Day 226…
I am at work.
I haven’t been able to say that in seven months.
I am downstairs at New World Stages on 50th Street and we are setting up for a Patti LuPone concert in a small theatre right across the hall from where Jersey Boys performs.
Performed.
Performs.
The theatre is tiny. The concert is going to be streamed for Performing Arts Center subscribers around the country so there won’t be a live audience present.
It’s not quite a show and not quite a TV program. It’s somewhere in between. Actor’s Equity Association and SAG/AFTRA are in a pretty nasty turf war at the moment over exactly who has jurisdiction over this murky in-between area.
AEA is the union that covers actors and stage managers in theatre and SAG/AFTRA is the union that covers actors in film and television. Many actors are members of both. Thankfully, as a concert, this gig falls outside the purview of AEA whose jurisdiction mainly covers plays and musicals.
Supervising something means that I can spend quite a bit of time just sitting around while various projects get completed. So far this morning, I have answered a question about where Patti will enter from at the top of the concert. I now have a break.
There is a COVID compliance officer on site. We had an orientation and briefing when I first got here. There are hand sanitizing stations set up at regular intervals throughout the space and plenty of PPE available. Everybody is in a mask.
When Patti and Joseph Thalken, who will accompany her on piano, get here to rehearse they will be in masks but obviously once they are ready to go onstage, they will take them off. All of us who will then come into contact with them will be given face shields to wear to help protect our eyes.
The tech tables and cameras have all been set up to comply with social distancing as much as possible. Rather than sitting in the theatre as I normally would do while a show is getting loaded in, I am sitting out in the lobby where we’ve each been given a separate station to work from.
All of these measures should make us all safer over the course of the day but there is still some risk involved. We are going to all be working together all day. Mask wearing does not fully stop transmission it just impedes it.
I know what I’ve been doing these past few weeks, and I am fairly confident that I will not pass along anything to anybody. Whether anybody I come into contact with today or tomorrow ends up passing something on to me remains to be seen.
We are using the back of the Jersey Boys theatre as a kind of green room area. Some of the props and furniture from the show are stacked onstage. The ghost light is on.
Most theatres have a standing light that gets placed onstage and turned on at the end of the evening that is called a ghost light. Theatre lore says that the light is for the comfort of the spirits of the theatre or to drive away the more destructive ones. Practically, it keeps people from walking onto a darkened stage and falling off the edge of it into the orchestra pit.
The glow from the lamp doesn’t light up the whole stage, but I can still make out the outline of the steel bridge that is the Jersey Boys main set piece. The stage looks the way it does after the day off. It looks ready to perform on tonight.
Last night was the final debate between the two Presidential candidates. There is a palpable sense of relief that it is over and done with.
In contrast to his performance in the first debate, the President was far more restrained last night.
Each of the candidates had a different goal to achieve. Joe Biden, more or less, just needed to get through it. He did that. The President, on the other hand, really did need to convince undecided voters to swing his way. Whether or not he did that is much less clear.
While he was far more restrained, his fact to lie ratio was maybe the lowest it has ever been - and that is saying something. He did little if anything to outline any actual policy plans that he might have for his second term. He continued to claim that the pandemic is almost over and on its way out despite all evidence to the contrary. He used a lot of right-wing code words and phrases that nobody beyond his base and people who have really been following what’s going on would have the slightest idea what he meant.
At one point he said, “While he was selling pillows and sheets, I sold tank busters to Ukraine.” This took some figuring out.
What it seemed to refer to was something that Senator John McCain had said in 2015 when he was criticizing the Obama Administration. Though they were withholding military support to the Ukraine during their war with Russia, the US did, at some point, send over supplies and other such assistance. “The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we’re sending blankets and meals. Blankets don’t do well against Russian tanks,” is what McCain said.
He also referenced some material that former NY Mayor Rudi Giuliani claims to have somehow implicating Biden’s son. This is the information that he received from the Russian operatives he has been working with for years. The Wall Street Journal was meant to be releasing these potential bombshells, but it looks like they are just going to be mentioned in an op-ed piece instead. The New York Post, true to form, blazoned their headlines with it this morning.
Fact checkers from all of the major networks have all said much the same thing - this was one of the least factual of the President’s appearances - ever.
Polls taken after the debate pretty much gave it to Biden, but it is unlikely to really change much of anything in either candidate’s standing. It’s just a relief that it’s over.
I’m now being called back in to look at the lights. We’ve got about three hours before Patti and Joe get here to run through the concert once before tomorrow.
I last time saw Mark, our sound designer, was in Yakima, Washington on a Mandy Patinkin concert at the end of last year. It seems like yesterday. The fact that that was almost a year ago is truly mind boggling to me.
Wow, does it feel good to be doing something in a theatre again - even under these strange and restrictive circumstances. I’ll take it.
Maybe, with better leadership, we can flatten the curve to the point that we will really be able to get back to doing this kind of work full time.
Here’s hoping.
❤️you are giving me hope today being at work, in the theatre, with a light on 🌟