of the orchestra. On Gypsy it's a French horn player. On Chicago it's a trombonist.

Press says that the lineup of music roles on a revival isn't that different from the lineup on a new musical. Sometimes a revival doesn't have to hire a new orchestrator, which is the case on Gypsy — they're using the same orchestrations used for the previous Broadway revival, in 2003. As for those orchestrations, "They are changed from the original but very slightly," Press says.

But sometimes a revival does have to hire an orchestrator, and even a new dance arranger. At the Encores! concert revivals, "We desperately try to use original orchestrations," Press says, but sometimes they have to be reconstructed from fragments, or they simply can't be found, so an orchestrator comes in.

Press says that the main change over the last few decades is the advent of computers. Some orchestrators, such as Jonathan Tunick, still write out their orchestrations by hand, and a copyist has to put them into a computer. But most orchestrators have gone electronic. It makes things like key changes very easy. "You can just push a key, and it all goes down a tone," says Press. The only other big difference between now and 50 years ago is the smaller orchestra size — a subject that Press was more reluctant to discuss.

Ask Playbill.com: Check In

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Andrea Macy from Bellmore, NY.

Question: What time are Broadway actors required to arrive at the theatre? Stagehands? Is there a difference between arrival times for Off-Broadway and Broadway actors?

Answer: To help answer this question, AskPlaybill.com checked in with our regular source for all things stage management, Ira Mont, currently the stage manager of Young Frankenstein and the third vice-president of Actors' Equity.

First, for both Broadway and Off-Broadway actors, Equity contracts state that actors should be at the theatre no later than a half hour before curtain. Each show has a sign-in sheet posted as close as possible to the stage door, where all actors have to sign in when they arrive.

Actors who need lots of hair and make-up work each night — think the Beast in Beauty and the Beast or the monster in Young Frankenstein — have to come in earlier to get ready (the extra time gets counted towards their number of rehearsal hours for that week). Actors are, of course, always at liberty to arrive as early as they wish to prepare their hair and do other things.

So what happens when an actor is late? When does the stage management decide to call in the understudy? "This is where you will find slight differences based on the needs of the show or the management style of the stage management or general management," Mont says.

Typically, the first thing you do when you see that an actor hasn't checked in is make sure the actor isn't in the building and simply forgot. "What you do is page 'Joe Smith, we're at half hour, if you're here please let a stage manager know,' and a phone will ring or someone will holler from the stage door, and they're embarrassed, but they're there," Mont says.

Technically, if an actor is not there at half hour, the management has the right to not let an actor go on. "Truthfully, that's rather archaically strict," Mont says, and many stage managers give leeway.

Some stage managers encourage actors to call if they're running late. So, "if they've already called you and said, 'The number one stopped at 59th Street and I'm running late,' then you're not concerned," Mont says.

But what if they're not in the building and you haven't heard from them? Some stage managers have stricter cutoff times than others, but "if you haven't heard from an actor at twenty of eight and they're not present, you're probably going to get the understudies in motion, and probably not going to turn back the clock" and let the actor go on if he shows up late, Mont says.

Still, sometimes it depends on the nature of the performer's role. If a role requires a lot of costume pre-sets, for instance, you're going to call in the understudy earlier, since understudies need their own costumes pre-set. And, in a musical, chorus members tend to have more costumes pre-set (it could be around a dozen) than the principals.

But the tricky part of this issue is that there is a system for fining actors who show up late (but still perform — if they don't perform it's considered an absence, which has its own separate consequences). And that fining system must be applied universally, with no special treatment for stars. Again, stage managers do sometimes give leeway regarding the fines.

Many actors forget about the relatively new 7 PM curtain times for some shows on Tuesdays. The stage manager will call them to see what's up, and they'll still be at home. "There was an occasion," Mont says, "where an actor, a principal actor who didn't appear in the show for almost the first hour, forgot about the seven o'clock curtain. We called them, we got the, 'Oh my God!' and we actually allowed them to come and do the show."

As for the stagehands, each department (props, electrics, etc.) has a department head, and each stagehand reports to his or her department head upon arrival.

According to Bruce Cohen, a spokesperson for the stagehands union, on Broadway, the stagehands are required to report to work a half-hour prior to curtain. But "in reality, the shows are so sophisticated now" that it takes a lot more time to set up, he says, "so 99 percent of the shows now have a pre-set hour, which means stage crew show up at 6:30 PM to accomplish these tasks" for an 8 PM curtain. It's not necessarily the entire running crew that shows up that early, though.

The tasks include re-setting sets, props, costumes, etc., so that everything is where it's supposed to be for the beginning of the first act. The crew members also check out the sound systems, computerized lighting systems and automated set and projection systems to make sure they're working properly.

Ask Playbill.com: Rights

From Playbill.com

This question comes from M. Gonzales of Albuquerque, NM.

Question: What determines when a show's rights are released? Do touring shows also have an effect on a regional/community/educational theatre's chance to perform a specific show? And if a show is revived, are the rights revoked for the time it plays?

Answer: For this question, Playbill.com spoke with Bert Fink, a spokesperson for the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. The organization does many things, but one of its divisions, R&H Theatricals, licenses the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, plus those of other writers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, to professional and amateur companies worldwide.

After a new hit musical opens on Broadway or Off-Broadway, at some point, the rights holders of a musical — typically the writers, or their estate, and possibly the creators of the source material — will make a deal with a licensing company such as R&H Theatricals or Music Theatre International to allow the company to administer the process of licensing the rights to professional and amateur companies who want to produce the musical.

The rights holders and the producers of that Broadway or Off-Broadway production will later make the decision as to when and where they want the licensing company to allow what kinds of productions.

Some producers wait longer than others. For example, the Altar Boyz producers have already allowed R&H to license the show for various productions, even though its original Off-Broadway production is still running. The show was licensed to a Budapest production last year, for instance.

But some producers choose to wait, so that licensed productions don't compete with the original New York production and its tour. R&H Theatricals acquired the rights to The Light in the Piazza during the show's Broadway run. After Broadway, the show went on a national tour. Only after the tour ended was R&H Theatricals given the go-ahead to license professional productions. R&H still can't license amateur productions, in order to protect the professional market, Fink says.

When a musical is revived on Broadway, productions of that show are typically restricted — in the New York area to protect the Broadway show, and potentially nationwide to protect a planned tour, Fink says.

If a producer puts on a major Broadway revival of a big Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, "restrictions can in theory be on national level," Fink says. "It's not unusual that professional theatres don't have access to that title for a couple of seasons."

While Fink doesn't know the exact details of the arrangement for Lincoln Center Theater's upcoming production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, for instance, he can say that "my assumption is that we are not licensing professional productions of South Pacific in a certain radius of Lincoln Center. That's standard policy."

Fink says R&H Theatricals tries whenever it can to convince the producers of major professional productions to still allow nearby high school productions, since, he argues, they don't take away audiences from the professional production, and instead encourage students and their families to see the show. Fink says R&H asked Lincoln Center Theater to allow New York area high school productions of South Pacific, and they obliged. "Lincoln Center Theater understood the value of encouraging high school students to do South Pacific in the New York area," Fink says.

A licensing house also deals with day-to-day problems, such as two professional theatres in the same city wanting to put on the same show. Fink says, "We want to protect them from each other."

Ask Playbill.com: Rehearsal Schedule

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Lisa Morey of Salt Lake City, UT.

Question: I teach middle school theatre and my students complain that they must attend every rehearsal in which their character is involved. What are the attendance rules for professional performers during the rehearsal process? How much notice must they give for a conflict and does the union provide for a certain number of absences?

Answer: A typical Broadway show rehearses six days a week for eight hours a day — from around 10 AM-6 PM. The actors work for seven of those hours, and the rest is breaks. Big musicals rehearse in the studio for four to six weeks, while plays rehearse for less — David Mamet's new Broadway play November, for instance, rehearsed for a little over three weeks. The company then moves to the theatre for tech rehearsal — which can last one-and-a-half to two weeks for a big musical — where the hours get longer. (See the Sept. 21 column for more information about rehearsal rules.)

Musical rehearsals tend to go for all eight hours every day, but plays tend to be more flexible. "We would rehearse sometimes five- or six-hour days," says Jill Cordle, November's production stage manager. "That's the preferences of the director as well as the actors. If you got really good work done in the morning hours, you may not want to do a full afternoon. Nathan Lane is in every scene and never leaves the stage. A rehearsal day for him was very long and very intense, so some days we wouldn't rehearse a full day because it would be an overload."

Some actors don't have to be there all the time. One actor in November, for instance, isn't in the play until the final scene. On some days he was allowed to come in late. Some days he could miss altogether. "In the first week, when we were really working through the play slowly, piece by piece, we didn't call him for three of the days that week," Cordle says. Later in the process, when they'd be running through the whole play, "he would come the whole day, every day, so that he would be ready to go into the rehearsal when we got to his scene."

On a musical, however, it's more difficult to make such accommodations. "Pretty much everybody is called all the time," says Ira Mont, the stage manager for Young Frankenstein (who happens to be Cordle's husband). Musicals might rehearse in three rooms at a time: "You can be blocking one scene in one room, and learning a dance in another room, and in another room the music director could be teaching a solo," Mont says. Plus, understudies sometimes need to be watching rehearsals even if they're not actively rehearsing. Plays rarely use multiple rooms, especially since there's no music director or choreographer, only a director.

There are situations in which musical performers get time off. Some may get to come in at 11 AM or so, on occasion. Very often with musicals, principals don't have to show up for the first few days — or even the first week — of rehearsals, while the chorus learns the music to the group numbers, and then the choreography. The principals can be added into the group numbers later. And, when you're working on smaller numbers, like Young Frankenstein's "Roll in the Hay" — which uses only five actors — and you need the director, choreographer and music director all in the main room to help out, with nothing going on in the other rooms, the rest of the performers can take that time off. But stage managers avoid situations in which a performer is needed but isn't there. "You always do err on the side of the need of the rehearsal as opposed to the need of the actor," Mont says.

Now, onto the question of unexpected absences. Actors are allowed some paid sick days. Technically, according to a spokesperson for Actors' Equity, when a performer is absent from rehearsal for seven days for an illness, the producer may terminate the actor's contract. But Mont, who is also the third vice president of Actors' Equity, says that he hasn't experienced this ever happening. He has experienced situations in which a performer is injured, making the performer unable to play the role.

Another rule is that if a performer is absent from or late for rehearsals without a good reason on more than two occasions within 12 months, the performer's salary will be docked for the time missed. That, Mont says, does happen occasionally, but "it depends how strict the management wants to be," he says. In practice, "To some degree you have to cut somebody a little slack."

"We live in New York City � there really is no such thing as on time," he adds. Instead, everyone's either early or late. "Actors are good about calling and saying the Number One train isn't running, I'm going to walk 15 blocks," he adds. But "if it became a little epidemic and you needed to make a point, because of the nature of your company, the management could make it a financial situation."

Ask Playbill.com: Gypsy Robe

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Christine O'Donnell of Fair Lawn, NJ.

Question: Can you tell me what happens at a Gypsy Robe ceremony?

Answer: On opening night of every Broadway musical that has a chorus — basically every Broadway musical except for purely ensemble pieces, such as Falsettos — the chorus member with most Broadway chorus credits receives an honor known as the Gypsy Robe.

The Gypsy Robe ceremony takes place about an hour to an hour-and -a-half before the opening-night performance. All of the performers (and sometimes the crew members as well) stand onstage in a circle. The person who received the robe for the previous Broadway musical will arrive with the robe, stand in the middle of the circle and announce the winner. The recipient puts on the off-white, muslin robe — which looks like a combination of a dressing grown and a kimono — and walks counterclockwise around the inside of the circle three times, as everyone in the circle touches it for good luck.

"People are wound up, frankly," says Tom Miller, who was recently appointed director of outreach and career development at Actors' Equity, and who — through his duties as one of Equity's Chorus Councillors — has attended almost all the ceremonies over the last few years. "People are just excited."

Amy Heggins recently received the Gypsy Robe for Young Frankenstein. "Honestly, I wasn't surprised because when you're in the rehearsal process and you talk amongst yourselves, we all know what we've accomplished," she says. "But the first time I received the Gypsy Robe I didn't expect it." That was for Dream 1997. Heggins also received it for Thou Shalt Not in 2001.

"It's really emotional," she says of the ceremony. "My eyes watered up. It really sums up your whole career to date, and the fact that you're actually being acknowledged for all that you've done is rare, and it really it means a lot."

Equity representatives and past winners will also attend the ceremony. If multiple people have the same number of chorus credits, the previous recipient selects the winner.

After the ceremony but before the performance, the recipient brings the robe to each dressing room in the building. "That's a little personal moment of whatever your relationship is with that person," Heggins says. "You can go into a room and no one's in it, but you have to go into each room. It's a moment of you going in and blessing their room with that robe, and there could be a hug, there could be a kiss. You'll sit and talk about the process, and how you're feeling at that moment."

At some point in the days after the ceremony, the recipient collaborates with the costume department to create a small panel to attach to the robe to represent the show, typically with every cast member's signature on it. The Color Purple's was a patchwork quilt-type panel, for instance, and Tarzan's included elements of the set, costumes and curtain.

The robe itself is then typically stored in the show's wardrobe room, Heggins says, before the recipient brings it to the next musical's opening night to give it to the next recipient.

According to Equity's website, the ceremony began in 1950 when Bill Bradley, who was in the chorus of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, got a chorus girl's dressing gown and sent it to a friend on opening night of Call Me Madam.

"It began very casually, just a very sweet, under-the-radar kind of thing," says Miller. Eventually, during the 1970s and 1980s, the ritual became more formalized, Miller says. Recipients have included Jerry Mitchell (for The Will Rogers Follies) and Hunter Foster (for Footloose), though most recipients are veteran chorus members who are well-known within the musical theatre acting community but unknown to fans.

Since the panels fill up the robe, Equity usually creates a new robe at the beginning of every season, and has by now built up quite a collection. There's one robe on display on the second floor of the Equity building in Manhattan, and Equity is planning on setting up displays in its offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Orlando, Miller says. Equity has given robes to the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. In addition, Miller says, "We have ten of them at Equity that we would very much like to get archived in an appropriate way."

For more information on the Gypsy Robe — including a link to a list of recipients dating back to 1982 in the top right corner — visit the Actors' Equity website by clicking here.

Ask Playbill.com: Tours

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Samantha of San Francisco, CA.

Question: What non-actor employees besides the production and stage managers go on tour with the casts? Being that there are a lot of people offstage who make a show work (dressers, props masters, hair, lighting, PR, and other admin), which positions travel with the company and which are employed locally in each city on the tour?

Answer: Here's a list of personnel for each of The Lion King's two national tours, courtesy of a spokesperson for the tour:

 

53 cast members - all traveling 21 musicians - 13 traveling, eight local Thirteen carpenters - six traveling (one head carpenter, two automation carpenters, three carpenters), seven local carpenters Ten electricians - four traveling (one associate production electrician, one head electrician, one front light operator, one vari-light operator), six local electricians 20 wardrobe people - six traveling (one wardrobe supervisor, two wardrobe assistants, one puppet supervisor, two puppet assistants), 14 local dressers Five hair/make-up artists - three traveling (one hair/make-up supervisor, two hair/make-up assistants), two local artists Four props people - two traveling (one head prop man, one assistant prop man), two local props men Three sound people - two traveling (one sound engineer, one assistant sound engineer), one local sound man Six creative associates - two traveling (one resident director, one resident dance supervisor), four people who work in the Disney Theatricals main office (two associate producers, one associate director, one production dance supervisor) Eight administrative people - six traveling (two company managers, four production stage managers), two people who work in the Disney Theatricals main office (one national press representative, one booking manager) Total: 143 So how do all these people get from place to place? "It's just a matter of being hyper-organized," says Frank Lott, company manager of The Lion King's "Cheetah" tour (the other one is the "Gazelle" tour). "I'm a list maker." The tour marks Lott's sixteenth Broadway show or Broadway touring show as a company manager. At each tour stop, the theatre typically has its own tech director and department heads who all get hired for The Lion King's run. For the rest of the crew, the tour sends the local stagehands union what's called a "yellow card," which lists the jobs it needs, and the union determines who gets the jobs (it's often based on seniority). The musicians work in the same way — the tour tells the local union what it needs, the union determines who gets hired, and the musicians receive the score ahead of time to practice. Lott notes that some Broadway shows might travel with only one, two or three musicians, while hiring the rest locally. The Lion King needs more because "several of the musicians that we employ are highly specialized," Lott says. "A great part of the score is African rhythms and African music. Our flute player plays, I believe, 16 flutes. If we were to send a flautist in Toledo and say 'We'd like you to pay 16 different pan flutes,' he would be lost." By contract, with the stagehands, Lott says, The Lion King's ratio of traveling personnel to local personnel is more typical. The crew that travels with the show knows the show's quirks, while the locals know the ins and outs of the theatre. "It's an age-old arrangement that works very well," Lott says. Unlike shows that travel to a different city every Monday, The Lion King plants itself in one place for a dozen or so weeks at a time. People who travel with the tour stay in corporate housing apartments or hotels built for long-term stays — something with a kitchen. The two tours share an extra jump set — a portion of the set that includes the deck of the stage and an electrics package. A week before the Cheetah tour's run ends in City A, the extra jump set starts getting loaded into the theatre in City B. A week later, when the Cheetah tour ends its run in City A, the City A jump set gets packed up and sent to City C, where it gets loaded in in time for the Gazelle tour. In each city, the run typically closes on a Sunday. That's when the rest of the set, known as the "show to show," gets packed up and shipped, usually via truck. For the Cheetah tour's Hawaii run, which ends Dec. 9, the jump set was sent by boat — it's slower but cheaper — and the show to show was sent by air. Many company members drive from one city to another in their own cars, Lott says, and get there in a day or two. The rest fly together on Monday. On Wednesday, actors get orientated in the theatre, and the local and traveling musicians rehearse together for the first time. The dress rehearsal typically takes place Thursday during the day, and Thursday night is the first preview. Press opening is on Saturday. The schedule has been pretty much the same ever since February 2003, when the Cheetah company ended its initial sit-down run in Los Angeles and began touring the country. "It's like clockwork at this point," Lott says.

Ask Playbill.com: Strike Miscellanea

From Playbill.com

This question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: Now that the strike is over, when are the new opening nights for shows that were affected by the strike that hadn't yet opened when the labor dispute began?

Answer: Here's a list of the new opening nights:

The Farnsworth Invention: Dec. 3
August: Osage County: Dec. 4
The Seafarer: Dec. 6
Is He Dead?: Dec. 9
The Homecoming: Dec. 16 (previews will begin Dec. 4)
The Little Mermaid: Jan. 10

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This question comes from an anonymous reader.

Question: Unfortunately we were unable to see A Bronx Tale because of the cancellation of our show due to the strike. This is a limited run. Are there any plans to extend the run so those who wanted to see it have an opportunity?

Answer: A Bronx Tale is still set to close Feb. 10, 2008, but beginning Dec. 9, the show will play an additional performance every week on Sundays at 7 PM, for December only (that's Dec. 9, 16, 23 and 30). During the strike, August: Osage County announced that because of the missed performances, the play will extend three weeks to March 9. Rock 'n' Roll will still play a limited engagement through March 2, its original end date.

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This question comes from Lizzy DeClement.

Question: Are the actors paid during the strike?

Answer: Actors' Equity Association paid each actor $405 a week, which is equivalent to what they would have gotten through unemployment. The salaries come out of a $2.3 million strike fund earmarked for this situation. Equity also paid the actors during the musicians strike in 2003. A spokesperson for the musicians union says that the musicians were also being paid during the strike, but the spokesperson could not reveal how much.

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This question comes from Playbill.com staff.

Question: How does the end of the strike affect Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS appeals that occur this time of year?

Answer: The annual holiday season curtain call appeals to contribute to the famed Broadway charity began on Oct. 19 but were derailed because of the strike. The Gypsy of the Year competition, which marks the end of the appeals period, has been moved from Dec. 3-4 to Monday, Dec. 17 at 4:30 PM and Tuesday, Dec. 18 at 2 PM at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Tom Viola, the executive director of BC/EFA, says that each show decides for itself when to start up the appeals again. "We would hope that they would pick up where they left off with the appeals once they are comfortable with being back at work," he says.

Ask Playbill.com: Thanksgiving

From Playbill.com

This question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: The Broadway stagehands strike continues this Thanksgiving week, leaving only nine shows running on Broadway. How important is Thanksgiving week to the Broadway economy, and how much will Broadway be losing?

Answer: The tourist crowd — and perhaps even those Broadway performances at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade — tend to give Broadway a big boost during Thanksgiving. Here are the Thanksgiving week figures from the last few years (as recorded by the League of American Theatres and Producers):

2006: $23.3 million
Average week that season: $18.0 million
Change: +29 percent

2005: $20.8 million
Average week: $16.6 million
Change: +25 percent

2004: $17.4 million
Average week: $14.8 million
Change: +18 percent

2003: $18.9 million
Average week: $14.5 million
Change: +30 percent

2002: $18.6 million
Average week: $13.9 million
Change: +34 percent

As one can see, Thanksgiving is always well above average. In 2003-04, for instance, it was the third-biggest week of the entire season, behind Christmas and New Year's. In 2004-05 it was the ninth-biggest week.

So how much is Broadway losing? Variety estimated last week's strike-week total at $4.6 million (Young Frankenstein doesn't report grosses, so Variety estimated its total at $1.7 million). Even with, say, a 25 percent bump to $5.75 million over Thanksgiving, plus another half a million for Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which is back on the boards this weekend, boosting our hypothetical total to $6.25 million, that would still be around $17 million below last year's Thanksgiving weekend. And — given inflation, and the fact that in a strike-free world there'd be a couple extra shows on the boards this year — it's about $20 million below this year's potential.

Ask Playbill.com: The Strike

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Patrick Flynn of Cranston, RI.

Question: I was wondering why most shows are affected by the strike, but some are not. Can you tell me why shows such as Mary Poppins and The Ritz are not affected?

Answer: Let's start from the beginning. This dispute is over the contract between Local One (the stagehands union), and the League of American Theatres and Producers (the organization that represents most of the Broadway theatres and producers). That contract sets out rules for how much the stagehands get paid, how many stagehands the theatres are required to hire, and other issues.

But some Broadway theatres are members of the League (and use that League-negotiated contract) and some are not (and use their own separate contracts). The theatres that are members of the League are the theatres owned by the big three companies — Shubert, Jujamcyn and Nederlander. Those are the theatres that are dark. (With the stagehands, Nederlander actually negotiates separately from the rest of the League, but they are standing firm with their League brethren in this dispute.)

The theatres that are not affected by the strike are theatres that are not members of the League. For instance, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is at the Circle in the Square, which is not a member of the League, and is on its own separate contract with Local One.

Cymbeline, Mauritius, Pygmalion and The Ritz are at theatres controlled by non-profit companies — Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and the Roundabout. They're on what's called a LORT contract, which typically governs regional theatres (these big three Broadway nonprofits have their own separate LORT contract especially for them).

Also still running is Xanadu, which is at the Helen Hayes, which is owned by Richmark Entertainment. Young Frankenstein is at the Hilton Theater, which is owned by Live Nation. Mary Poppins is at the New Amsterdam, which is owned by Disney.

A question one might ask is, aren't the producers also involved, in addition to the theatre owners? It is, after all League of American Theatres and Producers. Plus, on Broadway, the line between producers and theatre owners is blurry — all of the big three theatre owners are also producers, for instance.

But the contracts with the stagehands union are tied to the theatre, not the producer. After all, it's the theatre that employs the stagehands — many stay on at a theatre even when one show moves out and another comes in.

So, even if you're a producer who's a member of the League, when you put your show in a non-League theatre, your payments to the stagehands are governed by that particular theatre's contract with the stagehands union. For instance, David Stone is a lead producer of both Wicked and Spelling Bee, but Wicked is not running because it's in a League theatre (the Gershwin, controlled by the Nederlander organization) and Spelling Bee is running because it's in a non-League theatre (Circle in the Square). Disney is not a member of the League, either as a producer or as a theatre owner. But two of its shows — The Lion King and The Little Mermaid — are in theatres that are owned by the Nederlanders, which are part of the League, which is why they're not running. Its other show, Mary Poppins, is in a theatre not in the League, owned by Disney itself, which is why it's still running.

One wrinkle is that Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which is playing in the Jujamcyn-owned St. James, a League theatre, and which is dark during the strike, is actually on its own contract, according to David Waggett, the show's general manager. Every year, the show, which played last holiday season at the Hilton Theatre, has to negotiate its own contracts — modified from the theatre's regular contracts — with the stagehands and other unions to get permission for its atypical performance schedule of 12 or so performances per week, as opposed to the typical eight per week. While the League's contract with the stagehands expired in July, Grinch began negotiating its own contract with the stagehands in the spring, came to an agreement Aug. 30, and executed it a few weeks later, Waggett says. Therefore, he says, "Our point of view is that our contract is, in fact, still in effect," but the stagehands still decided to include the show in its strike. Local One is not currently commenting on the record about the strike.

Ask Playbill.com: Sound

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Brad Walters of Malden, MA.

Question: Why are the sound control consoles seen at the back of Broadway theatres so big with hundreds of dials? How does one operator control so many microphones?

Answer: To answer the question, AskPlaybill.com had an email conversation with Nevin Steinberg of the sound design firm Acme Sound Partners, which has designed the sound for many Broadway shows, including Spamalot, A Chorus Line and Legally Blonde. This discussion focuses on Spamalot as an example.

AskPlaybill.com: Why are the sound control consoles seen at the back of Broadway theatres in shows such as Spamalot so big, with seemingly hundreds of dials? How many buttons and dials are there, and what different aspects of the sound do they control?
Nevin Steinberg: Actually, the Spamalot console is relatively small! The adoption of digital control for audio in the theatre has led to significantly smaller console surfaces. While the number of buttons and dials vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and from show to show, each switch and/or dial generally corresponds to either an input (such as a microphone on an actor or on a musical instrument) or an output (such as a loudspeaker system for the balcony seating area, or the backstage announcement system). On a large musical, the sound system might comprise as many as 120 inputs or more, with capabilities for upwards of 60 outputs. The faders or sliders, knobs and dials control all aspects of the relationships of the inputs and outputs. One can adjust basic settings such as level (volume), equalization (tone), routing (the distribution of the inputs to the various outputs), as well as more technical aspects of audio such as time alignment, automation and effects.

AskPlaybill.com: What does the sound board operator do during a show?
NS: The sound board operator, sound engineer or mixer literally operates the sound console. For a play, duties might include triggering the playback of transitional music or sound effects. On an amplified musical, the engineer is actually activating each actor's microphone in time with his/her dialogue and singing, and making real-time adjustments to the balance of the actors to each other and to the orchestra. It's a terrifically busy job!

AskPlaybill.com: So if I understand you correctly, the person operating the sound board is either called the sound board operator, sound engineer or sound mixer?
NS: All different names for the same job.

AskPlaybill.com: Are all those inputs and outputs constantly getting adjusted during the show, or are all the levels set beforehand, so there's not much adjustment to be done?
NS: The inputs are constantly adjusted in real-time during the show. The outputs may change on a cue-by-cue basis, but this is generally automated and happens much less frequently.

AskPlaybill.com: How many microphones are used in a Broadway show such as Spamalot, and where are they placed?
NS: Spamalot uses about 90 microphones for the cast and the orchestra. The actors wear their miniature wireless microphones on their heads, usually at the center of the forehead, but sometimes over their ears. Some microphones are also hidden in helmets, hats and costumes to pick up a specific character's dialogue or singing. There are additional microphones on the scenery and even run down into stockings, pant legs and shoes to pick up tap dancing!

AskPlaybill.com: How many sound cues are there in a Broadway musical such as Spamalot?
NS: There are about 20 sound effects cues in Spamalot.

AskPlaybill.com: What are some of the sound effects cues?
NS: The shovel hits, the monks' bible slap to the head, the "fart symphony" at the French Castle to name just a few.

AskPlaybill.com: How high can the number get?
NS: There is no limit to the number of sound effects, and some shows have none at all.

AskPlaybill.com: In what way does the sound board operator collaborate with the sound designer to prepare for the show's run?
NS: The sound designer and the sound board operator collaborate on all aspects of the sound of a show — from preparing the sound system design and executing its installation, planning an approach to mixing the material, initiating strategies for creating special effects, and arriving at a style. This relationship is crucial to the achievement of a coherent, successful sound design.

Ask Playbill.com: Stage Managers

From Playbill.com

This question comes from Robert Seier of Bronx, NY.

Question: What exactly is the difference between a stage manager (or assistant stage manager) and a production stage manager in terms of their respective responsibilities in a theatrical production?

Answer: To answer this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with a spokesperson for Actors' Equity (which also governs stage managers) and Ira Mont, the third vice president of Actors' Equity (an office held by a stage manager) and currently the stage manager of Young Frankenstein.

Let's get the titles out of the way first: The person billed in the Playbill as production stage manager is the boss, followed by the stage manager, and then the assistant stage manager, plus any other assistant stage managers who might be hired.

That's what happens in the Playbill. In the contracts, the titles work differently, Mont says. Let's take a scenario where the entire team is a production stage manager, stage manager and assistant stage manager — which is currently the case on Young Frankenstein, Mont says, though they might need to hire another assistant because of the workload. In this case, Mont says, the person billed as production stage manager is contracted as the "stage manager," the person billed as stage manager (Mont) is contracted as "first assistant stage manager," and the person billed as assistant stage manager is contracted as "second assistant stage manager." Confused? Don't worry, this stuff basically just governs who gets paid what.

While Mont says that most Broadway musicals these days have a production stage manager, the boss of the stage management team will often just have the title "stage manager," especially in smaller productions Off-Broadway and regionally.

Almost all Broadway musicals require at least three people on the stage management team, Mont says. Plays require at least two.

So now that we've got the titles out of the way, what do stage managers do? Basically, they coordinate the artistic side of the show. They carry out the director and producers' wishes and help them maintain the show's artistic integrity. They schedule rehearsals, keep track of all the technical cues and the blocking (the movements of the actors during the show), and coordinate the actors and the tech aspects during a show. Note that the stage management staff is distinct from the company management, which deals more with the business side, such as payroll, contracts and ordering supplies for vendors.

In terms of the breakdown of which member of the stage management team does what, it always varies. "Fundamentally, I feel like all the stage managers on a team share in all of the duties," Mont says. "It's really just a question of how you would organize any office or any organization — there's one person [who has] got to be in charge, delegating how things get done."

During rehearsal, Mont says, "One person might be in charge of taking down blocking. One person might be in charge of tracking all the costumes and props required." The production manager might take down the blocking and also serve as the stage management's point person for the director, designers and other members of the production team. During the technical rehearsals, when all the tech elements come together for the first time, Mont says, "Usually the production stage manager will tech the show, set up the calling of the show, and the other stage managers will be on the deck setting up."

Calling the show, for those who don't know, means telling everyone working on the show, via headset, when each cue should occur, right before it's supposed to occur — such as telling the light board operator when to switch the lights, or telling the sound board operator when to bring in a sound effect. Mont says that early on, the production stage manager typically calls the show, but everyone on the stage management team eventually gets a turn. While one stage manager is calling the show, the others are in the wings, helping to set up and direct traffic.

Sometimes, during a show's run, the production stage manager can't call the show because he or she has to be taking notes for the actors and director. Some production stage managers, if they have the clout, may even get a title such as "associate director," Mont says.

During a show's run, the stage management team is also responsible for running rehearsals for understudies and cast replacements, often on their own, without the original director present. The production stage manager will often serve as the "de facto director" during this process, Mont says, while the other stage managers will help out and sometimes even jump in to read lines.

Ask Playbill.com: Recoupment

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Brian M. of New York, NY.

Question: What exactly does it mean for a show to recoup its investment?

Answer: To answer this question, Playbill.com talked with John Breglio, the producer of the current Broadway revival of A Chorus Line and a theatrical lawyer who has represented the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Theatre journalists write all the time about a show "recouping" its investment. Put simply, Breglio says, "Recoupment is the point at which the producer has repaid to his investors all the money that he raised to develop, mount and produce the show." All that money is referred to collectively as the capitalization. In the case of A Chorus Line, the capitalization was $8 million, but it can get much higher for bigger musicals. That's all the money a producer spends on a Broadway show from the day someone comes up with the idea to the day it officially opens on Broadway. Those costs include the sets, costumes, props, lighting design, rehearsal space, performer and crew salaries during rehearsals, the rights to the material, the advances paid to the writers and the out-of-town tryout.

Every week, whatever the show takes in at the box office — minus the running costs, which include actor and crew salaries, theatre rental, advertising and other costs — will help pay back that capitalization. "One week in November of last year after we opened, we did $800,000, say, in gross," Breglio says. "That week I probably made $350,000 in pure profit. That $350,000 now goes towards repaying that $8 million [capitalization]."

Determining the weekly profit can be rather complicated. For instance, for a Broadway musical, typically 65 percent of the profit every week goes to paying the investors back for the capitalization, while 35 percent goes to the profit pool, which includes the writers, directors, choreographer, designers, lead producer and other people involved in the show, each one getting an agreed-upon share of that profit pool money every week.

Some shows have an arrangement called amortization, in which every week, before the 65-35 split is made, an agreed-upon figure (typically one to two percent of the capitalization) gets taken out of the profits and is sent directly to the investors. Then 65 percent of the remaining figure also goes to the investors, and 35 percent of the remaining figure gets sent to the profit pool. The amount taken out for amortization is later paid back to the profit pool after recoupment. One can see how it gets rather complicated, and every show has a different agreement. (For more info on this topic, click here for a previous Ask Playbill.com column on writer salaries.)

The first time Breglio paid his investors for A Chorus Line, he handed them each a check on opening night in October 2006, since the pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco and the Broadway previews had actually netted some profit already (typically, a show doesn't expect to make a profit during those performances). He then sent them each a check once a month until the $8 million was paid off 19 weeks later, in February 2007.

After recoupment, the weekly profits are divided differently. First of all, typically, the profit pool's portion rises to 40 percent, and the investors' share goes down to 60 percent. Second of all, Breglio says, before recoupment, the lead producers — whose day jobs involve developing and running the show but who don't typically invest their own money in the show, per the famous rule stated in the musical The Producers — only get paid their share of the profit pool plus an office charge of around $1,500-$3,500. But after recoupment, the lead producers start to take home a portion of that investors' share of the profits. The figure can be anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of the investors' share, depending on what was agreed upon before the show opened. (Note: On A Chorus Line Breglio is the sole lead producer, but on some shows it can be three or four or so. Also, if 30 people are credited as "producers" above the title on the musical's poster outside the theatre, not all of them are lead producers working on the show day-to-day — some are just big investors.)

The percentage that a lead producer gets depends on how hard a sell the show was to the investors before it opened. "If you have a show that is considered a good bet, a safe bet or slam dunk, you can keep a lot" of the profit that's made after recoupment as a lead producer, Breglio says. "If it's a show that has to struggle to raise money — and we all know which those are, you don't have to guess, even — then the lead producers will have to give away a lot because they have to attract these investors."

So what about the ultimate question: How can you tell beforehand if a show will recoup its investment? "It's a complete crap shoot," Breglio says. "People told me I had slam dunk with Chorus Line, and I said there is no such thing as a slam dunk."

Breglio does have one overall tip: "A lot of people focus on how much the show cost, and they go, 'Oh my God, the show cost $20 million.' Yes, it's important. But the key to successful shows is what your weekly expenses are, not your capitalization. Because if your weekly expenses are reasonable, and you keep them down, you have a shot at making money."

Ask Playbill.com: New Cast Members

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Jennifer Orr of New York, NY.

Question: How does an on-going Broadway production integrate new cast members?

Answer: To answer this question, Playbill.com

  checked in with The Phantom of the Opera, Chicago, Spamalot and Stomp.

Usually, training a new performer for a lead role takes about three weeks. It can take longer — at Phantom it takes three weeks to train a new Phantom or Raoul, but four weeks for Christine, mainly because of the singing. New Stomp cast members take six weeks to learn everything before they go into a show.

Chorus members take less time — at Spamalot they take two to three weeks, but at Phantom they take only a week to ten days. Performers returning to lead roles in Phantom after an absence take only a few days to brush up.

Peter von Mayrhauser, the production supervisor for The Phantom of the Opera, says that during the first couple weeks of rehearsals for a new lead, the dance captains and the stage managers work with the actor on blocking and choreography and the musical director works on the singing, all for a total of about five hours of rehearsal per day. At some point during those two weeks, the understudies for the opposite lead roles might join in.

During the final week, tech elements such as costumes are added, and the actor begins working with his or her fellow principal actors. The day before — or sometimes even the day of — the new actor's first performance is a final "put-in" rehearsal, in which the actor goes through the entire role, in order, in costume, with all the cast members and all of the tech elements that affect the role. (The Phantom process described above is very similar to the process in Chicago and Spamalot.)

At nights during rehearsals, new actors will often watch the show from the audience, or from the wings, where he or she will follow around the actor currently in the role to learn where to enter and exit and to get a sense of how long costume changes take.

The show's original directors aren't usually present during these rehearsals, even for lead roles. Chicago dance captain Gabriela Garcia says of the director Walter Bobbie, "Sometimes if the person requires it, he'll come in during rehearsal time, but other times he lets them get a couple of shows under their belt and [then] he'll come in and work with them." Von Mayrhauser says Hal Prince, Phantom's director, works in a similar way: "He prefers to have them go into the show and then he goes and sees them, and then usually he'll ask for a rehearsal." Peter Lawrence, associate director of Spamalot, says the show's director Mike Nichols comes in for a full-cast table read to begin the process and then typically comes back for the last two days, including the final put-in rehearsal. (If they're in town, the original directors will often participate in the final stages of the casting process, especially for lead roles. Throughout the show's run, they will occasionally hold rehearsals for the entire cast, just to have them brush up.)

Roles will often change slightly when a new performer comes in. "When we get new people in, we do not tell anybody to imitate somebody's performance," von Mayrhauser says of Phantom. "Each actor, within the framework of the show and within the framework of the staging, has great freedom to develop their own characterization. That's really important to keep the show fresh, as opposed to a museum piece."

Lawrence says Nichols encourages reinterpretation of the Spamalot roles. For instance, Lawrence says that the original cast member Tim Curry "played a very plummy, self-satisfied king," while "Simon Russell Beale played the role as if he was a brand-new king — things delighted him" that wouldn't have delighted Tim Curry's king. In Chicago, Garcia says, in the song "Razzle Dazzle," extra singing was added for Usher, and George Hamilton chose to wear a top hat.

Certain aspects of the show are harder to learn than others. In Phantom, the actor playing the title character learns how to walk around with a huge cape and how to take it on and off gracefully. He also has to master some pyrotechnic effects. In Spamalot, the dancing in the song "Camelot" is particularly tricky, and "our principals are typically not dancers," Lawrence says. Lancelot has to learn to fly and to walk on stilts.

As you can imagine, long-running musicals with big casts, such as Phantom, are always rehearsing new performers. "It's absolutely constant," von Mayrhauser says. "It never stops."

Specialized shows such as Stomp can work differently from traditional musicals. According to Fiona Wilkes, an original cast member and currently the rehearsal director for North American company, new Stomp cast members take the first three of their six rehearsal weeks to learn the various rudimentary rhythms and the specialized Stomp language to name those rhythms. For instance, Wilkes says, they learn that a "Pearl and Dean" is a certain rhythm that gets repeated at different times throughout the show, and is so named because that particular rhythm could be heard in British movie theatres during pre-movie advertisements presented by the British advertising company Pearl & Dean. For the second three weeks, the new cast member learns his or her particular track through the show. Though Stomp seems like a free-for-all and cast members seem interchangeable, each cast member is actually on a particular track — they're even called "characters," and each one has a character name. As a result, any cast member who performs a character in one Stomp company can then do the same character in another company in another part of the world, without missing a beat.

Ask Playbill.com: Writer Salaries

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Michael Ricciardi of Van Nuys, CA.

Question: How much pay does a composer, lyricist and librettist each get during a Broadway rehearsal period, and once the show opens what percentage of the show does each get?

Answer: To answer this question, Playbill.com talked with Peter Franklin, an agent who represents songwriters and playwrights for the William Morris Agency, and Ralph Sevush, the executive director of the Dramatists Guild. This article will discuss Broadway musicals only.

Around 25 years ago, during the run of a Broadway musical, writers were paid a percentage of the gross — 4.5 percent at first, rising to 6 percent after a show recouped its initial investment, as required by the Dramatists Guild's contract with the producers.

But in the last two decades, most Broadway musicals have transitioned to a profit pool system. In this system every week the writers either get a percentage of the profit (if the show is making a profit) or a small weekly guarantee, whichever is greater. By enacting this system, each side was making a tradeoff: the salary for a writer with a marginal or struggling show got lower, to help those shows stay afloat, but the salary for a writer with a hit show got higher.

As required by the Dramatists Guild's contract, the writers' weekly guarantee is at least $6,000 — split equally among composer, lyricist and book writer.

But if there's a profit, and if the writers' share of the profits comes out to be more than $6,000, then they'll take home the share of the profits instead.

If there's a profit, typically around 65 percent of that profit goes to the investors and 35 percent goes to the profit pool. The profit pool includes the writers, director and lead producer, plus perhaps designers, the orchestrator, the source material's rights holder and others. That 35 percent of the profit is split among these participants, with some getting more than others. Once the show recoups its initial investment, the profit pool's share typically rises to 40 percent.

Sevush says the Dramatists Guild's contract isn't concerned about the profit pool's 35 percent figure or about the writer's share within that 35 percent. All that the contract requires is that the writers take home at least 15.56% of the profit before recoupment, and at least 17.78% afterwards. The profit pool is split up in a way that accommodates these figures.

Recently, a concept called amortization has been added into the mix. Under this arrangement, one to two percent of the initial capitalization is taken out of the gross and given directly to the investors, before the profit is calculated. This arrangement allows the producer to guarantee the investors that if the show runs a certain number of weeks, they will have made their money back.

So if a show makes $800,000 a week and costs $600,000 per week to run, then the profit is $200,000. And if the show's initial capitalization was $12 million, and amortization is one percent, then $120,000 of that $200,000 goes directly to the investors. Of the remaining $80,000, 65 percent goes to the investors and 35 percent goes to the profit pool. The writers would make at least 15.56% of that $80,000, or $12,448. If there are three writers, each takes home $4,149 that week.

One of the reasons for the rise of the profit pool system is skyrocketing production costs. "A show in 1980 could survive at 50 percent" capacity, Franklin says. "Now it's got to be 75 to 80 percent."

If a show is really in trouble, the producers might ask the royalty holders to forego even their weekly guarantees, in order to keep the show running.

Writers aren't paid for the rehearsal period. But, leading up to a Broadway run, writers do get paid at different stages of the process, as required by the Dramatists Guild's contract. When producers option a show for 12 months, the writers get a minimum of $18,000 (they get more if the option is later extended). At the first rehearsal, the writers get paid an advance that's a minimum of $60,000 — with some writers able to get more — and a maximum of two percent of the entire initial capitalization.

These payments are an advance on the income the writers make during the Broadway run, Sevush says. If the writer gets the minimums — $18,000 and $60,000 for a total of $78,000 — then once a show recoups its investment, the writers have to give a certain bit of the their weekly paycheck back to the producers, until the $78,000 is paid back. Any amounts over the minimum are taken from the paycheck before recoupment.

The writers of a hit Broadway show eventually take home money from licensing to touring, foreign, amateur and stock productions, plus cast recordings, the rights to the songs, and even rights to the movie adaptation. Overall, Franklin points out, "A hit makes pots of money." Sevush adds, "All you need is one hit, and you've created a revenue stream that will subsidize your writing career." Even shows that never make back their initial investments on Broadway but get respectable reviews and run for a year or so can often end up netting some of that extra income. For huge flops, however, writers don't get much more than their $78,000 advance, and that could be shared among three writers, for five years of work developing a musical.

Ask Playbill.com: Rehearsals

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Ross Weiner.

Question: I was wondering what makes an Equity rehearsal different than a typical community theatre rehearsal.

Answer: The short answer is that for Equity performers, acting is their full-time job, so they tend to rehearse all day. At community theatres, performers tend to rehearse at night.

"They work during the day," says Joseph Conklin, the chairperson of The Park Players, a community theatre company in Bergen County, NJ, that will mark the beginning of its 30th year in January. "They have actual full-time jobs as teachers or waitresses," or other jobs.

The Equity requirements for rehearsals are rather complicated, but we'll try to describe them with as little confusion as possible. Here are the rules that apply to Broadway shows: Shows can either rehearse for up to seven hours out of a maximum of eight-and-a-half consecutive hours in a day, or up to eight hours out of a maximum of nine-and-a-half consecutive hours. If they choose the latter option, they get two days off per week, as opposed to one.

In terms of breaks, rehearsals can't go more than five hours without stopping to take a one-and-a-half hour break. Plus, there must be a five-minute break after each 55 minutes of rehearsal or a ten-minute break after each 80 minutes of rehearsal.

Conklin said that The Park Players rehearsals typically run Monday through Thursday from 7-9:30 PM, with an occasional rehearsal on a weekend day. About halfway through the evening rehearsal, the actors will take a 15-minute break. Conklin says this evening schedule is typical of community theatres.

For both Broadway and community theatre, things change during the final week before performances start, when the cast goes through grueling technical rehearsals, in which the technical aspects of the show are introduced. For Broadway, during the last seven days of rehearsal before the start of performances, rehearsals can be longer than they usually are, but they can't exceed ten out of a maximum of twelve consecutive hours per day. The final week before the first performance does not have to include a day off. Plus, during the last three days before performances begin, the show does not have to abide by the rules for breaks.

For Conklin's Park Players, the rehearsals from Monday through Thursday during the week before the first performance — which typically occurs on a Friday — will last a little longer than usual, around 6:30-11 PM each night. The show might also devote a Sunday or two right before tech week to an all-day rehearsal that would last from morning until evening.

There are various other Equity rules for such issues as payments for rehearsals that go overtime and rehearsals during out-of-town tryouts. For more information, one can mine through the actual Equity contracts, which are available at Equity's website, www.actorsequity.org.

Ask Playbill.com: Past Dating of Tickets

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Paula Fuhrmann of Long Island.

Question: Due to illness, my sister (who lives on Long Island, NY) could not use her tickets last April to Jersey Boys. She called the theatre the morning of the show to say she would not use her tickets and was told she would have to wait a year to re-use them. Why? I also live on Long Island and have never waited that long to re-use tickets. I know it is a popular show but it doesn't seem fair.

Answer: Broadway theatres tell patrons that ticket refunds and exchanges are not allowed. But if you have a ticket to a Broadway show and for whatever reason you end up missing the performance, or know you're going to miss a performance, the show may allow you to trade in the tickets for another performance of the same show. This policy, known as "past dating," varies from theatre to theatre.

A theatre manager for Jujamcyn — the organization that controls the August Wilson Theatre, where Jersey Boys plays, in addition to the St. James, Al Hirschfeld, Eugene O'Neill and Walter Kerr Theatres — summarized the company's past dating policy as follows: Traditionally, if you've missed a performance, you should call Telecharge after 11 AM on the day of the performance that you wish to attend instead. That performance must be an evening performance on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. If tickets are available, a Telecharge representative will grant you new tickets. When you show up to the theatre, you must bring the original tickets, to trade them in for the new ones. The Jujamcyn theatre manager notes that "the courtesy of past-dating is at the sole discretion of management and subject to availability and black out dates, and there is no guarantee that the patron will get a seat location comparable to her original location. Past-dating is also usually not available during holiday weeks or the final week of a production's engagement. For a hit show, past-dating may not be possible until several years into the show's run."

Jersey Boys is a hit show. In fact, because of the show's continual popularity, past dating has never been available for Jersey Boys. So the reason why Ms. Fuhrmann's sister was told she would have to wait a year to get a replacement ticket for the show is that it'll probably be at least a year before Jersey Boys has tickets still available at 11 AM on the day of a performance.

When told of Ms. Fuhrmann's question, a spokesperson for Jersey Boys responded in an email message, "For Jersey Boys, the past dates would be honored once the show is in a position to be able to offer tickets. This would be when the show is no longer selling out, which would not be in the near future."

A spokesperson for the Nederlander Organization — which controls the Nederlander, Brooks Atkinson, Lunt-Fontanne, Gershwin, Marquis, Minskoff, Neil Simon, Palace and Richard Rogers Theatres — says that, as with Jujamcyn, if you miss a performance at a Nederlander theatre, you can call the theatre on the day of the performance that you would like to see instead. The substitute performance must be Monday through Thursday. If the performance isn't sold out, the theatre will accommodate you. To inquire, you should call the general number for the individual theatre, which is listed in the White Pages. If you're really stuck you can call the organization's general number at (212) 840-5577.

A spokesperson for the Shubert Organization, which controls 17 Broadway theatres, said that the organization has no formal policy on past dating, but "generally, if you can't make it, we make an exchange for you for another date." You should ideally contact the point of sale, though if you bought a ticket at the physical box office and can't make it back there, just call Telecharge. In addition, "it's always better if you call before the performance happens," the spokesperson says.

Ask Playbill.com: Lines

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Debra Banerjee of Scarsdale, NY.

Question: What is the etiquette? Do ticket holders have to stand on line to get into the theatre or can one just go up to the ticket taker, bypassing all the good citizens who have lined up outside?

Answer: The short answer: No butting on Broadway. If a ticket-holder line has formed, ticket holders should stand in that line, says Joann Swanson, the house manager at the Lyceum Theatre for the last eight years, who was filling in at The Phantom of the Opera's Majestic Theatre when AskPlaybill.com spoke to her last week.

Still, AskPlaybill.com has always been puzzled by these huge lines that crop up so early before show time. Phantom's notorious line typically begins at 7 PM. Remember that these are ticket holders — the will call line, for picking up tickets, is a totally separate line. Note that tickets holders already have assigned seats. And the doors don't even open until 7:30 PM! ("If it's extraordinarily hot or extraordinarily cold, any kind of extreme weather, we try to get it open sooner," Swanson says.)

Some early arrivers who refuse to be herded behind the velvet ropes might simply mill around right outside the front doors and then jump into the actual line when it's short enough to satisfy them. The problem is that the sidewalk can get pretty tight, especially at Phantom, where there's actually two lines — one jutting up 44th Street and another snaking around the corner and up Eighth Avenue. "There's not really a place to stand that would be out of the way, other than far away from the front doors," Swanson says.

Certain theatres — such as the New Amsterdam (Mary Poppins) and the Imperial (the upcoming August: Osage County) — have large entryways where ticket holders can stand, so the lines don't tend to trail down the sidewalk like they do at other venues.

The pre-show lines tend to be longer at larger theatres housing big musicals. Swanson notes that the Lyceum — a small, 900-seat house usually reserved for plays — rarely ever has a line at all, especially since the theatre has a small lobby where ticket holders can hang out before they're let in. But a line could crop up for particularly popular shows, such as the Lyceum's last tenant, Inherit the Wind — Brian Dennehy and Christopher Plummer fans would start lining up at 7:15.

One might wonder why people don't simply wait until 7:45 PM to show up. Or, if you have to buy or pick up tickets and you're worried about how long that's going to take, get to the ticket window by 7:30 PM and then go wander through M&M World for 20 minutes. But don't get too hypnotized by the multi-colored towers of chocolatey goodness. When you get back at 7:50 PM, the line might still be there, leaving you little time to get to your seat and go to the restroom and do whatever else you have to do. After all, getting 1,600 people into a theatre in half an hour leaves only 1.125 seconds per person — a tall order, even with multiple entryways. "We still have people coming in and having their tickets scanned at two minutes after [8 PM] — the tail end of the line," says Swanson.

AskPlaybill.com: Chorus Salary

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Adam Schwab of Morris Plains, NJ.

Question: I was curious what the typical salary is for a typical Broadway actor/dancer in NYC…(not your mega-bucks Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Hugh Jackman sort). Can you become financially successful enough to afford a Manhattan apartment?

Answer: Each performer who is in a Broadway show — or a Broadway show that's on an Equity (union) tour — must be paid at least $1,509 a week, according to the contract between Actors' Equity and the Broadway producers. Some chorus members make exactly that much. Others — especially if they're more seasoned, have a good agent or manager, and/or are in a show with more lenient producers — might make more.

The minimum can rise, depending on the performer's role in the show. For instance, if you're a performer who's also a dance captain, your minimum salary goes up $300 to $1,809. If you're an assistant dance captain, it goes up $150.

For every principal role that you're understudying, your minimum goes up $33. For every performance in which you, as an understudy, actually end up playing that principal role, you get an extra one-eighth of your weekly salary. So, if you're understudying one principal role, the minimum amount you'll be paid is $1,509 plus $33, which is $1,542 per week. If you're making that minimum, and there's one week in which you end up playing that principal role for two performances, you'll get an extra two-eighths of $1,542, which is $385.50, for a total of $1,927.50 that week.

During the weeks in which you're performing, the producers of your show contribute to your pension and 401k account, on top of your salary. You're also eligible for health insurance while you're working, and for a certain period of time while you're not working, depending on how often you've been working in the recent past.

So, can a Broadway chorus member afford a Manhattan apartment? If a chorus member makes the minimum for all 52 weeks a year, that's $78,468 a year before taxes. "If you're making $1,500 a week, you could afford a $1,700, $1,800-a-month apartment, and those can be found in various places in Manhattan," says Lucy Seligson, a social worker in the Entertainment Assistance Program of The Actors Fund, a non-profit support organization for people in the entertainment industry.

But most performers are not making that much. According to Actors' Equity, there are around 17,000 Equity members living in New York City (out of around 46,000 nationwide). Even if every Broadway theatre were packed with 20 actors each, that's only around 800 performers who would be guaranteed that $1,509 a week. According to a spokesperson for Actors' Equity, only 2,070 of the Equity members who live in New York City were in an Equity show of any sort — Broadway, Off-Broadway or otherwise — during the week of Aug. 20-26 (granted, that number will increase as fall arrives and more Broadway and Off-Broadway shows open).

Because of the instability of the acting profession, Seligson advises actors not to let a good Broadway gig tempt them into signing expensive leases. "I see that a lot — 'Oh, I'm in this show, I'll go from show to show,' or 'This show will run forever,' and for some reason that doesn't happen, and we try to help people plan for those times," she says.

Seligson advises actors who want to save money to look outside Manhattan for housing, find an outside source of income and apply for the many subsidized housing programs available to actors. Overall, she says, "Good budgeting and planning, a realistic assessment of the industry, and a realistic assessment of the real estate market — those three things, if you pay attention to all three of those areas, you're going to be more comfortable wherever you are."

Ask Playbill

I've begun a new column at Playbill.com called "Ask Playbill." Check out the first installment:

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/107102.html

The Ultimate Guide to Sitting Onstage at "Spring Awakening"

(My first special feature at Playbill.com)

Up-close views of certain parts of the anatomy are not the only attractions of sitting in one of the 26 onstage seats at the new Broadway musical Spring Awakening. You can also hear actual singing voices, as opposed to amplified ones. You can give the actors a pat on the back — or get kicked by errant choreography.

"I actually felt the spit from one of them," said one onstage audience member, Haisten Willis, who was in town visiting from Georgia.

Yes, you can also see the spraying of the lead actor Jonathan Groff's saliva, the volume and regularity of which rivals the fountains at the Bellagio. On the night that this writer watched, the cascade climaxed late in the second act with the T sound line "Wendla too," which sent a huge string out from his lips and over his chin.

You could always laugh at the people in the orchestra section, who paid $80 more to sit farther away. Or just wait for the nude scene.

When I arrived at the theatre with my onstage ticket, labeled "Stage AA 10," I was directed to a hallway off to the side of the house, where an usher instructed everyone to put our belongings — such as coats, bags and cell phones — into our own personal lockers. I then walked down the aisle and onto the stage, taking my seat on the stage left side in the front row. I scanned the people around me, most of whom seemed to be in their twenties or thirties. I only glanced at the hundreds in house, which felt not unlike looking off a cliff.

The conventional interpretation of the onstage audience is that it represents the overbearing community of the 1890s German town where the musical and the original Frank Wedekind play is set, and where adults shame their teenage kids into repressing their sexuality.

The show's director, Michael Mayer, says it can't be reduced to a single, clear-cut meaning.

"I don't want to tell people what it represents," he says. "It can sustain a multiplicity of readings."

Mayer had a variety of reasons for introducing the onstage seats in the show's world premiere Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company, where it began last spring before transferring to Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre in the fall.

"Number one, I knew that I wanted the cast onstage all the time," he says, so he added spaces for the cast to sit. "And then I realized, when they're all onstage in scenes, then all the seats will be empty and we'll lose the sense of people watching the play." So he added onstage seats for audience members, and had the cast sit among them when not performing.

He also noted that at the Atlantic, some seats at the back of the house were taken up by a sound mixer, so it was a bonus to have some extra real estate. On Broadway he found himself with more standbys, so he turned the four of them into ensemble members by having them perform from the onstage seats. They begin by sitting camouflaged in modern dress, but they eventually stand up and join in.

Mayer does say that it's important for all audience members — onstage and in the house, the main part of the audience — to see that other people are watching the show.

"If you're in Jersey Boys, you can forget that you're in an audience. You can get sucked up into the story," Mayer says, but with Spring Awakening, "you're constantly aware that you're watching something" because you see the other people watching as well.

Audience members have breached the fourth wall on Broadway before. Tom Hulce, a producer of Spring Awakening, made his Broadway debut in Equus, which had audience members onstage, as did the musical Cats and Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen. Ayn Rand's Night of January 16, which began on Broadway in 1935, plucks audience members to serve as jurors for a trial, and currently The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee picks a few of them to try to spell words like "casserole." In Off-Broadway shows such as Tony 'n Tina's Wedding and De La Guarda, all audience members are in the action, as the stage and the house are one and the same.

Mayer noted that European nobles used to have the privilege of sitting onstage, but the practice ended in the seventeenth century. Onstage seating for Spring Awakening turns that tradition on its head, since it's "for the hoi polloi, not the royalty," he points out, as seats are only $31.50.

Before the show began, the usher walked onstage and told everyone not to bring food or drinks up onstage after intermission, and that we'd get our Playbills from her after the show.

Kimberly Grigsby, the show's musical director — who also sits onstage every night with the band to conduct and plays piano and harmonium — says that the onstage audience's self-consciousness and lack of personal items guard them from the typical distractions. Normally, as a conductor standing right in front of the first row, she is accustomed to hearing whispering, fidgeting, ruffling and the jiggling of Junior Mints. But it doesn’t happen onstage at Spring Awakening.

"They behave themselves," she says. "There's no talking. They're not flipping through their programs to read. They're actually paying attention to the show. I don't even catch people's eyes wandering."

The four onstage ensemble members arrive with the rest of the audience. Each one grabs a ticket from the prop table backstage and then at around 7:55 PM they sneak out a door that opens into the house (on the right side, if you're facing the stage) but is shielded by a curtain.

Sometimes, when they walk onstage "we act like we came together and we act disappointed that we're not sitting together," says Krysta Rodriguez, who's in the ensemble.

When one of them has to perform, his or her spot is taken by one of the two standbys for the adult roles (who usually stay backstage).

A little into the first act, the ensemble suddenly pop up and begin singing.

"When we stand up — oh my goodness, some people freak out," she adds. "We had one kid who could barely sit in his seat he was so excited."

As Ryan Boring, another audience member in town from Georgia, said after the show, "The guy scared the crap out of me."

The most anticipated part of the onstage experience — the sex scene at the end of the first act — turned out to be no big deal. From my perspective in the front row of the stage left side, peaking over Groff's shoulder, I got a peak at Lea Michele's chest and a lot of Groff's behind. But the experience probably wasn't as erotic as seeing it from the house, where the audience gets a full view of the two of them horizontal.

"I find they react more to the masturbation scene than to the sex scene," Grigsby observes, which would make sense, as the act, which Jonathan B. Wright performs while seated and facing the audience during the song "My Junk," is easy to see from the side, and comes suddenly, early in the show.

Still, Michael Hojlo — who's a manager at the restaurant 7 Square next door and who has seen the show both onstage and from the house — said of the sex scene, "It was more exciting being closer. The further away you got you kind of missed those nuances," such as facial expressions.

At intermission you can schmooze with the ensemble I struck up a conversation with Robert Hager, an ensemble member sitting next to me. Understandably, he said he enjoyed participating in the show every night, instead of sitting backstage waiting for an actor to be absent. "It makes it a lot easier" to learn all the roles, he said, "and a lot more fun."

"They always want to talk to us: 'You totally fooled us, you had tickets and everything!'" Rodriguez says of the audience. "Or they get really scared of us. They realize that now people will be looking in their direction, and they get really self-conscious. They always ask, 'Are we going to have to do anything? Are there going to be lights on us?' People ask if they're dressed properly. When there's a spotlight on the person next to them, they get really uncomfortable."

Also during intermission, I asked Eric Lane, a fellow onstage audience member, whether he had felt the audience's eyes on him. He replied, chuckling, "I wasn't thinking of that until now. I was just so engaged with what was going on that that just kind of went out of my head."

Certain parts are better onstage than others. "The ones where they're jumping around or they're moving," such as "The Bitch of Living," work better onstage, observes Hojlo. "The ones where they don't do as well onstage are the duets, where they're very much more focused toward the audience."

"You're behind the action some of the time — you're going to miss certain words and lyrics and some of the finer points," Mayer says, of the onstage seats, "but hopefully the tradeoff is that you get a dynamic experience."

Mayer says that there are speakers on the floor below the seats, aimed at the onstage audience. But the sound from the speakers aimed into the house is sometimes more powerful and creates a bit of an echo to those onstage. "The sound is a little bit off," Hojlo acknowledges. The benefit is that you sometimes hear the music directly — from the mouths of the singers, or from the instruments, which are a joy to watch up close.

"If you're out in the house, you're hearing a mix — you're hearing all of the voices coming out of the same speaker," Grigsby says. "But when you're onstage, you're going to hear it from the source."

So far, no audience member has tackled an actor in mid-scene or rushed to the piano and started playing chopsticks. Some fanatics will sing along, Mayer says. Others — or perhaps the same ones —will offer a hand to shake or say "good job" when an actor sits down nearby after a song, Rodriguez says.

Christine Estabrook, one of the adult actors, is allergic to cologne, so some very nice-smelling audience members have had to be moved at intermission.

"I've kicked people a couple times, I'm not going to lie," says Rodriguez. "There's a part where I have to swing my leg over, and depending on how large or small the person next to me is, I kick them — in the leg."

Grigsby says that after the show, even audience members who weren't onstage feel comfortable marching up the steps to talk to her. "They don't come to the edge of the stage and say 'Excuse me,'" she says. "They come right up onstage to talk about the music or talk about the lights. Which is great."

The reason for their brazenness, Grigsby thinks, is that because of the onstage seating, the entire audience — onstage and in the house — feels invited into the world of the musical. "There's not a barrier — we're up here telling the story and you're down there listening," she says. "We're all a part of this world, and your participation is necessary."

It acknowledges, she says, that "every single one of us can tell a part of this story. We all go through this. We all become adults."

As Hilary Paige Willis, a drama student who sat onstage, said afterwards, "When you sit that close, you feel like part of the story."

More on the "Urinetown" Controversy

Here's my latest story on the "Urinetown" plagiarism controversy. This one felt particularly good, as I was the first to report the lawsuit. I got a tip that something was going on in the U.S. District Court for Northern Ohio, so I called the court and asked a clerk if there was a "Urinetown" lawsuit, found out there was, and bugged her to send me the document. Yeah, like a real reporter.

Charged With Plagiarism, Regional Urinetown Teams Fire Back; Lawsuit Filed

"Urinetown" Controversy

I wanted to alert you to two related Playbill.com articles that I wrote last week. I just found out that they were the two most-visited articles on the entire site during the week of Nov. 12-18:

Urinetown Broadway Team Accuses Two Regional Productions of Plagiarism

Hunter Foster Defends Jennifer Cody's Akron Production of Urinetown

New Job at Playbill.com

I am happy to announce that today I begin a full-time position at Playbill.com. There will be too many articles to post each one at my web site, but you can see them here.