I started the day teaching at 11am at The Atlanta School of Burlesque. Was done with my super awesome class and then ran over to Barbizon to pick up black and white gaff tape. Then picked up Heidi and was at the theater by around 1:15pm. Justin got there shortly after so it was time to get started.
Lighting. For those that don't know I've been doing lighting for a few years now in addition to stage managing. With the nature of this show and staffing/time I am doing both for the CD release concert. I know all the songs, I know what the show looked like and there is no one that saw the show more than I did between rehearsals and then the actually show run. As we only had one week of rehearsals before we went to tech it made sense to have someone who is already familiar do it rather than bring in someone new. Same reason we didn't replace the cast members that couldn't be here with new people, same reason I was thrilled that Joe Davis who ran sound in 2012 came back for this run. This is why I am glad that Edi and Maya who were crew before came back. We already know how we all work, we've made it happen successfully before and we all work really well together. Seriously, we got this better than ANYONE. Original cast and crew for the win!
So lights. Normally I would have sat down with the director (in this case it would have been Heidi S. Howard, the artistic director of 7 Stages) and talked about what the wants and needs are for the show. We'd pick a color palette, talk about any specialty lighting, get with the set designer and then I would sit down and draw out (yes, literally draw as I don't have Vectorworks yet) a lighting plot. That's how I normally actually do things and that is the proper way. That being said, it has NOTHING to do with how I am doing the lighting for this show.
Walk into the theater and look up...what do I already have hanging in the air? Right, two rows of Fresnels, the upstage row has been unplugged, recircuit it and get it back on. We have a second row of strip lights that has been added, get that circuited in. Fresnels will be two rows of wash, one set green and one set purple, strips will cover my blue and red needs along with the alternating front lights so I have 4 different wash colors...done, next! I have some Source 4s already kind of in the right place for the band, refocus and move one to be in the right place, BOOM! Done! Two upstage booms, one red and one blue for some back lighting and for on the band and done. That's how it should have gone. All of those things are now up, but what actually happened is that we found every bad dimmer, every bad cable, had a spark pop while he was plugging something in that was big enough I saw it from the booth and we had to go flip the breakers back. We had to run one cable 3 different times just to get it to a dimmer that would work. We were focusing lights from 1:30pm to around 11:30pm with a 1 hour dinner break and a brief period where Justin was making a D gobo while I tried to get a little bit ahead on the light cues.
I wrote light cues until around 2am and would have kept going if I had not fell. I was coming back on stage (let's face it, I was very tired at this point) and tripped on something on the stairs from the dressing room and started to fall. However, I was falling in the direction of the scrim and one of the legs...two very expensive things that I cannot afford to fuck up so I had to stop myself from grabbing them which means I didn't have enough time with the change in plan to catch myself on the floor so I landed on my nose. I was stunned for a minute, walked into Java Lords and told Jed and Heidi what happened and that I was feeling nauseous. To make sure I didn't have a concussion they sat there with me for an hour just to be safe before I drove home. I may or may not end up with a black eye. It usually takes a couple of days for them to show up on me. If I do get one, I'm just going to tell everyone that Heidi smacked me around for not getting the rest of the lighting cues written that night.
PURCHASE DRACULA: THE ROCK OPERA CONCERT TICKETS HERE FEB 13-15, 2014
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