{"id":161,"date":"2009-02-11T12:07:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T17:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegobutton.net\/blog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2011-06-28T21:45:26","modified_gmt":"2011-06-29T01:45:26","slug":"st-louis-day-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/st-louis-day-off\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Louis Day Off"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBus. \u00a0And truck.<\/p>\n

We left Poplar Bluff last night around 1:30AM. \u00a0Load out was a little rough due to the fact that the theatre doesn’t have a loading dock, and getting heavy carts up a ramp to the truck (in the rain) is a lot harder than getting them down (in the not-rain). \u00a0We also broke a castor on our plywood cart, which holds all the pieces of our floor. So after the cart was all packed and strapped down, we had to take it all off and load it by hand. \u00a0Our pipe cart, which is the heaviest, scariest piece to move even on a level surface, was never even attempted to be loaded in one piece. \u00a0The cart, and the metal box built into it that holds our cheeseboroughs, was loaded first, and then every piece of pipe loaded by hand. \u00a0It was quite comical when a backlog was reached, and we had a line\u00a0of about 12 people stretching from the truck to the door of the theatre with these pipes. \u00a0 I was about halfway back in the line and took this picture.
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\nAfter load out we went to a Huddle House nearby for dinner. \u00a0Some of us didn’t get anything to eat before the show because we were rushing to get ready. \u00a0I know Daniel and I didn’t. \u00a0He had to adapt the lighting design for a venue with less than half of the instruments the plot requires. \u00a0In each city, once everything is focused, the two of us sit down and flip through all the cues on stage and make sure they look like what they’re supposed to, and reprogram them as necessary. \u00a0We were doing that right up through fight call, and then continued to make changes during fight call. There’s one bit of fight choreography which involves almost the entire cast running around with swords and poles and jumping on things in near-darkness followed by strobe lights, and I wanted to make sure they had a chance to do it in the cues we had built, to make sure we had given them enough light — of course we hadn’t, so good to know. \u00a0This was our first true one-nighter, and it was exhausting, but kind of freeing in the sense that there was no time to get tired of being someplace. \u00a0If there’s something not to like about the venue or the situation — the stage right door is dragging on the floor, the dressing room paging system isn’t great — \u00a0who cares, we’ll be gone tomorrow! \u00a0Two things basically made it hard in Poplar Bluff: the performance which had been contracted for 8pm ended up being at 7pm, which we found out the night before. \u00a0If we’d had that extra hour it would have been perfectly relaxing. \u00a0Also, if we’d had enough instruments (and interestingly, cable) to do the usual light plot, much less time would have been wasted redesigning the show as opposed to just putting it up like it always is.<\/p>\n

One thing I want to share about our lighting situation for educational purposes: the lack of cable actually presented a greater obstacle than the lack of instruments. \u00a0We don’t travel with a full lighting package, but we do carry some strips and broad cycs. \u00a0Unfortunately, due to the short cable supply at the venue, we couldn’t use them. \u00a0The Henry design depends a lot on powerful silhouette images of blue and red created on our RP screen\/black scrim combo, and we needed a way to preserve that. \u00a0When I saw the solution I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: three par cans, hung side by side dead center upstage of the RP. \u00a0One blue, one red, one no-color, or something similar. \u00a0Behind the RP was hung the house’s cyc, to use as a bounce. \u00a0I thought, “we can’t seriously expect this to work!” \u00a0Well let me tell you, it worked! \u00a0It wasn’t beautiful. \u00a0It would make a lighting designer cringe. \u00a0But it told the story just as well as the full design does, and if you weren’t a lighting designer, you’d never know or care that the coverage wasn’t quite as even as it should be. \u00a0 For all the effort designers put into lighting cycs — fighting for the right number of strips, and just the right angles, we lit the damn thing with one instrument! \u00a0It may not be elegant, but when your plot requires 132 instruments and you’ve got 60-something (40 channels), it’s nothing short of a miracle. \u00a0Towards the end of the show I actually forgot I was calling something we had just thrown together a half hour before the house opened. \u00a0It really did look close enough to the real thing, and Daniel set up a bunch of submasters so he could fill in gaps when our thrown-together design needed a little extra something. \u00a0As he was right next to me, I knew he was using them a lot, but most of the time I couldn’t even tell by looking at the stage. \u00a0He said it was like running a 2-scene preset board. \u00a0One of the interesting things about this tour is that there’s an understanding that we will play venues that can’t satisfy the technical needs of the production. \u00a0It’s part of the deal of bringing professional theatre to communities that don’t normally get it. \u00a0Our bosses back in New York understand that we will have to cut corners some places, and me, Joel, Ian and the supervisors are expected to make any changes needed to do the best show we can with what we’ve got in each venue. \u00a0This was the first time we’ve really had to think on our feet, and I think we did a really good job.<\/p>\n

This was our first audience that seemed to be made up of people who don’t get much exposure to Shakespeare. \u00a0They were a very quiet audience, but they livened up a bit in the second act, and were very appreciative at the end. \u00a0A number of people seemed to have left at intermission, which we assumed meant they didn’t like it, but one of the local guys believed they may not have known the show was over. \u00a0It’s really fun to perform for an audience that’s familiar with the show and follows it easily, but really the mission of the Acting Company is to perform for audiences like those we had last night. \u00a0If we’re the most professional theatre performance that comes through that venue, then we’ve accomplished our goal, and hopefully they got something educational and enjoyable out of seeing Shakespeare performed live by professional actors.<\/p>\n

Nick and the cast stayed behind and performed the 1-hour Henry this morning for about 500 students, which apparently went well according to his report, except that the door on their bus broke in the morning and they had to take cabs! \u00a0It’s fixed now, and they are currently en route to join us in St. Louis.<\/p>\n

As for me and the crew, after eating at Huddle House in a downpour and tornado warning, we got back on the bus and hit the road for the 2-hour drive to St. Louis. \u00a0I don’t know how long it actually took because I was exhausted and malnourished and damp and disgusting and went immediately to bed. \u00a0The drive was pretty scary. \u00a0The rain was ridiculous, first of all, but I could feel the wind pushing the bus to and fro, drifting all over the place. \u00a0It felt like we were going really fast, but I think that may have simply been the fact that we were driving into the wind so it felt like more resistance. \u00a0Not being able to see anything from the bunk, it’s sort of like a trust exercise. \u00a0You lie down in the dark and close your eyes, and no matter what you feel or hear, just trust that Bart’s not going to drive us into a tree or off a cliff, or get us sucked up into a tornado. \u00a0I don’t spend that much time in tornado country, and I’ve never seen one, but the idea of a tornado warning at night is very scary to me. \u00a0I mean, seeing a tornado is bad. \u00a0I figure not<\/i> being able to see a tornado is worse!<\/p>\n

Anyway, we apparently made it without tornado interference, as when I woke up we were in the parking lot of our hotel in St. Louis. \u00a0We arrived sometime overnight and Bart went to his room to sleep and left the rest of us sleeping in the bus, to check in whenever we felt like waking up. \u00a0I was desperate for a shower so I got up around 11AM, dressed and ran around in the rain trying to figure out which cargo bay my luggage wound up in. \u00a0Then I checked in and took the best shower ever. \u00a0Any shower would have been the best shower ever, but the water pressure was especially good, too. \u00a0I unpacked a bit, gathered up my dirty laundry to do tonight, bought a Mountain Dew from the vending machine, but having not bothered to bring my computer bag from the bus, eventually ran out of things to do, so I have returned.<\/p>\n

By the time I got back, Daniel was up and at the desk in the front lounge, no doubt working on a light plot for some venue in the future. \u00a0That’s basically all he does. \u00a0I feel like at this point in the tour, there are many people whose jobs suck more than mine. \u00a0I’m not really used to that. \u00a0Anyway, I counted the number of closed curtains in the bunks (not counting Nick, who is traveling with the actors on this trip, and whose job also currently sucks more than mine), and determined that the back lounge would be unoccupied. \u00a0I was very pleased to find that the case, so here I sit, feet up on the leather couch. \u00a0The wind is still blowing the bus side to side. \u00a0 Now people are starting to wake up and come visit me. \u00a0Our plan for the day is that when Bart has had enough sleep, he will come back to the bus and take us to see the St. Louis arch. \u00a0I’ve never been here, so I’m excited about that, because it’s pretty much the only thing I know about St. Louis. \u00a0 Our plan to go go-carting has been squashed by the fact that the track we planned to visit has apparently shut down! \u00a0We were so excited, we even invited the cast to come with us tomorrow, and they were really looking forward to it, too.<\/p>\n

Our schedule here is kind of nice. \u00a0We have the day off today, then load in at 8AM tomorrow (for Henry<\/i>), but then have no show or anything else at night. \u00a0Friday Nick and the cast have a 1-hour Henry<\/i>, which I suppose I’ll drag myself out of bed for if there’s no reason not to, \u00a0and then we do Big Henry at night. \u00a0Then Saturday at 8AM is the changeover to The Spy<\/i>, and a performance that night, then we hit the road for Glenn Ellyn, IL.
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bus. \u00a0And truck. We left Poplar Bluff last night around 1:30AM. \u00a0Load out was a little rough due to the fact that the theatre doesn’t have a loading dock, and getting heavy carts up a ramp to the truck (in the rain) is a lot harder than getting them down (in the not-rain). \u00a0We also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,6],"tags":[79,116,117,17,97],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3326,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions\/3326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/headsetchatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}