Opening Day

Whew! Finally. It's been a busy (really, really, really busy) couple
weeks. When I showed up on the 19th, well, my connection in Ireland
was very delayed and with having to go in and out of customs I just
missed an earlier connection from Shannon to Dublin. So eventually I
got rerouted through Heathrow (as if I haven't been there enough times
already) and ended up in Edinburgh about three hours late. After
getting the bus in I still had a fifteen minute walk uphill with all
my stuff (lots and heavy, at one point had to trudge up 5 flights of
stairs to get to the top of north bridge (Edinburgh is full of
bridges, it exists on several different vertical levels). Anyway,
after getting there got sent to my flat, another fifteen minute walk,
and I got mildly lost. The place is nice enough, has three bedrooms,
four beds, common room, little kitchen, bathroom, no one else there,
good. Dropped off my stuff, meeting that night, went to pub with
everyone, got groceries, home.

Work started the next day, with a meeting at 9am. We worked through
until about 6:30, with an hour for lunch. That was the shortest day
we've had since I've been here. The next day went til 7, and since
then I stopped paying attention. In terms of work, it's been all
sorts of stuff. C venues, the company I'm working for, has venues in
four different areas, but, since I got assigned to C main, I've only
been in the one building, so I'll describe what's gone on here. It's
a large building that's used for exam halls by the Universtiy of
Edinburgh the rest of the year. The main floor and the three floors
above it have a large foyer on the street side of the building, and a
single larger room on the back side. There are other little rooms and
closets here and there, but those two rooms are the basics. The main
floor big room has been transformed into a bar, and the three floors
above are theaters (+1, +2, and +3). +1 and +2 are smaller, have
relatively low ceilings, maybe 15 feet (?), and accordingly are used
for smaller shows, children's theater, comedy routines, stuff like
that. After its last show of the evening, the +2 foyer transforms
into a jazz bar. +3 has a much higher ceiling (when the scaffolding
was bare it was great for climbing on), therefore more space for
lights and stuff, and it's used for bigger shows and musicals, as is
-1, a pre-existing, actual theater one floor below the main level.
That's my venue for the festival. Down the back stairway, usually
just a fire exit, you get to Stores and some dressing rooms we built
in - 2, basically just a storage space way down at the bottom of
stuff.

Anyway... Most of the work for the first week or so was loading in
lots of stuff, moving out unnecessary desks and chairs, keeping people
from walking into the path of the scaffers while they moved
scaffolding in, etc. Once the scaf was up in a space (0/bar, +1, +2,
and +3), we moved in with platforms, facing, kickrails, drapes,
turning it all from bare, white-walled rooms into black box theaters.
Huh, I don't think I've been up to +3 for four or five days. In
principal it sounds fairly simple, but it's a lot of work, and takes
even longer since a lot of people, esp. the hordes of
front-of-house/box office people (aka FOBOs, who mostly arrived on the
22nd, more about that later) don't have lots of experience with
hanging drapes and stuff like that. I ended up spending on whole day
just working on draping in +1, not passing it off because I didn't
want to risk having to re-tie it later. Usually that wasn't the case,
and up until recently there's always been plenty of carrying stuff
around to be done. Another day I worked on fixing/making kickrails.
Was that also in +1? I think so. Then the next day +3. Basic
carpentry skills come in handy. In the days just before we started
tech rehearsals I got relocated to the bar. There we put up a false
wall around the entire room, and I helped make a doorframe, and
worked on facing around a couple doorways, as my own project made a
cover, with holes for downlights, for the space above the main
entrance doorway, and drilled holes for and installed downlights above
the bar. Even thought we opened the bar, what four days ago?, work
has been continuing in little bits. I'll take photos so you have a
better sense of how much has been constructed. It's kind of hard to
believe the change, and that there are now performances happening in
all those spaces.

About our schedule: Shows start at 10am, and the latest end around
2am the next morning. The main bar is open from 10am until 5am, which
has meant that since it opened it is the only bar in Edinburgh open
past 3am. Apparently other bars then direct their patrons here and
it's been quite interesting for those two hours from 3-5. Fortunately
I got on the morning shift for tech rehearsals, so I wasn't awake or
even in the building then.

Let's see, so for the fit-up, it got to where we were usually working
from 9 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night, although not
infrequently later. As tech rehearsals approached we gradually moved
onto a shift system, ending up with half the techs/house
managers/other managers being on from 8am-9pm and the other half from
8pm-9am. FOBOs lucked out with a 9-9 or 12-12 shift, no overnights
for them. The first tech rehearsal came on the 29th, and they really
got underway on the 30th. In -1 we had an 8-hour tech with a Japanese
dance company. For that we got one of our other techs, who is
Japanese, down, she ended up doing most of the work of explaining the
theater space and training the light board operator. The last couple
hours Andrew (the senior tech in -1, who's also on day shift with me)
Fortunately our next group cancelled gave us time for lunch, then 9-11
was left for Kevin, the other tech for -1. The next day we had a
bunch of 4-hour techs, with which we were much more engaged. One was
with a Korean company. Their director has decent English, but limited
comprehension, so my teacher training came in handy as I was able to
speak slowly using comprehensible language. That was also important
because I had to train their light board op, whose spoken English is
just about nil. They didn't really schedule enough time for their
tech, many light cues to write, so they (and I) returned that night
from 12:15-1:30, they used their dress rehearsal time yesterday for
tech, and then came back in from 3-5 this morning (I didn't) to
finish. I hope they're ready to open today. They seem very nice, I
like them, but they really didn't plan well for that aspect of it.
Anyway, yesterday we did dress rehearsals, basically running all the
shows non-stop as if we were open. It went fairly well, but there was
one show that set us 15 minutes behind. I hope we'll be able to speed
them up. That show actually also requires sound and light operators,
so I actually designed lights for their show, which was a lot of fun
to do again. It's not great, but better than functional, I hope.

Need to go get ready for load-out of the morning musical ("Honk", the
musical of the ugly duckling). Will try to write more about flatmates
and stuff soon.