Success!

Well hello again bloggers.

So today was the day, our first show with an audience, i'll get onto that shortly but first let me tell you about yesterday.

So after having worked a 12 hour shift on Tuesday it came as no surprise when we ended up doing another 12 hour shift yesterday. The morning and early afternoon were spent doing final alterations to costume and the set and Fx. We then watched a run through of the show with all the Fx, pyro, music and lighting and no actors on stage. The purpose of this being that we had to remember when to avoid certain explosions etc. After that the techies had to work hard to finalise some of the things that hadn't worked particularly well in time for a full run through. At precisely quarter to midnight we began a full run of absolutely everything, most of us were pretty worn out by then but we knew it had to be done.

It went pretty well bar the odd hiccup, some lighting and pyro were a bit off but there wasn't much else wrong. Finally, at about 12.40am we were allowed to leave but were told we'd have to be by 9 the next morning.

So after a few hours sleep we all went back to the set today to do one more run-through before the very first show with an audience. The run through didn't consist of any pyro etc as there wouldn't have been enough time to reset everything. We started the run at about 10:30 and decided that we were ready to go ahead at 12pm.

The audience today consisted of all sorts of officials from Moviepark and lots of members of the press as well as senior representatives of Mirage entertainment, basically it was time to impress and everyone gave 100% resulting in an un-interrupted show with only 3 or 4 errors, all of which were Fx of Pyro (I.E, not our fault). After the show finished we were asked back out on stage where we were given flowers and received much more applause. We then spent an hour doing photos for the press and for the park publicity team. So all in all, a successful day.

The next 3 days at the set will be taken up by a cheerleading show (weird isn't it? But we have known about it for a while now) meaning that we've been given tomorrow off to recover from the last few weeks and we dont need to go back til Friday evening when the cheerleaders are gone to do some final tweaking of the show before our director, Mirage and Sigma (special fx) people all fly home.

Tonight we're going to Dorsten for a celebratory meal with all the cast and crew, no doubt celebratory drinking will happen too. I'll raise a glass for all you people back home who've been following the blog, from now on it takes the role of telling you about each performance day and the kinds of things that go on once a show of this magnitude is open to the public.

Cheers!

P.