Production Week:Wednesday

WEDNESDAY 27^th March 9am- 11pm:

So today was the day of the first performance so everything had to step up a gear and made sure that everyone and everything was ready for tonight’s performance. Unfortunately Will wasn’t able to come in until later so I was mixing the band and Microphones for the first rehearsal that day, which didn’t mind because I was only going to touch the band mix if I really had to. While the cast and band once again were doing there warm ups I started to look through the script so I could start to remember microphone changes. I also started adding notes at the beginning of scenes of what character had what microphone to remind me. After the first rehearsal of the day we got really positive feedback from the director saying that the sound really had improved since the day before which was huge leap forward.

There still was a couple of issues to address but these were only minor at the moment which was a really good sign that our work was starting to pay off. Some of the thing we had to change were the volume levels coming through the 4 foldback speakers we had and then a slight change in volume on the PA. I had to make a slight adjustment to the mix of the keyboards so that the Musical Directors wasn’t overpowered by the others.

Just after I had made these adjustments I had a break like everyone else before we moved onto a dress rehearsal, we were going to face new challenges here when it comes to the wireless microphones placement on their costumes. The one costume that we had to worry about was Julia’s Wedding Dress, because Erin has a great voice but it hasn’t got a huge projection to it so we needed to make sure we were still picking up the vocals and the speech.

Not long Will arrived with a box full of adaptors and extra cables that we order a while ago for the show, we now could change parts of the band set-up to make it sound even better because it meant at place we could do a correct job instead of a botched job like we had. After we had finished off these minor changes it was time to do the Dress rehearsal before the first show. This went alright, I was still making a couple of mistakes but I was just going to have to try not to make them on the night. After we had finished we did ask to go over certain numbers once more just to try them again and for me to take some notes. We had one final job which we remembered right at the last minute which was that we had to create a safety announcement with some of the characters, Will raced off to create something on the computers while I tidied up the sound area so it look tidier to the Audience.

Evaluation:

The first show in my opinion could of gone a lot better in terms of the mixing of the wireless microphones, I managed to make quite a few mistakes and cause a couple patches of feedback, I think this also was down to the fact I had only done it 2 times before this one so was still trying to figure out the play itself, the band was still maybe a bit to loud for some people liking but again it was still an on-going mixing battle through-out the performance, the radio sound that came with the guitar was rather much louder at parts so we need to see if there is anyway we can attempt to change this. Also right on the opening number and for a small period after we totally lost the lead actors microphone, we didn’t know why because after a small amount of time it just came back and started working again. For the first performance give the time we have had as a team we worked well together and tried to overcome the rubbish parts. There are a couple of things that need doing before the second show but we also need to take on board the director and musical directors feedback.