Tech Rehearsals

Thursday, September 25th: Today we dropped the set off at our trial venue, The Atlas. It’s not in the best neighborhood but the theater is pretty nice. Unfortunately, you can’t back a 26’ box truck up to the loading door, which is at truck height(the height of the bed of the truck). Some of our boxes we had to take around the alley, in a different loading door, through another theater and up an elevator to get the theater we were using. The rest of our boxes we had to lift from our truck over a small gap and into their loading dock. Overall it was a really painful process and probably the worst situation we would have to deal with. Fortunately, we were only dropping off the scenery. We headed back to the offices to work for the rest of the afternoon.

Friday, September 26th: Today started off about a bad as possible for a load in day. I woke up at 6:30am and found an email message from one of the Atlas Staff saying that our house crew was called at 9am, not 8am as we had planned. I called my boss to let him know and then called the rest of our crew to say that we’d be leaving at 8:00am instead of the original 7:15am. We left the Kennedy Center just after 8:00am and on the way got a phone call from the Production Manager at the Atlas saying that the house crew had actually been called at 8:00am as originally scheduled. By this point there was nothing we could do about it and ended up starting on a very slow note. The rest of the day was spent figuring out how the set actually fits together, which was very exciting since no one who had done the original production was there to help. It actually went together very easily and with only a few runs to the hardware store.

Saturday, September 27th - Sunday, September 28th: We finished up the set and then started actual tech rehearsals. It was a slow process, but we made it through the show in the afternoon. Most of the time was taken up by working out the technical issues in the show and generating our run crew sheets (the paperwork that tells us what scenery to move and when to move it!) It was another long day but a lot was accomplished. On a funny note, I learned that you can’t eat 6 salteen crackers in a minute without drinking any water. We were sitting eating dinner and Diana, the Costume Coordinator, came up and asked if we could eat 6 salteen crackers in a minute. Most of us were like “No thanks” but my boss just couldn’t pass up the try. We all set our watches and looked on as David P. and Diana tried to eat the 6 salteen crackers. If you’re curious how it ended up just try it.

Hope all is well!
Brian