A play to remember August 13, 2005
Posted by Aaron in : News, Play , trackbackTonight was the last show of the play that the community theater has been putting on this week. I know this because I have been helping out (no, not on stage) by manning a couple switches and noises. The play is Neil Simon’s Fools, a quick summary from some other groups production of the play can be found here.
Preview night was rough (wednesday) it was the first night I’d had several sound effects available (which I know now, I should make a much greater fuss about having them run all through at least once) and there were a couple line fumbles, mostly though I was the only one noticably off. Oh and I cut myself. Oh by the way, the auditorium’s light box sucks, I only controlled 2 sets of lights, on and off for the left and right sides. Both push-buttons liked to stick down, but one actually required an extra click to turn off. Only a couple places where both go off together, but sufficient to say they never actually did. Oh and it gave me a mild shock one of times.
Thursday was nearly 100% better, most of the fumbles were covered up nicely, and I didn’t screw up too much, nor did I bleed. About a bakers dozen in attendance. Introduction of cymbals instead of a generic noise box for one noise, the cast members were suppose to collapse when it happened. An extra element of realism was added because most of them didn’t know I was going to use something with more noise than the sufficient but not great noise box. Light box didn’t shock me either.
Friday was probably the peak performance, we had nearly 40 in the audience and they did a good job of laughing when they were suppose to (not as easy as it sounds). Sound and lights worked well, in general it was a great performance (this one was the one that was taped thank god).
Tonights was an interesting one. We’d joked about the approaching line of storms conviniently knocking out the power in the 2nd act. That didn’t happen. Instead we got a brown out about halfway through act one. Those on stage mostly did a fabulous job of continuing as if nothing had happened, even though the lighting had been cut to a quarter what it had been. There were a couple mistakes and we did realize at one point that one of the actors had actually been relying entirely on the prop book (which had his lines in it) and in a couple places was forced to ad lib with, well, not much luck. We scrounged up a propane lamp, and taped 4 flashlights to the balcony railing. Really all and all considering what happened things went amazingly smooth. Though it was too dark to take the sparse set apart and that will be done tomorrow.
I have a couple pictures but I’m not quite sure where I set my camera when I walked in and it is after 12:30 so I’m not posting them tonight. It was mostly fun but thank God its over.
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