The thing that was very clear to me this weekend is that no matter how neatly we have our ducks in a row, they can be blown out of the water in an instant when the bus / semi / mini-van pulls up to load in for the show. We had two fairly large productions this weekend, one on Friday night and one on Saturday. I was actually more concerned about the one on Friday night because we didn't have very good communication with anyone about it ahead of time so I was concerned that we would have to scramble around when they arrived in order to be ready for the show. On the other hand, I felt pretty good about Saturday's show since we had made all of the arrangements ahead of time and had a few extra hours to set it all up.
When the Swell Season group pulled in on Friday morning around 11:00 a.m. everything went exactly as planned. I wasn't there when they started unloading because of the trail ride but when I arrived at the theater in the afternoon, everyone was calm and very pleasant. After the way we were treated at the last concert in the theater, I wasn't looking forward to more of the same but it was a completely different story. We even had time to break away in the afternoon to prepare for Saturday's show.
The concert went beautifully and I enjoyed most of their music. The piano player and the guitar player were in a movie a few years ago titled, "Once". I tried to watch it earlier in the week but I didn't quite make it through to the end. They seemed to be very down-to-earth and friendly and that always makes things easier. . .
After a late night Friday, it wasn't easy to be up and out at the Civic Center by 8 a.m. on Saturday morning. We were all feeling very prepared by the time the group rolled in around 10:00 a.m. but we quickly found out that it wasn't going to be an easy day like we had planned. In retrospect I could see that the problems were due to the group being on a fairly new tour and they had three people in charge who all had very different visions of what the production should be like. I can laugh about it now but the "creative director" was pretty flamboyant and artsy and was much more concerned about how everyone and everything looked than how they played and sounded. Just as an example, he asked me to remove the guitar player's monitor because the girls would need to dance in that spot. Of course when the sound engineer realized the guitar player didn't have a monitor, he started to bark about that and it started a bit of a tiff which the creative director won! The guitar player still got his monitor but it was off stage to his left rather that in front of him where it should be. It was one thing after another like that and they ran us pretty ragged all afternoon. We even had to run back to the shop to bring in a mixer that they said they would be providing but didn't bring. I won't go into all the details but it was an interesting afternoon! We were still ready in plenty of time for the 2:00 sound check and the 4:00 matinee'. In spite of the fact that everything on the stage was shuffled around and back again and plugged in only to be unplugged and re-routed, it really did turn out quite beautiful:
We were still putting last minute touches on things during the sound check but I had a chance to sit back a take a few pictures. . .
Both the matinee and the evening show went off without a hitch which had a lot to do with our pre-planning and our willingness to jump through all of the hoops they put in front of us!! The performers themselves really did a great job and were appreciative of all of our hard work. After the show, of course, everyone was complimentary and said it was their best show yet. Go figure.
This is a Youtube video of scenes from Once. It was a good movie if you could get past the language. . .
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