The last 3 days have been kind of a blur. We arrived in Crowley for our performance at the Rice Theatre and had the chance to meet up with our really great friend, Andre Kole and his team. They were performing in Baton Rouge and met us in Crowley. It was great to spend some time with all of them. They decided to stay another day and see the show at the Rice Theatre before driving on to their next gig in Houston.
The Rice Theatre is an old movie house that was transformed into a performance venue. The organization that sponsored our show is in the process of restoring a beautiful old vaudeville house called the Grand Opera House of the South. In the meantime, they use the Rice Theatre for shows.
The crew and sponsor could not have been more pleasant and willing to help in every way they could, especially Brian and Kim. While this venue has a large stage, it didn’t have everything we needed to pull off the full production. There was no fly space and everything was dead hung. For some reason, they also didn’t hang our light plot in any form. That meant that we were busy for at least the first 3 hours trying to pull together our lighting on stage, repatching dimmers, moving some instruments around and placing gel. We did get our intelligent lights in the air and, because the stage was large, we were able to get some nice visual effects. They also had a light board that we were unfamiliar with – an NSI Board. We’ve worked with one before but, in 20 years, I think we’ve only come across three.
Cindy pulled together an “open curtain” show and we ended with the Milk Can Escape. The audience seemed to have a good time and we had a fairly full house, even with a 6:30pm show time on Thursday.
The following morning we were up and driving to Lake Charles for our performance at the Civic Center.