Sunday, October 25, 2009

I Love When Everything Works Out

Last night was a fantastic night! The official opening of Landscaping The Den of Saints went well. Again a few minor glitches, but nothing horrible. My one moment, well okay 15 minutes of absolute horror came in the middle of Act II, it's a 40 page scene between the two leads. It has two sound cues at the beginning and then nothing for 35 pages (roughly 25 minutes). The first cue went fine and then 30 seconds later when I hit the play button for the second cue there was no sound. How could there not be sound? It was just working, first thought -- bad track on the cd (it had worked yesterday, but you never know), so I advanced a track, which fortunately was a very similar sound cue, it didn't work either. The moment on stage passed, they moved on without the cue but now I was left to panic in the booth. I wasn't sure if the cd player was having problems or the cd itself and of course there is no way to test it during a live performance and we'd already passed intermission. So I'm sitting in the booth trying to figure out what to do...the only thought I kept coming back to was if only I had a way to test the cd. Then it occurred to me that I did have a way to test the CD. So I did something I've never done before during a show, I not only left the booth, I left the theater! I ran next door to our other space, climbed up to the booth, tossed the cd in the player and hit play. Sound immediately came out of the speakers. So the good news was the CD was working, the bad news -- that meant something was wrong with the player next door. So I ran back down the stairs, out of the theater, back to our theater, through the green room where my cast is staring at me in utter confusion, climb back up into my booth, sit back down and stare at the cd player. Time to troubleshoot, hard to do when there is a performance going on below you. Since it had been working, I decided maybe it just needed to reboot, so I shut it off, turned it back on, cued the CD and kept my fingers crossed for the next 15 minutes. Thankfully when the time came to play cue 14 all went well, I don't think I've ever been so thrilled to listen to a sound cue of babying crying for four minutes :)

After Landscaping everyone headed next door to the other theater for The Artists' Nightmare. This was the culmination of our 24 hour theatre event. I could not have pulled this off without the help of several very talented people. Our host for the evening, a talented actor and writer as well the president of our company was spectacular. The three plays were entertaining, the actors were great -- everyone had everything memorized, it was amazing. Truly a success! I can't wait to do it again in a few months.

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