Tonight was closing night of The Examined Life, otherwise known as the collaborative project (collaborative being a word used very liberally in this case). It was interesting, but not in the good way.
At the top of the show, the wrong button activated for some reason, and the house lights didn’t go out properly, instead turning on three-fourths of the work lights. Advanced touch screen technology is great, man. We just need to get our operators up to its level. So I spent the first sequence of the show bouncing up to manually fix the lights myself since we hadn’t had the time to properly train the board op on how to do it and it was just faster to do it myself.
Then, we have a lot of stuff where the evening is just generally kind of off. And then the cicada piece comes. And my ASM informs me that Chris, one of the actors in it, is nowhere to be found. The show must go on, so they figured out backstage who could cover his lines and blocking. They get onstage, and when one of my actresses went off, I had my ASM make sure she was going to handle the cicada puppet. The piece went off beautifully, and the audience never knew. Those guys made me so damned proud tonight.
Monday, I’m hoping to meet with one of the choreographers and my director/advisor to do a post-mortem of the show. I have a list of things that need to be addressed in one manner or another. I feel positive about this, despite how negative I felt during the run.