FAULT LINES JOURNAL PART VI

For journal entries I-V, please see belowSo, by the second weekend of the performances, we were all (actors, crew, band) seasoned veterans of the show. I think everybody felt really confindent and were willing and able to take chances.

As I have stated in previous posts, there were 7-10 Brewery Tap regulars who were there for every rehearsal held at the Brewery Tap and every performance. So they saw PLUMP play every night. By the second weekend, each of these regulars had come up to us individually stating how much they liked the band, and ho they particulatly loved it when we played the Cheech and Chong song "Earache my Eye" (as heard on the soundtrack to the classic movie "Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke"). Each one of these regulars loved it when we played this particular song. The patrons loved us. By the 3rd weekend, we were on "hug" greeting status with this regulars rather than a "handshake" greeting status. Hilarious.

The good people of "Horsehead" had arranged for different types of food for the patrons of the play. There was complimentary popcorn and pretzels in baskets throughout the bar (of which PLUMP always got a couple special baskets.) AND, they had arranged for a family who operated a food cart be stationed outside the bar which sold hot dogs, nachos, chips, etc. It bears noting that these may well have been the best hot dogs in the world. Seriously. The hotdogs were wrapped in strips of bacon. Seriously. They were garnished with jalepenos, relish, onions, tomatoes, mustard, etc. Al ate 1-2 every night. I miss the hotdogs, and especially the bacon. The food cart people loved us. Number one because we ate hot dogs every night. Nuber two because they loved the band. The food cart owner said we sat back and grinned during the pre-play PLUMP set every night. But his love of the band didn't carry over to giving us free hotdogs. Luckily, they were only $2 bucks a piece.

During the performances, PLUMP tried it's hand at drinking all manner of beverages. Provided by the bar or not provided by the bar. Even though we were in a bar and had access to the draft beers there, Jason Jackson saw fit to bring lone star tallboys just about every night. A couple of evenings, he brought a bottle of tequila that was passed around the band stage, in the dark, as they play was going on. We grew adept at having conversations using sign language or mouthing words as the play went on. And we grew adept at drinking tallboys and tequila as the play went on. I hope the audience wasn't watching us.

Stay tunes for Part VII

FAULT LINES JOURNAL PART V

For Fault Lines Journal Parts I-IV, please see the respective blog posting

Opening night for the play "Faultlines" was Thursday March 11. After all the preparation and the fixing of the electricity and sound, I think everyone was pretty confident. The opening night was full of close friends of the cast and crew. It was not sold out, but it was a full house. The capacity for the play was, I think, 90 people. Comfortably, I think there were about 50 good seats, but we would cram in as many as possible up to 90 people.

It was amazing during the rehearsals, and as it proved out during the 10 performances, how the actors would subtly make little changes and variances--very similar to how we would do it for jams. The first night the actors were really live and excited. AND, the audience loved it. They laughed at almost every imaginable part. Very cool. The Ceremony music came off very well. The lights and sound were very good was eerie and loud and freaky--which is what they wanted. I thought PLUMP sounded mighty fine. We had assigned a number to each of the different parts of our underscore music, and we would look at eachother and nod and such to make sure we knew exactly what part we would be playing. I was in charge of watching the script, and cueing the band as to when we would come in and go out. It was slightly different every time, just based on where the actors were in a line compared to where we were in a groove. I caught the audiences head moving to the music a number of times, so I knew it was sounding pretty good. We had champagne after the first night, and every one was really happy--I think the opening night performance was one of the best nights of the run.

Friday night (Mar 12) the crowd was a little smaller than the Thursday night. They enjoyed the show, but they definitely did not laugh quite as much. Over the course of the run, PLUMP would have a quite a variance in the crowd response during the PLUMP part of the show, which was basically an hour of music before the play. Some nights the crowd really liked it. This particular Friday night, the crowd was a bit older, and I think we were too loud for what they would typically want to hear. I think many in the crowd wanted us to shut up. I think this partly because one particular gentleman stuck his fingers in his ears for the majority of his time in the bar prior to the beginning of the play.

On the first Friday night, near the beginning of the play, the actors ended up skipping about a page and a half of dialogue. There was even about 15 seconds on stage in which both actors were really struggling with what line to say. There dialogue descended to:

Jim--"You are crazy"
Bill--"No you are crazy"
Jim-- "No, you are crazy"

over and over again until one of the actors could remember a line that would get them on track. I could tell that the actors were really struggling, but the audience did not notice. It was actually kind of neat, for me, because I understood what was going on, and what they were frantically trying to do. Also, the whole time the actors were struggling with the lines, I was scanning the script because I needed to know when they would find a line to pop back in, so that if we had a music cue nearby that we would get back in. When the character Jim finally got a line that got them back on the script, luckily it was a line I knew, because it was about 10 seconds before we were supposed to go on. The band music got in correctly, thank God. Other than that, the show was perfectly fine.

Saturday night (Mar 13) was good. We had some sound problems during the PLUMP pre-show show, as the vocals were not going through the PA mains--the vocals were only going through the monitors. I am sure there was a big hole in the music from the perspective of the crowd.

We did a show on Monday May 15 as a "industry night", as all the people who work in theatre typically have Monday nights off, so we did a show so a lot of these people could check out the play. The audience, though smaller, loved it. This was definitely another of the best nights. I think because it was all friends and theatre people, the actors were more relaxed. It is a funny play, and if the crowd got to laughing early, the actors always responded with a really inventive performance.

We were all exhausted after spending the last 8 days together. We were in the Brewery Tap from 6 until about midnight from Monday thru Saturday, then Sunday off, but then again on Monday. We had Tuesday and Wednesday off, and the next show was Thursday night. But between doing the play and also working out day jobs, we were all really really really really tired.

Stay tuned for the Journal Part 6...

FAULT LINES JOURNAL PART IV

For more Parts I-III, please read prior postings.

OK, so the venue that was chosen to host the play was the Brewery Tap, which is a bar in the northern part of downtown Houston. I had seen the Brewery Tap many many times, but had never been, and honestly I thought it was closed. (Sorry Brewery Tap!!) Super cool bar. Wood paneling. Soccer banners and scarfs on the wall. Good jukebox. 10 or so regulars who were there every day (I mean every day). Not super large. There were two slightly raised areas in the bar--one of which served as a natural stage for the play and one of which served as a natural stage for the band. The venue is kind L shaped, in that from certain sight lines in the bar you couldn't see the band, etc. The Brewery Tap had live music very semi-regularly, but was not really a good sounding room at all, acoustically.

The Horsehead people set up the lights and sound all day Sunday March 7. March 8 was the first full technical and dress rehearsal at the venue. Technical/Dress rehearsals were to be held over the next 3 days (March 8-10). During these 3 days, we encountered just about every technical problem you can imagine. There was a $10,000 or so lighting rig, and a bunch of sound. The power supply at the Brewery Tap was shaky at best. One of the breakers blew one night. One night during the rehearsals we could only have sound and no lights because the venue's power could not handle it. The breaker box at the Brewery Tap was in a state of disrepair. Horsehead had to pony up some dollars to get an electrician in to make a short-term fix just so the show would go on. This was Wednesday, the day before the show. I know they were extremely nervous.

Sound. I don't think we ever mastered the sound (even during the 3 weeks of performances). This was not the fault of the sound people. It just was what it was. Mic's would go out. Amps would go out. Speakers would go out. It was crazy, and definitely a very stressful 3 days of dress rehearsal. To add to this problem were the regulars. Part of the deal with the play was that when the show started, the regulars would get in for free every day. They were there every single day. During the rehearsals, they would have conversations at full volume, in that they were drowning out the actors. And, they didn't really care for the Ceremony Music, which was very in your face and loud and screeching at times. They had to listento us play this 4-5 times a night, which I am sure got old. But they came every day. You have to respect it.To combat the the loudness of the potential talking, the actors began using tiny mics hidden on their person and ear monitors. The mic's were first introduced into the production on Tuesday March 9. The mics did help with the overall actor volume, but the mics would pick up weird feedback and sounds at inopportune times, and overall were extremely difficult to monitor and handle. Jaz (Horsehead Sound) did a great job of keeping the sound problems related to the mic's to a minimum. Another strategy we devised to combat the regulars voice volume was to come up with a little speech (which I was to say every night before the show) that would ask out of respect for the actors and the audience to keep conversations to a minimum. This seemed to help keep the regulars a bit more muted.

The one part of the show I was most nervous about was the lighting for the ceremony. Jeremy the lighting designer was designing a light show that would be programmed to match the music with the Ceremony (overture) theme. The Overture was about 5 or 6 minutes long, had multiple tempo changes, etc. I was nervous that we would be able to consistently match it. Or that he would not be able to "punch in" on cues at certain times, which would allow him to manually make changes with us, so that we would not get out of sync. To make it a bit more stressful, by Tuesday (2 days before the performance) we had not even seen how the lights would work, nor had we rehearsed it. Luckily, Jeremy the sound guy was a fucking pro, and the first time we rehearsed it, it matched up really nicely. It looked really good. I was glad that I did not have epilipsy, as it might well have caused me to go into a seizure. But it was awesome.

The actors were amazing through all this. They were always able to concentrate and act through all the electricity, sound, loud regulars, anxiety etc. Luckily, we had a really good rehearsal on the last rehearsal night (Wednesday), and I think we all felt like we were ready to have a great run of shows. Stay tuned for Part V....

FAULT LINES JOURNAL PART III

To read Journal Parts I or II, please scroll down

The actors in the play were really beyond good. My buddy Drake played Bill, and he was literally on the stage the whole play. Rick played Jim. These two guys really go pretty much the whole spectrum from smiling laughing kidding around sitcom-like banter to screaming and yelling and hatred--just short of physical violence, but not quite. They both went all out. Phillip played Joe, who is kind of the dick but also the conscience of the play. It really is THE part, and Phillip was fucking awesome. Ivy played Bill's wife. She has the smallest part and doesn't get to have quite the range the other characters had, but she was still damn good.

It was so neat to see the play over and over again in the practice and then in the actual performance to see how things changed and what was good and what sucked. We had to watch the real close for our cues as to when to go in or out. It was kind of tough, because we would be playing along to a given beat, and the actors cadence and pauses were always different because they are not talking, necessarily, in time to the music. So, in the case where we would come out in the same spot according to the dialogue, it could definitely be a different spot in a riff we were playing or a beat I was playing. It was cool, but a challenge.

PLUMP basically took a break from PLUMP practicing in order to do play practicing. We practiced with the play about 4 or 5 times during the two weeks immediately prior to the last week before the show. Horsehead had arranged to practice at a big room at Univ of Houston campus in their theatre department (1-2 of the Horsehead people work there; Anthony is the technical director there). So that was pretty cool.

We played a show on Feb 27 in Lake Charles and on Mar 5 in College Station in the midst of all this practice. That then gets us to Monday March 8, which was the first first dress rehearsal prior to the opening show on Thursday March 11. To be continued....

FAULT LINES JOURNAL PART II

(Please see Part I for the first portion of the journal, if interested).In my opinion, one of the neatest aspects of participating in the production of the play was entering the "theatre world". Its neat seeing how actors rehearse and how the production people work and to see how the everything progresses to the actual performance with an audience. PLUMP had never really had to meet a deadline before, but here there was definitely a lot of work to get to the actual show.

We went to all aspects of the actor rehearsals--really to get a sense of how the underscore music should be. We went to the first read-through, with the actors, of Fault Lines. I came out of that super impressed by how good the actors already were even at this stage (granted, all of the actors are pros). We also went to one of the first rehearsals after all the scenes had been blocked (all stage movements by the actors had been determined--at least at a first draft level). We took beer. It was nice. The actors laugh a lot when they drop lines, etc. It was extremely laid back. I was especially impressed at how well the actors could concentrate on their scene--because there were always other conversations going on, because the director and production people had no problems having conversations while the rehearsal was going on. After every practice, the production staff would send out an email to the total production company, saying how it went, what props were needed, and other logistical stuff. It was very organized.

For the music, we decided to come up with a theme for each of the main characters, and for the play to have a theme. Characters Bill, Jim, and Joe each had a theme music associated with him, that was played multiple times. (Actually Bill was supposed to have theme a and theme b--wherein theme b was supposed to be a variation on "a", but sadder. The end results was a music not much like "a"). We wanted to serve the play, but to also have PLUMP-like music, where possible. We actually made one theme "Bill's Theme" pretty much like one section of a song we have called "Oso Nova". One theme was very funky--kind of in a "Shaft"-like way. The Joe theme and Fault Lines theme were closely related--mostly because Joe's dialogue often served as the theme of the play. These two themes, and the "b" theme referred to above which we called "Sadder", were very moody, kind of dark. One reviewer said PLUMP played moody music during the theme, and I think they were often referring to this. We also had some bell toll type stuff with bass and mallets on symbol. Al and Jason really had a big chance to play some cool crazy stuff through out. I felt Josh played the melody on the bass most of the time. And I played along with Josh on drums. Very cool. We had read through the script with the director, and marked the spots where we though we should come in and out. This evolved over the course of the rehearsals. Our spots coming in and out sounded really cool, and really served the drama going on the stage. Sound, or lack thereof, can really provice focus during a performance. Tune in for more.....