Most of you reading will know that I’m on tour.  Those of you who don’t…I’m on tour right now, stage managing a show for LA Theatreworks.  There, you’re caught up.

I’m here in St. Louis, we just finished our second and last show here before we move on to Lebanon, IL.  Tonight’s show went very well, but it was a long way getting to it.  This is where I go all Alias on you and flashback to:

37 HOURS EARLIER

After flying in the day before, we arrive at the Edison Theatre at Washington University to tech.  This was to be a final, brush up tech after having techhed the show a few days earlier in Los Angeles.  After loading the lighting program into the board, we found that we had some very, very bad cues.  We still aren’t sure what went wrong, but the first show looked great while the second show looked a mess.  A bad disk, a bad save, we really don’t know what happened, but it came down to that fact that an hour before curtain we had to rewrite cues for the entire second act (the second show).  We sped through that, opened house at 5 minutes to 8 and went up about 10 minutes late with the hastily thrown together cues.  The show went on, as it always does.

So the next day, today, we were scheduled to have the day off with a 6pm call at the theatre.  However, as the second show needed to be rewritten and refined from the emergency cues constructed the night before, my time off today was cut very short.  Christina and I took Mooses, who you’ll meet in the photos below, and went to Gateway Arch and The City Museum in the morning.  We left the hotel at 9:45, came back at noon, picked up our stuff for the show and after an hour at Kinko’s, eventually succeeding in printing out a lighting cue sheet, we headed to the theatre at 1pm.

The original lighting program for the second show turned out to be unrecoverable, and we began rewriting cues from scratch.  I didn’t say anything at the time of course, but the timing was very good.  The cast arrived at 4:00, we finished writing cues at 4:30 or so.  We stepped through the show to make sure the cues were good, finished that at 5:40.  Did some quick adjustments to the first show and were able to break for dinner at about 6:15.  Right on time.  A welcome change from the previous night’s frantic revisions at 10 minutes to curtain.  The cues looked great, the show went well and we’re (knock on wood) ready to move on to the next stop.

So, here are some pictures from my 2 hours of tourism this morning.  I’ll write up Mooses’ origin story in a later post, for now enjoy and good night.  I have an early morning tomorrow.