As anyone who has been following this blog will know (and thanks for the comments, all of you, they’ve been great), up until now everything has gone smoothly. But the bump-in to Carriageworks proves to be bumpier than most. The plotting of the show runs so far behind that it bleeds into the tech rehearsal, so that everything is running at least half a day behind. At the production desk, faces lit by laptop screens look tense, jaws are clenched. They look like a bank of air traffic controllers trying to bring a plane in through a storm.
There is some brief discussion about cancelling the preview, but Kate decides to plough on. The only sign that she is under pressure is that one of her legs shakes uncontrollably. When someone asks her if she’s alright she replies very calmly ‘ No I’m not, and I’m not going to pretend I am’ but with the same courtesy I’ve seen for the past six weeks she still thanks the performers for getting through a frustrating stop start run.
Max and Roz sit in different parts of the auditorium, checking sightlines and sound quality. The flakes, which Kate refers to as kitty litter, are much noisier than anyone realised and they drown out some of the spoken recorded text. There’s nothing anyone can do about that now. But the visual effect makes up for that. Liz’s extravagantly curly hair gets caught in Josh’s shirt while they rehearse a sequence. Could be tricky if they can’t disentangle themselves in time.
After Kate’s given notes to the cast sitting, as usual, on the cold concrete floor of the foyer, they eat a pre preview dinner of Thai takeaway - prawn crackers crunch like the flakes, so for a minute it sounds like they are eating the set. Geoff’s computer crashes and he loses all the notes the team have just spent several hours making about lights and text projection.
At the other end of the foyer startling creatures start to arrive, flamingos on stalks in beaded dresses, ready to parade in the Ultimo Fashion College show.
The preview, which is really a technical run through, goes surprisingly well, considering.
Overnight, Kate makes the last changes she can.
On opening night Kate, Max and Jeff watch from the production box. Up there, away from the public, a significant handover takes place. The show no longer belongs to Kate. She’s handed it over to Erin, who is now calling the shots. Someone has moved Vince’s ladder a fraction out of the spotlight for his opening monologue, but from there on, things proceed pretty seamlessly.
And as the applause begins, another invisible transition takes place in the dark in the course of those sixty minutes: now the show belongs to you.
