Where's the story of the person who did a show with sand and after the run it was extremely clean and they never saw it again? Haha!
I did a show with sand, had to load all of the sand out through small doors, so it was all done by wheelbarrow...a wheelbarrow... through the sand, one of the worst days I can remember. Finally someone suggest using 2x4 across the sand but if you rolled off the plank the sand went everywhere, and the sand was in a pit so you couldn't start at the edge and move in cause then you wouldn't be able to get out of the pit with the extremely heavy wheelbarrow.
As for keeping the sand nice, they would rake, use big magnets cause somehow everything got lost in the sand pit. and spritz before the show. This was of course they year after they did the show with rocks and dirt...that theatre will never be clean.