It's been a long time...

Since I spent 14 hours in one day working on a show. Shit, most of the gigs I get nowadays, 14 hours is about all I spend on the entire thing! I exaggerate a little, but yesterday was a long fucking day.

I still think this director is pretty damn cool. She's got big ideas and isn't afraid to take risks. Unfortunately she has no real production experience, from the technical side, and the opera has received practically zero support from the UNCC Dance and Theatre Department, which is a shame. Yeah, I know it's a music department production. Yeah, I know it runs concurrently with a theatre department show. But just the simple help of offering up some practicum student assistance or even making working on the opera an option for the theatre kids woulda been nice. But in academia, there be turf wars. And this be one of them.

So we rehearsed from 7Pm to midnight last night. Which sucked ass for an hour-long show, but really wasn't that bad when you consider everything that had to happen. We had to get lighting integrated into the show. We had to get the orchestra in place and integrated. We had to get video integrated. A lot of video. Like four projectors and a roving camera lot.

I may have mentioned before, but video is hard. And frequently people that work with video don't often work in theatre, so there's a vocabulary gap there as well. The impressive thing last night was that all the technical folks remained relatively calm, even when the viola player got smacked in the head.

Yup. A chain that was part of a costume flew over the edge of the stage and clobbered the viola player. She wasn't even bleeding, but freaked out all over the place and threatened to quit over it! Geez, if I threatened to quit every time I got hurt on a show I'd never work anywhere! And like I said, she wasn't even bleeding...

But anyway, my lights are in good shape, and there are some very pretty looks in the show, so I'm pleased with it overall. I'd certainly love to have 3-4 more nights of touchup and cueing, but I don't. So tonight is final dress and it will be as good as it gets when I leave. Then on to the next thing.