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Back in the 1980′s I used to do the lighting for the local operatic society (before I went back to full time sound and running my own company). Here is a true story of a show back then when things didn’t quite go as planned…

The show was “Hello Dolly” and there were just two of us doing the lighting for this show, and just about everything had to be hired in.

All was well on the Friday evening, all the lights arrived on time at around 7pm. There were about 60 theatre lamps as I recall, plus a string of 500 flashing pigmy bulbs which were to be fastened round the edge of the front cloth, then right the way around a specially made stage extension which surrounded the orchestra pit. The building you see was/is not a theatre, more your local community centre, therefore making life even more complicated and technically challenging at times…

We worked all Friday night putting up the lights and eventually left at around 5am Saturday morning, only to return at about 9-30am after a couple of hours sleep. We finally got everything up, gelled and focused with only a couple of breaks by about 2am on the Sunday morning. My alcohol level was being replaced by the red stuff and I’d forgotten what a hangover was by this time I can tell you!

Noon on Sunday (dress rehearsal day) and we fired everything up and started to programme the lighting desk with some basic settings before the technical run at 2pm, and all was going so well until…

10 minutes before we are due to start… and it happened!!! just about everything in the entire building that survived on mains electricity died, except bizarrely enough for two drinks machines and that string of 500 flashing bulbs! Very nice they were indeed… the bulbs that is not the drinks machines.

Having eventually traced the fault back to the sealed main fuse for the building (yes the one thing we were not allowed to touch) we had to call the local electricity company out, which of course they were only too happy to have “man on call” come out straight away (well after the pub closed, gardening and dog walking had been completed of course). It turned out to be an electric hand dryer that had been “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and caused part of the problem. Nothing to do with us going mad on the lighting I assure you ))

So that was the technical rehearsal gone as it was about 5-30pm by now and you know what musicians are like if they don’t start on time. Valuable drinking time lost and all that!!!

We had to plot the finer details of the lighting as we went through the dress rehearsal which was fun. What we didn’t get time to try out due to the lack of our “technical rehearsal” was the “exploding tins” we had been asked to sort out… Needless to say we used smaller charges for the actual performances (remember the Italian job???) after everyone on stage dived for cover during the dress rehearsal… well by then we needed a bit of our warped special effects sense of humour to relieve the stress of the day!… Oh what fun we have…

Until next time… Keep smiling ))