Stan's Cafe

The container was nearly two hours late arriving but the driver redeemed himself somewhat by pulled off a precision reversing manoeuvre and thus allowing our swarm of technicians to unload in record time.

I fouled up first by not spotting immediately that the numbered doors were being set up where the lettered doors should have been and vice versa. Then it was revealed that I’d misjudged the placement of the flooring and everyone had to put their shoulders in to slide the whole construction 94cm forward. These things happen when I’m left to my own devices. People seemed to take it in good heart. The Enwave’s impressively level floor obviated the need for any painful chocking. Steve is a born Pin Man and in tandem we soon had the doors hung. When Craig and Graeme, ‘fresh’ from the airport, poked their heads in the set was up and looking good.

In Bucharest Alex was Bernadette, here she is to be Jan. By lunch she’d been though her costumes, turned up a pair of trousers and is ready to join Bernadette, Gerard and Gareth on a sightseeing adventure. Nina’s sound is plumbed in. She’s remixed things again and promised us “20% more audio excitement”, which sounds like a bold, does the dial go up to 11?

Over here we’re on 110V power, down from Europe’s 240V. Arvo’s cooked up a plan and a mixture of local lights and step-up transformers, our lighting desk plugged via their lighting desk into their dimmer racks seems to be doing the trick. The fans appear to be cranked up as much as the ever have been, which is good news for those charged with wrangling the Orange Billowing Mass. Low power fans leads to a flaccid mass and no one wants that, least of all the wranglers.

James

Labels: ConstanceBrown

From the office and the A.E.Harris factory; from vintage clothes stores, actors homes and hardware shops; from the costume hire facility and fire extinguisher workshop, everything is finally gathered, in a trailer, in the Paul Mathew store, in Long Marston ready for the long haul to Bucharest.

"Moving Entertainment Throughout Europe".

james

Labels: ConstanceBrown, thericeshow

Link

Blog silence generally suggests something large has kicked off. In this instance it has been staging The Cleansing Of Constance Brown in Birmingham, an undertaking spectacularly more complicated, expensive and fraught than I had ever imagined it would be.

Testament to these rather strained circumstances, are a series of rather poorly encoded stress-dreams:

1: Having the rather robust and functional mobile phone I currently have replaced by an inferior and rather flimsy model against my wishes.

2: Marvelling at a fighter jet with flapping wings (“that is an amazing thing, how the hell does it stay aloft”) seconds before its twin male pilots grow over ambitious and pile, sickeningly, into a rooftop and explode in a fatal ball of flames.

3: Being shocked and upset that a well known theatre promoter who we work with is in fact signficantly younger than I am.

4: Being rather more upset that, because the show required it, I now have an artistic, but spectacularly ugly brown tattoo covering my entire left fore-arm.

Still, all’s well that ends well. The shows passed off smoothly, we even had the time to examine, re-make and finally cut the Spa Scene, re-introduce The Orange Billowing Mass and make a host of other, smaller changes. Audience numbers were great and their responses tremendous, no planes have crashed, I still have my phone, my youth and unadorned fore-arms.

Who could want for anything more?

James

Labels: ConstanceBrown