Over the past six months, we’ve done some pretty interesting versions of Ring of Fire. Ideally, we perform the version where everything goes as planned and designed, but sometimes there are extenuating circumstances that require us to adapt. We have a “B-show” that we do when the venue we’re playing isn’t tall enough for our set. In this case, our two towers are removed from their rotating platforms and bolted to the floor so the angles of the towers never change. When this happens, all of the blocking is modified and the show is a little less interesting, but if the audience doesn’t know how it’s supposed to look, they don’t notice that they’re missing anything. We’ve also played a few venues where our light grid won’t fit in the space so we’ve had to use the venue’s lights. This is sad because the lights are quite possibly the coolest part of the show. So woe is us.
We’ve also had a couple of strange occurrences that have thrown our show for a loop. For example, the time the fire alarm went off during my ballad, All Over Again. The show stopped, and about a third of the audience filed out before the stage manager announced that it was indeed a false alarm and the show would be starting again momentarily. Meanwhile, the band and I sat smiling on stage, waiting to be told what to do. Why we did not run for our lives is beyond my comprehension at this point, but at the time, just sitting there seemed like the right thing to do. Jens (the fiddle player) kept whispering for me to watch what I said because my mic was probably still on. What did he think I was going to say? A string of curses? “MotherFu*&#ingFireAlarms!!!”
We also did a B-version show in a small place in Georgia. The venue was not only too small for us to have our entire working set, but they also didn’t have power necessary to run our lights, so we were powered on a generator. Of course, the generator wasn’t big enough and all the lights went off on stage in the middle of act one. We ended up finishing the act with just work lights and spotlights, and then took a half hour intermission while somebody called somebody they knew (named Bubba?) and brought another generator in (that was also too small to handle our lights) and we did the rest of the show with about 75% of the lighting.
This past week, however, we did the show that takes the cake. For some reason, we were booked in a middle school (yes, a middle school) in Ashburn, Georgia. Why? I have no idea. This middle school’s cafa-gymna-torium doubles as the town’s civic center. Nice. When the crew arrived to set up, Dan, our technical director, deemed the stage unsafe for our set. I don’t know the details – just that our set and lights wouldn’t safely fit on the stage. We were told that we would be doing a “concert version” of the show. The curtain was closed, and the 16 of us sat in chairs on the front lip of the stage. They only had one spotlight in the café-gymna-torium so they left the lights on in the whole place - which was really awesome, because that way we could see the basket-ball goals and the score board. When it was our turn to sing, we would get up out of our chairs and use the 4 feet of “stage space” to attempt to act out a modified version of our blocking. We could never leave the stage because there was nowhere for us to go, so when we weren’t singing, we were sitting in plastic chairs on stage watching our cast-mates. It was actually pretty cool to be able to watch numbers that I am usually offstage for, and despite the ridiculousness of it all, the audience really seemed to enjoy it (and we could tell – since all the lights were on.)
Want to shoot some hoops after the show?
Tags: humor, travel, acting, erin, parker, writing, singing, theatre, ring of fire, tour, johnny, cash, cafeteria, terrible, venue, gym, fire, alarm, Ashburn, Georgia
