Monday, November 05, 2007

Another day locked in the aircraft hanger recreating the Massacre of Glencoe with ballet dancers, Girl pipers, bad actors, and a cardboard mountain - parts of which changed colour several times today accompanied by the sounds of increasing frustration and confusion from Felicity who is painting the set.
Felicity is a lovely woman but does have this dreadful habit - which she gleefully acknowledges - of leaving everything till the last possible minute. Literally. The last show I worked on that she was involved with she was still painting the scenery as the audience were taking their seats. I was first person on in that show and instead of the usual "Good luck!". or "Break a leg," or "Knock 'em dead!", just as I walked on the give the first line of the show, the stage manager leaned over to me and whispered: "Don't lean on any of the scenery, it's still wet."
Felicity's trouble today was that none of the colours she was mixing looked right when she put them on the flats. The purple she was trying to get kept turning into a blue. It took me and Kiree, who is doing the the lighting for the show, a while to convince her that if she was mixing the paint over there <-- under the nice, pinky white Mercury vapour house work lights and then painting it on the flats over there --> which were bathed by the nice bluey-white Halogen flood lights we had rigged up for her, of course the bloody colour would change.

The rest of the day was similarly frustrating. Lots of stop, start, nothing getting finished, trying to work out what to do next faffing about and waiting for other people to stop faffing about and decide what they were going to do next so you didn't get in their way, etc. etc. etc.

The usual pre-show chaos.

I managed to run away and avoid a lot of it by hiding behind the cardboard mountain and pretending to add more bits to the supporting structure. It is now pretty robust now. I screwed a shitload (that's a theatrical technical term) of wood to the back of it and piled it high with concrete blocks swiped from the skateboard park next door. Later Andy turned up with a pile of weights he 'borrowed' from a gym somewhere and we piled them on as well. We are nothing if not inventive - and safe. It would take a bulldozer to knock the thing over now.

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