On such a winter's day...

Ah, California, the land of dreams... We so deserve this kind of house after the past week of horrors. Let's evaluate, shall we?

Huge venue with plenty of room backstage for gondolas AND dressers AND actors AND cross throughs. The last time that happened was probably Wilmington, Delaware.

The mid rail for our flyman is at the height of most of the ceilings of our previous venues.

Ingrid has props people that actually watch cue lights and follow directions.

I have dressers that have worked wardrobe before, do their jobs instead of watching the show and appear to know how to read and follow directions.

We had the third truck dumped before lunch and I was doing laundry. That has never happened.

We have a HUGE wardrobe and wig workspace. And it's indoors. And it has plenty of light and chairs and tables and outlets.

Reliable internet connection in the hotel AND at the venue. We haven't had that since Atlantic City.

Walking distance to Target and various restaurants from the hotel.

Walking distance to Starbucks and sushi from the venue.

Christmas has definitely come early for us! We had a load in that went to smoothly and so fast that the majority of the crew was home taking naps and eating an early dinner by 4PM. That has never happened either. However, Jen and I were toiling away in our huge, well lit, well wired space instead of napping. Why, you ask? Well...

Thursday (Thanksgiving, so yes these blogs are posted after the fact) our plane lands in San Diego and I get a voice mail from our company manager saying that our actor who plays Roger Debrides had a death in the family and will be out of the show for the weekend, at least. Now my loyal readers will remember that we have our swing in for our Character Man #1 and our swing is also the Roger cover. Character Man #1 is not supposed to be back in the show until Saturday at the earliest, which leaves us with a principal actor and an ensemble actor out and only one male swing.

And we've had 2 fittings for our swing but we still don't have a reliable set of costumes for him to play Roger. This means that not only are Jen and I loading the show in by ourselves but I have to make time to have a fitting with our swing and alter or create all the costumes necessary for him to play the role in less than 24 hours.

But that's not all! We also were told that same day that there would be a press event at 8AM on Saturday morning. They plan to film one of our numbers - “I Wanna Be a Producer,” which is where Leo Bloom has a fantasy sequence about being a Broadway Producer complete with numerous chorus girls feeding him champagne - on live television for a local morning show. So in addition to loading in and a fitting and an unknown number of alterations, I also have to look over all my chorus girl outfits and make enough repairs to beading and sequins and jewels to have them look good on camera, paint their shoes, Jen has to set wigs and we have to take all the costumes to our hotel room over night and be up and ready to go by 7AM on Saturday morning. Please note all parts of that previous sentence as it will definitely become relevant later in my story...

Fortunately, most of my dressers can sew and they spend all day working on my chorus girl outfits and altering my swing's Roger clothes and we are in really good shape by late afternoon. We spend large portions of the day figuring out how to transport our chorus girl costumes and wigs to the TV studio. And our show also went smoothly. Our character man #1 came back in and we split his track with our female swing. It was now official, we had both our swings in the show so anyone else calling out was going to make it a very complicated situation. The show ran well with some goofs, typical of a first show, but for the most part our dressers and wig people are experienced and competent and can read and follow directions. Miraculous.

Jen and I run around after the show grabbing all the girl's clothes and wigs and makeup and shoes and earrings etc. etc. packing them into boxes and hauling them all to the bus and then to our hotel rooms. I have to repaint all the girl's shoes so I go to Jen's room and paint on the balcony at midnight while she fixes wigs in her room. We have dinner and hang out and I go to bed around 1AM.

At 3AM I get a phone call that wakes me up but I don't answer it. It's followed immediately by a text message from jen:

“Did we bring any costumes for Austin (our actor who plays Leo Bloom)?”
...
...
Oh Dear Lord.

It's 3AM in Escondido California and I have a live TV show segment at 7AM and no clothes for our principal lead who will also be giving an interview... And I'm acting in Wardrobe Head capacity so it's totally and completely my responsibility. I somehow got all the girl's stuff but forgot about Leo Bloom!

Let me consolidate the next hour and a half. We spent an hour talking about what to do and trying various phone numbers for the theatre, once we remembered the name of the theatre. With much trepidation we decided we should call our TD and have him call the house TD and get him to open up the theatre so we could get the costumes. Imagine calling your boss at 3AM to have him call some unknown bigwig to drive downtown at 3AM and open up a theatre because you were an idiot, and you have some idea of how I felt making that call. But my TD didn't pick up the phone. I called him again and and he still didn't pick up so I figured that was a sign. I called Jen back and told her that confession wasn't an option, we would have to try something else.

We finally found the theatre website and there was a number for security. When we called, the security guard at the theatre picked up! We explained our predicament and he told us he'd let us in. So we hopped in a cab and drove downtown at 4AM to the theatre where the guard let us in. He immediately told us that he had seen the show the night before, and loved it and showed us his ticket stub and followed us around talking about the show as we collected costumes. We grabbed a handful of things, made multiple trips back and forth after shoes, t-shirts etc. and finally got back in our cab and went back to the hotel. Very surreal, the feeling of climbing back in bed after an hour and a half of stress and running about.

Got one more hour of sleep (3 total) and woke up to go watch TV filmed live. Everyone did great and the segment was really short. Jen and I had several moments throughout the process laughing to ourselves about our surreal evening and our ability to keep it a secret! Ok, clearly not a secret now that I'm writing about it but the moment has passed so it's not as big of a deal...

As we drove home, we discovered that our character man #2 had called out of the show. Now we had a principal man out, a character man out and both our swings already in. At this point, I'm no longer horrified or stressed by this development as it has become our regular show routine. So, more fittings, some scrabbling around, some more and different split tracking, changing of lines and blocking etc. etc. Despite that we had a perfect show. No dresser problems and no major costume problems.

Everything is still TBA regarding Jen's and my titles, any kind of raise for us each doing 1.5 people's work, possibility of us getting as assistant, possibility of Michael coming back or not... etc.

Word I hate? bureaucracy

4 pumpkins and a gin and tonic

Well, if we thought Idaho was bad, it's only 1:30 in Montana and we already have a totally new system for venue assessment. After losing half our load out crew last night in the middle of load out, our TD arrived in Montana, did a head count of the loaders available and noted that we were 17 people short. He told the house TD that until he had the requisite number of people for load in, our crew wasn't getting off the bus because it was a breach of contract.

So we arrived at the venue at 8AM and didn't get off the bus until 10:30 when they had scrounged up the remaining 17 people. The only pro to this situation is that the head count now matches the contract. The cons are many:

1. Just because we have certain number of people doesn't mean any of them are competent. We now have someone with an atrophied hand, a guy missing part of his arm and some volunteer college students in addition to the old union stagehands with 20 years of experience who can push 200lb boxes by themselves.

2. All of our heads of department in this show range in age from 22-36. In every city these heads manage local help ranging in age from 14-80. The union stage hands and any local over the age of 30 seem skeptical of our ability to manage a crew. This means proving our competency in every city, which means every day having subtle power dramas with the local crew. Sometimes we win, they respect our position and our experience and do things the way we need them done. Sometimes we lose and they do whatever they want, openly defy our position and sometimes walk out in the middle of the show. It's a bit grueling. The heads of department under the age of 25 have an especially hard time not taking all of this personally.

3. This power struggle is not helped when locals arrive at 8AM on a day where it's snowing and 19 degrees outside and then sit around for 2.5 hours wondering why we are still on the bus and not getting the show unloaded. Now the uphill battle has achieved an even steeper grade.

4. We have even less time to load a show into a venue that's too small to begin with and requires a lift to bring boxes to a stage that's actually on the second floor of the venue.

5. But the most important con of this situation is that we need these people for load out. And even if the contract requires that we have a certain number of loaders there, they could just take off leaving only our crew to load the show out. Their presenter is then technically responsible to pay us for that extra time but that is the king of all uphill battles and it only hurts us if it takes 8 hours to get our show out of this venue. We're on a schedule that requires us to be 200 miles away by tomorrow morning whereas the presenter here in Butte has already gotten their show and their money.

So battle won but war lost, so to speak.

And now I have to deal with dresser tracks and pretend like I'm head of wardrobe for another day or so. Let's see how much I can get done in that time...

Much later:
Oh good lord. I think that was worse than Blacksburg. And we're in load out right now, constantly counting heads to make sure people aren't leaving. The situation is really grim, not least because they have monster heaters on the street to melt the ice so we can actually handle the gondolas and keep them from rolling down the street and killing someone. The insides of the trucks are also coated with ice.

The show was unspeakable, mostly because of the inexperience of our dressers and the absolute minuteness of the space. I've never had such large numbers of people changing in such a small space. But once again, everyone made it on stage with mostly everything they needed.

However, Jen and I can't do this alone indefinitely. We would need an assistant. It's too much stuff; and weirdly, we can't be everywhere at once. We could do it if we had longer sit downs but one nighters is impossible. It's too easy to lose things and forget things and leave things in cities. Regardless, I think Michael will be back so it's a moot point.

I'm really tired. We are supposed to be in Billings tomorrow, but I suspect this load out will take us longer than it should. Which puts us behind tomorrow. Argh.

Update:
We were late into Billings but the venue was bigger, the crew more experienced and the overall experience much more pleasant. We had a show and then loaded out and slept in the bus for a couple of hours before getting on a plane for California. It was 10 degrees and snowing when the plane took off...

Says it all...

A stage manager, someone's mom and 8 high school students

See, we've come up with a new system of assessing venues. The Pumpkin system. 4 pumpkins is a Blacksburg Virginia Tech situation with the low doorway and ceiling, unloading everything in the parking lot, our army of college student pushers and loaders that jumped ship in the middle of the load out, the crazy show in front of the Broadway drop and the two day out. We put Greeley at one pumpkin and Atlantic City at negative pumpkins; you know, just for comparison. We're officially putting Idaho at 3 pumpkins. Maybe 3.25 pumpkins from a wardrobe perspective.

First off, the falls in Idaho Falls are lovely. As was the sunset the night before.

And I got about 9 hours of sleep before the show, of which I needed every minute by the time the night was over. The morning was so deceptively calm. Just a normal load in. Except that it was into the Civic Auditorium of the local high school. First period? Load in. Lunch? Pizza at the cafeteria. Recess? Very Very far away. Potential for jokes over the radio? Many. We all carry radios to talk to each other during load ins and the show so all the official talk was interspersed with:

“I just want to announce that cheerleading practice has been canceled.”

“The science club will be meeting, however, to build that volcano...

“We'll be meeting center stage during the lunch hour to stuff Suzanne (our stage manager) into a locker.”

“Miss Oliver wants to know why everyone is cutting algebra class...”

Etc. Etc. Aren't we hilarious? The thing is, if it's funny in Junior High it's funny backstage.

Amusing elements of the venue:

The space so small that this was our wardrobe room...


The circular iron staircase that was our only access to our dressing rooms.

And, as if to really confirm that the theatre was built before 1970, here's a little something.

That would be soap powder... I haven't seen that since Junior High.

But things took a weird turn at lunch. On the way to lunch Michael collapsed so he took himself to Urgent Care. I ran the load in for the afternoon as we waited to hear about his condition. Around show call we heard that he had a severe upper respiratory infection and some possible kidney or liver problems. Needless to say, he wasn't going to work the show. Or leave town for a couple of days. Soooo, that would be me on my own.

And the title of the blog? That was my dresser round up for the evening. Good times to be had, for sure.

Jen and I formed the Wigs and Wardrobe Department and she was Amazing. Michael wrote out his dresser track. I modified my track so someone else could do it and combined my track with Michael's. Jen filled in where ever she could, Ingrid made sure my dressers did some of their presets and even our TD offered to do a couple of changes that he's always around for anyway.
It was a whole new show for me as I got to see parts of it that I never get to see normally. And everything went well, all things considered. Some pieces were missed but the actors were good about it; and more importantly, Jen and I actually ran the show by ourselves. Which proves it can be done, if we need to do it later. Michael's bill of health is still pending, so we'll see what happens.

Load out was cold and we had an abnormally high number of homeless crack head pushers and loaders who appear to have slept in their clothes since the early 1990's. We finished load out around 3AM and got in the bus for our trek over the mountains to Montana...

Washington

My sister lives in Bellingham and amazingly that was on our itinerary. This meant my parents could drive up from Wenatchee and see the show and I could spend the night in a real house and see my adorable niece! Mike also offered to load in the show by himself, since I had done that in Ft. Collins – so I had 2 days off with shows at night. We later got in a spot of trouble for that scenario but it was worth every minute.

This was also my first experience flying with the company. We got on the bus after our load out of Avon, drove during the night to Denver getting to the airport around 10AM for a 1PM flight. Our bus driver needed the extra time to get up to Washington. We checked in and I had to pay my first overage charges for a suitcase over the weight limit. And this was after 3 days of weeding it down every day! The annoying thing is that if it's .5lb or 10lb over you still pay the same amount. Highly aggravating. 100lbs in 2 suitcases sounds like a lot of stuff until that's all you have. It's hard to live out of 2 suitcases when you have a boot fetish and you like to buy clothes. I'm just saying... I now have to strictly enforce the rule that if I buy something, I get rid of something.

Anyway, we had time to bum around and eat breakfast. I then found a small spot on the floor and watched TV shows on my laptop until boarding call. I have subscriptions to so much stuff on itunes but no time to watch it. The rest of the cast showed up eventually and we all piled onto the plane. It was kind of weird to be with a group that takes up half the plane, interspersed with all the regular Muggles. We got to Seattle and then had a 2 hour bus drive to Bellingham where Bet picked me up. By that time I had spent over 14 hours on one form of transport or another. In fact, the time in the Denver airport felt like an international layover because we were all so tired and grungy and unwashed...

Bet had cooked dinner thinking that I would be tired of restaurants, bless her! Wild salmon, roasted potatoes and wine and then she and I went out for coffee and dessert at Nimbus, a restaurant on the 15th floor of a building right next to the Mount Baker Theatre. I slept great and was awakened by the Pippa alarm at 8AM. Bet and I hung out all day, went for a walk along the bay, had lunch at Ave. Bread in Fairhaven and did a little shopping. And then it was time for work.

Oy, the Mt. Baker Theater. Easily the smallest venue we've played yet. Our gondolas were in the hallway behind the theatre and the load in door was blocked by a rock the size of a small house. I'll see if I can post a picture later. Our crew was mostly good, however, except for my dresser who apparently couldn't count. Does 7 look like 13 to you?? It does to her. We also had no swing outs for the first time in a week. Thank you sea level! Mom and dad, Chris and Bet all came to the show and seemed to like it to varying degrees.

I went home with them and we all had time the next day to hang out. Had breakfast at Old Town Cafe, as we always do, then made a stop at the mall to get me a pair of wicked Doc Martens as a belated birthday present. They have pink and black plaid on the inside and are totally fierce. They are also slightly too big, but I love them, and they mark the 3rd pair of boots I've acquired since coming on tour. It's obvious that I have a problem...

Mom and dad went home and I went to work. It was a little rough to get back into the show after a couple of days out. Made me really wish I could have an actual day off that didn't involve traveling or the bus. Our show was going along as always until the middle of the first act when the fog from our machine drifted into the hallway and confused the smoke alarm. In the middle of Franz cooing to his pigeons the alarm goes off and we have to actually evacuate the building. Everyone, including audience members and actors in costume clutching wigs and robes huddled under shallow eves because, of course, it was pouring rain. A couple of wigs were dumped in puddles, costumes got dragged on the ground and eventually everyone piled back into the theatre and the show went on. Mom and dad came to the right show :)

The load out was everything you would expect working around a huge rock to be. Ramp out of the truck, ramp up to the loading dock area then ramp into the theater. And it poured rain the whole time. But the best part for us was the 2 feet of space we had in our hallway that we needed for baskets and what all and that everyone else needed for crossover with all their scenery and props to get outside.

Every 2 minutes we were diving into our gondolas to avoid decking carts and tanks and whisking baskets off the floor to keep them from getting crushed. I was not sorry to leave. As much as I love Bellingham, I'm not sure I want to play there again...

Then there was Yakima. Friday night in Yakima actually went well. The venue was moderately sized and we had enough space downstairs for dressing rooms and also enough room on deck for our gondolas and dressing space. So yay! We also had a really nice space downstairs with couches for people to hang out in while they weren't in the show. Our crew ranged from very competent to totally clueless but all was going swimmingly until I realized we were missing some major laundry pieces and couldn't find out laundry hamper.

Turns out we couldn't leave things outside and there wasn't room inside so everything not actively in the show had been backloaded willy nilly onto the trucks. And it was pouring rain again. So we had to crawl into the truck, find a light, find the hamper and pull things out of it trying to keep them dry as we run inside.

I finally passed out laundry and our Character Man #1 calls out of the show right about the time of show call. And where oh where was our swing gondola? On the truck. So back into the rain, find the swing gondola, pass clothes down out of the truck, try to keep them under an umbrella and high enough to not drag on the ground. Argh. It was a couple of very damp trips juggling clothes, shoes, baskets and an umbrella. This was also the day I chose to wear a skirt and high heels... Let's just pass over that picture all together.

Then the usual hell of explaining a dresser track and telling people actor #7 is out of the show so don't look for #7, look for #15, except everything else is the same, put them all in the same places, yes, pull that same shirt for 15, etc... But the competent people got it and I spent a lot of time with the clueless people anyway so it's all part of the game.

I was hoping to have some time off on Saturday but we had a matinee. And female singer dancer #2, who has never called out of the show, called out. So it was back to the same routine of finding the swing gondola in the truck and pulling clothes out and yep, pouring rain again! It poured rain the whole time we were in Washington. Fortunately, after so many years in the desert I LOVE the rain. It can rain every day for a year before I get tired of it. But dragging costumes through the puddles gets very old in a hurry. The rest of the show was fine and load out was actually ok as well. I found out, after the fact, that friends of my parents had come to the show and I missed them. Disappointing! So sorry to Rudy and Shirley as I would have loved to at least have seen you and given you a tour of the backstage. Next show, I promise :)

Then it was a 10 hour drive and now we're in Idaho Falls. It's a pretty little spot. I haven't seen our theatre, the Civic Auditorium – where kids go to high school so I'm fully expecting a cafe-gyme-torium type scenario. But don't you know I'll keep you posted??

Pictures as promised...

The skating rink above our theatre in Avon, Colorado.

My usual load in position, sitting on a audio sami behind a meat rack, talking to Ingrid during one of her brief free moments. Note the coffee cup and the unwashed hair. Isn't theatre glamorous?

Our backstage gondola space in Greeley (?), Colorado. Note the edge of the deck and the fact that our gondolas aren't even there yet.

Our gondolas in their space. Note the one foot of space before the deck starts. That also marks the edge of the blackout curtain. In that one foot of space actors dressed, dressers helped and people crossed from stage left to right and back.

The "wig truck" in Pueblo, Colorado. There was no room on deck so we pulled an empty truck up, opened the loading door and voila! A wig room. Easily the most space Jen has ever had unless you count the great outdoors...

This was the wig room in Missouri. In the parking lot.

Here's Jen, sitting on the curb fixing a wig pre-show.

Would it be more fun if I were making this stuff up?

Colorado, seriously??

Ok, you can stop anytime... I'm just saying.

Pueblo: Well, the show was shoe horned into a tiny little theatre. So small that our deck didn't fit. And a low ceiling, again. So we couldn't fly anything. Stage left got very interesting during the second act when we had to quick change while standing inside the judge's podium set piece. Our local crew had some great moments as well, including letting their phone ring on deck and then answering it...

The theatre itself is a “historic building', which means old and not updated with modern conveniences. There were no outlets in half the dressing rooms and in a 5 story building there were 4 bathrooms on 2 floors. Plus each floor had the same layout with concrete block walls painted the same shade of cream with no signs or visual reminders of what floor you were on. I would run to the third floor intending to check the second floor rooms, run back down one floor, forget something on the third floor and end up on the fourth floor. It was like being in an Escher painting.

We left in the middle of the night and drove up to Avon for our show today.

Avon is a lovely little ski town near Vail, all Swiss-ish chalets and mountains with scraps of snow on them. And then the theatre was 4 floors underground.

We loaded into an elevator – again the scenery and decking went piece by piece, which adds at least 2 hours to load in and at least an hour to load out.

And the show was a horrific disaster area. Our lead guy, who has been out of the show due to altitude sickness for the past 4 days, decided that even though we had ascended another 5,000 feet he could do the show because he had friends in the audience. He made it through part of the first act.

We then had to swing him out.

In the middle of the act.

Which puts our Franz actor on in his place, and our character man #1 into Franz and our swing into Character man #1. That's a heap of costumes to trade out in the middle of a show with 2 minutes of warning. We had to call a hold on the show because there wasn't enough time in the scene. It sucked. It also shook everyone else up and several other things went wrong all night. And then load out was the normal nightmare of trying to put everything back in the right place.

Meanwhile our follow spot operator, who is out toward the front of house , discovered at the beginning of the first act that his booth had no sound. The wires were cut when the air conditioning unit was fixed. So he called the whole first act by sight with no sound cues.

Argh. Colorado I am done with you! Tomorrow we fly to Bellingham and I get to see my family! hooray!

Pictures of some of this madness to follow...

xox
k

I think Colorado is trying to kill us

It's really too bad that I had no time to write last week because every single day was an adventure. You'll have to be satisfied with the abbreviated version.

It seemed like it was going to go so well. We had just finished several one nighters and our stint in Ft. Collins, Colorado was going to be a 4 night sit down, which meant hotel rooms and a few days without a load in or load out. Plus Ft. Collins has the cutest little downtown area with great restaurants and shops and bars, everything you could need for a short interesting stay. And to be fair, it was interesting...

Tuesday: Mike is diagnosed with an upper respiratory infection and I load the show in by myself. It went well and was very productive, but it also meant that for 8 hours I was running around doing 2 people's jobs and trying to solve some difficult issues like dry cleaning and getting shoes fixed.

That night male dancer #4 calls in sick, so we start our show run with the swing actor running his track. Normally this is a standard situation. But in a new city it's always a crunch to have only 2 hours to train new dressers about our show system, give them all written tracks and show them where things are and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. It's doubly complicated to have to tell them that their tracks are already wrong since they refer to an actor who is not in the show tonight. And the show is completely chaotic with several missed cues, dressers missing changes and Mike and I having keep track of everything.

Then in the middle of the second act, female dancer #2 runs off stage and throws up. Apparently she has food poisoning. We pull costumes together in the middle of the show and the female swing goes on for the rest of the act. For the final scene she goes on barefoot because she can't find her shoes.

Wednesday Matinée: Male dancer #4 is back in the show but looks horrible. In addition to some pulled muscles he also has mild altitude sickness and is dizzy, pale and can't seem to catch his breath. After every dance scene he has to sit down for several minutes and pull himself back together. We hold our breath all night because the male swing is already in the show for character man #2 who is acting as stage manager that night. Female dancer #2 is also back in the show and says she feels better. She is proud that she managed to both not throw up on stage and to not throw up on her costume. I am also proud.

Then half way into the first act female dancer #3 runs into a set piece on stage during one of her exits and falls, badly bruising her hip and her knee. Again we pull together costumes during the show and the female swing goes in for the rest of the show. As far as I know, she went on stage in shoes for every scene, which was a small victory in itself. And the show is again chaotic. Dressers are still missing cues and changes and not seeming to get the hang of the show. Mike and I are still sleep deprived and run off our feet trying to fill in the gaps and answer multiple questions about all the actor changes.

Evening show: Female dancer #6 has called out with stomach ailments and a cold and female dancer #3 is still out of the show and not able to dance on her injured leg. Since we only have one female swing and two female dancers out, this introduces the hell of “split tracking.” We have to combine actor tracks, use both of our swings and eliminate characters in the show to accommodate our male swing playing some of the parts in the show. It's wretched and spawns more questions about what each dresser is doing. Plus, in one dresser track we have yet to have the same person every day. So each show I'm figuring out which actor is playing which part and which costume they will need and I'm training a new dresser. Horrible. Plus everyone is complaining about the altitude and the dryness. Our lead male who plays Max is especially unhappy. Mike is still sick with a horrible racking cough and several other people in the crew are also starting to sniffle and cough

Thursday: Female dancer #3 is back in the show but female dancer #6 is still out. Our swing goes in for her. Then half way through the show, character woman #1 sprains her ankle. It takes everything in me not to walk up to her and say “YOU ARE FINE! YOU CAN FINISH THE SHOW!” and instead say “Are you ok, sweetie? If you can't do the show it's ok, we'll cover you.” But she perseveres and we finish the show with only one swing and no split tracking. This is seeming like the normal situation by this point.

Then Jen Wilson comes up to visit and spend the night. I'm SO excited to see her and we have a great but very late night out.

Friday: We get very little sleep and then do a lot of shopping all day. I get a great winter coat and some Christmas presents and go to work. Jen stays to see the show that night. I get to work and hear that our lead male, Max, has called out of the show. Our actor who plays Franz is promoted to play Max, our character man #1 is promoted to play Franz and our male swing plays character man #1. Then female dancer #6 calls out again so our female swing goes in for her. This means switching costumes out for 4 people and then switching them back again at the end of the night so we can load out the show.

Despite all the swing outs, the show finally goes fine for wardrobe. The dressers appear – after 5 shows – to have figured out their jobs just in time for us to leave town. However, one of my jobs during the show is to stand in the wings for a particular scene and give the props people the go ahead to do their cue. Some cities I only have to do this once and after that the props people know when to complete their cue during the blackout. In Ft. Collins I had to be in the wings every single show to make sure they made their cue. In this last show, the props person misunderstood me – after doing the show 4 times – and walked on stage to do his cue during a scene. While the lights are still on. And people are still on stage talking. And the other props guy is still in the wings waiting. Are you kidding?

The show ends at 11PM, we load out the show for our usual 4 hours, crawl onto the bus at 3AM, drive 30 miles up the road to Greeley, CO and get up at 5AM to load the show in for a matinée performance at 3PM. We would be angry about the ridiculousness of this situation, but we are too tired.

Saturday matinée: our lead is still out so we have the show cast from last night. And that we are all exhausted is the understatement of the decade. We pull the show together. The venue is huge, which is a lovely change of pace. Our dressers all appear to have their act together, for which I am so grateful as I don't have the mental capacity for more stupidity.
Then the top of the second act the main curtains won't open. We cut the cords and manually open them. The show runs late. We then have an hour and a half between performances. Jennifer, the wig girl, and I have so much to do that we don't take a dinner break. Other crew members bring us dinner and we eat while running around.

Saturday evening: Our lead is still out. And now character woman #1 is having so much trouble with her ankle that she calls out of the show. Once again we have to swing out 4 people and then readjust so we can load out all the costumes after the performance. Load out goes until 2AM, we fall into bed on the bus and travel 200 miles.

Sunday: We wake up in Pueblo, Colorado and have a 6AM load in for a 5PM show. Ingrid is so tired she falls asleep outside on top of a work box during load in. Half the crew decides to take a nap instead of eating lunch. But there are delicious green chili breakfast burritos available at the mid morning break!

And that bring us to now. We've already cut major set pieces and unloaded the decking outside and carried it in by hand because of the small load in doorway, so load out promises to be buckets of fun. And the stage is small and the ceiling is low... All else is TBA. You will know as soon as I do

xox
k

north and nash

To recap briefly, our second load out day in Blacksburg started with us being late. Again. Says Dustyn, our audio guy. “How can we be late to the same venue twice? For a one nighter?” Questions to ponder. But this time we had some union guys and a fork lift.

Ingrid got a ride.

We packed the third truck and it went pretty fast.

Then it was Halloween night in a college town. So of course we had to play that up starting with a party at the hotel.

I find it amusing that the cast, who spends most of their waking life in costume, wanted to dress up for Halloween.
Whereas the crew...did not.

We all went out on the town and had a great late night. Then we got on the bus and woke up in North Carolina the next day.

Morganton, North Carolina kind of came and went. The load in was smooth. We could actually pull the truck right up to the loading dock door instead of our usual routine of ramp, hallway, another ramp, more hallway, outside door, ramp, sidewalk, parking lot, 2 blocks away another ramp and the truck type of load in situation. But then the show was totally crazy with a rather incompetent crew- some of which just left in the middle of the performance - and the load out was gruesome. Our load out crew had trouble following directions... when you have to tell the same three people the same directions four different times; well, it becomes a very long evening.
Needless to say, goodbye to NC; which, despite its problems, was not as bad as Blacksburg. So far, that's the venue to beat.

Then we had 2 days off! Woo hoo! In Nashville! Hooray!

And after 3 load ins, 3 one nighters and 4 load outs in a week most of us slept most of the first day. We got up for dinner at the Flying Saucer, where I had a stellar chocolate stout, and then some went home and some went out to a blues club.

The next day was more of the same. Sleeping in. Checking out of the hotel, catching a cab downtown for dinner. I got to see Jen's parents, Mr. And Mrs. Wilson, who live here in town. They took me to dinner and sent me home with brownies. It was lovely to get out of the world of the show for a brief moment.

So now we're on our way to Columbia, MO where I'll get to see Judith, one of my professors from UofA who is now teaching at Mizzou. We play there one night and then we head out to Colorado for the next 2 weeks or so.

In the burgs

Blacksburg. Wow. Not only can I not believe that we actually had a show here but I can't believe we survived it. And somehow everyone made their entrances in costume. It was a night of miracles.

To begin with, we finished loading out of Bloomsburg at 4AM. And then we had a 400 mile drive to Blacksburg, Virginia. We were supposed to start load in at 8AM but short of a warp in the space time continuum that was simply not possible. We slept for a good 5-6 hours and woke up in Virginia at 10:30. We got to the venue at about 11 and started load in.

So first the pros. The stage is actually larger than our 2 previous venues. So we had wing space AND backstage space. It felt positively cavernous after our last house of quick changing practically on top of the rail. Another pro was the number of people who showed up to help load in. I've literally never seen so many loaders.

And now the cons... Our theatre in Blacksburg is on the Virginia Tech campus. So all our helpers? College students. Lots of them sorority girls who were getting “community service” credit for showing up. I commend them for diving in and doing whatever we needed. It just took a bunch of them at any given time...

Next, the ceiling of the theatre is only 33 feet from the deck. So there is no grid and no real fly rail to speak of. Ergo, we could only hang one backdrop – the New York scene

and you can see here that even when it was flown as high as possible it was still visible.

So the rest of our 8 or so drops never got hung and apparently all of the Producers action happened on Broadway in NYC. Bavarians? In NYC. Hitler? Conquered NYC. Little old ladies and accountants? All did their business on the streets of NYC. It made for an interesting show.

But the real complication was the height of the doorway.
See here how our light towers can just fit?

See here how our decking carts could not possibly fit?

See here where our decking is being carried in piece by piece by an army of college students?

We did nothing but load the show in from 11AM until show time. Of that 8.5 hours, I probably spent 2 hours doing anything wardrobe related. The rest of the time I was a stage hand. When the actors came in at 5:30 for sound check, we were still building scenery on deck. Stage management bought us sandwiches for dinner and most of us found 5 minutes to sit down and eat them.

Then we got our crews of fresh faced eager kids who love theatre and had never worked backstage before. We had so many people milling around that Mike started pulling off pieces of hot pink gaff tape and labeling everyone in Wardrobe land to keep them from getting pulled into other crews. The wig people had bandanas tied around their arms and the props kids had bandanas on their heads. Made it easier to identify your crew. Also made it look like some kind of extreme sport or reality television show... Adding to the team sport factor was the varying competence levels. I think some of the college carpenters got voted off the island :)

Our TD got on headset at the top of show and instead of his normal "just remember...and have a good show" speech, we got the "Hang on everyone. This is going to be a wild ride!" speech. I don't remember much of the show but apparently it went ok. And our wardrobe kids did really well for their first show. I did alot more than I normally do but it all ran very smoothly. Stage management bought us dinner...exactly the same thing as lunch. I think I'm over BLT sandwiches for now.

And now we're loading out. Again. And doing it all in reverse where we hand carry all the scenery out to the loading dock and put it all on carts and then hand carry each piece of decking out.
Here's our “gravity works” solution to carrying the accountant units out of the building. Did I say carrying? I meant dragging... Oy. And it's dark. So who knows what kind of order this is all getting put in. And God only knows what our next load in will look like.

But all I know is that we worked 10 shows straight in 3 cities in 2 different states and now we have a day off! Yay! And it's Halloween! Double hurrah!

For the rest of the week? North Carolina, then Nashville and then Missouri on Sunday. And then Colorado next week...

Addendum from a day or so later: At 2:30AM that night during load out we got wind that we might be losing our crew. We were about half way through load out but due to some contractual agreement with the college, none of our students could work past 3AM. There was a lot of heated conversation within management while our crew tried cracking the whip on our poor tired students to get as much loaded as possible before we lost them.

The penultimate saddest part of the night was watching all of our boxes outside get transported back into the theatre for safe keeping overnight when we lost our crew at 3AM.

The Ultimate Most Wretched part of the night was the realization that we would have to be back at Virginia Tech tomorrow for Load Out Part Deux on what was supposed to be our first day off in 10 days.

That realization was almost equaled by the fact that we would be paying for our hotel room for the night and only spending a total of about 7 hours there. Just long enough to sleep and shower and get back on the bus.

Appropriately enough for Halloween Eve, it was a night of horrors...