Standard disclaimer: these are just some notes that I accumulated over the course of the last few months, when I was too "busy" to document them here.
Thursday, April 26
Opening night....the first performance would start at 7PM that evening, but I got to the School around 7:30AM that morning ... ready to work.
I knew there would be a ton of kids in and out all day. Luckily, I had saved a bunch of painting and cleaning up the auditorium and there was plenty of that. Erica had planned to have all of her classes work in there and a number of other classes sent kids down to help out. Shaf, Dan and couple of other guys set out to finish the piano as it needed keys and a coat of paint. The house was painted white and looked great, we even threw on some flower boxes and curtains, and loaded it up with some fake flowers that Sharon had acquired. Originally, these flowers were loose on the set, but attaching them to the house made the house look better and made it easier to change sets. Yesterday, J.T. built an awesome screen door so today I had him make some jacks to hold up the curtain screens. I gave him some general ideas and he just ran with it. I did manage to almost slice off my finger using my RotoZip saw. When he and I were figuring out how to make the jacks, I didn't practice safe power tool operation and tried to cut a piece of wood while it was in my hand. The saw jumped and gouged out a nice chunk of my already messed-up left index finger. I was extremely lucky and made quite an impression on my young friend. The blood poured from the gash and I smeared it all over a loose 2X4 that was lying around. He must have showed that to half the school that day...here's Mr. Shaffer's blood.... It actually was the final wound of the show, my tally was at a broken little tow on my right foot (dropped my drill on it one very late night) and my mysterious hip problem (not sure how that happened but it seemed to get worse when I was tired) and my hands were sliced up from a number of utility knife incidents.
We also had all sorts of kids moving junk out of the auditorium. Against my better judgement, it was decided that we should store the choir risers upstairs in the "catwalk". I was against it because while it seemed "close", you actually had to go through the main doors, up the stairs and around and through a bunch of doors. But the students had a better idea. Just load the risers up and over the entry attrium and thread them through the old projector window into the catwalk area. A couple of kids, lead by my man, Whiteshoes were up over the attrium while a few other studs, Kyle, Fish, Josh and Cliff (to name a few) hoisted the risers up to them. Andrew aka Whiteshoes was followed up there by his "girlfriend" Taylor, who is quite the clown. She was adding no value to the moving effort, she just wanted to "stand by her man". When she saw what she thought was trapdoor in the floor of the "balcony", she thought it would be funny to stand inside the hole...to be "short". She lowered herself into the hole in the plywood deck and stood, a good 18 inches below the "floor". The surface she was standing on, unbeknownst to her, was the drop ceiling over the entry to the auditorium and while she's a trim little girl, her weight vs. the strength of a suspended ceiling tile was no contest. She immediately plunged through the ceiling and onto the floor below...about a 12 foot drop. With God's provision she ended up with only a few scrapes and one broken ceiling tile. I was outside by the Mobile Mini with some other kids when all of this happened so my description of events is based upon eyewitness testimony. Needless to say, the powers that be for the School were less than thrilled. I think they suspected that this whole Music Man production was completely out of control...and they were right. But it had been out of control for months, they just hadn't been paying attention! After that, the rest of the day was fairly anti-climatic. I remember the relief that I felt that, for the first night in months, there wasn't going to be a rehearsal. Those extra couple of hours to get ready were a blessing.
During the day, I rigged up my final idea. One of the issues we ran into was how the stage could communicate with the light operator, Andrea and the Assistant Director, Kelly. My original goal
was for Kelly to have both a walkie in one ear and the board headset in the other. The board headset worked great to communicate with the light operator and the followspot operator, but it was a nightmare to try to get it to work downstage. It is a heavy headset with a long cable, not condusive to the tiny little "backstage" that we had. So I set up a clip on light with a little red bulb. The plan was that when the stage was ready, Dan would switch the light on. This would signal everyone, Jennifer, leading the orchestra and Kelly & Andrea that they could do what they needed to do with the scene and I would signal the curtains to open.By about 3PM, everything was ready as it ever would be. The set up for the orchestra was as good as it was going to get. The sets were ready to roll along with the big props. Sarah & Danielle, with a tiny bit of guidance from me, had the rest of the props ready to go. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the mountains of costumes move from the storage room to the changing rooms (class rooms) and it was about show time. The audiorium was cleared of it's usual junk and looked reasonably ready for the performance. I personally had wanted to really spit and polish the auditorium and the adjoining commons areas and bathrooms...but the management of that effort, combined with the labor force (the students) was not very well organized.
Seth and I started mic'ing up the actors and doing sound checks. As it would become obvious, the last undone thing was to get Seth up to speed in this area and sadly, this was the weakest link of the first performance, partially his "doing" and partially due to things out of his control. We hadn't really worked on the sound and coordinating the mix of 12 lav mics plus a number of choir mics, combined with the orchestra sound ended up being a daunting task. But we tested every mic and felt like we were at least ready.
The show opened poorly to say the least. The salesmen began their opening bit of "Rock Island" to colossal feedback, as bad as we had heard on Saturday when we first started goofing around with the mics. It quickly settled down, but it was an auspicious beginning.
We unfortunately had other problems with the sound & mics. The one that was the most out of our control was the loss of one of the two choir mics. When Steven had wired up mics all by himself, he had loaded the front of the stage with 5 total choir mics. We had decided that it looked bad and I took it back to two. Unfortunately, losing 1 was a big deal, so we ran about half of the 1st act with only the stage left mic working. It was truly the least of our problems that night, I just ran out during intermission and rattled it...apparently it's a known problem. We also kept getting reports from the orchestra that some of the performers couldn't hear the monitors. It was tough because if we blasted the monitors too much, we'd pick it up in the mics....feedback. It really showed the need for the orchestra to get in the auditorium and do real sound checks, but that never happened and we had to live with it.
The last couple of sound problems were tougher to solve. The most noticeable was whenever we activated Brandon's (playing Mayor Shinn) mic, we got a ton of static. Sadly, it was so bad we had to mute his mic and try to make it better for the next night. Our mic positioning was bad too. During the first night of Joseph (over a year ago), they had the mics clipped to the performers shirts, like standard lav mics. This picked up a tremendous amount of clothing ruffle so we moved the mics up into the hairline as Erica had done when she was in high school. This
worked perfect and had become our "standard" placement since. And that's how we did the mic tests and they sounded great. But after the mic test, the actors went back to costuming and got their hats. And the hats either completely covered the mics or were right on the "border" causing all sorts of noise. Some of the performers didn't like having the mic showing, so they pulled it up into their hair, pulling it further from their mouth. I knew I had to fix this and it wasn't until the next night that we could really fix it. The last two problems were really operator experience. Seth (per my direction) would mute the performers when they exited the stage. But he wasn't familiar enough with all of the scenes to know when they would make their entrance. Combine this with his habit of "spacing out" for a second or two and many times a performer was on stage and had delivered a word or two before their mic would become unmuted. This remained a sour spot throughout all 3 performances. The last problem was the general mix, especially on the quartet. We had never really worked with mixing the vocals, plus the generally variability of the performers themselves; they'd do a mix test at one level, then during the performance it would be radically different. At one particularily bad spot during a quartet song, Erica came into the booth literally fuming about how bad the sound was. (And it was bad.) The kid & I were doing all we knew how to do to make it better, which wasn't much. She instantly grasped the situation and switched gears and gave him some pointers. Our lesson here was like everything in this show: more experience and real testing had to happen...maybe next year I suppose.Sometime around 9:30PM the show ended, to a rousing applause. The actors had done a fantastic job acting, singing and especially dancing. The orchestra, with members who were playing for the very first time, did a terrific job. The stage crew did a marvelous job. The only glaring problem was the sound and it wasn't very good truthfully. I needed to solve the microphone problem, fast. And somehow Seth would have to do a better job cueing up the actors.... But for the first performance, only five days from the disasterous tech rehearsal, it was incredibly solid.