First One Nighter...

We loaded out of Cincinnati in 4 hours, our record time. We drove to Williamsport, PA on sunday night, got there Monday and checked into the Genneti hotel, a cute old boutique type hotel and then spent some time walking around town.

We get up at 5AM on tuesday, are at work at 6 and it's quite cold. Jen, Michael and I get coffee and wait for our trucks. The loading dock has two doors, but you have to pull trucks up to the alley alongside, ramp down, ramp up to the dock floor and then ramp down into the theatre. And it's really cold. And we have the usual bad venue complement of scroungy guys pushing stuff. Then it starts to rain. So we scurry around covering everything with tarps.

Ryan runs out to ask if we can move the Foy box under the tarp, I try to move it alone and my little finger gets crushed between two boxes. Fortunately, it's so cold I can barely feel it but it's bleeding everywhere and I'm afraid it's broken. So I bend it several times to make sure it's not broken, bandage it up and take some ibuprofen.

And the day goes on. The show is way too big for the venue and we haven't yet had to cut it down to a “B” show so all of the cutting is done on the spot. For instance, Dorothy's house doesn't fit so we have to cut it and find some way to represent it for the show. This means our props guy, Michael, spends his lunch hour looking for a chair and figuring out a way to set up a railing behind it to simulate a porch and then constructing a pile of rubble representing “house wreckage” that the ruby shoes can stick out of during munchkinland. Hairspray had come through this venue last year and Michael was with that show then. One of the locals recognized him and joked “You were here with a 4 truck show that didn't fit so you came back with a 5 truck show?” Oooh, yes. Yes we did...

We load the show in right up until the last minute and then end up cutting some of the flying because there was no time for rehearsal. The local munchkin kids are cute but really demanding during the fitting, which takes almost twice as long as normal – frustrating given we'll only be there for one night. Jennifer and I get 20 minutes to run out and order food to go for lunch and work straight through dinner to get everything done. There are 2 washers and 2 dryers – neither of which work well – so we do laundry up until the minute the show starts and then continue to dry things throughout the first act. My finger continues to bleed all day and I keep changing the bandages.

The show is a disaster area. The video projection goes out, we have a 40 minute intermission to build scenery for the second act. There's no storage inside and it continues to rain and sleet and snow so all the stuff that was stored outside has to be cleaned and dried before it can go on stage. I can't be on stage without a coat because it's so cold there from the wind through the loading dock, but the dressing rooms – 3 floors up – are hot so for 2 hours I run up and down the stairs, carrying my sweatshirt and putting it on and taking it off. Finally, thank God, the show is over.

And now we load out. It took 6 hours and rained and snowed and sleeted the whole time. Jennifer was outside the entire night documenting the truck pack – so we know which order things are packed – and I ran in and out of the theatre helping her out and assembling stuff to be packed. We were wet and frozen and exhausted and starving by the end, given we had gotten exactly 20 minutes and one meal all day. It was completely awful. And we kept thinking about last year and how this we used to do this 5 times a week. The bad old days...

We finished around 3:30AM, making it a 22+ hour day, got into the bus, fell into our bunks and drove the 4 hours to Philadelphia where we walked off the bus into another load in at 8AM. And if possible, that day was worse than the day I just described. But that's another post all together...

Citizens of Oz

Aren't they cute?

Glinda exits stage left, runs stage right, changes her clothes and wig in under 2 minutes and goes on stage as Aunt Em. The "Ozians" help keep the hallways clear for her to run...

Tampa and Orlando

Our first load out of Gainesville was a predictably painful 13 hours. We finished around 5:30AM, slept until 8:30, got on the road at 9AM and arrived in Tampa 2 hours later in time to check into our hotel and walk across the street for our noon load in.

The Tampa PAC is huge with a 4 truck dock and it took us two days to load in. But fortunately, once we were in we had plenty of room for this kind of silliness...

We had a decent week in Tampa with lots of work calls. I don't think the electricians or the carpenters had a single day where they weren't working all day. And of course, none of us has had a full day off for about 3 weeks now. But we survived our first 5 show weekend and then loaded out of Tampa in about 7.5 hours, finishing again around 5:30AM and crawling into the bus to drive the 2 hours to Orlando.

Our call was 5PM to start load in to Orlando but then we realized that this was going on right next door to the Bob Carr theatre...

So we grabbed lunch and got to the theatre early to try to avoid the traffic jams caused by this madness...

Lots and lots and lots of people showed up to hear Obama and Clinton talk.

It's good to know that the fine people of Florida are still fans of the electoral process after the debacle of the past few elections.

I would classify the mood of the rally as very calm and up beat. People stood for HOURS in lines that stretched probably for miles to get into the arena space.

We walked around and took pictures and then stood in our loading dock and watched the hoardes of people milling around. Kinda fun to be sideline to that kind of historical situation.

The load in to Orlando was rougher than Tampa cuz the space is much smaller. Somehow they have put the entirety of The Lion King into this space and Wicked got in only cutting one drop. When asked how that was even possible, one stagehand said "with a really big shoehorn..."

And the loading dock kind of sucks
Since you have to ramp down off the truck.
Load out will be painful, pushing all those crates and coffins up a ramp into the truck. However, they do have two loading docks, one on each side of the theatre, so you can theoretically load two trucks simultaneously, or at least be loading one and getting the other into position at the same time.

But that's a problem for a different day, like Sunday. Meanwhile, we have another 5 show weekend coming up.

look! it's a munchkin free post! More about them later...

What's worse than munchkins? Their mommies!!!

After being assured that the munchkin madness would be laid to rest in Gainesville – stage moms interfering with my fittings “can't my daughter wear bows in her hair? The other little girl has bows and she wants bows too...”, moms altering the costumes in the dressing room “can I have a needle and thread so I can just fix this??”and 8-year-old munchkins fighting, playing poker and gambling in the dressing rooms between shows – we have our final preview performance (and second show since all of our dress rehearsals were cut for technical problems that continue to plague us) in Gainesville on Sunday night.

We then have a 13 hour load out that goes until 5:30AM, we get three hours of sleep and get on the road at 9AM to drive ourselves to Tampa and start load in at noon, a bare 7 hours after we finish load out. The carpentry crew works until 10PM and is back on site at 8AM the next morning to work feverishly until 6PM which mean our final afternoon dress rehearsal is cut, again for technical problems, leaving me with a new crew who has never run the show, dresser tracks that still have problems because we've only ever had 2 shows to work them out and an opening night that constitutes the third performance we've ever had.

So, opening night, it's opening night!!! Everything that could go wrong did. It was really a terrible show. The highest uppity up guy in our company said it was the worst show he's ever seen.

hooray!

So happy we worked ourselves to death for 2 weeks and got no sleep and did everything we were told to do and more only to produce the worst show ever. Can someone please transfer me to Springtime for Hitler? I beg of you..

But fortunately, it's the Wizard of Oz, which everyone loves, so we got a standing ovation and a good review by the grace of God, which means that somehow we'll continue to sell tickets while we iron out the rest of the problems over the next month.

And then the munchkin mommy showed up. She's not only a mom of one of the munchkins – did I mention that we pick up 12 local kids in each city to be munchkins?? - but she's the teacher at the local dance studio where all the kids take lessons. During the fittings she wanted to take pictures. Which would be ok if they were candid shots but instead the kids want to smile and pose and do dance steps while I'm trying to get them to try on shoes, and fasten belts and figure out why a parent would mark down that their kid is 4 feet tall when clearly they are 5 feet tall, which means that the costume I chose for them based on the advance sheets won't work at all. And 12 kids means 24 hands for gloves, and 24 feet for two pairs of shoes each, and each kid gets two costumes consisting of many many pieces ([petticoats, shirts, bum rolls, jackets, suspenders, hats etc.) so that's a lot of stuff and i have one hour (1!) to get all this done and she wants to distract the kids by taking pictures.

So I ask her not to take pictures explaining that I'm busy and pressed for time and that I lose the 10% of the kids' attention that I had to begin with. I know I was harried but I also know that I used the word please. And instead of saying “oh, you're right. There are three of you and 12 kids and you must be busy...” she just gave me a look like I had told her her child was an untalented wreck that didn't deserve to be on stage and turned around and walked away.

well, then.

So I finish fittings, we have our mediocre opening night and this munchkin mommy continues to cause us problems. For legal reasons we have to have local chaperones to watch the kids backstage. And if I could I would post this sign in the dressing room:

“To all local chaperones, you are a baby sitter. You are here only to watch the kids, not to give us costume advice,and not to alter the costumes. We don't tell you how to raise your kids (or we would tell them to stop punching their neighbor and fleecing the next door munchkin for their lunch money), so please don't give me advice on what color your daughter should wear. She's a Lollipop munchkin. This is her costume. That will be all.”

But instead we have to say “thanks for your help but could you stand over there so we can get this done as quickly as possible?” And every time we said that to the Tampa munchkin mommy, she would stalk away from us and say loudly as she walked away “Girls, I love helping you with your costumes but i just can't because THEY won't let me!”

Really?? Are we 12??

AND THEN, Jennifer went into the munchkin room on Wednesday night and that same munchkin mommy was drinking beer.

In the dressing room.

Backstage, during a performance.

While she is in charge of 12 kids.

!!!!!!!!!!

And when Jennifer told her that she would have to get our company manager, the mommy says “oh, so now you are going to tell on me??”

Those were her exact words.

To recap: gambling munchkins and their moms on the bottle. This is Wizard of Oz on tour.