Ladies and Gents of the internets, it’s been a very long time, and we’ve graduated!
I completed my last class the past Monday, and my final grades will be in August 8th and I shall receive my diploma at some undetermined date after that. Hope has been finished and it currently on a Eurotrip with our close friend Rob.
The past, oh, 7 months have been extremely busy and sort of strange. Hope and I had been planning to move to New York this August. She is going to stick around Richmond through October to stage manage Richard III with Henley Street Theatre– a relatively new theatre company around here which marks it’s second season with the opening of Richard III. Myself on the other hand… I don’t really know what I am going to do. I’m on hold. I’ve gotten one job offer in New York with an Off-Off Broadway company that I am extremely fond of, but I had to turn it down as it was to start this past Monday. Other than that my job search efforts have been similar to trying to find an apartment– meager. So it looks like I’m crashing on people’s couches the first week of August and moving back in with my parents until the right opportunity attaches itself to me.
So here is the rundown on what Hope and I have been up to the past several months:
Hope stage managed Cabaret for our University, while PSMing The Seagull with Henley Street, and co-directing Beef with me on our University’s black box stage.
I started off the year working with a theatre reviewer turned director, it was quite the experience and taught me a lot about how to work with directors who are not great communicators (and in addition to that don’t own cell phones and only checks their email once a day). The show got extended one extra weekend which was nice, but the houses were small.
After that I could focus on Beef. Beef was a lot of fun. A week after Beef was over I started working on Reefer Madness: The Musical. It was the first time in 4 years I’d worked on a musical, and really the first time I’d stage managed a musical knowing how to properly stage manage. While I don’t feel like I learned anything of super value while working on this show, I did make an incredible number of mistakes. All of my mistakes, as they always are, were preventable. This time, I believe, my mistakes were always a result of my own slack about the Pre-Production of the show. Over all, this show was a really great experience and also a pain in my ass. I only had one nightmare about the show, which was me waking up calling the cues to the song “Murder.” This show ended up being the highest grossing play the theatre had ever put on in its 15 year in existence and was given an extension of two performances. The owners of the theatre attempted to stretch it out for another 4 weekends but, the producers and director felt it was time to let it die.
A week after this was closed I once again was to work on a new works festival here in Richmond. I did this same festival last year. Only this year, my playwright decided she did not want to participate in the festival so I ended up working it as an Assistant Technical Director. The festival was staged readings, so I won’t put this on my resume as ATD, mainly because my job consisted of making sure everything got to where it needed to be in between the shows and that it was all fixed, and then load-in and load-out.
In midst of the new works festival, my stage manager for Reefer Madness asked me to come in as ASM during spacing for Henry IV pt. II with the Richmond Shakespeare Festival. So that’s what is happening these days. Perhaps Trevor will post here about this experience.
Basically, since the beginning of the year my jobs have lined up nicely… we’ll see how that continues.
