The Hills are Alive with the sounds of dinner theater

So I spent the last two days helping a friend (for a paycheck) at the Candlelight Pavillon Theater(The Sound of Music) in Claremont. She anticipated lots of problems and wanted to bring in someone she knew because of all the confusion in the pre-production process of the show.

It tooks weeks just to get a copy of their house plot from the house electrician, and when she did get it, it was a jpg file (she needed the CAD file). It was obviously done in CAD but they didn't seem to know how to get the original and send it.

So she dragged the jpg into Vectorworks and created her plot over that. She told the house electrician she would adapt their house plot so that's all he had to worry about doing before she arrived. We showed up on Monday and lo and behold, house plot wasn't finished. Plus, there were speaker clusters blocking the view of many lights in the first FOH position (not on the plot).

So...

-The house electrician took it upon himself to "redesign" the FOH and change the purpose and angle of some lights for her benefit (uncircuiting everything putting us off schedule)
-Their additional electrician actually cut one gel out of the center of a sheet of gel and threw the rest away
-The additional electrician also refiled gels we had pulled for focus time, so we had to redo that
-We asked for two or three floor mounts, and they brought us the bases of mic stands
-A base went bad on a 6X9 so I asked for the cap off an altman ers we weren't using, the house electrician brought up a cap with the ground wire actually dangling outside of the connector and said "don't worry, if it's out of the connector it can't hurt you, it's not carrying a current."

So sadly, I could only help two days, so when she should have been sitting down to start building cues, she was now sitting watching yet another rehearsal trying to figure out where she could cut cues tomorrow. She's gonna have to rely on their electricians to finish the focus and fix any other problems that arise. I felt so bad leaving her there, but we couldn't work while the rehearsal was going on.

And before I left, we both happily noticed, one of the speaker clusters had a blown speaker in it. Looks like the director and audio's gonna have some fun on this run.