I sort of thought I knew what "cluster fuck" looked like. That was the Jay Chou New Years eve show at the H P Pavillion. The gig I ran away from after the FIRST day of 12 hours loading in crap that apparently none of the road crew had ever seen before, or put together. We are so used to seeing equipment and sets roll out of the trucks like parts on a conveyor belt; crew leads who direct us step-by-step through a well rehearsed dance of creation. Walking into the Jay Chou load in was like getting smacked with a frozen salmon.
Today, I did it again... except that this time it was crammed into the vastly smaller Shoreline Amphitheatre. Hours of waiting while the LD looked at the set... then his board... then the truss. Set pieces and a video wall too heavy to hang or to put on the stage, brought in anyway, and then... left sitting on the dock for four hours, while people tried to figure out how to get all this stuff on stage.
I was working on lighting... and they seemed to have no idea what they wanted to put on the three trusses we had. OR where to run all the control cables. Or what should be run where. We started at 8 AM, and by 4 PM, we still didn't have all the truss in the air. It was 6 PM before we got there, and we then spent 2 more hours trying to clean up the rats nest of cabling on stage right. This included routing cable around one of the 2500 pound blocks of concrete.. yeah, that's right, a 3 foot by 3 foot concrete cube poured around a steel frame... one of twelve.....
All this for the one-shot "K-Pop" Korean pop music festival. We are going to be spending three days loading this in, for a single performance Monday night, and then we tear it all down again..... shoot me now.
So, to follow this up.... it turns out that this "KPOP" was initially going to be a private party for Google. At some point they decided to open it up to the general public... good move, as what they spent on labor for this show was astronomical. Spoiler alert for Google shareholders... roughly 60 stagehands came in Friday morning at 8 AM to load in the show. 12 hours and two meals later, they began to cut us. Some 20 people stayed until 11PM... and we were not finished. That 8 hours straight time, 4 hours overtime, and 3 hours Double time.
Then people came back Saturday, about 40 of them, to spend another 12 hour day. Most of the first 3 hours was spent waiting, while video finished up, and sound began to load in. Another key discovery here; the video wall, which our staff was told weighed well over the capacity of the roof beams to support... only weighed 3000 pounds. We could have hung that on the upstage truss along with all the lighting, and had room to spare. Maybe to hang the Artistic Director, who was 3 hours late arriving because he was "Shopping"... who began by wandering about on stage for a half hour, then asking "can we add LED lights to all the truss?" No. You don't have the money or the time to do that.
The show itself was quite successful. After rehearsing on Sunday, the show went off smoothly and was really well received by a packed crowd of over 17,000 by my estimate. "Wonder Girls" was the big hit of the night for the crowd... not so much for us. I've seen Britney Spears put more effort into looking like she was actually singing. As for the groups choreography.... well, there are only so many things you can do when the repertoire is "step left, step right, jazz hands, wave, spin". Still, they were pretty.
After that it was our turn. The stage went dark at 10:30 PM, and our crew of 70 began to load out. Lighting had to wait an hour and a half beginning at 3AM, because the upstage lighting truss had been trapped behind the scaffolding wall supporting the video wall (needlessly). So all the video had to come down first, then the top tier of scaffolding... all so we could get the 12 lights and 4 truss sections loaded. When I left at 5AM, they still had not finished breaking down and loading the scaffolding. Our poor crew of carpenters was still there at 6AM, while the rest of us were cut at 5 AM. So that came to 3 hours of regular time, and 6 hours of Double time... all in all, very lucrative for us. Not very good in terms of profit margin or efficiency.
