Toured a 1920s
theatre today. Vaudvile
house. Narrow building. No evidence of left or right galleries. Pjnrail at
stage level. Wood walk on
grid. And an upstage
gallery/
catwalk.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/pMLG3xgExpVGt4yE3
IIRC, these had a specific lighting or production function. Anyone refresh my aged and addled brain?
@BillConnerFASTC Since no one else is rushing to contribute I'll mention the following: The theater we installed 'Sunset Boulevard' in on Broadway had all of their single
purchase counter-weight carriages muled to the
up stage wall. As you walked the width of their
up stage fly-floor catwalk you passed all of the odd numbered line-sets followed by roughly a 15' wide
arbor holding approximately 40,000 pounds of counter-weights to counter-balance the 40,000 pound flown raked two story mansion complete with several LX pipes within its flown raked floor to light scenes played beneath it both while it was flown out of sight and also while it was hovering with scenes being played simultaneously within the two story mansion as well as beneath it and finally you walked past all of the even numbered single
purchase sets. The mansion was flown from 6 cables, I believe each cable was 1.25" running over sheaves approximately 2 feet in diameter on a
tertiary grid two levels above the theater's original
grid. Our shop built and installed the 'On the
road' automated fly-piece which from memory weighed in at approximately 11,000 pounds. Normally if you show up with an 11,000 pound fly-piece you're bringing the heaviest fly-piece in the production but not so with 'Sunset'. At 11,000 pounds the 'On the
road' piece was third in
line behind the 14,000 pound 'pool surround' and the 40,000 pound / 20 ton flown and
tracking two-story mansion. The mansion not only flew but tracked
up stage /
down stage both while appearing to be resting on the
deck and also while hovering atop scenes beneath it. The mansion was an excellent trick. Basically Feller Precision were flying the world's largest automated drawer slides and the two-story mansion was the drawer. I got to install our shops part of the full-bore 'Sunset' three times; Broadway, Toronto and Vancouver, and NEVER tired of it due to the caliber of gear and people I was working with. During the Broadway install I was told Peter Feller Senior had been consulted about the methods and feasibility of installing a set like 'Sunset' at some
point in the future and in the case of this one particular
theatre it was Pete Feller Senior's decision to omit the traditional catwalks from both sides of the
stage in favor of muling all line-sets to the
up stage cross-over
catwalk. We were given a three day window in their lengthy
load-in schedule to get our automated piece in, up and tested. We were pretty organized and were complete in our first 8 hour day plus only 2 hours of our second day. Time is ALWAYS money and even more so on Broadway. You can't buy time but the producers were more than thrilled when our piece effectively bought them 1.75 days of unanticipated free time at non-overtime rates. The rest of my Canadian crew-mates, along with the owner of our shop, spent their free time eating sushi and bar-hopping on Broadway. Moi, total abstainer that I am? I spent
ALL of my free time touring their theater from basement, which was three stories above street
level, all the way to their secondary and
tertiary grids. The mansion was the only piece flown from the upper-most
grid with our 11,000 pound piece and the 14,000 pound pool surround being pretty much all that was hung on the secondary
grid. Everything else hung from the theater's original
grid. You don't get many opportunities to see and appreciate theatrical rigging on that scale. I suspect it's not covered on most university curriculums.
Edited to mention the Broadway theater which housed 'Sunset Boulevard' was the Minskoff.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard
.
