A talented cast

Well that was exciting!

Library Photo

First night of The Tentmaker 2011 tour has come and gone and I must say it's a great feeling to have survived the new format. It was also a great chance to test out some shiny new sound equipment that Going Public have just bought.

Breaking from tradition, the play had a support act beforehand in the form of the elegant Miss Beth Bullock and her songwriting skills. If you haven't heard beth before I recommend you hop over to her Myspace page and check her out. I covertly recorded her set and may put a track or two up here, but not before I get permission from the lady herself.

The Depot at the Swansea Grand Theatre is a great little performance space; tiered seating around 3 sides, with a mirror and black curtain along the back side underneath an overhang that houses the PA. There is a gallery running above the seating which houses the lighting rig and operator, while the sound tech has a mobile desk and rack by one of the exits. 

We weren't able to use the PA without incurring extra charges for the host church so we took along a new HK audio system comprising of an active sub running two 10in tops on sticks. The tops themselves seem to put out a fair amount of noise on their own, but add the sub and it's a perfectly adequate system for an audience of around people.

Photo by Andy Crowder

When setting up the projector and screen I was presented with a problem. The throw of the projector wasn't short enough for the image to fill the screen without the screen being halfway downstage. Then I had a flashback to my days at college when we put on a concert and we had exactly the same problem, which was solved by one of our technicians by facing the projector backwards and having a mirror reflect the image back in the right direction, thereby essentially cutting the throw distance in half! This is exactly what I did with the wall of mirrors behind the stage and with a flip of the image so it was the right way round, we had a working screen! Maybe I should start packing a mirror in with the rest of the gear...

I may have mentioned that this was potentially the best venue that we would visit on the tour, but new information about the Ealing date has revealed that the The Depot is more akin to a secondary school rehearsal room when compared to the Ealing Christian Centres main auditorium and the amount of kit they've got! I'm very excited about this date now, but first I have to brave a week in the wilds of North Wales!

Now, where did I put that canoe...

Theatre, dahling?

Two weeks of almost solid theatre work and it's over! I've acted in three different capacities on three different plays, but surprisingly I'm not worn out by it all! 

The first production was "The Tentmaker" with Going Public Theatre Company, where I was a one-man technical team, squeezing every last drop of performance potential out of Microsoft Powerpoint to try and make it all appear as professional as possible.

The second was a week-long run of "The little matchstick girl" with Pukka productions where I was lampie. Once we had got past the halfway mark, I had refined all my lighting cues, and the actors managed to remember all their lines and cues, making the whole thing very enjoyable and fluid. On the last day of performance we had a matinee, but none of the windows in the church-cum-theatre were blacked out, which meant scene transitions were visible to everyone in the audience, but they all went off without a hitch!

The third and final production was a play based on the nativity story at temple baptist church. Having a bunch of current and ex-glamorgan technical students, the christmas play is always a very technical effort, with lighting, staging and video all being squeezed into a little space. For this I helped program the lights, made a few of the videos and played in the band during the performance. It was probably the most haphazard and sketchily-prepared of all the productions but from where I was stood it all seemed to go as well as a typical church christmas play goes, with kids not knowing how to hold toy sheep, forgotten lines and some managing to turn off their microphones before going on stage!

To help round off the week, the techs kept the christmas play rig up so we could use it in the evening for the second of our Alchemi events. After giving one of the non-technical helpers a crash course in intelligent lighting for events, I hopped up on stage with the rest of the band and played our little hearts out with modern twists on christmas songs and modern worship songs. There was a talk by Hedd, talking about what our "nightmare before christmas" might be. hopefully there will be some photos coming up soon of the matchstick girl, christmas play and alchemi, ill put them up when they appear.

For now though, here is the title video that was played just before the talk to help people get into the right frame of mind for the challenging talk that followed. (Soundtrack by BRIGHTLIGHTS)