Christmas Tech

We had a long day yesterday setting light cues and reworking some of the ideas I had on color for the set. April came home last night and worked on developing the sound cues until after midnight. This morning I went in early and continued refining the lighting and sound cues. I've been fighting two requests that April has asked for. She wants to have a light that has a soft edge on it and at the same time doesn't allow light to spill past a very narrow beam. the second request is that the sound system has a hiss in it whenever I turn the volume up above a certain point. I worked hard today to get rid of the hiss but then didn't have enough volume to play the sound effects loud enough. Tomorrow I'm going back to the drawing board to try some other ideas.

Today about 1:30 I was inside the theatre and heard someone walking by the auditorium doors knocking on the doors. I thought it was the Herdman kids in the play since they were supposed to be walking outside from the back stage to the front of the theatre to make their entrance. I stuck my head out the door and spotted three kids walking away from the door dressed in the Herdman costume of hooded sweatshirt and jeans with baseball caps on backwards. I yelled at them to stop knocking on the theatre doors. When the kids turned around none of them were the actors. They were kids who just happened to be walking by causing mischief dressed exactly like the Herdman kids in the show. I stepped back in the theatre and started laughing. I told April and she laughed.

MHT board members Sid Hancock, Jennifer Hughes and her daughter Sydney, and Heather Overby all brought in Hot dogs, pizza, brownies, and soft drinks to show their appreciation to the cast and crew after the tech rehearsal while April gave notes.

We have had one electrical circuit in the theatre that decided to blow out right before the tech rehearsal today which left part of the stage in the dark. I didn't have time to get out the ladders and tear into the circuit to repair it. The dimmers had flipped themselve to protect the system. So we just left the dimmers flipped and tried to work around the problem for the rehearsal.

The theatre's lighting equipment is over 40 years old and is showing its age lately. The light board has developed a new little quirk in that some of the little LED's that show you the progress change from one cue to another are now erratic and 1/2 the time don't work at all. We have a couple of slide faders that are also becoming finicky. Lights ghost on after you turn the system off until the dimmers shut down. We have all sorts of safety checks to make sure everything is safe. Many of the theatre lighting instruments are constantly being repaired to keep them in operation. We've developed a stack in the scene shop of lighting instruments that need to have their insides reworked and retrofitted.

On a bright note The Best Christmas Pageant achieved its budgeted income goal for the run last Thursday. All of the the theatre's shows this year have met or exceeded their box office income. Of course the economy was so bad last year that we were very conservative in our estimates.