Beijing Load in

It started with a pre-rig at 9PM on Tuesday. The trucks arrived at 1AM on Wednesday morning and 4 crew members dumped them and loosely organized the contents in the theatre space, getting home at 4AM.

8:30AM Wednesday morning was our crew call for our official load in day, even though clearly some of the crew had already put in an 8 hour day...

Most people went home at 10PM on Wednesday night and were called at 8AM on Thursday morning. The plan was to finish load in on Thursday morning, have a tech rehearsal in the afternoon and have an invited press dress reheasal that night.

The Beijing Exhibition Hall theatre space is fine, not nearly as big as the Shanghai Grand, but nothing really is. That's the biggest theatre I've ever seen.

And the dressing rooms are really nice.

Unfortunately, all they have in the building is squat toilets. But that's a minor issue.

The main problem is electricity... There's never enough of it. Everything gets turned off at night to conserve energy and true to all bureaucratic form, there's one guy in all of Beijing who knows how to turn the electricity on and he's gone home, or to lunch or is on vacation. So the beginning of load in we wait for hours to get that problem resolved or try to work in the hot darkness.

And then once it's on, we begin the massive process of running electrical cords throughout the entire building to power all of our American electronics that have the wrong plugs for Asian outlets...

This is where Wigs and Wardrobe get held up the most. We can't work without light, irons, sewing machines, hair dryers etc. so we wait the longest.

Wigs spent their waiting time creating and decorating their "Hair Saloon"...

The Louann wig and her tiny troll double...

While we in Wardrobe waited for washing machines and dryers to get hooked up.

The machines were rented and teeny tiny and had to be delivered and then hooked up

in the men's bathroom...

This process took all day wednesday so we came in on thursday and still had 8 full sized loads of laundry to do. These are half sized machines and that dryer in the middle, the one you can hardly see, belongs in a doll house.

Plus they weren't hooked until mid morning thursday and then we had trouble with a washer getting water. So once all that was resolved, we had this problem...

I asked my translator to help me start it and she looked at the machine sort of blankly and then shrugged and punched some buttons and it turned on.

3 hours later the machine was still cycling on the first load of wash.

And after it finally quit it turned out that the water was blazing hot and one of the shirts had bled all over the rest of them... So everything was pinkish and several shirts were unwearable...

sigh.

I was on the verge of saying something like "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT CYCLE TO PUT THE WASH ON WHEN IT'S IN CHINESE! THAT'S WHY I ASKED SOMEONE CHINESE TO HELP ME!"

And then I remembered two things:

A. I'm in China. It's My responsibility to figure it out, not theirs to make everything readable to me...

and B. Just because you can speak and read a language doesn't mean you know how to work a washing machine. I always have crew members asking me to help them with washing machines that are labeled in English...

Anyway, a VERY long and soggy story short (er), we did the wash

in

the

sink

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In a Men's Bathroom Sink!!!!!

By hand!!!

If I'd had some rocks and a river, those shirts might have gotten clean. As it was they were

clean...er.

and very wet. So took our dressers into the shower of the men's bathroom and put them in teams wringing everything out... And then faced the problem of getting everything dry.

The one dryer fit about 4 towels at full capacity and the baby dryer didn't work at all.

So we trekked out to the department store to buy fans. I can't even think about that situation without laughing.

All we wanted were fans. it seemed so simple. And we found them! Then we tried to pick one up and take it to the counter. But it doesn't work that way in China, apparently. So we went back and forth with the sales reps in two languages, trying to do charades of picking up the fan and taking it away, and them them taking it away from us, putting it down, pointing to the price tag and making "you can't do that" motions.

FINALLY we realized that they have this stack of price tags on each item. You have to take as many price tags off as you want (1 tag for one fan, 2 tags for 2 fans...) and give them the tags.

I have no idea what should happen after that. Here's what actually happened.

We couldn't have fans that only had one tag. Apparently that's the floor model and it's not available... It took forever for us to understand that since we kept pointing to fans and they kept shaking their heads.

What seems like hours later, we finally had 4 fan tags that they would let us have. And they wrote down some stuff and handed us a different sheet. Now we had a piece of paper, no fans and no idea what to do next. Eventually, after more charades we realized we had to pay first and hopefully get the fans later.

So we paid and got a different set of papers. But now all the people we had been dealing with had vanished and we still had no fans! So we're wandering around with the paper trying to figure out what to do next and wanting to just go pick the fans up off the shelf and walk away with them already...

Somehow we track down one of the original people that we were dealing with, we hand her the paper and do more charades of picking up boxes and trying to take them away. She motions for us to wait and she vanishes.

By this point it's SO frustrating to not understand the system or the language but the "pointy talk"and the charades are also so hilarious that I'm just falling apart laughing.

More time passes and we wait until the girl and her two helpers come out from the back with our fans. She puts them on the ground and we dive at them. But she shakes her head and motions for us to wait again.

Nooooooooo...............!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She goes away again and finally comes back with a cart but by this point we don't care. here are our fans. we want them. done.

We just picked up the fans, balancing these huge boxes in our arms until we can't see eachother or her and then precariously head for the escalator with her running after us with the cart and us teetering down the escalator yelling "no, really it's fine...! We've got it...!" until we got out of the building.

crazy americans...

So we dried the laundry with our new fans...

On dressing room tables
On light fixtures...

And in the parking lot...
AND THEN... We got already for a show for the press and streams of people start pouring in the backstage door and wandering around. There are literally hundreds of people funneling through the door as we're trying to set up the show, train our stagehands, actors walking around in underwear with wig caps on and our two company managers desperately trying to get everyone to just keep walking into the house and not wander off and in the meantime figure out why all these people are here when we didn't sell tickets and why they are walking thru the backstage door.

Once all 500+ of them are in the house we find out three things: 1. Someone sold tickets and we don't know who that was. 2. There's only one door open to the entire theatre and it's the backstage door. 3. The theatre administrative types are so concerned about all these extra people in the house (they tell us they didn't sell the tickets, they thought we sold the tickets) that they call the cops for extra security. So now we have 2 dozen cops roaming the house and 500 more people in the audience than we expected.

Not surprisingly, the stage manager holds the show until we can figure this out. And there are so many people arguing in front of house that no one can tell what's going on. Our production manager wants everyone out except the press, the paying audience doesn't want to leave and the theatre is angry because they didn't make money on ticket sales. So half an hour into the "discussion" our PM realizes that we won't get the show up and run in the time we have alotted, which means overtime, more money etc. so he cancels the show. Just like that. And kicks everyone out.

A note for future reference when kicking out an angry audience, make sure they have an exit door that doesn't go thru backstage...

It got ugly in a fast hurry with lots of people not wanting to leave the theatre at all and then hovering around the stage door waiting for us to come out. But the cops stood around and we got in our buses and got out of the parking lot somehow...

And none of us are really clear on what all happened and how that went down... But start to finish it was a grueling day.

I know I said this about Shanghai, but i really mean it this time.

let's not do this like this again.

ever.