New Rep Studio- Stage Managing workshop & Stumble through

Hey guys,

Sorry for posting so late, I had a really busy weekend. Anyway let me fill you in on what we did on Thursday and Friday. Thursday, we did a stumble through. For people who don't know what that is, a stumble through is when we run the whole show off book with mostly all the props. It went pretty well and even though we had to call for line a few times, we basically had our lines and songs memorized. Everyone did a really good job remembering all the blocking we did and remembering what props to set and how to build the barricade for the fight scene. It was really amazing watching the whole show come together after so much hard work and we were all pretty proud of ourselves.

On Friday, (my birthday!), Debra Rafson came in and did a stage managing workshop with us. We talked about all the responsibilities of a stage manager and let me tell you, they have a lot more stuff to do than I thought. One of their jobs is creating a relaxing environment for the actors and furnishing the rehearsal room so people feel relaxed. Besides working at New Rep, Debra is also one of the stage managers for Blue Man Group. For an activity, she brought in a tape of one of Blue Man Groups's performance numbers and also brought in the cue list. So what we did was we watched the tape so we became familiar with it and then we got to call the cues for the lights in the show. We read the cues off a piece of paper. (The cues coordinated with the words of the song so we knew when to call them). It was SO fun, although now I know that I definitely don't have a stage managing career ahead of me. Aside from my lack of talent, some of the girls were really good at calling the cues. It was a great workshop and we got a much better taste of what being a stage manager is like.

This coming week is our last week in camp. We're going to polish everything for the show and make sure we have everything down solid. It's going to be so sad to say goodbye-we've become so close!! It's really amazing being with 12 other talented girls around my age and putting on an extremely difficult show with minimal props and lighting. Seeing everything come together so far was such an incredible experience and we're not even done polishing things yet.

I'll make sure to keep reporting on how the show is coming along,
-Talia