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Maximum Fog!
Dec. 7th, 2007 08:29 amThe review for A Christmas Carol came out today, and it's a doozy:
( I guess I've reached the stage where I like my bad reviews more than my good ones, just for the quotability factor. )
Last night was running pretty smoothly for a first-day-back crowd. Marley had done his scene, groaning like Garth Algar during an extreme close up, with the fog and the lightning effects, and had retreated through the trap door into the basement, and the Ghost of Christmas Past had just flown on to show Scrooge exactly where he'd gone wrong.
Then the fog machine in the basement triggered the fire alarm, setting off 120-decibel buzzers all through the building.
The Ghost of Christmas Past kept going for a minute, INCREASING HER VOLUME TO TRY TO OVERPOWER THE BUZZER, but it was apparent that this was going to take a while to fix. Children were herded outside, the audiences (there are two shows going on simultaneously in the facility) were told to keep calm and that it was a technical problem, not an actual fire, and to please keep their seats. One of our crew is a fireman in Bartlett as a day job, and once the key to the alarm was located, reset the system, after ten minutes of obnoxious buzzing.'
The good thing about near-catastophe is that it makes audiences that much more appreciative of the show, which they were. The good thing about this particular near-catastrophe is that they might turn down the fog machines in the future.
( I guess I've reached the stage where I like my bad reviews more than my good ones, just for the quotability factor. )
Last night was running pretty smoothly for a first-day-back crowd. Marley had done his scene, groaning like Garth Algar during an extreme close up, with the fog and the lightning effects, and had retreated through the trap door into the basement, and the Ghost of Christmas Past had just flown on to show Scrooge exactly where he'd gone wrong.
Then the fog machine in the basement triggered the fire alarm, setting off 120-decibel buzzers all through the building.
The Ghost of Christmas Past kept going for a minute, INCREASING HER VOLUME TO TRY TO OVERPOWER THE BUZZER, but it was apparent that this was going to take a while to fix. Children were herded outside, the audiences (there are two shows going on simultaneously in the facility) were told to keep calm and that it was a technical problem, not an actual fire, and to please keep their seats. One of our crew is a fireman in Bartlett as a day job, and once the key to the alarm was located, reset the system, after ten minutes of obnoxious buzzing.'
The good thing about near-catastophe is that it makes audiences that much more appreciative of the show, which they were. The good thing about this particular near-catastrophe is that they might turn down the fog machines in the future.
