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« on: Apr 18, 2008, 01:35 pm »
OK, here's what we did. Bear in mind that this was several years ago.
The show was the world premiere of a script by William Finn and James Lapine, (Falsettos, A New Brain, etc.) a musical about bodybuilding. It was originally conceived to be the 2nd half of a concept piece about beauty, two one-act musicals done back to back. The other half was "Passion," by Lapine and Sondheim, which was finished and produced to some success on Broadway.
The script had languished for nearly a decade and was finally picked up by a non-equity house in Chicago. It was my second production with the company, following a one-man show. I was 24 at the time, I believe. We did the show as our final production of the season, running in April and May. It was, for a non-equity theatre, an amazing coup with a huge amount of pressure to succeed. It flopped. Badly. Turkey feathers everywhere. But that's theatre for ya.
For the final show, family and friends of most of the company, artistic team and production staff were in the house.
During the production, one of our more difficult actresses had gotten involved indiscreetly with the Managing Director. Her "in" with the source of the money in the company allowed her to override most requests from the production and artistic staff. She would take no notes, even straight from the director.
On the final matinée, the thunderstorm took out the power at the climax of the 2nd act - the big "pose-down." We had about 20 minutes left. I told my spot ops to stay put in the booth until I could check out the stairwell for myself, and went downstairs. It was about 5pm on a May afternoon, and as I mentioned, the windows in the lobby stretched from floor to ceiling, three stories tall. The storm passed quickly but the electricity did not come back on. Emergency lighting had come on in the house and no fire alarms were sounding in the complex. Sunlight was streaming through the lobby.
Following the hurried conversation with the Managing Director, we decided to move the show out to the lobby with only the bare minimum of furniture pieces. We would do the staging to the best of our ability, as family of the director and choreographer were present to see their work, and the paying audience deserved to see as much as we could give them without the stage. What we had left to go was the 2nd half of the pose-down, the poignant solo from the main character following the climax, and the company closing number. Our set was modular, made up of weight benches that were used for a variety of purposes, from tables to chairs to standing flats, so with about three of those pieces we could conceivably finish. The MD instructed our ushers to escort the house out into the lobby and set up folding chairs.
I poked my head into the house and signaled with hand gestures to the spot ops to come downstairs and bring my prompt book. Any other accessories were completely unnecessary, but the cast was likely to need prompting for the first time in six weeks.
I scurried down to the dressing rooms and rounded up the crew and cast, thinking up staging as I went. I assigned the 2 crew members to bring three benches and the cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger upstairs to the lobby along with any additional costume pieces needed for quick changes in the last 20 minutes. I took my script from the spot ops and put them to pushing out the upstairs upright piano and getting the Musical Director set up properly. (The piano needed baffling in the 3 story lobby otherwise the echo was dreadful.)
I then started giving instructions to the cast. We rounded up in the hallway by the dressing room under the emergency lights and I ran down the call sheet to make sure all were present. We used the time that the ushers required upstairs to talk our way quickly through the last 20 minutes of the show. We flashlit our way under the house and came up into the designated lobby performance area. We set off down the hall in one big clump. (And since half the cast was full of bodybuilder types, I do mean a BIG clump.)
By the time we got to the other end of the hall and were ready to come up the stairs, a whisper brigade started by our problem actress had managed to confuse things. She thought we should do a standing sing-through of the rest of the show instead of trying to work in the remaining choreography, and had managed to convince many of the actors that I'd given those instructions. I was in the process of re-explaining the original plan when the Managing Director came over to see what the delay was about. Following an extremely impressive diva-fit on the part of the actress in question, it looked like the standing sing-through was going to win out, the MD thought that he'd given those instructions to begin with, and I was, for 30 seconds, terminated from the staff of the show for insubordination.
At this point, three of the larger members of the cast who remembered the initial conversation by the dressing rooms did stand up for me. They collectively intimidated the Managing Director and his lady friend into "realizing" that a standing sing through would be disrespectful to the choreographer, the director, and pretty much the entire artistic team. With no more cues to call and no more board to run my official running duties had ended with the lightning strike, but I was reinstated and did call places for the show to resume and complete. Our total time taken from power outage to resume was about 10 minutes.
We got very lucky. If the storm had lingered, or the set had been less modular, or the cast less supportive, or if we'd had an entire orchestra to move, the whole thing could have gone far worse than it did. In the long run pretty much everyone except me walked away from the ordeal feeling good about themselves with a strong sense of team spirit. (I was, of course, mortified that the cast conflicts got so horribly out of control.)
It took another few shows in the city for word to get out about our actress and her ongoing attitude problems. I did one more show with her, believe it or not. After driving one SM to quit a production outright and pulling in some absolutely wretched reviews after inserting her own material into a show after opening, she relocated to LA to "work on her film career." The Managing Director had a bit of a nervous breakdown and left both the company and the city with no notice. I was rehired as resident SM for the company's following season, and wound up doing six more productions with them through 2004.
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