Sunday, July 01, 2007

Pillow Posts -- 7/1/07

Judging by the amount of crap in the Duke right now, I'm probably not going to make it to bed until some ungodly hour of the morning, so this is going to be a combination post for yesterday and today. It seems that Fridays and Saturdays are going to be the least interesting days of my week, since I will have already seen and written about the show at least a couple times by then, so don't necessarily expect a daily post if I don't have anything to say. You all probably don't want to hear a detailed account of how many pieces I added to the jigsaw puzzle currently in progress in the Campus Center.

How much crap is there in the Duke? Well, it would be tough to take a picture because it is spread all over the place, but I think an inventory list (only approximate, since it is only what I can remember) will get the message across:

  • Two lengths of truss spanning the entire stage
  • A big red curtain
  • Two red curtain legs which travel across the stage
  • Two more sets of two black curtain legs which remain fixed
  • A large chest of drawers
  • A flower vase, a round table, and a coat rack
  • A costume that makes the wearer look like she is walking on her hands
  • A toy train track
  • A costume that makes the wearer look like he is being carried by a coat
  • A small tap dance floor
  • Various articles of clothing suspended from the ceiling
  • A contraption that allows someone to look like they are turning into sand and falling through a funnel
  • A giant puppet stage, at least ten feet across by ten feet in depth
  • A small puppet stage, probably four by eight feet
  • A litter (as in, a chair carried by two people on their shoulders)
  • At least two or three ladders
  • A costume which makes the wearer look as if she had a hole in her torso
  • A lots of other stuff that I can't recall at the moment, but which we will nonetheless have to pack up tonight and put into a truck

It is next to impossible to walk through the wings of the Duke, the shop is full of their road cases, and even with that, we still had to truck some of the road cases out to one of the farther dance studios that no one uses and put them in there. We had to remove and/or reposition several of our side lighting booms to accommodate all the stuff in the wings.

Luckily, the guys coming next week (Club Guy and Roni) aren't using the side booms at all, so we'll have all week to get them back into working order. The reason Club Guy isn't using side booms is because they are going to turn the theatre into a giant room. That is, they will use big giant cloth flats (or something; I haven't seen exactly how it works yet) to cover the three onstage walls. This actually makes me pretty happy, since it will cut down on the lighting work quite a bit. They don't really seem to care about the lighting too much anyway; the plot they sent us made no sense, and in the words of our lighting coordinator, looked like it was "sketched out on a bar napkin." So I'm hoping Club Guy will be a little less crazy than this week was, although now that we've gotten to know each other, the Aurélia folks are actually pretty cool.

Thomas, the lighting guy, left us a note two days ago saying "See you to the pub?" and Nassir, the sound guy, wanted to show me a free sound program which you can use to play back cues just by using a "Go" button (currently, he is using three MiniDisc players, two of which have their two channels split into four). The program is called SeqCon, but he says he doesn't use it simply because of reliability issues--you always know that a MiniDisc player will work, but computers tend to crash, quit, and otherwise explode in ways that are unacceptable in a theatrical situation.

Well, I've wasted about as much time as I can in typing, so I'm going to post this and then try and think of something to do with the rest of my day; everyone partied hard last night, so I don't think people will be getting up for at least a few hours yet, and we don't have call until 3:30PM.

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