Olympia Theatre

Today I slept in a little and walked over to The Olympia at around 11. It was a cold, rainy day. Best spent indoors working, I say. The theatre is really amazing. The room is really narrow and increadibly tall. The third balcony, about 50 feet up, is raked at such an angle that it gives me vertigo just looking at it. I couldn't imagine sitting through an entire show up there. The house set up turned out to be the remnants of a touring theatre production that we happened to interrupt with our two shows. They decided to leave their gear in place, rather than load it out and then back in. I didn't complain. I don't remember what it was called but it's about an Irish football player, and it's set in ancient Rome. Sounds magical. So the stage was pretty cluttered with tons of pre-rig truss tipped on end and filled with frenels for key (side) lighting. There was also a huge cyc (cyclorama) drop which I discovered while poking around the fly system. A cyc is, quite literally, a blank canvas. It's a white, stretched curtain that commonly covers the upstage wall and spills out to the sides. It's a simple and stunning effect to set a row of lights in the truss or on the floor at the cyc and change the color of the entire stage. It's a great silhouetting effect as well. The Strokes did a New Year's show at The Apollo Theatre in New York a while back and they had a huge cyc drop there. I toured with one for a year after that because the band liked it so much. It was also nice to see a bunch of newer intelligent lights and a pretty dark, moody set of gels already in place. The not so hot end of things is the console, an older Avolites Pearl. Avolites was an industry standard maker mostly in the 80's. They are still pretty common in the UK mostly because they are made here, like most lighting equipment. They are also made of steel and wood, unlike most newer, aluminum/molded plastic desks these days. They are pretty much bullet-proof. I usually ask for one when hiring conventional lightining locally to suppliment a touring system (often due to budgetary or truck space restrictions) because you can drop one down a flight of stairs and it will still work. The newer Avolites desks (Diamond IV or 2005, which Coldplay had out) have updated software, but pretty much the same layout and physical design of the original desks. The one glaring exception is their lower end club desk that is covered in a composite rubber sheath so that you can spill a beer on it and it will work just fine. It's pretty colorful, and resembles a children's toy. It is totally impossible to patch and program, and I would like very much to bury them all in a pit in Taiwan where they were made. They have one of them at Irving Plaza in NY, or did the last time I was there. Shame really. The last tour I was on I requested an Avolites Saphire 2000 because it's pretty rare, extremely old and absolutely massive. It is larger than newer digital sound desks and looks so out of place next to 'modern' technology. It was a joke, but one turned up in Philadelphia. It took four guys to lift it out of it's case. Neg Earth, one of the biggest lighting suppliers in England has one on the wall of their shop, as a work of art. The one they have has a slide out cocaine mirror as well. How's that for rock? So, the avolites desk today was no fun at all. I am fine programming it, in fact I started out with one, but after spening years with a hog II and now hog III it seems absurd to use faders for every single fixture instead of numbers on a keypad and touch screens. I spent several hours setting up palattes in a rather counter-intuitive manner on the desk and programmed some bits and pieces for the show tomorrow. I didn't do pages for songs, but instead split the desk up in 3rds of the show and hot/cold looks. It's almost like being bilingual. Anyone who has ever dabbled in any form of programming knows that to shift formats or languages is a challange. Lighting is no different. So I set up some go to scenes and have each element on the stage on a handle. If you are accustomed to it you can run a decent show on the sixty or so faders on the desk. It's a royal pain in the ass, but it works. So, it's a busking type show. It takes time to get used to, while running a show, selecting a group of lights, putting them in a position, giving them a color, maybe a gobo, maybe making the gobo rotate, making them move and/or chase and then giving them intensity last. I prefer theatre stacking on a hog, or maybe just a day off. It'll be marvelous, I'm sure. I've seen some great shows in Dublin. Everyone in the crowd gets pretty fired up, and bands generally feed off of that energy. When The Strokes first played a show here (at the same theatre) Julian pitched a 50lb monitor off the stage into the photo pit and then tried to climb into the box seats on the side of the stage. The local electrician said that they recently had The Stooges (or maybe just Iggy Pop) in and he lassoed the balcony rail with his mic cable and sung out into the crowd. I expect to see some more guitar smashing antics tomorrow.