A Wild Ride in Oshkosh!

So we started our final week of the tour at The Grand Theater in Oshkosh, WI. It was one of our few repeat venues his year. It's a charming, beautiful old refurbished opera house and we were scheduled to do 2 performances here. Our first evening was plagued by a blizzard that blew in around 4p, we had left Milwaukee early to get in ahead of the storm and drove the last 12 miles through sleet and ice, by 5:30 it was a virtual white-out. But in spite of the weather we still had a good house - approx. 400 people braved the storm including a bus from Sheboygan Falls! (their bus driver got a round of applause during the curtain speech!) So it was a good show and we were looking forward to our Friday night performance which was almost sold out because of all the people who transferred their tickets to avoid the storm. Several of us went to lunch and out to the outlet mall, Paul went to a movie and we were generally having a nice relaxing day. A little before 3p William called me and said there was a little bit of drama in the works. The City of Oshkosh had shut down the Grand because of structural problems. In the course of preparing to install a new sprinkler system, they discovered that the roof was in danger of caving in, so they shut down the theater. But the good news was that the TD at the Grand is also the TD at Oshkosh West High School, so we were going to move the show there!

it wss the fasted load out ever! I was on the phone non-stop from about 2:50p until 4:30 or so. We got everyone over to the Grand and got the set out in record time. We drove the whole thing across town and started to load it into the high school. We were down to our last two scenic carts when the hydrolic lift on the back of the truck decided that it was done working for the day. Only half of it would lower threatening to dump our carts off the side of the lift! We tried beating it with a pipe, we tried soft words and curse words and finally had to pull out the metal ramp and unload the last couple of carts one scenic piece at a time. But we did get everything into the theatre. We had pushed the curtain time back half an hour to 8p and we worked right up until 7:30 half hour when we stopped to eat.

The set looked nice in the space, it looked like many of the performing art centers we have played on this tour, it wasn't quite as up to date technically and for the first time on this tour we were forced to call the show by looks rather than cues. We had a Stage Left Crate look, Stage right crate, dark shanty, talking shanty, singing shanty, sr shanty crate, sl shanty crate, fish and band. The calling of the show sounded a lot like "Stand by to cross fade Right crate to left crate" "Add right crate go" "Pulse fish go" "Singing shanty and fish go" it was pretty comical.


But in the end, an audience of approximately 600 loved the show and gave us a big standing ovation at curtain call. So... another tour first; we loaded out the show, moved it, loaded it in and were ready for a show in 4 hours. BUT, I'm pretty sure none of us want to do it again!

The good news is, that the Repairs on the theatre should be done and shows will be back on the Grand stage by next weekend!