Up for Air
Fredonia NY – With a few minutes to spare I am coming up for air for a short post as Rocky Horror prepares to open this coming Friday. I left town on Thur. to visit my daughter who lives in the Boston area, spent Friday and Saturday touring Walden Pond, the King Richard Renaissance Faire, and getting cars repaired, and drove back Sunday for first tech. Since Sunday night I have been leaving the theatre at about midnight and getting back to work at about 10AM.
I am continually amazed at how much energy and peoplepower it takes to put on a full-scale production in a 400-seat house. Last night we actually blew a fuse somewhere, when just before the last number we were trying to run a fog chiller. It seems that, with a 9-piece band, full lights, a wireless sound system, and all sorts of other things, we still have to be careful about overloading the system.
I’ve been observing this process with a different eye, because in some sense all this is overkill. But, when you have a theatre program with so many students all seeking an opportunity to learn their stuff, you try to create as many opportunities as possible. I have a cast of 19, but I only really needed about a cast of 12. I probably only needed a band of 5, but we have 9 so as to add some horns. The set is large enough to fill a full-sized proscenium stage, with the two towers reaching 16-18 feet in the air (they tell me the bridge across the two towers is rigged to hold 3/4 of a ton of weight). You’re also trying to create a regional theatre scale production with students, because the space and capability it there. One interesting thing is that what we don’t have are stage mechanics for moving scenery, things like hydraulics and such, so every scene change has to be made by humans. The stage crew is pretty large, as we have two jackknife stages to move scenic units in and out, and a huge revolve in the center of the set to go from the castle exterior to the lab interior. So, are we doing too much, or is it just the circumstances of the space, the amount of students, the selection of show, or what, that causes so much frenetic energy towards the end? I had a brief discussion about this with some of my technical colleagues, and hopefully we can find ways to refine this process. -twl
