It's late on a Wednesday evening and I am very pleased.Tonight at the Bicknell Center, we hosted two nationally recognized comedians. We have been preparing for this event for quite a while and Tuesday we prepped the stage by placing the monitors, microphones, and stage props (stools). Early in the day today, my audio team leader came in to ensure that she was prepared for the evening. Besides being in charge of the training of our audio engineer for tonight's event, she was also our stage manager. She asked all the right questions and ensured her crew was prepped for the event. Our students arrived and finished the final preps for the event.
An aside. I need to go over all the prep so you have an idea of how much work goes into an event, but that would take too long, so I'll just go over the front of house position AND I may leave a few things out. Feel free to skip down to the non-italicized part if you don't want to read this.
Before an event begins, the front of house manager has to ensure that the house (the place where the seats are) is secure (i.e. locked) so that when the building is open, visitors may use all the facilities in the building without disturbing final preps on the stage. The FOH (front of house) manager also needs to set all lights in the lobby and sound in the lobby (pre-show music, etc.) all before anyone arrives at the building. After this is done the FOH manager can open the building. Once visitors start to arrive, the FOH manager and staff are the face of the facility, working directly with visitors to help them enjoy whatever event they have come for. The FOH job is not done once the show starts however. The manager now has to change the lighting and the audio in the lobby. The manager must also work with the stage manager, ushers, and ticket takers to make sure that guests only enter when and where the performer wants them to. I think I've bored you enough, back to the story.
So we are ready to go, the stage is ready to go with a start time of 8 and the house opening at 7:30. About 7 we discover that the seats that are on our pit have been sold and we cannot use the pit as part of the stage. I call an all-hands so we can get the stage reset and get the seats placed on the pit. we complete the job with time to spare, ready for a 7:30 house opening. Unfortunately, our comedians had not yet arrived. My staff handled it, My FOH manager made announcements to the lobby kept the guests informed. As soon as the comedians arrived, my stage manager and team leader spoke with them to find out what they needed for sound, lights, stage movements, and projection. We discovered that besides the video that we had, there were also pictures that needed to shown during the event. Not only did these need to be shown, but they needed to change at certain times during the show. Our sound technician (who also would be running the A/V) took the script and worked with the artists to make sure that he knew when the changes needed to happen. I was able to spend the evening in my office, working on prepping for a show coming in two weeks, without having to worry if the event was going well. I was only a radio or headset call away, but it wasn't necessary, everyone did their job to the letter and the event went swimmingly. Afterwards, the crew flipped the stage for our next event, taking all of the stuff off the stage from tonight's event and setting the stage for a university event tomorrow. NOW, I need to take things more in stride, a DID get a LITTLE worked up when I had to change my lighting for the event AND I DID need to eventually just send myself away from the stage so my crew could do their job without me looking over their shoulder, but overall, it was good.
TL,DR version. Things were rough, crews worked their tails off, event was good, I need to calm down and let my crews do their job. I'm proud of them.
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