A Christmas Carol

I’ve been busy … real busy. We just closed a production of “A Christmas Carol” at Chapelgate. As with any show, it was not without it’s difficulties. We opened Friday night with one show, did two shows on Saturday, and closed with one show Sunday evening. In the end, everything came off really, really well. And, it was a great reminder of how much I enjoy theatre work — no matter how tiring it is.

Pulling off the show, from a technical standpoint, required a pretty significant re-wire of our audio and lighting systems. The picture at right shows the control room as it was configured for the show. The big mixing console in the lower left is our main house mixer, a 40-channel Allen and Heath GL3000. We use 36 channels of the main board just to support our weekly church services. For the show, it was used for 10 boundary mics, sound effects cues and as the master monitor mixer. The next “station” is a Mackie 1604 we used to mix 13 wireless microphones that were shared among the 50 cast members. The output from this mixer was fed into the main house mixer. I ran the main mix and effects, and two other crew members handled wireless microphone control.

The small silver console is the terribly out-dated main lighting controller. It sports a whopping 12 dimmers and two scenes, plus the house lights. There is no preset memory. Frankly, it’s just barely capable of handling lighting for our church services, and, several of the house light dimmer packs are beginning to fail. Beyond the main light board is a DMX lighting controller for use with “intelligent” lighting instruments. The church owns two, and we rented another 8 for the show. Two operators were required to handle the lighting cues.

Beyond that are the racks of wireless microphone receivers. Adding the wireless capability for the show required adding almost 300 feet of additional audio cable in the control booth! The results looked like an explosion in Mama Celeste’s kitchen!

Adding to the overall confusion in the booth was the need for two follow spots, which were operated by the second lighting tech and myself.

Things are slowly returning to “normal.” The set is gone, and the rented wireless gear is packed for return to the rental house. We’ve rolled all the extra cables up and put them away. This morning, the adrenalin rush wore off, and the show schedule caught up with me. A nap was in order before the surprisingly positive post-production “debrief” with the Executive Pastor and the other affected department heads. We’re all looking forward to our next production in the early summer.