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Sunday, September 17, 2006
Making a Broadway show portable is a challenge - baltimoresun.com
But in the most literal sense -- that is, mounting a touring production, also known as a road show -- there's nothing simple about it."
3 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I believe taht touring alone should be able to bering fresheness to the production. A different city, a different audience. On the other hand, for the venue, a new show every week/month/day is a huge cahallenge, and the turnover rate alone can keep you on your toes.
This article speaks briefly about the challenges associated with a touring show, but doesn't come close to covering all the different problems of working in different venues and moving all around the country. Designing and making a lift is hard, but not nearly as hard as making the same lift break apart, fit in a box truck, store compactly, and be put together by someone without a masters degree in automation. Another difficult obstacle is the different venues themselves. Don't count on having line sets on standard centers and don't even pretend that more than a third of your stages will be trapped...and level stages (jokester). Additionally you are always dealing with the worst possible [blank]: the proscenium size, the loading door/choke size, the wing space, the house depth, and the list goes on. But that is just scenery...life is even harder for the sound designer/engineer. Can you imagine doing an acoustic survey and speaker spread configuration for a space that changes every week? or trying to select wireless microphone frequencies based on local radio and television stations? Or how about being a lighting designer (by which I mean master electrician) when you don't have standard FOH positions, etc, etc. It is a technical nightmare to take a show that should be sitting in a theatre never moving, and break it up into truck-size pieces, make it all fit together, make it work where it shouldn't, and ship it around the country. If there weren't millions of dollars in touring shows, it just wouldn't be worth it...
It does seem like an oddly written article. I presume it was some entertainment writer's attempt at describing the upcoming season in Baltimore, but it does that poorly. It does an even worse job of educating anyone on the challenges of taking a show on the road, as Chris points out. I'm just really not clear who the intended audience for this article was.
3 comments:
I believe taht touring alone should be able to bering fresheness to the production. A different city, a different audience. On the other hand, for the venue, a new show every week/month/day is a huge cahallenge, and the turnover rate alone can keep you on your toes.
- Julie
This article speaks briefly about the challenges associated with a touring show, but doesn't come close to covering all the different problems of working in different venues and moving all around the country. Designing and making a lift is hard, but not nearly as hard as making the same lift break apart, fit in a box truck, store compactly, and be put together by someone without a masters degree in automation. Another difficult obstacle is the different venues themselves. Don't count on having line sets on standard centers and don't even pretend that more than a third of your stages will be trapped...and level stages (jokester). Additionally you are always dealing with the worst possible [blank]: the proscenium size, the loading door/choke size, the wing space, the house depth, and the list goes on. But that is just scenery...life is even harder for the sound designer/engineer. Can you imagine doing an acoustic survey and speaker spread configuration for a space that changes every week? or trying to select wireless microphone frequencies based on local radio and television stations? Or how about being a lighting designer (by which I mean master electrician) when you don't have standard FOH positions, etc, etc. It is a technical nightmare to take a show that should be sitting in a theatre never moving, and break it up into truck-size pieces, make it all fit together, make it work where it shouldn't, and ship it around the country.
If there weren't millions of dollars in touring shows, it just wouldn't be worth it...
It does seem like an oddly written article. I presume it was some entertainment writer's attempt at describing the upcoming season in Baltimore, but it does that poorly. It does an even worse job of educating anyone on the challenges of taking a show on the road, as Chris points out. I'm just really not clear who the intended audience for this article was.
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