A Tale from the Production Meeting: How Umoja Screwed Over South High Theater
This entry is doing two things:
First, it's letting me vent some of my anger over how our theater program has been trampled over by the Umoja folks.
Second, it's letting you all know the details of how and why our schedule for the rest of the year is screwed up. It's really long, so I'm going to put it behind a lj cut.
Before I launch into the story, I want to give this disclaimer: This was written in a moment of anger. I'm sorry if anybody connected with the Umoja production is reading this and takes offense, but this is my personal journal, and I'm going to vent my feelings here. Said feelings may or may not still represent how I feel about this whole thing once I've had a chance to calm down.
Ok, so I'm going to start out by laying out the original plan for the theater this year, starting in January.
During the month of January, there would be rehearsals for the one-acts off-stage 4 days a week, dance rehearsals for Anything Goes on-stage one day a week, and rehearsals for the Black History Month show would share the stage with tech four days a week. The Black History Month show would be done as an IP with Frieda, and be produced the first week of February.
At some point in here, Rhinoceros starts off-stage rehearsals.
During February, there would be band concerts (still happening) on the 10th, 15th and 17th, and the one acts would share the stage time around the concerts with Anything Goes, and then go up on the nights of the 23rd and 24th of February. Then the one acts would strike, and then Rhinoceros would tech and go up on March 9-10, which is a Wednesday and Thursday and totally sucks, but we're not going to get into that right now. After Rhinoceros, Anything Goes would have 3 weeks on stage before spring break, followed by tech week and show week.
Ubu Roi would go up may 11 and 12, and then we would be out of the theater for the rest of the crazy month of May, which contains 3 band concerts, the ASA auditorium, 653,527,284 different awards programs and a partridge in a pear tree.
Sounds like a workable schedule, right?
So the assistant principal who is in charge of Umoja gets transferred to another school. The new person doesn't like the plan for the Black history month show, and instead wants to produce a show on February 28th, and needs 21 days of stage time to rehearse the 45-minute production.
Frieda, Linda Nelson, Dagny Waldeland and whoever this Umoja person is have a really long talk. I believe that happened this morning, and I think it took about 4 hours. I'm not sure what happened, as I wasn't there, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me because Frieda told me the both Linda and Dagny were on our side, yet we still got bumped out.
So the result is this: Umoja rehearses on stage during the entire month of January, except for Fridays, which are anything goes dance rehearsals, the 2 days of anything goes auditions, and the 2 days for the talent show. (An aside here-if Mr. French so much as thinks about considering moving the talent show, ... I'm not going to finish this sentence. I think you get the picture.) Umoja also gets Monday through Thursday for the 1st 2 weeks of February, Except for Thursday, February 10th, when there's a band concert. They only have one day on stage in the 3rd and 4th weeks of February, and then they perform on the 28th during school (auditorium schedule.) If we wanted to produce the 1-acts in February, we would have 2 days to rehearse onstage before the shows. That's bad.
Then, in March, Anything goes is onstage the entire month. I don't know why they need so much time, but I think it's because they lost their time during January and February. This means that there's no time for Rhinoceros. Anything Goes goes up as scheduled in April, with the exception that the Saturday show is moved to Wednesday because of Prom, which was re-scheduled after we had already planned around it. Anything goes strikes on April 25th, and 1-act auditions are April 26th.
Now comes the fun part: May. Remember how I said that there are 3 band concerts, the ASA auditorium, 653,527,284 different awards programs and a partridge in a pear tree during May? Well, they're all still there, except now we're adding 2 senior projects and the one-acts.
So the plan is to run Rhinoceros and Ubu Roi in repertory on the 10th-13th of May, which means that one show goes up on Tuesday and Thursday and the other goes up on Wednesday and Friday. The Monday after the shows is a staff development day, so we'll be here for about 28 hours that day teching the one-acts, which have that Monday, the 16th, and Monday the 23rd to rehearse before going up on the 24th and 25th. They'll probably also be able to make partial use of the stage on one of the band concert nights, which are that Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Wednesday the 18th is the ASA's rehearsal for their auditorium during the day on Monday the 23rd. Thursday the 26th is the Boat Bash, and it'd be hard to do the shows on Friday the 27th because that's Memorial Day weekend. There might be something else going on that night too.
So that's the long and detailed version of how our schedule got so screwed up. Basically, Anything Goes is going to be fine, but the two remaining senior projects and the one-acts are all getting the shaft.
I'm going to bed now, maybe I'll add some of my own personal feelings in the morning.
Oh, and as far as how I'm doing, I'm sick, tired and stressed out. I've got a rash all over my face from the hot tub on Saturday, and my face feels like it's going to explode. I know that Korla also had a rash on her shoulders, and Kristi had exactly the same funny bumps on the back of her ears that I have. Anybody else have symptoms?
Ahh! I just hit spell check and it deleted everything in the LJ cut. Fortunately, I'd copied it into word before I made the cut because I don't trust Internet Explorer.