Day 1

The view off our "back deck"

The first day of school. Er. Work. Picked up around 8:30am and we head up to the Opera for the first time. The drive up is brown; I don't know how else to describe it. It's dry, everywhere. We park and are introduced to the Boss, then we tour around the facility and the campus throughout the day.

A "hodge-podge" is an easy way to describe the Opera. Over the decades, technology has been added in addition to, or over top of previous iterations. Tiny offices populate the backstage area, with equipment stored throughout. Road cases here, TVs on carts over there, fabric storage in the corner. One thing that becomes apparent is there's little delineation between "indoors" and "outdoors"...because there are no doors  blocking many of the entrances and exits. If a wicked storm were to roll through, lots of equipment and people would be at the mercy of the elements.

I'm also saying this from an east-coast point of view. The Boss said that there are 360 days of sun in New Mexico, and when it does rain, it's quick and painless. There are lots of high roofs to help with the straight-down rain, but if it gets windy, there's a lot that can get wet. The weather today is gorgeous. Low humidity, 75 degrees. One of those days where pants are necessary in the morning, but shorts would be nice in the afternoon.

There are video, audio and speaker patches EVERYWHERE. Everything seems to be documented well, too, at least from an audio standpoint. Going back to what I said about decades stepping over one another, apparently the scene shop table saw has a breaker in our control room. And the control room lights are tied to a breaker in the costume shop.

The stage crew was hard at work today painting STOP and SIGHTLINE markers on the back deck. The back deck is about the size of a football field, and falls off the upstage edge of the stage. Large scenery is laid out here, or staged before it's moved up to the stage level. There is a lift on the upstage edge that travels from the basement to the stage level, and all scenery has to fit on this lift to make it to the stage. Around the lift on the back deck are SIGHTLINE strips that fan out from the lift. If you're inside the SIGHTLINE strip, it's possible to be seen from the house.

Just before lunch we were issued knee pads, leather work gloves (DeWALT-branded fancy) and a hard hat. It's been said that if you need to walk on stage for any reason to wear the hard hat just in case something were to drop from the catwalks.

We made our way to lunch across the street to Tuseque, a quiet area with a Village Market which served native New Mexican food. I got the Fiesta Chicken, a grilled piece of chicken with green salsa and melted cheese, wrapped in a tortilla. I had been warned on many occasions that the salsa here is different than any other salsa (read: spicy), and I was surprised at how tame it was. The green salsa was full of flavor, and hot, but not "I-want-to-rip-my-throat-out" hot. Just...pleasant.

We get back from lunch and we continue the tour, next up is the catwalks. This excites me, because now I can see something i'm familiar with. There are 8 or 9 catwalks, upstage-to-downstage. There are circuits...EVERYWHERE. All throughout the house, the catwalks, the wings, it's unbelievable. There are six or seven 96-dimmer packs, which means the Opera has close to 700 dimmers. AAAAHHH. Lots to do for this electrics crew, which starts their hang in the coming week. I also noticed on the last catwalk an assortment of VARI*LITE fixtures, including a VL500, VL2000, VL3500 and....a VLX! I think these may be here the whole season, so I hope to get some more hands-on with the VLX.

After that, we played with some of the cameras and the wireless intercoms, and it was time to go home. Tomorrow is when we re-hang the main front speakers, and continue testing the entire rig for the upcoming season.

Cheers!
-Matt