Singing Men of Ohio

School of music shows at Mem Aud aren't very excited. The band concerts and choral concerts all have a great following, but for the stage hand, there's not much to do. In this post, I'm going to give you a quick view of a long, slow day at the auditorium.

For SMO, we had three stage hands, Sean Kacir was the SM (it was his first show) and Curt Marker, also an SM, was there to supervise in case Sean needed help with anything. Here's how the schedule went:

10:00 a.m. We set up the risers and the orchestra shell.
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. We went to lunch.
12:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. We hung out for rehearsal. This is one of the longest parts of the day. We have nothing to do but hang out in case they need anything. I spent the afternoon in the SM office where I read an entire issue of People, played multiple games of TextTwist and changed my Facebook profile.
4:00p.m. - 6:00 p.m. We went to dinner break.
6:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. We had multiple jobs until the house opened around 7:30. The show started late, a little after 8 p.m. and lasted until around 10 p.m. During the show, I ran the light board, another stage hand ran the sound board while the third stage hand called the show from backstage, meaning she cued us as to when SMO was about to go on stage, leave stage, etc. Here are some pictures of the light board and the sound board that we stage hands get to run during smaller shows:

Below: The light board. You can't see it, but there are headsets at each board, which are used to cue from backstage.

Right: The massive sound board, a new piece of equipment just installed this year.