This isn't turning into a theatre blog, I swears it. But I did mention workplace shenanigans at one point recently, and oh, do I have a story to share.
Friday night. Opening night for The Diary of Anne Frank. It was about 7:15 in the evening; the show was scheduled to start at 7:30. I was sitting in the booth, reading Catching Fire (liked the series a lot; didn't love it as much as did the friend who recommended it to me and nowhere NEAR loved it as I love the Potter series but it definitely held my attention), when the Stage Manager, Nathan, came crashing into the booth.
"Shanelle, there's all this water pouring out of the wall upstage, you need to go back and make sure the strip lights are okay." Crash back out of booth.
My immediate thought went to the spigot near the loading doors; it's for the rare occasion we need to hook up a hose in the stage area. We tend to shy away from water in the theatre, because hello, water and electricity just can't play nicely. But people know about that spigot, and if it had been accidentally opened, they'd have been able to shut it off pretty much immediately. So I followed, at a slightly less-crashing pace, and to settle the marbles still spinning from being wrenched away from my book, asked "Wait wait wait... water where?" Nathan paused long enough to say "Upstage above the loading doors!" and leave the unspoken "...dumbass!" hanging in the air, then took off rushing to the lobby, presumably to look for staff members who know how to deal with crap like this.
Above the doors.... the aforementioned spigot is down near the floor. I took off in the opposite direction, hating myself for thinking "This is gonna be good."
Here's the thing about live theatre. As a concept, we don't like crises. They throw massive wrenches into our plans. They're inconvenient and almost always mean more work for someone (or several someones), possibly work that will ruin a weekend or vacation. In the case of severe damage, or cancellation of shows, it can cost the theatre a boatload of money.
But in the rare event we do suffer a meltdown of some kind, oh my God, does it make things exciting. Believe it or not, our schedule can get kind of tedious. It changes constantly, yet it's always the same. Particularly for those of us who are directly involved in the day-to-day running of each production. Imagine reading the same magazine--or watching the same movie--every.single.day. For six weeks. Sometimes twice or even three times a day. It doesn't take long to be completely over it; three performances is about all I personally can take. Since we do at least three previews before we open, this after a good 3 or 4 days of rehearsals, I'm mentally done by the opening weekend.
So having an angry, smelly waterfall pouring out of the ceiling on opening night is really, really, really exciting.
Yeah. Smelly. Somewhere on the fourth or fifth floor of the building, the HVAC system suffered a burst pipe. No idea when it started; it clearly had been gushing for a while. It trickled down through the floors and walls of our 85-year-old building, and by the time it hit the floor on the ground level it was cloudy and greenish and stinking of God-knows-what. When I reached the most-endangered lights on the ground floor, the girls who take care of things backstage were running around, soaked to the bone and bailing bucket after bucket from a cluster of about a dozen under a ten-foot-wide swath of chiller vomit. They'd collected every towel in the building, and even a binful of dirty towels from the hotel next door, and had tried to form a sandbag line of sorts to prevent the water from getting downstage where we use lots and lots of electricity. They were doing their best, but holy crap. There was a lot of water.
During all this, the audience had no idea what was going on. They only knew that it was 7:55, the show was to have started nearly half an hour ago, and they were getting "restless." Well. The House Manager called them restless. I'd have probably used "agitated" or "disgruntled" or most likely "pissy," but that's why he has that job and not me.
Anyway. It all wraps up quickly. The Artistic Director and Managing Director went onstage for the preshow speech and deftly downplayed the horror that was still unfolding thirty feet upstage of them. The show started, minus the lights in the line of fire (which was unfortunate, because they were the only things lighting up the sky behind the set, so the entire first act looked like it took place at the same time of night). The Maintenance Supervisor, whom we regard as a semi-supernatural being because of his awesomeness, managed to get the water shut off quickly, and it was just a matter of time until the remaining water flowed down through the walls. Some other members of the staff went to the third floor to assess the damage, which was considerable (floors in two rooms are being ripped up and rebuilt this week, luckily there was no damage to electronic equipment). By intermission, the cascade was down to an increasingly-sporadic drip, so we pulled the tarps off the lights and went ahead with Act II as planned.
And... that was that. No more excitement. Hopefully, no more at all for this show. It's hard enough, what with the starvation and the cabin fever and the Nazis. We don't need Operation Havasu Falls on top of everything else.
You made that way more interesting than C did. :)
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