Photocalls in the Time of COVID
I wanted to follow up my longer posting about the Midsummer photo call to also talk about some organizational changes that we made to the structure of the call to accommodate COVID protocols and the generally awkward schedules we are all working with these days. Normally, we limit our calls to 1 hour, usually after an evening performance or during the lengthy break between a matinee and an evening show. Pretty common for most of us. However, one of the things that we’ve been careful to do is limit the time everyone is in the space, and ensure everyone doesn’t have to stay super late after an evening show. Additionally, several of us on the design team had to isolate after a suspected exposure earlier in the tech process (turned out negative for all…), so we had to seriously adjust our tech week & cancel a Preview.
In the end, we decided to split the call into two 30-minute calls after the Monday & Tuesday evening performances in the second week. This gave everyone some recovery time after tech, and ensured that we would mitigate the time in the space. The downside, of course, was that everyone shooting the call had to go back to campus late in the evening, not once, but twice. Still, not a major sacrifice for the well-being of the group. We were able to organize the shot list so that costume changes were minimal each evening, which was especially important since most of the performers played two roles, as is common with this play. The set was a unit set with a lot of props, but no major scene changes were required to be accommodated in the schedule. Overall, the two calls went smoothly, and we finished five minutes ahead of schedule on each evening.
Building off this experiment, our next major show in the space was a new musical, Nostalgia Night, and we decided to try a split call again. This time it was determined that the calls would be 5:30p-6p on a Tuesday & Wednesday, which meant the calls for stage prep & makeup backed up right into the end of the class day. Finishing at 6pm gave the performers & crew time to rest and eat, and still have the show ready for house open at 7pm for a 7:30 curtain. Splitting the calls allowed us to manage the scenes with heavy haze & fog by confining them to one of the two nights, while the other night was relatively clear air. Additionally, during the show, one of the main characters gets vomited on, requiring a costume change and a laundry call. We didn’t have a double of the costume, so by shooting before the show, we could do the shots in the dress and in the alternate costume, but didn’t need (or really want) the shot of the vomiting moment. If we’d shot afterwards, the dress would have not been usable until it was washed, seriously delaying the call. We’ve run into this before with things like blood (thank you, Sweeney Todd!), but in those cases we had doubles of the costumes, so we just had to plan an extra laundry call so we had both a clean and bloody set for that call & worked backwards through the show. The split calls worked, but were really tight and ultimately we decided to go back to the single hour call during a weeknight of the second week of our runs. It makes for a later night for everyone, especially costumes, but we felt we weren’t really saving ourselves anything by adding in the extra administration of two calls. In the future, if we have a specific costume moment like this one, we will just do a short 10-15 minute shoot before the show, and get the rest of the shots afterwards. When possible, having doubles of costumes or props/sets that are changed/broken during the performance really helps, but might require some extra purchases & planning.
Nostalgia Night, Pavilion Theatre, Penn State University, Feb. 2022.