Who? What? Where? (paperwork sucks..)

For the past two days I have been holed up in a tiny office in the basement of the Arturo di Filippi Educational Center in Miami, where Florida Grand Opera has its home. Preparing for an opera is mounds of paperwork - sheets and sheets of organization that the public has no idea about. Today was a nine hour day of me sitting in front of my laptop filling in spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet. I think the paperwork may be even more difficult when you are recreating an opera (as we are doing now) because you aren't starting with your own work, you are trying to decipher someone else's spreadsheets. It makes my eyes bug out just thinking about it.

I think the most heinous of these sheets is a chunk of paper called the "Who/What/Where." This is basically a list of everything that happens during the run of a show: who comes on the stage, who leaves the stage, what they are wearing, what side of the stage they leave their props, where the curtain comes in, where the quick change happens, etc. This is all listed with precise timings and score notations so that an entire show track can be read from said sheet. It's a monstrosity of paperwork and the specificity is mind boggling. We have two of them that we are looking at for this show right now (we haven't yet begun rehearsals mind you). One is from the original time the production was done and one is from the run in New York last year. What has my panties all in a twist today is that there is no possible way to reconcile these separate who/what/wheres. They are completely different in every way and that either means that the show changed considerably from one house to the other, or someone is doing really shoddy paper work.

Either way, I'm feeling a bit screwed right now.

Ah, the glamorous world of show business. Paperwork and filing, cleaning up other people's shoddy work, sucking down coffee while staring at a computer screen for hours on end. Gee...I might as well be at your job.