Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I believe it would be an understatement to describe last night as an improbable, mildly choreographed dance on the edge of disaster.
"Awesome" will be putting on noSIGNAL at Bumbershoot this year, and last night was our allotted set-up time. They gave us from 6:45 to 9 pm to get set up. By the time we got in, it was already past 7:10.
To put this in perspective, we were attempting to do in two hours what had taken us 20 the first time we did it. We're certainly faster now, having worked out a lot of the bugs in the first tech week, but we're not 10x faster.
We got our stuff loaded in pretty quickly, and introductions were made. Stormy (spelling unknown) was our stage manager, and these were our sound, light, projection folks, and these were our stage hands. Everything passed in one ear and out, as every member of the group stared more or less slack-jawed at Stormy. She was perhaps 28-30 with long auburn hair, and for some reason utterly captivating. That's great and all, but I could feel our time trickling away. (I was no less captivated, don't get me wrong, but I was also frantically aware that we needed to be working fast.)
First things first, let's get those lights set up. Great, progress! Oh, wait... Why is that light bar coming down? What's going on guys, why are we patching lights? 20 minutes of futzing later, the lights were sorted out. By the time we actually got to being able to write cues on the light board and start setting up sound (which necessarily happened simutaneously), it was already 8 o'clock.
A frantic 45 minutes of slowly building light cues later, and we were maybe 1/3 through the cues I knew we wanted to build. You'll notice that this put us at 8:45 if you've been keeping track. We had 15 minutes to finish the other 2/3 of cues. No, actually, Stormy informed me, you have 10 minutes, because we need you out at 8:55, so we can shut down the theater. Oh, great!
Dustin and I kept plugging, slowed down to the speed of cold treacle through the whole thing by a complete unfamiliarity with the lighting set up. There were four of us on headset, trying to get cues set: Gary in the booth, actually hitting buttons; me, trying to stay out of the way and occasionally shouting out cue numbers; Dustin (our light designer) trying to muddle his way through the "magic sheets" the theater had provided; and someone else (Warren?), the theater's light designer. It was cacophonic and difficult. Add onto that that I occasionally had to go off headset to shout something at the actors, or answer a question from someone else (about 2/3 of the way through any of these given distractions, Dustin would tug on my sleeve and make it obvious that lights were more important to him than anything else going on).
On top of all this, I (and everyone else in the room) couldn't stop glancing back at Stormy, who continued being captivating whether we had a ton of work to do or not, and regardless of how much or little time we had left in which to do that work.
Finally, at about 8:53, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and Stormy leaned down to tell me that she was extending our tech time to 9:25. Hooray! I wish it hadn't felt so much like the state had just moved my execution date out a week.
Dustin and I got back to lights, feverishly plugging them into the board. Things were going faster as he got used to which lights were where, and as I looked at the light cues in my book, and ruthlessly crossed them out one by one. 2/3 of the cues left quickly dropped to 5 cues left under my smoking redaktionsstift.
Finally, light cues were done (but not before we'd had to pause for 3 minutes while the band played at full volume, completely cutting our ability to hear each other). I jumped up and announced we were done. The band cheered. They got on with their final sound check. I called out, "5 minutes! No, wait... 2 minutes! We have to clean up and be out of here in 8 minutes!"
There followed an immensely frantic collecting and packing of props, instruments, accessories and cords. I gathered up a load of stuff, following after Stormy as she showed me the small bathroom which she had deigned to let us use for storage.
Then it was the quick-paced baggage train, getting all our stuff into the tiny bathroom. Fortunately, it was capacious enough for twice the stuff we had, and we were done by about 9:27. Thank-yous were shouted all around as we bustled out. I was out the door before 9:30.
We met there outside the loading dock door, in the cool, calm night air. I felt like I had just come out of a war zone. I heard others trading jibes ending in phrases like, "but I already have a wife," which was my first clue that I wasn't alone in finding Stormy completely distracting. (I had been too busy doing everything else to pause long enough to read others' stares.)
We worked out a plan for Saturday and split up, but not before The Distraction Herself and the rest of the theater's crew filtered out the door and to their respective transport media.
Still feeling shell-shocked by the whole experience, I rode my Littlest Ninja home, where I got to spend a lovely hour or so reconstructing my sound work from 5 months ago to send to our sound designer -- I hope he got those files. I think I was finally in bed by 11:52. I'm sure I was asleep before the clock ticked over to midnight.
Posted at 12:23 permanent link category: /theater
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater