Stage by stage, Part 1
Revisiting my old school, the halls brought back a lot of memories.
The lower school hall (now called the South Hall) was not very theatrical but it did have a balcony and a large dimmer in the stage left cupboard that dimmed the six main sunflood downlighters and three PAR56 wall washers above the stage. On the downside, the hall didn’t black out, something I found to my cost when lighting Godspell in here. Having scrounged a large (for me) lighting rig from the Drama adviser along with an 18 way Mini II control system. We dismantled one of the main stage internally wired lighting bars and fixed it across two scaffolding towers on the balcony, for twelve circuits. (The school organised an electrician to get us extra power from a nearby cupboard fuse box, after he had been, most of the lower school electric clocks were running backwards). The third 6 way dimmer was placed down at the stage end to connect some side lighting and floor uplighters/backlighters. (The cupboards each side had a handy swing-out door above accessible by built-in ladder which made excellent perch lighting positions).
The show was more of a platform performance in that it was sung but not really acted too much and the first half was the school band. The staging was arranged as a thrust in the shape of a cross, with the musicians either side and three vertical banners were affixed to the back wall. We had roughly focussed the lights during the afternoon but when I pushed up the scene master fader for the start of the show I was surprised to see much of the audience light up as well! The throw was a bit too far for Patt. 123 Fresnels and barn doors don’t really work too well when spotted down. (We had to widen the beams on some of them and then shape them off which makes them a lot less bright).
Our furtive & discreet focussing was also thrown into disarray when we found that the Band had joined us for the second half up on the balcony. The show went well though with the Finale’ being particularly impressively lit (well, I would say that!) We toured that show into several Churches round the area, improvising the lighting according to local conditions. (We had two follow-spots with excellent operators, my mates Wally & Brian).
We did one show in a church down the side of Fenwicks in the City Centre where at the end, the local preacherman wanted to say a few words and it turned into a full blown sermon. We were over-running Patt 23Ns with 1000 Watt lamps and we were worried that the lamps might be damaged so we cheated them out after the first ten minutes. On checking afterwards, one of the lamp envelopes had softened sufficiently to have sagged at the base and blistered at the top.
The other memory of the school hall balcony was where I first became a Young Scientist.
