(Editor's note: This story took place about two years ago while I was on an Asian tour of the musical 42nd Street, it just occurred to me that you may find it entertaining. Also a "Load In" is when we take everything for the show off of a truck and put it together inside the theatre. A "Load Out" is the opposite.)
China is, well, China. Things are different here, sometimes very much so, sometimes almost imperceptibly. Shopping, for one, can be a chore or an adventure, depending on how you look at it. Almost all of the prices here are negotiable. I bargained considerably for the laptop on which this story is being written. I talked them down from $650 to about $450. I feel that I got a good deal, but I'm sure if I had my translator do it she'd have gotten them down lower, probably significantly lower. Aside from the censored internet here, this computer has worked well. On a side note, I highly suggest Tor to anyone who is: a) concerned about privacy on the web, or b) connecting to the internet via a method which censors what sites you can or cannot access. Tor is great, as anyone looking at my traffic will see me go to a Tor entry point and that's it, then my packets get chopped into tiny bits and sent over our heads and across the room, where they are then rematerialized into much smaller packets that you can take out of the TV and eat. I'm not really sure how it works, but it does. It may or may not taste like chocolate, I'm not sure. Don't give Slugworth your gobstopper.
The theatres I've been in have mostly been Shakespeareholes. (It doesn't matter where in the world you are, a Shakespearehole theatre is a Shakespearehole theatre.) We're currently in the Ningbo Grand Theatre, which is sweet. This thing is huge, pretty, and very clean. The stage left wall is about a football field away from the stage right wall. we have all the space we want, with enough left over for American Gladiator-style aerial battles with the gantry cranes. The stage drops, and the side stages slide in place of it. You can shift an entire set in about 45 seconds with no stage hands.There's also no need to worry about intercom lines, because the venue has it's own wireless com. No need to run a conductor or front of house camera because there are PTZ cameras already mounted in the positions where we would need them to be. There is building-wide internet access that is pretty fast, even with Tor, so I can update while the show is going on. The side lighting towers move, some of the seats in the house move. Every bell, whistle, and widget is in this place, and most of it is behind nice wood paneling. The main entryway is so big you could put another football field on it. The stairs leading up to the entry are big enough that they put a KFC and a supermarket underneath them. Needless to say its a good place to fly my helicopter. (read "fly" as "break"). This place has everything you could ever hope to ask for, except monitor speakers in the dressing rooms. And you'll need monitors in the dressing rooms, because they're about 450 feet away from the stage. Don't get me wrong, I think it's hilarious in a Murphy's law sort of way, and this is a vast improvement over the theatre in Hang Zhou. That one smelled like cat Shakespeare. You know why? Because cats were living in the orchestra pit, which explains why the theatre didn't have a problem with mice. Just cat Shakespeare. What can I say? Cats shouldn't be in theatres.
Still, It has been a fun experience to this point. I'm digging the work and the learning and all that. I find it really nice to get up and go to a job I enjoy doing. That even counts for the load outs, the first of which took 16.5 hours. They've gotten better though; the last one, in shanghai, was only about 8. For a six truck show in a foreign country where you don't speak the language, that's pretty damn good. Communicating with the locals, however, is touch and go. For the most part the crews haven't been that bad, except Hang Zhou. Hang Zhou was probably the most interesting load out to date.
Let's take a moment to set the scene, shall we?
I had eaten some questionable food earlier in the day, and said questionable food was doing the questionable food thing. Needless to say i'd been in and out of the bathroom all day making China heavier. (I spent so much time in there that day that somebody put my name on the door.) None of this was helped by our local crew. They weren't big on listening, and that's sort of a problem. There was also a communication problem between the presenters and the house staff. For the load in we didn't have a fork lift. We raised hell and the load out was much better. They provided a fork lift, it just wouldn't start. So the truck loaders decided to push start it.
A forklift...
A Diesel forklift...
Yeah, it worked really well. About this time one loader found some 20 foot slings and decided to get his truck so they could tow start the forklift. He proceeded to get his truck (which, honest to god, looked like a flat bed golf cart, and would have done well to tow a beer keg) and hook it up to said forklift. Inside we were fairing equally well. I had just come back from my sixth trip to the bathroom to find that one local had already been sent to the hospital because he got his foot run over (I actually got my own foot run over by one of our (thankfully empty) speaker tower carts). After that fiasco, our intrepidly deaf crew bumbled along with the load out until it was time to put the deck on our deck carts.
Allow me to elaborate:
We have two deck carts, each holds approximately 35 4x8 sheets of plywood that is faced on one side with masonite (which is the stuff stage floors are usually made out of.) Combined, they weigh about 110lbs per sheet. The carts are of course built to handle this weight, and are made out of 4x2 box steel. Imagine a steel cube that is about three feet deep, nine feet long, and five feet tall, with one of the top spans removable so you can load about 35 sheets of plywood into it. 35 sheets that weigh 110 lbs apiece.
Ok, the scene is set.
Needless to say, the carpenters gave very specific loading and handling instructions:
1)Only load one sheet at a time.
2)Once loaded, hold them by the top from the back of the cart.
3)Don't stick your hands in the sides to hold the sheets.
4)Above all, if the pile starts to fall over, let it go!
This was explained to the locals by our carpenters and two different interpreters, as it was a very important procedure and nobody wanted 1.5 tons of plywood falling on the crew. The locals proceeded to load the cart and all went well until the stack started to slide. Fortunately everybody but one person was paying attention to the safety lecture and got the hell away from the cart. That one remaining person stuck his hand inside the cart and tried to stop the huge stack of plywood from tipping over. As the stack was quite large at this point, this didn't quite work as he had planned. "Catastrophically failed" would be a better way to describe what happened next, as the stack of wood hit the man's hand in the middle of the palm, and proceeded to fold it over on itself against the steel rail.
Backwards.
You know in the cartoons when the guy gets his hand crushed between two gears? It looked kinda like that.
Yeah, he broke it.
Anyway, so this broken-handed man proceeded to go into shock, which is understandable as his hand was purple and rapidly approaching the size of your average honeydew melon. Being as this man was in bad shape, the local crew chief called an ambulance and we went back to work. 20 minutes and another trip to "my office" later we got a call on the radio that the ambulance was there, but couldn't get in because the truck which was trying to pull-start the forklift now had a burnt out clutch, and was blocking the way.
...I swear, you can't make this Shakespeare up.
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