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It’s the busy Christmas season for yours portly, and last night I made it over the first of two major humps before Christmas break:  the Middle School Christmas Play.  The next hump is the Christmas Concert for my own students, which is this Friday, 8 December 2023, in the morning.

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the play, as our school particularly loves to stage light-hearted musical comedies.  You wouldn’t think that a musical would involve substantially more tech setup than a typical play, but it makes the work exponentially more challenging.

The Drama teacher this year did a fabulous job, and created one of the most tech-heavy productions I’ve been involved with so far.  It was a multimedia extravaganza:  songs, choreography, videos, backing tracks, lights, around twenty-five microphones (stationary/hanging mics, floor mics, individual headset mics, wireless handhelds, etc.), and more.

Here is a panoramic view of my sound booth about ninety minutes before the play:

The astute observer will note two sound boards/mixing consoles, plus a lighting controller, as well as my $80 refurbished laptop, which does fine if I’m just cuing backing tracks, but otherwise runs like a potato powering a lightbulb.  There’s also the spotlight, two lighting trees with around ten lights each, and a projector screen.  During the production my student assistant and I had to move a projector into place, along with a auxiliary cord running to a DI box, which fed via XLR (microphone) cable to a “snake” onstage, which ran all the way back to us at our booth.  We also had to move a baby grand piano (don’t worry—it was on wheels)!

Setting all of this stuff up is stressful, because it’s usually done in fifty-minute snippets of planning periods.  But the finished product is worth it.

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