crew night

its a fun night, where all of us who work our asses off for little or no appreciation go out and chill or party.
 
Im 15 and once again we also usually strike untill midnight ish and go out and see a movie and grab something to eat and usually get home around 2 or 3 and our crew is only like 9 people so we are all really close. My parents had a problem with it at first but after a while they just looked at is as normal. But I know if they could have their way i would be home at 7 every night.
 
Usually our plays show thursday through saturday, and on the Friday after the show, we all go down to Denny's (around 11:00 PM)

Last year, during Alice in Wonderland, our theatre manager bought the crew bunny ears, so we went into Denny's last year in stageblacks wearing bunny ears.. it was great 8)

This year after macbeth, those of us who could find them, wore the ears again and we got some funny looks.. good times indeed.
 
LOL that's great!

(Driving from our place to the movies and back (never mind seeing a movie) would take from 12 till 2! Enjoy living where there is actually stuff to do! (that same time frame goes for the nearest Denny's :-/ ))

The closest thing we have had to your bunny ears are pins that said "Friends of Fenwick" that we were supposto wear a few days before our production of "The Mouse that Roared". It didnt really happen b/c everyone was dissapointed and upset with the show (This was the show that the director yelled so much, 1/2 of the cast walked out 2 weeks before opening). The ears are defanatly a great idea (the perfect antenas for headsets if you ask me :) )
 
walking into walgreens right after a show has to be one of the funnest things we've done, around 12 of us walked on togeater, all in black, the security guard flipped out, and a lot of people were giving us weird looks, and some were definetly scarred, but then we just bought some pop and chips for the company party and everyone had a relived look on their face.
 
Dark Night

At my theatre we have a tradition called the "Dark Night."

Basically, its a night that happens after tech week the night/day before opening. The only thing on stage, apart from the set, is a ghost-light, and the entire theatre just basically sits there ready to go.

(It is quite common to find a lonely techie working after hours to get a last minute job done, but that happens on a black-night about once every two years!

ANYWAY - the whole idea of a blacknight is to give everyone, cast and crew both, a 24-hour period where they're not thinking about the show!

It actually works really well to focus the entire cast and crew.

To relate back to the topic, blacknight will normally see the entire tech crew at a movie, pizza place, club or bar - just having a holiday after the stress of tech week.
 
*grins* Tech /week/ ? LUXURY. We're lucky to get a tech /weekend/ - and by weekend, I mean we get access to the theatre on Saturday noon and we're supposed to be ready for a cue-to-cue by Sunday afternoon.

Why, I remember one tech weekend not too long ago where I showed up as a volunteer carpenter, just to pitch in for a few hours, and discovered that the show's master carpenter had bailed.. and thus nobody had any construction plans, nobody had bought any wood, nobody had done ANYTHING with regards to making the set a reality. In fact, the TD and Director will still trying to sort out what they wanted things to look like. Oh. And they had almost no budget left.

That was... fun. It worked - by Sunday afternoon, they had a full set, including a brandnew bed, a hospital operating gurney, full sets of walls, including some cutaways, doors and windows and moving walls.. but it was a lot of hours at no notice.

Of course, the show then proceeded to flop, but that wasn't the fault of my set.

-OG
 
At my theatre, the crew spends so much time together, we're like a family almost. The actors rarely join us on our nights out - they reside primarily in NYC, and just want to get home. Usually, the crew will get together on any given night of the week, and I'll be there waiting for the hangover victims on a matinee day. I'll sometimes join them on Friday nights, when they go to a local restaurant / bar for karaoke.

We play this great game sometimes called 'theatre tag' or 'flashlight tag'. We wait until the building is empty, and just go nuts. Always fun with a comlicated set. Of course, we're all careful - each crew member knows that if they break something, the game is off to fix it... and if they break themselves, the whole thing loses it's purpose. It's just a blast to blow off some steam occasionally. In our situation, that's a necessity. After all, we're sometimes working 7 days a week, and once every three months we're putting in an average of 100 hours in a week. Lots of steam to blow off!
 
heh. you guys are taken aback by rocky horror. oh dear.
our entire company loves rocky horror, we've even preformed it for the audience participation midnight showings. but if you think that a guy wearing fishnets is creepy, oh wow i hope you guys never see what we wear. >.> <.<
 
Working in live music full time we tend not to do much socialy after gigs. However the once or twice per year i do theatre type stuff (once per year at my old school) on closing night the hole cast (ages 13-18yrs plus teachers) goes to a local pub and we all get wasted, well tho older looking ones - typically 16yrs plus. Its great, get rid of all that tension and usally end up throwing up after one too many snake bites and vodka! Rock On.
 
moojoe said:
heh. you guys are taken aback by rocky horror. oh dear.
our entire company loves rocky horror, we've even preformed it for the audience participation midnight showings. but if you think that a guy wearing fishnets is creepy, oh wow i hope you guys never see what we wear. >.> <.<


For you Rocky Horror Fans here is a news story from New Zealand, where it's creator Richard O'Brien lived for many years. Checkout the statue made by Weta Workshops (Lord of the Rings ).

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=6500547
 
Traditions

We have a few crew traditions. The first is that before every show for the three days that it runs we do something called "Techie Love" its where we go and get together at one of the techs house after school and write a mean skit about actors (they write one about us as well) and then we perform them during the cast party. We also go as an entire cast to a mexican resteraunt called "tortilla sams" after the second night show. After the third is the cast part and the first is nothing. The day of the opening show is black and white day and anyone involved in the show either a actor or tech or music wears only black and white. And every play we get shirts for the play and one day we're allowed to wear them and then they become in dress code.

~Nick
 
I miss that part of a show in high school, now it's just a big drunken party every night, which gets old really fast.
 
wow, someone else with my dress code. Last year I mandated black dress shirts shoes, slacks and dark or silver ties for all tech crew at all formal events.For local bands and such we just wear jeans, industry t-shirts,steel toe boots or sneakers and credentials.
 
we dont have credentials, i wish the school would make us AV IDs. for this show im going to try to get tech crew to wear all black even though we arent backstage, it is almost like a uniform for crew.
 
it weird alot of times schools give even the smallest employee an id tag, I had a club in middle school and since we sort of were working for the school (not being paided) we got id tags for our club. Yet now that I work as av tech, even though students are not suppose to be in the school when school ends, we get nothing to identify us to teachers/staff that we are suppose to be there.
 
Well, there is the usual cast party after the strike. But after the performances, usually a bunch of people go out to a resturant and just BS about stuff. But there has been a couple random times where myself and some other techies have gone out and played some laser tag, which is fun to do when you know the people that you are playing with.
 
Back in the 1970's when I was in school drinking and drug use was much more prevalent, and much less discussed. So the strike party was a pretty drunken affair. Crew nights didn't happen much. If they did, I never went because I had a 40 hour a week job. And sleeping in classes wasn't enough sleep so I had to sleep some time.
 

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