The special hazard on this show is confetti. In the Act 1 sequence where Horton sits on the egg through storm and changing seasons, the Cat pelts him with water from a super soaker, a bucket of autumn leaves, and a big batch of confetti. Half of the crew’s intermission cleanup consists of sweeping up little white dots of paper—from the deck, from the steps of the tree unit that Horton is perched on—and still the confetti goes everywhere. It may be worse than glitter. We find bits backstage in the green room, we find chips of it in the auditiorium, I find it in my slippers. There is show confetti in my back bedroom at home where I’m typing this.
This past Sunday was the day for more than one little thing to go wrong. In the Act 1 finale, Gertrude’s lengthy tail, made of feather boas glued end to end, parted in two. Suddenly Alexa found herself tugging against no resistance (from offstage, I’m usually holding the other end while Gertrude struggles in vain to get airborne). Alexa’s a trouper, she covered, and she yanked with all her might against nothing.
Then, late in the second Act, the Bird Girl who usually has the Who-bearing clover so that she can hand it off to Gertrude to restore it to Horton, didn’t have it. As they came offstage, there was a lot of muttering, “I forgot the clover!” and Kevin (the Cat) scampered back to find a substitute. He slipped to Horton during the next scene, and I wonder how many people noticed.
Probably the WATCH judges did. If something goes wrong in a matinee performance, 95% of the (traditionally less sophisticated) audience won’t spot it, but matinees are also peppered with adjudicators. They’re there on Sunday because they often have their own evening performances to deal with.
Sunday was also designated as an autographs in the lobby day. Don’t ask me why, but I just loathe autographs in the lobby in costume. So I got to show my “I’m crew” card, and I cleaned myself up while the rest of the cast Met Their Public. Which meant that I had to do some crew work. Now I don’t mind wet-mopping the deck, and with all that confetti (vide supra), mopping is always in order, and in fact I can Tom Sawyer myself into enjoying it a little bit. Water + swab, swab = things are cleaner.
I’m working on building up that same “hooah” attitude towards the orchestra pit cover. At CenterStage, there are two sections of the deck that you remove to make an opening for the orchestra pit. (This opening is only so that the conductor can be seen by the cast.) The first section is composed of several layers of hardwood, altogether making a slab 20 inches by 70 inches by 5 1/2 inches thick, and the other section (which forms the lip of the stage) is somewhat smaller.
To open the pit, what you do is this: walk downstairs with a buddy into the pit area; unbolt the first section from the girders that hold everything in place; on a count of three, with your buddy, push the section straight up until it clears, then slide it back (upstage) (it has casters to make this part a little easier, and usually there is crew above to help with this step); get a stance on the top of the railing that forms the conductor’s platform and push the smaller section up and out; climb out of the pit; lay the small section on top of the first section and roll them out of the way far upstage.
I don’t have a lot of upper-body strength, so I’m not one of those people that you look to first for jobs that require doing something on three. Usually Chris, Rick and Steve take this detail.
Okay, now that I’ve popped the pit cover a couple of times I can figure out how much it weighs. Figure generously on a specific gravity of 0.6 for the composition of the cover. Eurgh: 170 pounds.