Tuesday, November 11th: We had a 1:00pm load in at the Lebanon Opera House today. It’s located in the same building as the Lebanon City Hall. The building is set up very interestingly because different parts are used by the City Hall and other parts have been renovated from it former use. The bottom floor of the building use to be the civic gymnasium. In the 40’s and 50’s, when new high schools were being built with gyms, the civic gymnasium became obsolete. Sometime between then and now they renovated those parts of the building to make more offices for City Hall and more storage for the Opera House. They had two loading doors, one at street level and one 11’ or so above the street level. They had a 5’x9’ elevator that most of our scenery and boxes fit into. The larger pieces that we were using had to be lifted into the 11’ door or carried around the front of the building. Their stage also has a 2 degree rake. This is VERY strange for an inside theatre. There was also a lot of concern about our scenic pieces wanting to roll down the rake. Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad and we didn’t have any major issues. Caroline, Eric, Rudy and I went over to a fantastic little Irish pub call the Salt Hill Pub for dinner and live Irish/Celtic music as well. We had a rehearsal for about an hour just to make sure that all of our changes would work and that the scenery was not going to fall off the front of the stage.
Wednesday, November 12th: We had two shows 9:00am(30) and 11:00am(31). They went very well and load out was quick as well. We had a couple of people work for us who had worked on our show when we were in Burlington, Vermont. We also had a woman on our load out who is the Lighting Director for “Blue’s Journey” which is the other tour that the Kennedy Center is doing this year. In addition to this, everyone we had for our local crew in Lebanon was really amazing. This was easily one of the best local crews we have worked with so far. Everyone was extremely helpful, easy to talk to and very smart technicians. After load out, we drove 175 miles(3824 total miles) to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I want to note again at this point that we have now performed three shows in Massachusetts, two shows in New Hampshire and one show in Vermont in this order: Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. We were actually staying in a very small town called Lenox, MA next to Pittsfield. We got off the high way and had to drive a couple of miles through a small town and out into what felt like the country. As the GPS told us we were nearing the Apple Tree Inn, we started to get nervous because we were out in the middle of nowhere. We took a slight right and saw the sign for the Apple Tree Inn. We took another right and went up a winding, steep drive way to our resort on the hill. We were the only people at the Inn(except for the person who checked us in) and all of our rooms were in the same hallway. It felt like college again with everyone walking around the hallway with their doors open. It was also really creepy and felt kind of like “The Shining” because it was so vacant! The crew dropped off our bags and left for the load in at The Colonial Theatre. Load in turned into a fix it session for me. We had a bolt break at the last load out and then we had a caster fall off during the truck unload at this venue. I spent most of the four hours of load in fixing scenery and was still working on some pieces when we left at 10:00pm.
Thursday, November 13th: We arrived at 8:00am and I immediately continued my work on the broken pieces of scenery. We had two shows at 9:30am(32) and 12:30pm(33) with a production meeting in between the two. Norton Juster, who wrote the book that this show is based off of, came to see the 9:30am show with Ruth Black, who is widow of Arnold Black the composer of the show. They came backstage before the show and mingled with the cast. After the shows, we loaded up the truck and drove 195 miles(4019 total miles) to Union, New Jersey. This was the most exciting drive to a hotel that we have had so far. Rudy and I were driving along, no problems, until we hit a toll booth, which wasn’t an issue either. We pull up to pay for the toll and the guy working the booth tells us we shouldn’t be driving on that road, the Garden State Parkway. Trucks are generally not suppose to drive on parkways. Rudy and I had just missed the signs that we were driving onto the parkway. The toll booth guy also told us that we could get a $200 ticket for the offense and charged us $.70 for the toll. We immediately got off the parkway and stopped on a side street to figure out how to get to the hotel. After a number of phone calls to Caroline and David Paige, we figured out a route and finally made it to the hotel, after adding an extra hour to the trip.
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